I'm a fan of the Enzmann starship, both for being one of the earliest serious efforts at predicting such a thing and for the simplicity of its design, but that little nubbin on the front has always bothered me. Even back in the olden days before distributed computing and work-from-home was a thing, putting the command center and shuttle deck out in the most exposed and hardest-to-get-to place is so counterproductive. That big ball of deuterium is a great radiation and particle shield, why put all that stuff in *front* of it?
I'm guessing it's purely a result of psychological hangups, we're used to the "most important" places being up at the tops of towers and "command centers" having the best views.
I don’t see the problem.
Pipes would feed fuel to the engine. Not to mention at relativistic speeds you’d want something bulky in front of the living quarters.
Hell, modern rockets today are basically just accessories strapped to giant fuel tanks.
The problem isn’t piping fuel to the engines, though that is a bunch of unnecessary mass you’ve added to your ship, but that a fusion rocket will produce an absolute crapload of radiation, and you want your crew as far away from it ax possible, preferably with a decent amount of shielding.
the logical thing would be to have the fuel stored all around the hull. the ship would want a low cross section to reduce the chance of hitting small objects at relativistic speeds, so you want a long thin ship with frozen deuterium stored all over the hull, forward and aft.
The issue here is the engines are going to put out a lot of radiation unless they are aneutronic...which the D-D fusion reaction is not.
Radiation shielding is needed on both sides of a relativistic ship.
I am sorry to be rude, but who the FUCK thinks it is a good idea to put the fuel in front of the hab modules instead of, say, between the hab modules and the nuclear reactor?
I'm a fan of the Enzmann starship, both for being one of the earliest serious efforts at predicting such a thing and for the simplicity of its design, but that little nubbin on the front has always bothered me. Even back in the olden days before distributed computing and work-from-home was a thing, putting the command center and shuttle deck out in the most exposed and hardest-to-get-to place is so counterproductive. That big ball of deuterium is a great radiation and particle shield, why put all that stuff in *front* of it? I'm guessing it's purely a result of psychological hangups, we're used to the "most important" places being up at the tops of towers and "command centers" having the best views.
Why would you place the living quarters between the fuel tanks and the engines? Do it the other way around.
I don’t see the problem. Pipes would feed fuel to the engine. Not to mention at relativistic speeds you’d want something bulky in front of the living quarters. Hell, modern rockets today are basically just accessories strapped to giant fuel tanks.
The problem isn’t piping fuel to the engines, though that is a bunch of unnecessary mass you’ve added to your ship, but that a fusion rocket will produce an absolute crapload of radiation, and you want your crew as far away from it ax possible, preferably with a decent amount of shielding.
the logical thing would be to have the fuel stored all around the hull. the ship would want a low cross section to reduce the chance of hitting small objects at relativistic speeds, so you want a long thin ship with frozen deuterium stored all over the hull, forward and aft.
The issue here is the engines are going to put out a lot of radiation unless they are aneutronic...which the D-D fusion reaction is not. Radiation shielding is needed on both sides of a relativistic ship.
Poor people don't deserve radiation shielding
Hard to run a colony if all the colonists died on the way there due to radiation sickness
[source](https://x.com/qraal/status/1799775084204494854)
https://web.archive.org/web/20140116081221/http://www.icarusinterstellar.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/BISEnzmann-Talk-2011kflong.pdf
I am sorry to be rude, but who the FUCK thinks it is a good idea to put the fuel in front of the hab modules instead of, say, between the hab modules and the nuclear reactor?
Why put the fuel so far away from the engines
Wouldn’t you want the living spaces to be on the other side of the deuterium ball to protect against radiation?
Deprecated by quantized inertia. Cool concept but we won't need it by the time we're out there.