Bussard Ram Jet, Starship Wanderer
JimP
🖼 280 images Departed Legend - Rest in Peace
To give you something new to look at... I realized this evening I haven't done any new drawings on Starship Wanderer, its on my Traveller site.
So here is a cut away view of the Bussard Ram Jet engines used in it. 17 miles long by 2 miles across. I may put some color areas in to show general locations of living quarters, machine shops, etc. But I don't think they would show up easily at this scale.
So, here ya go. This png is at half-size. I'm giving you all first look, not on my site yet.
So here is a cut away view of the Bussard Ram Jet engines used in it. 17 miles long by 2 miles across. I may put some color areas in to show general locations of living quarters, machine shops, etc. But I don't think they would show up easily at this scale.
So, here ya go. This png is at half-size. I'm giving you all first look, not on my site yet.
Comments
Green rectangles are work shops and berthing compartments. Those would be sleeping, eating, etc. compartments. The two reddish rectangles with yellow borders are work areas only. Radiation suits required due to the lasers firing at the compressed hydrogen gas.
Now I can say that it all makes perfect sense, and that I love the shade of green in the Firing compartment
I'm not familiar with the Traveller rules. Is this just the engine or is it a ship in itself? What is the fuel on the intake?
The Bussard was a common faster than light ship for several years in science fiction. But substationally smaller.
It has a huge cone made of magnetic fields out in front that is used to gather the atoms together. Then they are compressed in the engine. The lasers turns them into plasma and they are fired out the back.
Nothing to do with Traveller. That game has huge ships, but smaller than this one. I thought of this ship years before rpgs had been printed. It was in the early 1970s. I didn't hear of Traveller until 1980. Maybe 1981.
edit: I've decided to go with a more block diagram approach than lots of detail for the entire ship. I just moved this ship from its own sub-domain over to the travellergame sub-domain to make for fewer sub-domains... hasn't stopped me from making more sub-domains though.
LLAP
Nacon4
I decided for my site, and future game purposes, that Wanderer could travel about one quarter or one third as fast as a Jump ship. I may tweek that as I have time to sit down and work on it.
One problem though, the local interstellar medium, like around Earth's solar system, there isn't enough hydrogen cloud to sustain a Bussard. but our gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn, could be skimmed for Jump fuel.
LLAP
Nacon4
While I'm not a Bussard expert, from what I have read it needs hydrogen atoms to be above a certain density, and the solar wind wont work for that. I'm not a physicist, so I have no idea on details.