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Thought of this last night at the control room console.
How about a solar powered particle beam propulsion system? It works like this. Suppose you had two particle beams, one is H2, and the other is 02, powered from the sun, and a array of solar panels. They both exhaust out the back end of a spacecraft but at a forty five degree angle towards each other until they collide into one another. The collision should set off an H2, and 02 explosion.
You would get the acceleration from two sources. The first one would be by the fact the gasses are exiting the spacecraft at very high velocities from the particle beams, and the second would be the explosion that occurs just behind the spacecraft.
They can be pulsed in longer or shorter nano second bursts to achieve the desired acceleration rate.
It could be used as neat missile defense, also. If you were to focus these two separate beams on an incoming missile it would destroy it quicker since the H2 and O2 would explode on impact thus destroying the missile.First a laser would laze the target then the two particle beams would focus on the laser pin point.
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One question:
How do you keep the beam from degrading?
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Well, In the vacuum of space, and the few feet it travels before the collision, I dought it would degrade much. At the instant the collision occurs the particles slow down and creat the heat needed for ignition through kinetic energy.
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one more question for you:
does the benefit gained from the explosion more than compensate for the roughy 30% loss of energy from slanting the beams at 45 deg. Or could the beams be less slanted and if so how would that effect the (for lack of a better term) force concetration that goes into pushing the craft?
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I agree, a 45 degree angle would probably give less reaction than a 22.5 degree angle. Perhaps a 11.25 degree angle would be best. Since, you are using the fuel in two different ways to propel the craft, I would think you are getting more bang for the buck per gram of fuel. Sort of like a combined cycle steam power plant.
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