--- David Nicol davidnicol@gmail.com wrote:
On Tue, 29 Mar 2005 17:56:35 -0600, Oren Beck oren_beck@hotmail.com wrote:
...
Has anyone else read Gerard O'Neil's "The High Frontier"
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/189652267X/tipjartransactioA/
I'll have to check it out.
My reccomendation for an ion rocket is to use iron. Choose a suitable iron asteroid, set up camp in it, accelerate your iron ions and fling them out one way, save enough mass to decelerate after you get wherever you're going, but the question of where the energy to do all the ion accelerating comes from is still up in the air.
Well, one way would be to use a nuclear fission reactor. Alternatively, a more conventional power plant should work. The main problem is the amount of fuel needed to power everything.
Brian D.
__________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Small Business - Try our new resources site! http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/resources/
I know a couple of weeks ago I posted a message recommended a person not learn REALBasic for their first language. I still believe in this very much, but we do apparently have a couple of people on this list that work with REALBasic. In my spare time I spend time helping multiple open source projects - one of them being OpenAL. I don't know if many of you are aware of this project, but more information can be found here:
A person is currently trying to "port" openal to REALBasic. I am assuming this means a wrapper around the API. At any rate he is running into some trouble. I don't know enough to help him, nor do I have time to dig deep into this issue. If you are interested in helping out with this you should look at his webpage:
http://www.maui.net/~mauitom/openal.html
and his post:
http://opensource.creative.com/pipermail/openal-devel/2005-March/thread.html
which can be found there once the archives catch up. The linux implementation is not without flaws, unfortunately I found that it is difficult to get patches into the sample implementation. This should not dissuade us from providing help.
If you know REALBasic, have a moment and would like a project ... think about helping out. I don't ask because it is going to help me, but because I think it is just a good thing (tm).
//========================================================\ || D. Hageman dhageman@dracken.com || \========================================================//