OT: Sci-fi fantasy - Torchships!

I was just musing about making fusion practical, and I've come up with a science-fictional fantastical black box that takes hydrogen in one end, and puts helium and a whole shitpot load of energy out the other.

This could be either:

  1. Technology we haven't invented yet
  2. Alien technology
  3. F''king magic

depending on the style of story you're writing. :-)

Anyhoo, I looked up some numbers, and Wiki sez:

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The numbers I'm interested in are in the inset under "Overview." They say, "Fusion of deuterium with tritium creating helium-4, freeing a neutron, and releasing 17.59 MeV of energy, as an appropriate amount of mass converting to the kinetic energy of the products, in agreement with E = ?mc2.[1]"

So, what I'm wondering is, how to convert those 17.59 MeV per event to stuff like "how much electricity per gram" and specifically, if you magickally imparted that 17.59 MeV to the helium atom, how fast would it be going out the exhaust, and how much thrust would it generate?

Would it be like a particle beam weapon? =:-O

Admittedly, my fantasy is about plain hydrogen, but using deuterium will get me in the ballpark, and H+H would be more.

The idea being a rocket that takes hydrogen for fuel, and spits out very hot, very fast helium, accelerating at 1G half way and decelerating at 1G the rest of the way. If you could do that, you could get from the Earth to the Moon in, lessee ... s = (1/2) at^2; in CGS, 125,000 miles is oh crap. MONGO centimeters; anybody wanna do my homework for me? ;-)

Thanks, Rich

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Rich Grise
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