New Mars Forums

but to mine it it would be more cost effective if you have some permanent buildings there so that you can have living quarters there.... not to mention the fact that you can reproduce artificial gravity there... so you can stay longer periods of time. we still need to work out cost before we go out and work on stuff like this though... it all boils down to breaking through the earths atmosphere.... how we can do it cleaner, faster, and ALOT more inexpensive.

Personally i dont think its just the core thats the problem its the fact that it has 3 moons pulling on the planet screwing arround with the cores stability. thus the magnetic fields would be off....

actually i was thinking about having it as an orbital space launching system.... that way you dont have to worry about weight as much..

sure you would have to think about recoil, but that can be over come with standard propultion engines....

in space since there isn't really any resistance, you can easily reach over those speeds of mach 5-6

just drop off the peices needed in space with a few shuttle launches, and then bring up the ship in peices and there you go.

What about a type of Rail gun system to launch the shuttle in the general direction and have it be under almost constant deceleration on the way there...

you can have it so its a controlled launch, like pick up speed and just gain acceleration as it goes down the track, and then in the second half, it kicks it into high gear....

roller coasters can get things moving from 0-100 in like 1-2 seconds... so it could be a feasable way to do it with this.. heck you could send with a whole train like system with the shuttle so that you can build one for the trip back home too...

it also doesn't mean you cant do it land based too (such as the moon or something to that effect... in reality that would be the most logical)

I know they were thinking of doing something like this for one of the concepts for a land based clean launch but they scrapped the idea unfortinately.

very impractical.. with the gravity lighter than earths then you will be launching much higher and thus landing with more force.

say you are moving core samples.. you will need a vehicle... that is unless you want to try and jump arround with the equiptment and samples back to base...

im sorry, i didn't mean the private companys should make it, but do computer simulation test models, and so on. stuff like that isn't 1/4 as expensive.

personally i look at it as an investment for bigger companys to invest in smaller ones to work on ideas...

ok, so say you give up some thrust for saving power. i would say its worth it because then that means it takes less of a powerplant to create power that is offset at a specific out put efficiency level...

what about a reactor system that holds and uses plasma power to power the magnets? there are always ways to do things differently...

i agree that the figure seems weird, but look at the time frame... 20 MT in 39 days... thats fast as hell! on average we are looking at reducing travel times with that engine from 7 months roughly to about 4.... so figure 20mt x 4 and you have roughly 80mt to play with.

as far as me thinking out loud (or typing) about the engine being able to be much more efficient, i was thinking about using the engine in a rerun process to creat a higher potential than its able to do right now...

we know how the engine works but here is a run through so i can explain where the rerunning would work on it..

propellant of Helium runs through the magnetic component turning it into plasma, and then the energy wanting to escape runs out the back as exhaust basicly like on a plane...

well a rerun design would take the plasma state and use that to help aid the magnets to convert the gas into plasma (like taking fire to creat fire) and run it through as exhaust still..

i could be completely wrong, but then again it never hurts to think out side the box

very impractical... sure its ok for space travel but thats about it.. there are safer ways of acheiving the same goal

they should work on propultion systems more so they can get more vehicles that are reusable for heavy lifting.... they had some great technology going on one of the X planes they stopped research on.... In all honesty private research is cheaper and better as far as getting new and innovative ideas out there.

ok i just did some research on the VASMIR project. Chang-Diaz said that on 200 mega watts a 20 Metric Ton shuttle can reach mars in roughly 39 days...

There has to be a way to increase the over all productivity of this meathod so even if it is using the same ammount of power, it will put out more propultion than this design.

Does anyone know where they have a schematic of this engine? I would love to take a look at it and see what could be done to make it more reasonable...

these are really intresting topics in here, but i wouild like to put some of my input in here too...

when your in space, lots of the standard rules wont apply. Temperature is a big factor of reactors, from cooling to heating... in the reactor section of a ship there usually wont be the whole living quarters and everything under a controled temperature environment.

if your doing long range travel like say mars (crazy i know lol) you would want multiple power systems. its like with cars, you could just get a lemon even if it is hand built to exact specs, there is always that thing that could go wrong. Not even just talking about the things that could go wrong with the system, but what about using multiple power sources for driving the VASIMR enigne?

Sure you might add lots of weight to the ship... but then all that means is that it drives like a train instead of a bus. so what when its not made for high manuvering?

there are lots of factors when dealing with non-stationary powerplants. just some food for thought.