Most likely candidate for future spaceship propulsion

[Gardamorg]

Originally Posted by Moontanman

A magnetic field has no effect at all on uncharged hydrogen. To gather the hydrogen via a magnetic field it has to be charged no way around it. To compress the hydrogen and heat it the hydrogen has to be charged. Regular hydrogen is the most difficult to compress and fuse, that why current designs use deuterium and tritium.

Other periodic elements gathered in the magnetic field with the hydrogen from the interstellar medium could be condensed and fused into plasma, such as dust grains and helium from the distant stars.

I wouldn't be surprised if some of the hydrogen was already electrically charged from the collisions of cosmic rays and space dusts from the interstellar medium.

And if we got unlucky and didn't gather any electrically charged hydrogen we could just collide it with the gathered space dust and cosmic rays.

But if all else fails there's always helium in the medium.

[Gardamorg]

Originally Posted by Moontanman

No, actually it is a good thing for traveling toward a star, you have to decelerate, a magnetic field will allow you to decelerate with the target stars own wind. a magnetic sail will power your space craft as far as a solar sail would using star light and even faster because a magnetic sail will expand as it moves away from a star and allow you to get more thrust as you sail away! a magnetic sail doesn't have any problems with erosion from interstellar dust and can be furled and unfurled in a short time with no danger of damaging the sail. A magnetic sail that gets larger as you move away from the star would allow you get thrust a large distance from your sun, and a magnetic sail could interact with the galactic magnetic field to give some thrust. You could build up a large delta V close to a star and then coast to the next one.

It wouldn't be as fast and no matter how big you made the Magnetic field there wouldn't be enough power from the distant sun to propel it at all, once the sun becomes a dot, it's pretty much hopeless.

And there aren't enough mag fields in the interstellar medium to propel it far enough.

It would become stranded in space.

[Moontanman]

Originally Posted by Gardamorg

It wouldn't be as fast and no matter how big you made the Magnetic field there wouldn't be enough power from the distant sun to propel it at all, once the sun becomes a dot, it's pretty much hopeless.

And there aren't enough mag fields in the interstellar medium to propel it far enough.

It would become stranded in space.

Stranded in space? Do you think it's going to stop? You coast to the next star, decelerate into orbit around that star or a planet. Think!

[Moontanman]

Originally Posted by Gardamorg

Other periodic elements gathered in the magnetic field with the hydrogen from the interstellar medium could be condensed and fused into plasma, such as dust grains and helium from the distant stars.

I wouldn't be surprised if some of the hydrogen was already electrically charged from the collisions of cosmic rays and space dusts from the interstellar medium.

And if we got unlucky and didn't gather any electrically charged hydrogen we could just collide it with the gathered space dust and cosmic rays.

But if all else fails there's always helium in the medium.

Gardamorg, a magnetic field is not going to pick up anything that it not charged! Not dust, not helium, nothing! Charged particles are not common enough to support a space ship's evergy requirments.

[Gardamorg]

Originally Posted by Moontanman

Stranded in space? Do you think it's going to stop? You coast to the next star, decelerate into orbit around that star or a planet. Think!

Coast had better be a fancy way of saying sun generating solar energy from 20 light years away, or it won't work.

A star can only provide enough propulsion to get your mag field space craft may be two light years away, but after that the sun will be too distant to provide any real magnetic propulsion, and that's saying the mag field can be lengthened to a million miles in diameter.

[Moontanman]

Originally Posted by Gardamorg

Coast had better be a fancy way of saying sun generating solar energy from 20 light years away, or it won't work.

A star can only provide enough propulsion to get your mag field space craft may be two light years away, but after that the sun will be too distant to provide any real magnetic propulsion, and that's saying the mag field can be lengthened to a million miles in diameter.

Gardamorg, once you achieve a velocity in space you keep it until something else acts on you. And at least theoretically a magnetic sail could be a million miles in diameter. But it wouldn't need to be, once you had achieved your velocity you could coast to the end of the universe if you wanted but I would prefer to coast to the next star and decelerate into orbit around that star. Power to generate the sail could be generated by a nuclear reactor. All this technology could be done now, nothing new needs to be discovered for it to work.

[Gardamorg]

Originally Posted by Moontanman

Gardamorg, once you achieve a velocity in space you keep it until something else acts on you. And at least theoretically a magnetic sail could be a million miles in diameter. But it wouldn't need to be, once you had achieved your velocity you could coast to the end of the universe if you wanted but I would prefer to coast to the next star and decelerate into orbit around that star. Power to generate the sail could be generated by a nuclear reactor. All this technology could be done now, nothing new needs to be discovered for it to work.

The weight of the payload that the magfield would be hauling would generate drag.

Weight is a constant, and it is a force that acts against velocity, surely it's not as great in space as on Earth, but it's still there.

[Moontanman]

Originally Posted by Gardamorg

The weight of the payload that the magfield would be hauling would generate drag.

Weight is a constant, and it is a force that acts against velocity, surely it's not as great in space as on Earth, but it's still there.

A mag field weighs nothing and would turned off after it was no longer providing thrust. No mass does not act against velocity, once the velocity is reached the more mass you have the harder it is to slow down not the opposite.

[Gardamorg]

Originally Posted by Moontanman

A mag field weighs nothing and would turned off after it was no longer providing thrust. No mass does not act against velocity, once the velocity is reached the more mass you have the harder it is to slow down not the opposite.

Not the Magfield, the craft that's generating it, that's the weight that will work as the force that slows it down to a complete stop.

[Moontanman]

Originally Posted by Gardamorg

Not the Magfield, the craft that's generating it, that's the weight that will work as the force that slows it down to a complete stop.

No, an object, regardless of it's mass, once in motion tends to stay in motion until acted on by an outside force. A more massive object is more difficult to slow down.