Timeline for What would be the ideal reaction mass for hall-effect engines?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
17 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jan 30, 2023 at 21:23 | comment | added | Silver | and under the right conditions, bismuth could look really cool if it did condense on the engines | |
| Jan 30, 2023 at 5:24 | comment | added | Sam Kitsune | Huh, so basically everywhere. Thanks! | |
| Jan 30, 2023 at 5:18 | comment | added | BMF | @SamKitsune You'll find bismuth ore pretty much anywhere you find rocks. It's twice as abundant as gold. It will be a natural byproduct of mining & refining other common metals as well (copper, iron, tungsten, etc.). | |
| Jan 30, 2023 at 5:12 | comment | added | Sam Kitsune | And on the off chance you'd know, where would you get an industrial supply of bismuth in the solar system? Is there anywhere in particular that'd get a lot of infrastructure to mine the stuff? | |
| Jan 30, 2023 at 4:57 | comment | added | Sam Kitsune | And FYI JBH shot that down because I didn't write it good enough... sigh ...I do plan on putting it back up, but I just have to re-write part of it to specify that the tether spins and how to not ask for opinions and such the like. | |
| Jan 30, 2023 at 4:56 | comment | added | Sam Kitsune | @BMF I was hoping someone would take a gander at the gas ratios you'd get for mining helium on Saturn/Uranus... (If I'm being honest, I say in the book that they mine helium 3 on Jupiter/Saturn just to not have to say the 7th planet's name...) and then come up with an answer based on that... but I can do that myself, just hoping someone would do it and find something noteworthy I wouldn't have if I didn't ask. | |
| Jan 30, 2023 at 4:54 | comment | added | BMF | Also, unrelated to this, may I ask why did you delete your Q about skyhooks? I was preparing an answer and stepped away for a bit and came back when it was already deleted. I figure someone probably commented how it wasn't strictly about worldbuilding? (How momentum exchange tethers work is probably better suited on SE:SE, but it's not like those kinds of Q's don't end up here sometimes.) Anyway, if you're not planning to ask it again, I might ask a similar Q myself. | |
| Jan 30, 2023 at 4:47 | comment | added | BMF | @SamKitsune I mean FWIW I don't think you were going to get many differing answers. In your Q it sounds like you were hunting for special molecules and mixtures & compounds but there's no obvious reason why that would be beneficial. Complex molecules will be ionized and disassociated, and now you've got to design an engine that likely sacrifices efficiency to accelerate lower mass particles as well. What you want is a relatively heavy & inert substance that's already gaseous that's easy to ionize, and Xenon checks all those boxes better than everything else. Bismuth checks most of them. | |
| Jan 30, 2023 at 2:33 | vote | accept | Sam Kitsune | ||
| Jan 30, 2023 at 2:33 | comment | added | Sam Kitsune | @BMF I just gave you 50 rep for free... scowl ...eh, you deserved it. | |
| Jan 27, 2023 at 21:40 | comment | added | Christopher James Huff | @SamKitsune bismuth's melting point is lower than lead's, so it's not that difficult to just pipe around in liquid form. | |
| Jan 27, 2023 at 14:49 | comment | added | Daron | That is yummy-looking diagram you have there. | |
| Jan 22, 2023 at 14:33 | comment | added | Sam Kitsune | I mean, I've also heard of trying to use mercury, but thats just got planet-poisoning disaster written all over it. Some old fuel depot falls out of the sky? And suddenly the oceans and skies are filled with mercury vapor. | |
| Jan 22, 2023 at 14:32 | comment | added | Sam Kitsune | Maybe, making bismuth fuel as some sort of colloidal sludge suspended in some synthetic fluid-like medium so it can be pumped like a liquid right into the engine's metal vaporizing system, or maybe just pelletized bismuth that come in hefty cases would work. | |
| Jan 22, 2023 at 14:30 | comment | added | Sam Kitsune | Huh! Bismuth! I didn't know that was even a thing. Sure, the design constraints give it a reasonable minimum size, meaning it suffers the same issue as the fusion engines, but definitely not as bad. Maybe for large cargo ships and such, doing slow adjustments, bismuth is preferred, but for smaller probes-n-skiffs you'd use noble gasses and simpler, lower power engines. | |
| Jan 22, 2023 at 4:59 | history | edited | BMF | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
added 152 characters in body
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| Jan 22, 2023 at 4:51 | history | answered | BMF | CC BY-SA 4.0 |