Interstellar Drive; A System that pushes something over an Interstellar Distance.... to traverse the great gaps between The Stars...
A Ship that can bring Human Beings to another Star would quite possibly be the greatest single achievement in our History.
People have long been coming up with ideas for how we might do this, but, so far, no-one has ever successfully built anything that could be capable of such a Feat, or actually tested most of them on a grander Scale.
So...
What's the best way?
We could use Conservation of Momentum to accelerate a Fuel out the other end of our Ship (like The Shuttle does), but whether or not it can get us fast enough is doubtfull; see, everything that uses this Method is constrained roughly by
The Rocket Equation, which means you need exponentially more fuel the faster you want to go - which is very bad, unless you have a really energetic Fuel.
Of course, we could counter this by just throwing some more fuel out infront of it (probably in containers for it to pick up as it goes), but then we have to accelerate them as well - lol, the preperation time is longer, but the overall time the people spend in transit doesn't have to be.
And the overall expendature of Resources is less.
Perhaps Solar Sails or other forms of Beamed Propulsion offer the solution (you push the Ship with a Laser Beam from some massive Laser somewhere far behind it - so your craft doesn't need any fuel at all), though I can't find the logic in this method when I try to Quantatively analyse it - from what I find, the thrust just sucks.
You could even use a Space Elevator - yep, that's right; if you put a huge line out into Space on the other end of a Space Elevator and put something on it, it will just slide up the thingand steal it's Orbital Energy - concequently, if your string is long enough, you get a huge velocity out by the time you get to the end (yes, only about 0.3% c for Earth, but you could be cheaply launching Space Probes every day with it!!!).
Unfortunately, I lack the know-how to analyse all this by miself...
So...
Discuss; how would we practically create an Interstellar Spacecraft?
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