Talk-Polywell.org

There is an article and interview with Elon Musk on Popular Mechanics about how he is going to achieve reusability of the Falcon 9 (and as it appears also of the Falcon Heavy). http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/space/rockets/elon-musk-on-spacexs-reusable-rocket-plans-6653023?click=pm_latest B...

If on Venus, better would be to create floating city's high in the atmosphere. The air is so dense that floating would be easy, this also takes care of the temperature problem. Could use remote robotics to mine the surface for materials. Only issue is you'd have to make the entire skin of the habit...

Are Martijn Rambonnet and Bent de Lange included in this list somewhere?

I keep seeing that Blended Wing-Body airframe morphing into a flatter, wider variant of the X-33 shape for SSTO, with a Polywell in the middle and embedded, sealable VTOL fans (nice and fluffy for reentry with metallic TPS, if radiation shield and down converter mass can be kept low enough). The bo...

Thanks for pointing that out that paper, Betruger. A 30km shift in 6 years didn't make a whole lot of sense to me anyways. I still think it could be profitable to visit Titan's poles sometime in the future. I don't know how we could do it, but I think we will.

Raw materials just aren't there any more like they were. And if you have no industrial infrastructure, then you can't extract and make use of these deep, very lean deposits. Which means if we loose our industrial infrastructure we just won't have the raw materials available to access those remote d...

Efficient, superconducting, high power density electric fans would be great for VTVL, and electric turbines for low-medium speed forward flight. The problem is that they require low voltage, which requires extra mass to down-convert Polywell's ~1.5MV to a usable range. Maybe this can be done lightl...

It's VTOL electric lift fans, transitioning to electric turbines up to ~M2.5, transitioning to REB from there to orbit. See Bussard's papers on hypersonic propulsion. I'm feeding air to the REB until the atmosphere thins out, only then blending in onboard reaction mass. Would this be feasible to do...

Nydoc wrote:I think the Aerovator is a much better option

I take that back. It would never work for a myriad of reasons.

Hi. I just recently stumbled across this forum. Looks like there's a lot of cool ideas here. The estimated strength rqmt is at 65 GPa. The best carbon nanotubes (CNT) we can make are right in that range. Ultimate strength estimates for CNT are in the 120 GPa range with diamond a little better. Obvio...