The Cosmic Wanderer

This book covers a large number of relativistic rocket concepts. Many of the concepts described within are non-conventional. The reader can feel confident with the rationality of the arguments provided in this book with an understanding that every effort was made to include the numerous conditions that likely need to be met for the various methods to work.Some of the methods require extreme materials such as bulk forms having a density on the order of the atomic nucleus or greater. The...
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This book covers a large number of relativistic rocket concepts. Many of the concepts described within are non-conventional. The reader can feel confident with the rationality of the arguments provided in this book with an understanding that every effort was made to include the numerous conditions that likely need to be met for the various methods to work.Some of the methods require extreme materials such as bulk forms having a density on the order of the atomic nucleus or greater. The subject materials are offered in a plausible although somewhat informal way with the understanding that solid state physics is a still-developing field. Mechanical and refractory properties of plausible nuclear density or "supernuclear density" materials are explained in the descriptions of the related interstellar propulsion methods.Also included are scenarios for which relativistic rocket spacecraft may achieve very extreme gamma factors which in some cases will require the above mentioned extreme materials. However, contexts in which such materials would be required are delineated for some scenarios involving hypothetical missions that could occur in the cosmically distant future or which may endure for cosmic time periods. Such lengthy missions are arguably possible without the extreme materials based on the possibility of an eternally expanding universe and the subsequent rarefication of the intergalactic medium. The reason for this is the increasingly rarefied photonic and massive backgrounds in intergalactic space as the universe expands in volume. With lower mass-energy densities, the amount of drag and heat due to friction will be reduced for a given velocity. Also, the background electromagnetic radiations will be progressively red-shifted and therefore cooled, thus enabling higher spacecraft gamma factors.