As mentioned previously, I’m still plugging away on my Nuclear Pulse Propulsion book I’ve got the Daedalus diagrams mostly done… most of the actual drafting is probably done, but there’s some line formatting and layering to work on yet. Shown below is the full British Interplanetary Society Daedalus starship design in all its two-stages of glory on the left, with the stages separate on the right, the vehicle as a unit. Wedged in between ’em are the Saturn V and the Space Shuttle, looking small and inoffensive.
The Daedalus is at a scale where the Shuttle is just not doing the job as a scale reference. Does anyone know where I could get an *accurate* side view (either a CAD drawing or a detailed GIF/JPG) of the Empire State Building?
9 Responses to “Starships are not small: more”
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http://skyscraperpage.com/cities/?buildingID=23
Sadly, far too low resolution.
Daedalus was really something to look at…now if the BIS had only figured out the details of how the engine was going to work in detail, as we can’t do repetitive fusion explosions with a bootstrapped electrical power system on Earth, much less in space.
They might have just as well stuck with the Orion concept, as we at least know that A-bombs will work, even if the pneumatic shock absorber system and oil covering of the driver plate between detonations sounds pretty iffy from a practical point of view.
There’s a lot about the Daedalus propulsion system that seems iffy. Firing electron beams dozens of meters through massive and rapidly fluctuating magnetic fields, for starters…
> They might have just as well stuck with the Orion concept
Then they’d never get a starship.Orion is great, but even the most advanced forms of Orion are nowhere near capable of 20% lightspeed.
I say we use my “Vegetative Starship” concept – like an ion drive, total thrust per second is very low, but the thing is self-homing and provides food for its crew as it moves…provided that they don’t mind living off of a diet of flax seed for the next fifty years http://groups.google.com/group/rec.arts.sf.written/msg/602dbce274268532?hl=en
Of course the BIS never thought of that, did they?… the little imperialist Ireland-enslaving bad-toothed bastards.
http://www.vector.net/2010/skyscrapers/
Try here:
http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/advdesign.php
And waddya mean, Pat, “Ireland-enslaving”? You got the inestimable benefits of British rule! And you say “Imperialist” like it’s a bad thing! 🙂
Grif
I remember from my early childhood–late 1960s–a ‘Buck Rogers’ comic strip were the powers that be of the Earth in that XXIII century were building ‘a mile-long spaceship.’ I kind of remember that the plot included an antimatter asteroid in collision course with Earth. Pretty good stuff for an impressionable six-year old nerd with stars in his eyes an a (inertial confinement fusion) rocket in his heart! I always wanted to see that strip again…
Eager to see the nuclear pulse book in print!
I’ve seen similar comparisons before. A gripe: I’d like to see one against, say, a pier of the Golden Gate Bridge (including the part under water), against a Ford class carrier, against a big stadium, and so on. How about against a modern BIG skyscraper, not the 1930’s stuff.
I actually went looking for some VRML models to do this with a few years back, but didn’t find anything decent of Daedalus. I know it’s out there, I just couldn’t find it.