USS T-Rex

The Universe is a Dangerous Place

Welcome to "The Conceptual Design of a Constellation Class Starship." This is not a fantasy website presenting make believe ideas, but a serious look at the technical challenges of building a space craft to travel beyond our Solar System.

Integrated Engineering Systems

The items in the figure above are familiar to Star Trek fans:

[1] Warp Drive

[2] Nacelle; aligns to gravity helix

[3] Navigation Array

[4] Aft Stabilizer

[5] Weapons Axis

[6] Weapon Directional Control

The space ship design is superimposed upon the geometric structure of a Three Body Problem, and the items refer to important concepts in Celestial Mechanics:

[1] Barycenter

[2] The L4 and L5 Lagrange Points or the Equilateral Points

[3] A "Free Return" orbit

[4] Small primary mass

[5] The L1, L2, and L3 Lagrange Points or the Colinear Points

[6] Halo orbits

This section introduces you to some new ideas and how they are integrated into the spacecraft design. The theory comes from Celestial Mechanics and the famous Three Body Problem (3BP). The "3BP Theory" tab on the side bar is where you should start. It describes this fascinating body of work, its applications, and its role in the design. It is not hard to understand this theory, and requires no rigorous math or other technical knowledge.

There are references to individual papers in the formal Theory which is in Tabs one through five, located on the horizontal bar menu at the top of the page. These are a series of forty short technical papers that generally get more mathematical as the number increases. Every paper, however, is carefully illustrated and can be grasped conceptually without any advanced mathematical background.

The starship design goes hand in hand with a comprehensive new model of space. The space craft, for example, does not have a fantastic new power source capable of generating huge amounts of thrust to achieve ultra high velocities. Instead, it is designed to fit exactly into the very fabric of space, like a zipper moving along an intricate series of interlocking links. The space ship finesses its way to high velocity, following the geometry of space like a surfer catching a giant wave, or a sail boat in a strong head wind.

The L-1011 Tristar section shows how the systems can be incorporated into a regular old passenger jet, the Lockheed Tristar. This is the platform where the ideas here can be developed and refined. The Light Barrier section shows that space behaves just like a fluid at very high velocities, so it's even possible that the same control surfaces that allow jets to fly on Earth will have similar purposes in deep space.

Lockheed L-1011 Tristar Jet

The formal Theory shows that gravity is a helical wave which collapses into a series of interlocking helix's - like three phase electrical current in a round wire. The starship nacelles create an electromagnetic field that locks the spaceship into this helix, like a train on a roller coaster ride. The Theory shows how this gravity helix acts upon the planets in our Solar System, and this gravity structure is extrapolated to deep space beyond the outermost planets. At this point the Theory acts just like the well known String Theory, which says that gravity is not a field across the vast distances of deep space but behaves more like an individual web made up of stranded strings.

The astronomical theory on the structure of the Solar System explains in a single consistent Theory dozens of phenomena in the motion of plants and their moons that is not explained by any other theory - including the orbital elements of all the planets, the rings of Saturn, Jupiter's "Great Red Spot" and why Earth's moon always shows the same face to Earth. All this is based on the 3BP of Celestial Mechanics, and is developed carefully, deliberately and with many illustrations.

Now, the equations of motion of a body under the influence of gravity have exactly the same form as the equations of subatomic motion between charged particles like electrons and protons. Consequently there is a 3BP of subatomic physics and also of quantum chemistry. The gravity forces that organize the planets in our Solar System and keep planets in stable orbits are just like the electrostatic forces that keep electrons in orbit around nuclei and form bonds between individual molecules.

Free Return Loops for Different Mass Ratios

What this means is that this elaborate new Theory not only gives new insights into the cosmos, but also into the very structure of matter itself. You may be familiar with all the atomic orbital shapes from high school chemistry. All these patterns are duplicated in special cases of the 3BP, and this suggests ways that matter can be converted into energy s a power source or for other "science fictional" applications. The above figure shows several types of stable orbits around two bodies by a small third body (hence, the term "Three Body Problem") that in three dimensions are barbell shaped - just like atomic orbitals.

Finally, the Theory here makes liberal use of the well known properties of Fractal Theory. This is the idea that patterns repeat, at ever increasing orders of magnitude. For example, if there is a 3BP at the astronomical level and one at the subatomic level, then so too must there be similar schemes in between - and beyond.

All of this probably seems quite abstract and so the next section shows what the classical 3BP is all about, gives some examples and then illustrates these ideas in some practical applications. This process takes place throughout the project - theory, examples in nature, and then engineering applications.

 

© 2004 bill h. clark ii