so, you want no backup? say someone is infected with a disease, but shows no symptoms. the food gets sick and dies. what do you do now?

 

surplus food would spoil. MREs last almost forever.

Surplus food can be put in deep freeze, or dehydrated so it would last forever. MREs last only something like 4 years.

And with someone getting sick with no symptoms, I really doubt that human diseases can be transmitted to plants.

what about the meat? anyway, bacteria might affect the plants. it depends on what it is.

 

on a different subject, the entire crew would need g-suits. i would suggest hydrolic g-suits instead of pneumatic. i have seen video of a two pilots in g-suits at nine gs each having different types of suits. the one with the hydrolic suit was fine and the one in the pneumatic was about to pass out.

G-suits? What the heck for? If they wanted to accelerate at 1g, you'd need a 4000 kilometer wide collection scoop for the engine, anyways! 1g is great. Like what we'd feel on earth. No g-suits.

then you go slowly. and don't turn

At 1g acceleration, you'd hit c in around a year.

Not counting relativity.

 

 

It simply would not be practical to have enough power to do high-g manuevers, since the collection area for hydrogen would have to be humongous. 1g takes a 4000 km wide area! And that's with a theoretical FUSION engine, anyways. (this from The Starflight Handbook). Turning is easy. You just can't turn very hard. But for exploration missions you don't need to anyways.

what about away missions? like going to an asteroid or something?

 

edit:it would take much longer than one year to accelerate anywhare c at 1g. besides that, acceleration to c is impossible

possible hull material :http://www.scienceforums.net/forums/showthread.php?t=5854 ?

The best thing for this engine wise would be to use a cip engine with an electric generator for the motor of some sort, check it out.

 

I wouldn’t worry about heat problems apart from cooking yourself in the ship, space is a hard place to keep cool.

 

A cip engine is this, (it works as the weight move in and to of equilibrium).

http://www.forceborne.com/

He’s made a boat that runs with this and its going to be in a move sometime this year, I’ve been talking to him regarding his designs, his videos on there are very old the new engines he has are much nice designed by boeing,

what is a cip engine?

Cook Internal Propulsion

http://www.americanantigravity.com/cook.html

How is a CIP going to propel a spacecraft?

Yeah it will be a bit slow, o well.

The pictures you find on the next are 4+ years old of the design, hes made a great engine. but still would be slow, lol.

I would suggest seat belts and less knobs. Sorry, just had to say that!

Yeah it will be a bit slow, o well.

I don't see that it would do anything, seeing as it seems to work by slinging weights around.

Just as an amusing side-note to this discussion, according to this web page...

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimatter

 

... anti-matter can presently be produced at a cost of roughly $25 billion per gram.

 

Of course, in theory you only need a few grams of the stuff to reach the amount of energy expended on a typical late Apollo moon mission, so perhaps that's not so bad!

(hehe)

That cip thing looks a bit like something I was going to have a go at building but I didn't realy look to see if there was a design on there. I was thinking of a circular track with a weight on it. The weight goes round the track and the track rotates once per revolution of the weight. It would shake a lot and there is a lot of lost energy but some net thrust. It would provide more thrust than ion prop and could be driven by electric motors. Some of the lost energy can be recovered. The thing I would worry about is the constant bombardment by stelar matter. Have you seen/heard about astronauts seeing flashes of light whilst in space.