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Nuclear pulse in 2300?

M

Marchand

SOC-12
I'm sure many of us will have heard of the concept of nuclear pulse propulsion (NPP), e.g.

http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/O/OrionProj.html

"A rocket propelled by a rapid and lengthy series of small atomic or nuclear explosions."

Has anyone considered introducing this into "2300" as a means of reducing interface costs?

Assuming it's technically feasible, do people think NPP would be any more socially acceptable in the 2300s than the 1960s or 2000s? An obvious answer would be that the Twilight War has turned everybody off anything to do with nukes, permanently. Another view might be that people would think, well, the added fallout from these machines will be a tiny fraction of what happened during the Twilight War, and the world's still here, so why not?

One could even imagine a post-Twilight, reconstruction period, "swords into ploughshares" rationale for France using some of those unfired nukes it has gathered up (for safekeeping, you understand) for a morale-boosting return-to-space programme.

Then, assuming it was socially acceptable and was introduced, can someone talk me through the consequences of lower interface costs for the 2300 setting? Heavier traffic and more trade for starters?
 
the daedalus fusion version seems like a much more ecologically friendly version and probably not much harder to build

by utilising components of the hydrogen bombs, the 'city busters', you'd get just as much good publicity and still have the fissionables for power generation

the consequences are many and varied but in-system exploitation should be more common as these drives make local travel much more economically feasable by providing a midpoint option between weeks+ by chem rocket and hours+ by stutterwarp ..... without relying on precious tantalum for the interstellar engines
 
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Marchand said:
"A rocket propelled by a rapid and lengthy series of small atomic or nuclear explosions."

Has anyone considered introducing this into "2300" as a means of reducing interface costs?
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A big NO for spacelift. The EMP effects alone would be horrific. Read the Wikipedia article, Dyson estimated 0.1 to 1 cancer fatalities per surface launch.


Marchand said:
Then, assuming it was socially acceptable and was introduced, can someone talk me through the consequences of lower interface costs for the 2300 setting?
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Interface is expensive (much less so in 2320). Accept it. Embrace it.

Seriously, the interface cost rules in the back of the Director's Guide are broken. I have the real ones if you're interested.
 
Yeah, I looked at the wiki article. As far as EM pulse goes: "This problem might be solved by launching from very remote areas, because the EMP footprint would be only a few hundred miles wide." To be fair, I guess it would be a problem for the launch site.

As for 0.1 to 1 cancer fatalities per launch, perhaps the operating company could sponsor ten people to stop smoking per launch..?! But (slightly more) seriously, as I am only considering this for the 2300 world, I wonder how much people in 2300 would worry about the additional carcinogenic effect on an Earth that has already suffered significant use of nuclear weapons? Presumably anti-carcinogenic medicines are better developed (even without invoking magical carcinophagic nanites).

So, I only got my 2300 CD from FFE the other day and already I'm trying to bust the setting...
 
Going from the impressions from the 2300 game books (and in the 2320 manuscript as well), people aren't so blase about life because humanity came through the Twilight War. Just the opposite - it seems that people are much more willing to trade away freedom for security and tranquility. Like even modern day Europe / Western Civilization still has not truly recovered from the trauma of the fall of the Roman Empire, I think in 2300 people are still wrestling with the ghosts of the Twilight War, 300 years on.

Far from "accepting" a few deaths from radiation poisoning, in 2300 Earth you might be gently but firmly guided to psycho-chemical "counselling" to figure out what's wrong with you for suggesting such a terrible thing.

In fact, one of the things that's sort of struck me lately is that people on Earth in 2300 would probably not like fusion power as it's related to that whole "nuclear devastation" thing that ruined the world. This, in turn, has made consider my "2300 Earth meets the Vilani" timeline that a striking difference between the Solomani and the Vilani is that the Vilani and later the Third Imperium would use fusion for everything, but the Solomani might be big on "alternative energy" ...
 
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I could see NPP as an interplanetary drive being acceptable, but I agree that as an interface drive it is probably politically unacceptable.
 
Plankowner said:
I could see NPP as an interplanetary drive being acceptable, but I agree that as an interface drive it is probably politically unacceptable.
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Alan Bond, the "inventor" of the Daedelus Drive, has argued recently for it's delevopment/use for a proposed theoretical Mars Mission, code named Helen, at a British Interplanetry Society (B.I.S for short) symposium, on the subject of Mars missions, a couple of months ago...
Given that Helium-3 exists on the Moon, it's possible that a Daedelus type drive could be constructed in the near future, for a manned Mars Mission, & travel time to Mars would be reduced from over 1 year, using current technology, to approxmately 21 days...
 
shaunhilburn said:
Daedalus has a thrust/weight ratio less than 1. It can't get off the ground, so its useless for interface flight.
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And that's immaterial for interplanetary flight, where the limiting factor is mostly ∆V. Daedalus has a decent ∆V
 
Plankowner said:
I could see NPP as an interplanetary drive being acceptable, but I agree that as an interface drive it is probably politically unacceptable.
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I agree with using it as a interplanetary drive system. Also, lets consider the possiblity of using such a drive to move a huge O'Neil class space colony, or a asteroid to serve as a teather for a future space elevator.
 
I just read a summary of the Project Icarus symposium, & it turns out that Lunar He3 mining may never be commercially viable, due to the extremely low yields (Nanograms per gram of Lunar Regolith mined), & as a result, any intra-system Daedalus-type pulse drive system would use a Deuterium/Tritium mix, rather than the He3/Deuterium mix originally proposed...
Incedentally, Alan Bond argued that such a drive should not be operated within 1 million Km of Earth, due to the nature of the drive pulse...
 
In the 3200 rules, they have inertia-less drives already and honestly, getting off the ground with a nuclear pulse engine would be in the realms of desperation (read FOOTFALL by Pournell and Niven). Today, Nasa and others are developing highly efficient new chemical and ion drives. By 2300 there's bound to be something more efficient than detonating expensive nuclear bombs behind your ship... though on the other tentacle, they DO have a culture for small nuclear-pumped lasers... hmm.
 
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