Hanno is the oldest man alive like Lazarus Long in Robert Heinlein's Methuselah's Children.
He explores the Solar System in "...a torchcraft..." (p. 456)
What rocket designers really want is an engine with both high thrust and high specific impulse. Such engines don't have to use weak Hohmanns, they can use fantastically expensive (but rapid) Brachistochrone trajectories.
Such engines are called "Torch Drives", a spacecraft with a torch drive is called a "Torchship."
The term "Torchship" was coined by Robert Heinlein in 1953 for his short story "Sky Lift", it is also featured in his stories Farmer in the Sky, Tunnel in the Sky, Time for the Stars, and Double Star. Sometimes it is referred to as "Ortega's Torch".
Nowadays it is implied that a Torchship is some kind of high thrust fusion drive, but Heinlein meant it to mean a handwavium total-conversion mass-into-energy type drive.
-copied from here.
Hanno explores Jupiter by sensory link to a robot probe like Sweeney in James Blish's They Shall Have Stars.
Between chapters, the narrative has moved into an indefinite future when Hanno's great age, dating from the early Iron Age, is no longer concealed but is known and respected. The authorities on Earth have let him have a spaceship to himself. He used it for a "Trial run.'" (ibid.) Knowing Poul Anderson and his heroes, we suspect that Hanno means a trial run for exploration of other planetary systems and we are right.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
And I still wonder how Hanno outwitted, outmaneuvered, or successfully hid from his enemy Senator Teddy Kennedy (oops, Edmund Moriarty!). I now think that mystery was deliberately inserted by Anderson.
And we both know "Moriarty" has Holmesian connotations!
Ad astra! Sean
The interstellar ship using Astrophage in Project Hail Mary is effectively a torchship such as Heinlein meant.
This looks like the closest thing to a torchship we are likely to get in the next few decades.
https://phys.org/news/2024-12-strategic-alliance-high-energy-nuclear.amp
I *think* the acceleration is cm/s^2 rather than the 9.8 m/s^2 of earth's gravity, so you have to start in orbit, but it would get you around the solar system on time scales of months.
I heard about it in one of the recent "Skeptics Guide to the Universe" podcasts.
Kaor, Jim!
I think Jerry Pournelle wrote an article discussing how it might be possible to get around the Solar System very quickly using some kind of "torch" tech, collected in A STEP FARTHER OUT (Ace Books, 1980).
Frustrating, very smart people like JP were talking about things like this all those years ago and we still don't have them. No wonder I got so discouraged, till Elon Musk and SpaceX came along!
Ad astra! Sean
Post a Comment