We don't actually have "flying cars"; the sci-fi notion requires some method of generating contragravity, which isn't even theoretically possible at this point. (Although with the discovery of the Higgs boson, it might be possible to learn how to manipulate them, generating gravitic effects at will...)
What we have are cars that you can strap wings onto. They still require runways to take off or land. There are also helicopter variants, but the ones that aren't traditional copters, using several smaller rotors to eliminate the need for a tail stabilizer, tend to be rather larger than automobiles, and still require special training to operate.
I still don't think flying cars would be a great idea anyway; people seem to be afraid of letting machines drive them (witness the mockery of, and resistance to, self-driving autos), and Humans can't seem to handle driving in two dimensions, much less three (see your local traffic reports for details).
True, even in the media world, such as TV shows and movies they can get things wrong for example the link i just posted which has something interesting but it lists the fastest spacecraft travelling is the Voyager 1 probe but it is the Helios spacecraft right?
Helios is the fastest in terms of absolute speed (in a Sun-centered reference frame), but Voyager 1 is the human-made object that is escaping from the Sun the fastest (i.e. making the most progress towards getting anywhere).
Someone else posted this but I think it is interesting and maybe could be used for travel. Imagine that, it will be like quantum slipstream or transwarp but traveling through naturally created tunnels. I would wonder if it is true how fast can an object e.g. spaceship travel inside one of these?
I think it will be great when this happens, travel to Mars but not as a single country but as a whole of humanity. Every country with a space program or who wants to be part of this should be. It should make relationships with other countries stronger and produce even more amazing technology plus it should bring down the cost.
As for for powering a starship with a black hole, WOW! if this even possible, will this be better than matter- antimatter power? From what I have heard a reactor fueled by matter-antimatter should be 100% efficient. But a black hole! The destructive thing in nature!
Hey, the Romulans use artificial black holes to power their ships, so why not? The main issue would be that a black hole is kind of heavy and thus has lots of inertia--which means that a portion of your energy will be spent lugging it around with you.
Hey, the Romulans use artificial black holes to power their ships, so why not? The main issue would be that a black hole is kind of heavy and thus has lots of inertia--which means that a portion of your energy will be spent lugging it around with you.
Why did the Romulans use a black hole to power there starships?
lol, but seriously. Do white holes even exist? Also do you think if other dimension exist will hyperspace travel exist? What is the difference between hyperspace travel to what Einstein theorised, the Einstein-rosen bridge?
Why did the Romulans use a black hole to power there starships?
In theory, it should be possible to extract considerable energy from the hole. Just toss whatever in there, and capture the energy given up as the stuff falls in. In practice, how to capture said energy is unknown, and as noted above you also have the mass of the hole itself to drag around (imagine building a spaceship, installing all the regular hull and shield generators and life support and whatnot - then bolting all that to a medium-sized asteroid and trying to fly that around). We'll handwave some way that the Warbird disposes of all that inertia, much as we handwave using impulse drive to accelerate to .25c in a matter of moments without turning the entire crew into chunky salsa spread across the aft bulkheads...
No one knows if white holes exist. If Einstein-Rosen theory is correct, it's one of the two possible solutions for a bridge end-point, but thus far we've found no evidence of any such phenomena. (The bridge itself would, of course, be undetectable; at least one end must also be cloaked behind a black hole, as that's the kind of stress that breaks the universe enough to bring Einstein and Rosen into the picture in the first place. It's possible that both endpoints are black holes, which makes them both undetectable and useless for our purposes, unless such a bridge might be located between a pair of rapidly-rotating Kerr black holes of sufficient mass, where the Schwarzchild radius might be expressed as a torus rather than a spheroid. Needless to say, our odds of actually developing a practical FTL drive are better than the odds of finding a random pair of Kerr holes in the correct configuration.)
In theory, it should be possible to extract considerable energy from the hole. Just toss whatever in there, and capture the energy given up as the stuff falls in. In practice, how to capture said energy is unknown, and as noted above you also have the mass of the hole itself to drag around (imagine building a spaceship, installing all the regular hull and shield generators and life support and whatnot - then bolting all that to a medium-sized asteroid and trying to fly that around). We'll handwave some way that the Warbird disposes of all that inertia, much as we handwave using impulse drive to accelerate to .25c in a matter of moments without turning the entire crew into chunky salsa spread across the aft bulkheads...
