Have a nuclear fusion reactor capable of reaching 5-20% of lightspeed

>Have a nuclear fusion reactor capable of reaching 5-20% of lightspeed.
>Doesnt give 10x10 square individual rooms, gyms, pools, and other zones of relax for the crew with such a gargantuannergy budget.

Explain your jewinesh.

It's not a matter of cost, all those things take up mass which is something you really want to avoid if your space travel is remotely realistic.

It's a % thing followingTsiolkovsky rocket equation. A bigger and more powerful ship should have room to spare.

Adding mass is still a negative though - if nothing else it'll reduce acceleration.

Also, it's a military starship, right?
>paying for luxuries on a non-officer part of the ship
>giving the grunts room to spread out

At most you want to give them a rec area and gym, but giving them cabin space or rooms for anything other than approved downtime is going to end up with stills, hookups and gambling rings - you'll get that anyway, but you want to limit it.

All that room is taken up by radiators.

Any mass wasted on luxuries is mass that could have been used for more propulsion or more dakka.

I'm not a literal rocket scientist but I'm pretty sure that the more mass you have the more fuel you need and the fuel has its own mass that means you need more fuel for it which means you need more fuel for the fuel for the fuel you need to carry your space gym and...well, it's best to keep mass down.

Of course, the need for gyms and pools and shit assumes that people in the future haven't been changed at all from modern ones and technological advances only mean you can put naval style ships in space. If you have technology advanced enough for practical interplanetary travel you can probably alter humans for space instead of the other way around. You wouldn't actually need a lot of room inside the ship either, since people could spend most of their time in virtual worlds. And that's assuming you need humans on your spaceship at all.

We have virtual reality.

>Orion drive
You have no idea how much I hate this meme when somebody brings it up in any half serious discussion.
If we play a space opera/pulp game or a Warhammer have, sure why not, nothing else needs to make sense either. But otherwise you need to be more than a little touched in the head to think that this would be an efficient method of space travel.

Yes, clearly you know a lot more about the realities of space travel than the actual rocket scientists who proposed this thing.

>20% of lightspeed

That's allows you to go from Earth to the Moon in 6 seconds. You are going to crash against grains of sand like if they were bullets. You would need extremly powerful laser and infrared radar.

Look buddy, I just want to accelerate a city-sized payload into orbit, and my planet happens to have a bunch of nuclear bombs lying around. If you've got any better ideas, I'd love to hear them.

Because humans are infallible and no "professional" ever had shit ideas.

Just use a regular nuclear drive once you are in orbit.
Use your material to build a tractor and use said reactor to superheat hydrogen, which is also laying around everywhere.
Much more energy efficient than riding out a bomb into space and have most energy go off into the vacuum.

Alright, I'm willing to compromise and just use the orion drive for the initial ascent. We can switch to less exciting propulsion methods in vacuum.

Seems fair to me.
Nuclear spaceships are best spaceships, till we find some drive that allows us to accelerate all the time.

Nuclear thermal rockets are better than chemical but only marginally unless you literally design them to run while core is molten down or even vaporized. The main plus of Orion is that it has relatively high thrust AND high acceleration and it is possible with tech developed in the 60-s. It is the first ‘torchdrive’ within modern humanity’s technological grasp and those things are either for military ships or for interstellar travel anyway. Yes, Zubrin engine is better in terms of thrust and efficiency, yes all fusion engines blow it out of the water but Orion, as retarded as the idea sounds, can be built here and now if some large country really needs it. That is why people talk about it.

Yeah but 60s tech has enough of other problems that won't allow interplanetary. By the time where it becomes common you usually have one of the more sensible options. Also I have doubts about it's capabilities as a combat vessel, because usually I see iron drives with a single thruster plate that simply screams "hit me!" And doesn't take too well in being damaged by anything.

>Much more energy efficient than riding out a bomb into space and have most energy go off into the vacuum.
It's not, actually. The only nuclear rocket engine more efficient than the Orion drive is the Nuclear Salt-Water Engine, which instead of being propelled by nuclear bombs going off periodically, is propelled by a single continuous nuclear explosion.

