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scoop it up as we go along if the concentration levels are high enough.
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The short answer is "no," the gas is vanishingly thin and you would need a collector of immense proportions traveling at very high speeds to capture practical fuel masses.
Somebody thought of a way around this to some point, and the device was named after him, called the Bussard Collector; the idea is to use the slightly magnetic nature of hydrogen to draw it in over a wide area using a gargantuan magnetic field as the ship travels through the gas. Unfortunatly, such a magnetic field would be extremely hard to make and you must already be traveling pretty fast to use it.
[i]"The power of accurate observation is often called cynicism by those that do not have it." - George Bernard Shaw[/i]
[i]The glass is at 50% of capacity[/i]
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It just depends on how much gas there is per cubic centimeter, and the velocity the ship is traveling. I doesn't have to be Bussards rocket design. If the gasses are there in sufficent quanties other applications could be used. I would like to see how much there is per cubic centimeters in this article but it does not mention it.
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Well i'll fill you in right now, that its for intents and purposes for rocket propulsion -zero-.
[i]"The power of accurate observation is often called cynicism by those that do not have it." - George Bernard Shaw[/i]
[i]The glass is at 50% of capacity[/i]
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How do you know without the figures?
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Because we are inside the Milky Way right now this very minute, and there isn't enough to scoop up anywhere in the solar system.
[i]"The power of accurate observation is often called cynicism by those that do not have it." - George Bernard Shaw[/i]
[i]The glass is at 50% of capacity[/i]
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Perhaps they have not found it yet in our solar system. Could it exist? They could have missed it as they did in this article.
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Perhaps they have not found it yet in our solar system. Could it exist? They could have missed it as they did in this article.
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No, this is much larger than the solar system. If there was something like it in the solar system, then it would be more accurate to say that the solar system is in it, and we would have detected it.
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Could be. However, we could have still missed it even if we are in it. Just a thought.
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The thing is that hydrogen is quite easy to spot. You look for certain spectroscopic absorption lines (Lyman Alpha lines, IIRC) that tell you where and how much hydrogen there is. There are areas of the galaxy that have high concentrations of gasses but unfortunately none of them are very conveniently located.
A Bussard ramjet would work but the problem is that you need a magnetic field generator that is far more powerful than anything we currently can make or can even think about making. It also requiresthat you are already going a significant fraction of the speed of light. If a bussard ramjet could be made to work it would be the most effective spacecraft drive in existence since it doesn't have to carry fuel along with it.
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Yep it has to go that fast because the concentration of H2 in space is but a few grams per cubic centimeter. It the percentage of H2 were greater per cubic centimeter it would not have to go as fast to scoop it up along the way.
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Yep it has to go that fast because the concentration of H2 in space is but a few grams per cubic centimeter.
No, it is much less than that. Did you meant a few grams per cubic kilometer?
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OOPS It is a few ions per cubic centimeter. Sorry.
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