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Originally Posted by WalrusLike
I think efforts to plan technologies more than a decade or so ahead are doomed to be irrelevant. We need to get out of the cradle before we start wondering what running shoes we will be using.
Lets work out what steps we can take in the immediate future to get to the point where we can sustain colonies off-earth first. Then we will find that we have enormous resources available right here in our own solar system. By the time we need to start to worry about system resource depletion we will already have a whole range of new technologies to consider for the next step.
Gourdhead I would suggest that your efforts are better spent on finding a more immediate problem... the far future will likely look a lot different than you or I imagine it to be.
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Thanks for the suggestion; however, I decline to take it. If you take a serious look at the concept, you'll realize that it is needed to terraform/colonize sites within the solar system and if we find useful resources at other sites and have developed a sufficiently robust infrastructure to acquire the resources we shall have folllowed a concept very similar to the one proposed. The steps to take in the immediate future are ones to implement the concept. We can't guess how soon the comet/asteroid destroyer/deflector feature of the concept will be required. Remember the set of systems required by this concept will take ~500 years to emplace. I would be very pleased to review an outline of systems of which you are aware that address the solution to near term problems associated with space exploration.
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...the ship should be symmetrical, around the centre of thrust- otherwise the beam would tend to push the craft sideways, out of the beam, losing power.
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Good point. However, the ion engines will keep the power receiver centered on the beam, but at a loss of efficiency. The fix I have been thinking about is to add one to three additional thrust modules around the circumference of the power receiver to achieve thrust symmetry with respect to the beam.
Stopping the vehicle at the destination will be achieved by reversing the ion engine thrust.