Additionally, an Orion Drive rocket does not, in fact, have "most energy go off into the vacuum", because they use nuclear shaped charges to concentrate most of their energy onto the pusher plate.

Reminder, we went to the moon with 60's tech and haven't bothered to go back since. The space shuttle's computers ran off an intel i386 processor. People can do a lot with a 'hell or high water' mindset.

Volume is still at a premium on a warship. The larger your cross-sectional area is, the more mass you have to spend armoring its surface.

I'm not saying that it doesn't work, in fact i agree with you on most avvounts.
I just think that for prolonged flights it's more attractive to be able to refule on site with hydrogen, which is basically everywhere instead of needing to mine rocks and then refine the metals and put them in a breeder, which you might need to carry with you.
As for combat vessles, again the giant piece that is the thruster plate that yells "hit me".

Have you read the Wernher von Braun's 1964 paper arguing the merits of Orion?

I thought not.

>t. Virgin nerd

Just to clearify, this wasnt me, the original "orion drive is flawed but not infeasible" user.

Listen up buddy, if you want to ride on bomb through spae, I'm not going to stop you but don't just put up strawmans and read the whole argument instad of just seeing the start and throw your feces around.

Obviously, I'm embezzling the shit out of the military budget.

Gather round while I sing you of Werner von Braun...

>refueling during space travel
>From unrefined hydrogen or anything else no less
Everyone point at this user and laugh.

That is hundreds if not thousands of years away from the orion drive.

>not running your reactor and coolant at 4000K
>not dumping all your heat and illuminating your ship from a couple tiny white hot hafnium carbide radiators for that high temperature efficiency

come on nigga

That might be the single weirdest Orion spacecraft I have ever seen. On that note, I'm sure the artist has no idea whatsoever how an Orion drive works.

Also, I laughed out loud when I reached the NTR maneuvering thrusters.

>Orion, as retarded as the idea sounds, can be built here and now if some large country really needs it.

This is actually untrue. Orion would have to climb an absolutely enormous engineering slope, probably much bigger than a workable fusion drive (not sure about NSWR). The Orion is simple on paper, but crazy complicated to put into reality because when it all comes down, it pretty much runs on prayers and space magic.

That's why the whole project never progressed beyond Hot Rod despite burning up 25% of the annual USAF budget.

I wish we'd just build a starship already. Even if it was never used, just to prove that we could.

Pic related is technically a starship.

A bunch of old people control all the money. They don't give a shit what happens to the future cuz they will be dead.

No, the reason that it never progressed beyond the planning stages was because of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty banning civilian use of nuclear explosives.

>can be built here and now if some large country really needs it
I don't think it's a good idea though, what happens when your spacecraft carrying thousands of nukes goes Challenger in the atmosphere?

>Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty

That was the Partial Test Ban Treaty, and it was a mere excuse to shut down the money drain. Note that Project Pluto, an equally insane idea than Orion, produced actual, tangible results in a similar time frame and with far less money.

Orion was also revisited later, but not-so-surprisingly, each project died once they started to really get into the idea and realized that the Orion drive ain't that super-duper straightforward as Dyson imagined it.

Orion drive belivers are on the same level as chemtrailers and flat earthers.
Singular evidence makes it sound reasonable but once you try to put everything together it all falls apart.

But the Galactic Empire has starships with all that shit.

>you can probably alter humans for space instead of the other way around.

Counter point: Humans have always had a habit of altering their environment to their needs with technology, rather altering themselves for their environment. Why would that change for space?

Because the newtypes can see the future?

Because frozeners have easily replaced organs?

because it's always been easier to alter the environment when it's pretty fucking close to what you need already and you don't know what the fuck dna is
self alteration becomes the easier option at some point when you are dealing with environments that are vastly harder to fix up and you also have much more ability to do alterations with genetic engineering shit