[Spaceships] Fusion Rockets

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by Neural Kernel

With a fusion rocket taken literally as written... just load it with hydrogen and go... the entire economic system of the Solar system falls apart.

Eh, it's already handwaved to make He-3 a valuable enough resource to justify a lot of extraterrestrial presence. As you noticed D-T is cheaper, and it's an easier reaction to ignite, and was successfully operating first in the TS timeline, and it uses fuels that's can't be embargoed (which has even actually *happened* so it's not a abstract issue), and it's possible to make He-3 anyway (it's the decay product of that bred tritium after all), and...

It's always a challenge in an SF setting to make space settlements look economically viable. They aren't in any reasonable near future projection, and it's certainly possible they may well *never* be, but it's tough to pitch a high tech far future setting where there is no human presence off Earth and never has been.

The primordial black hole(s?) found in the Kuiper belt are the most interesting development I remember from THS... not quite total conversion but potentially super fusion... at least for reactors if not rockets (cheap antimatter!!)

Nowhere near that good. The thing is that the fusion reaction only runs down where the escape energy is comparable to the confinement energies necessary to force the fusion. This is such a absolutely tiny volume that the hole has to mass more than asteroids best measured in miles before the yield from that surpasses the Hawking radiation, and that's mostly because the Hawking radiation at those masses is low, let alone looks competitive with an actual power plant.