Spaceship Design

[Moontanman]

Originally Posted by Pyrotex

Yes.
Don't do it.

Super-heated salts from sea water will dissociate and do major damage to your "rocket" engine. Bad joo-joo, man.

I would have thought that any engine that could take a continuous nuclear explosion would laugh off salts?

[Pyrotex]

Originally Posted by Pyrotex

...I wrote an unpublished SF story years ago, based on the discovery that a herd of "wahoots" was feeding near our Sun, inside the orbit of Mercury. They seemed to be made entirely out of plasma, held together by magnetic fields...

Wahoots – The Discovery

George’s footsteps echoed down the hallway as he took an absent-minded bite of his chicken salad sandwich and stared at the print in his other hand. He used his shoulder to punch open the door to the image analysis department of the University of Utrecht Solar Studies Building, and hurried over to the desk of his teammate.
“Hey, Zam. What’re these?”
The color print fell next to Zamir’s keyboard. George’s finger tapped the edge. It was just another of the tens of thousands of sun shots taken every day from SOHO-4a, one of two identical space telescopes positioned near the gravitational equilibrium point between the Earth and Sun. It took Zamir a few seconds to realize that it wasn’t just like all the others. There was a tiny blur -- actually a cluster of minute dots near the edge of the print. The scale at the top indicated they were about four solar radii from the Sun.
“You mean these things? Dunno what they are. Prolly just a patch of cosmic rays.”
He touched his keyboard.
“Okay… here’s a more recent… hello, they’re still there.”
With a few clicks of the keyboard, Zamir displayed a sequence of images taken about ten seconds apart.
“Wow, mon. They appeared out of nowhere, about twenty minutes ago.”
“Do they show up in shots from 4b? If they don’t, maybe we got a problem with 4a.”
“Sure. Lessee… Holy shit, mon! There they are again! They gotta be real!”
“Well, don’t just sit there drooling, see if you can triangulate their position.”
“Gimme a sec, I’m switching spectra first… Nope, they only show up in near infrared. Okay, let’s zoom in and triangulate...”
A detailed magnification appeared on his screen. A dozen circular blobs, each about the size of a thumbnail, appeared in shades of red and orange against a mottled black background. Bright green numbers flickered along one edge of the screen.
“Lessee, their range is 0.92 AU, just a smidge nearer than the Sun. They’re each about thirty kilometers wide and about two hundred kilometers apart. Their orbital velocity is… stationary? Holy shit, mon! Can’t be! I’ll notify Harvard and Berlin. They’ll know what they are.”
“Mmmph,” said George from around a bite of sandwich. “So, look right here at this one. Is that some kind of symmetrical internal structure? Zoom in all you can.”
Zamir and George bent forward toward the screen. Shades of green and orange cast shadows on their faces.
“I’ll be goddamned. Is this a joke? It’s gotta be a joke, right?”
Half of George’s sandwich plopped softly on the floor. Neither man noticed.

[CraigD]

Moderation note:
I moved a series of new posts from this thread to a new one, Teleporting rocket fuel as a Bose-Einstein condensate, because they don’t have much to do with the thread’s original topic of the popularity of spaceship design ideas, circa 4/26/2006.

If there are no objections, I’ll close this thread, as 2 years is really way too long to leave a poll open. If anybody would like some other subthreads of this one moved to new threads of their own, just ask.