Mass drivers

> From: sraj
> Will it be practical to use such mass drivers to move
> asteroids? And even use them for spacecraft propulsion?

It's pretty much the orrigonal proposal for moving asteroids around. Since
they can use any reaction-mass yoiu can get very good mass ratios, since you
'land' on your fuel rather than putting it in a heavy tank. If the military
ever manages to build a automatic-railgun with a >10kmps muzzle velocity and
a high rate of fire over a period of 8 minutes you might even use it to get
into orbit. ;)

The problem with mass drivers is power, and sometiems the durability of the
'rock crushers' needed to create the reaction mass from raw materials. An
ideal design might be a gas-core reactor with open-system cooling using pure
ice from a comet and dumping the warm water into the mass-driver buckets.
With a 500ton rocket engine and a billion ton iceball you could have a
deltaV of 435kmps - which is a very respectable 0.0015C. Not bad for a
rocket we could actually build.

ANTIcarrot.