Star Wars at the Tech

[tuftears]

A bit belatedly, but here're the pictures I took when dracosphynx and I visited the Star Wars exhibit at the San Jose Tech Museum!




This car was parked out front of the museum! Bet it draws a lot of looks when it's out on the street.








They had models of the ships. So much amazing detail!





Not all the models there were Star Wars. These are, from top to bottom, a Bussard ramjet, a laser-assisted ramjet, and a Nerva nuclear-bomb-pumped rocket, if I recall right.



I couldn't pass up taking a picture of the Han Solo outfit, of course. Yay, scruffians!




Lightsabers and blasters respectively.

It was a fun trip! We didn't like the rest of the Tech Museum quite as much unfortunately; it seems like the sort of place you take relatively young kids, in the range of about 8-10 years old or so, since there were a lot of hands-on exhibits. But the Star Wars exhibit was full of neat tech, including some presentations on how future tech is quickly becoming the tech of today-- bionic arms and the like. They had one area where kids got to drive around a 'ground effect' vehicle and see how it would slide around.

Comments

[cjthomas.livejournal.com]

The third picture is actually the Daedalus interstellar probe design. It uses laser-based inertial confinement fusion (the tanks store deuterium and possibly other fuels).

I ran numbers for the Bussard ramjet a while back. The main difficulty is that Bussard's initial calculations neglected drag, which is a rather serious omission. If you assume that the scoop slows down all of the hydrogen striking it and that you're only burning the deuterium, thrust is miserable (even mixing fusion plasma with the unburned light hydrogen turbofan-style, you're better off with a nuclear-electric drive). You would have to apply any of several flavours of magic to get it working usefully (letting the light hydrogen and the helium through in a drag-free manner while collecting the deuterium).

The laser-assisted ramjet is a fascinating idea, and could in principle work much better than either a laser sail or the ramjet alone. Photons are terrible as an exhaust gas; using beam-supplied energy to heat interstellar hydrogen instead gives you a much better thrust-to-power ratio (beam power is your fixed limiting factor in this situation).

Glad you enjoyed the exhibits!

[cjthomas.livejournal.com]

Update: It turns out that Longshot was the one using laser fusion. Daedalus used electron-beam fusion. Both are flavours of the zap-a-pellet scheme that NIF and its predecessors work with.