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dyna.soar (dyna.soar@tiscalinet.it)
Tue, 14 Nov 2000 23:09:06 +0900 (JST)
On Monday, November 13, 2000 at 06:24:36 PM, gundam@aeug.org wrote:
> Well, it had a few to-be-developed items, such as the Lunar mass-driver and ion
> drive. Both are still theoretical.
Well, they were theoretical. Ion drives have flown since the late 60's and right know the Deep Space One is travelling toward Mars propelled by a ion drive; you can look for details in NASA's website.
Regarding mass-drivers, apart from the prototype described by G.K. o'Neill, superconductors technology makes them feasible.
>
> But more importantly the O'Neill plan called for a gradual development: Island
> One, a 10,000-person habitat 500 meters across, which would be used to construct
> Island Two, a 140,000-person (sphere) or 820,000-person (cylinder) 1.8 km
> across, which in turn would be used to construct Island Three, the 5 to
> 10,000,000-person habitat 6.4 km across that would be the ultimate goal.
>
> In Gundam, they start off building Island Three cylinders, using Island One type
> habitats only as construction shacks for the O'Neill "open-type" colonies.
> Furthermore, they build them by the hundreds -- even at 10,000,000 people per
> cylinder, you need a hundred cylinders for each billion people. And they
> emigrated five billion people before Minovsky and Ionescu even began work on the
> compact fusion reactor.
>
> I didn't say the He3 fusion was a requirement for space colonization per se, but
> rather that I couldn't accept the colonization scope and schedule shown in
> Gundam being achievable without it.
>
> -Z-
>
I do agree. The timespan is way too short, fusion or not.
Bye, Max
> -
> Gundam Mailing List Archives are available at http://gundam.aeug.org/
>
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