Welcome

I am Timothy M McHugh, and I go by the pseudonym Orion II's Chief Designer, that is because I am designing the Orion II Starship for interstellar travel to nearby stars systems (preferably Alpha Centauri).  I have not selected a star system for the Orion II Starship to go to, because we have yet to find as my hero Carl Sagan once put it, a "pale blue dot" around a nearby star.  Alpha Centarui is still promising because those two stars are metal rich and have higher metalicity than our own sun does, but that alone is not enough to prove that it has planets.  Orion II is a Project Orion spacecraft that may the Project Daedalus-style D-He3 inertial confinement fusion (ICF) nuclear pulse propulsion, but it will not use nuclear bombs for propulsion.  I will talk about interstellar travel, outline artificial barriers set up by nay-sayers, outline arguments by advocates for FTL and other forms of handwavium, post against militarism, and review certain movies.  I am a strong advocate for starflight because as my Mars hero, aerospace engineering pioneer Robert M Zubrin put it, we either grow or we die, and interstellar initiative is the best way to beat out the war junkies via world cooperation.  Just about everyone is welcome and free of charge.

Handwavium: It outright violates the laws of physics.  You wave your hand and say pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.  FTL and spacecraft designs that ignore thermodynamics are examples of handwavium.  Many movies contain handwavium, some more than others.  And speaking of handwavium, the 2000 science fiction anime cartoon release known as Titan AE is 100% handwavium and I will be reviewing it in a later post.  As you can tell, I don't like Titan AE.