The Death Star project concept falls in a practical sense at the first hurdle as nobody knows how to build a near light speed propulsion engine for it.
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While the ship will not travel at warp speed, with an ion propulsion engine powered by a 1.5GW nuclear reactor, it can travel at a constant acceleration so that the ship can easily get to key points of interest in our solar system.
Conventional hybrids use mainly the gasoline engine for propulsion, drawing on the electric drive and batteries only occasionally to (impressively) improve gasoline efficiency.
Unfortunately, the easiest way to make a more efficient engine, nuclear-electric propulsion, is controversial.
The latter include, for example: supercomputers, advanced machine tools, fiber optic and other sophisticated telecommunications gear, jet engine hot sections, rocket propulsion and guidance components, "stealth" technology, to name a few.
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In 2010, the IMO adopted rules that require any large cruise ship built after July 1 of that year to have a separate, redundant system able to maintain the ship's propulsion, steering and so forth in case one engine is disabled by fire.
Here, the primary means of propulsion is a 3.5-liter V6 gasoline engine that nets a modest 275 horsepower.
The company numbers Boeing, Airbus and Lockheed Martin among its customers of propulsion-system components and aerostructures--such items as engine housings and fuselage parts.
Or, it could mean that they gain control of the spacecraft, but that the Fregat engine still will not ignite, yet the much less powerful propulsion units designed to land the craft on Phobos and propel the return capsule back to Earth are working fine.
The UK Space Agency engaged propulsion experts at the European Space Agency (Esa) to run the rule over the company's engine design.
The ELR will run on an electric propulsion system made of a T-shaped lithium ion battery, an electric drive unit and a four-cylinder engine generator.
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