How awesome would that actually be?

Can I be Bones 'He's dead Jim...'?

I hope he included 10 forward

Ah yes, I looked at the length given in meters (960) & thought it was a galaxy class ship but it actually looks more like the enterprise A.

The fantasy of travelling any significant distance in space is what keeps NASA funded and is tantamount to a fraud.

These sort of things help their cause in gaining more funds.

Space Travel, of any significance is not possible yet and won't be for a few thousand years at the very least.

I grew up in the era where, as children, we thought it could happen, as I've grown up I've realised it is a complete non-starter and there is no hope for it on the horizon... we ain't boldly going anywhere... not even to our nearest star, Proxima Centauri for at least 30 thousand years and by then the nearest star will be one of the Ross Group!

We're too fragile, we can't survive at much over 1g for sustained periods of time and we' have to accelerate within that strict confine to survive, unless frozen solid [in which we case die!] so for year upon year we'd have to accelerate at approx 12m. per sec/sec until we reached half way then turn the ship around and decelerate at the same rate for the remaining half, each half taking many years... the motors on line all the way! Unless these first star pilots were sacrificial then we'd have to provide resources to get them back again... well their grandchildren anyway, as the people who started the journey would all be long dead by the time this ship returned.

That friends is the reality.

The resource to build a ship that big would bankrupt the earth of resources, some of the rarer ones more than a thousand times over... so there is barely enough resource in our entire solar system to do it!

Some numbers for you...

9,460,730,472,580,800m x 4.2421 = 40,133,364,737,735,011m (distance to our nearest star in metres)

So, half way is about 20,066,682,368,867,000m

Escape velocity / orbital velocity and subsequent start off speed 7000m/sec

Sustained human acceleration rate 12m/sec/sec (this is likely to result in a 40% shorter lifespan for the ship occupants)

of course it is!

the Valkyrie is just a steel cables with an engine at both ends weighing in at just 100 tonnes and perfectly able to approach c.

all we need is either a cheap way to get "stuff" into space, or like the other thread, build the facilities to enable us to never need to ship up anything but people.

the money spent by the western governments bailing out the banks could have built us both options.

governments have the money, they just wont spend it... unless its to bail out banks

The anti matter drives too much of a stretch and, to my mind, unnecessary. Project Orion style nuclear pulse propulsion for me. Fairly low tech and it'd work, probably.

i love orion but due to the eco mentalists, we have no way of getting it into orbit... construction would be a very simple case of welding thick as you like steel together at a shipyard or something.

project Daedalus could be done with current tech. we have places in the US doing laser initilised nuclear fusion. they can only do pulses at the moment, but thats all that is needed for the daedalus.

lol you just reminded me of that cgi cartoon Shadow raiders... thats exactly what they did

technically.. it could work.

practically.. no

everything in line of sight of the engines will be cooked and irradiated ( and some beyond line of sight as gamma rays are powerful little buggers! )

everything else will get COOOOOOOOLD ! move far enough away from the sun and the atmosphere itself will freeze solid, quickly followed by the Marianas trench ( although key areas around volcanic hot spots will stay liquid.

but before all of that.. the dynamics of the molton core and process of stopping the rotation of the planet so i can be navigated will probably rip it apart!

example..

spin a raw egg on the counter top. stop it then immediately let go.. you will see it start to spin again! scale this up and you can see bad things will happen!

Didn't think of that...