No one knows if white holes exist. If Einstein-Rosen theory is correct, it's one of the two possible solutions for a bridge end-point, but thus far we've found no evidence of any such phenomena. (The bridge itself would, of course, be undetectable; at least one end must also be cloaked behind a black hole, as that's the kind of stress that breaks the universe enough to bring Einstein and Rosen into the picture in the first place. It's possible that both endpoints are black holes, which makes them both undetectable and useless for our purposes, unless such a bridge might be located between a pair of rapidly-rotating Kerr black holes of sufficient mass, where the Schwarzchild radius might be expressed as a torus rather than a spheroid. Needless to say, our odds of actually developing a practical FTL drive are better than the odds of finding a random pair of Kerr holes in the correct configuration.)
Raj011 that article is a bit behind they now expect to be making trips to the ISS by 2021-2022
as the British Gov has chucked more money at the project.
And as each plane/rocket type thingy me bob (what ever ya want to call it lol) can be used up to maybe 200 times the price of moving large amount of material in to space to build large craft to travel to say Mars and make a station there is much creeper and easier. So who knows we could have a true Mars colony in our life time thanks to the Brits in this case.
We'll handwave some way that the Warbird disposes of all that inertia, much as we handwave using impulse drive to accelerate to .25c in a matter of moments without turning the entire crew into chunky salsa spread across the aft bulkheads...
The handwaving has a name in this case. It's called an inertial dampener. :P
Infinite possibilities have implications that could not be completely understood if you turned this entire universe into a giant supercomputer.
The handwaving has a name in this case. It's called an inertial dampener. :P
It has a name, yes, but it's still a handwave, and I believe the question had to do with actual physics. Inertial dampeners fall under the heading of "sufficiently advanced technology", as they would need to violate a few known physical laws (not surprisingly, mostly those having to do with inertia).
In theory, it should be possible to extract considerable energy from the hole. Just toss whatever in there, and capture the energy given up as the stuff falls in.
I read that the theoretical upper limit on the amount of energy extractable by feeding matter to a black hole is around 40% of the rest mass (vs. 100% for matter-antimatter). Given that a black hole is less volatile than antimatter, it seems to be a viable means of getting such high levels of energy from your fuel.
Well there are many different theories we can go with. And looking through sci fi there are many different ways to travel through space. Things like warp drive slip space drive and how many others you want to name. I mean there are many different things we can do as a group. I do believe that the only thing holding us back as a people is what we are afraid to do as a people. That is just my theory on the topic.
" Now the gate has been unlatched headstones pushed aside; corpses shift and offer room ,a fate you must abide."
The artificial black hole is the "singularity" in the Singularity Warp Cores.
I read that the theoretical upper limit on the amount of energy extractable by feeding matter to a black hole is around 40% of the rest mass (vs. 100% for matter-antimatter). Given that a black hole is less volatile than antimatter, it seems to be a viable means of getting such high levels of energy from your fuel.
Well there are many different theories we can go with. And looking through sci fi there are many different ways to travel through space. Things like warp drive slip space drive and how many others you want to name. I mean there are many different things we can do as a group. I do believe that the only thing holding us back as a people is what we are afraid to do as a people. That is just my theory on the topic.
well yeah, politics and money is what is holding us back or slowing us down but we are slowly moving in the direction of us as humanity joining together, there will be some who won't agree. Following the ISS is a good example and united nations to.
What is the point again with flying wing aircraft/spacecraft? was it extra room, fuel efficiency and creates more lift? If so they should really use them, if the engines go they can just glide back down, right?
Well there are many different theories we can go with. And looking through sci fi there are many different ways to travel through space. Things like warp drive slip space drive and how many others you want to name. I mean there are many different things we can do as a group. I do believe that the only thing holding us back as a people is what we are afraid to do as a people. That is just my theory on the topic.
Those aren't "theories", logang. Those are "ideas". To be theories, they have to be mathematically consistent, and at least potentially descriptive of reality. Since both general and special relativity have held in all experiments performed so far, any theory of FTL travel must take these into account.
At present, we have precisely one theory that might enable FTL travel - Alcubierre-White warp theory. NASA's experiments to detect such warps have not succeeded so far, in large part because the experiments involve aiming a laser through a space between two metal blocks that is measured in microns, and any disturbances throw the laser off. (It's reminiscent of Forward's early attempts at developing a mass detector to find gravity waves. He got a pattern that had him really excited - until he found out that it was being caused by the vibration of semis passing by on the freeway a few miles away.) Of course, even if Alcubierre and White are correct, we still need to find some way of making several hundred kilograms of exotic matter, which we haven't even proved exists yet...
The other interesting facet of A-W warp theory is that since it depends on a vessel deforming space around it (that's the loophole in relativity; it addresses how quickly a mass may move through space, but not how rapidly space itself can contract and expand), it still does not permit an "ansible", an FTL communications device. Instead, any interstellar communications would have to be carried out either by lightspeed devices (lasers and masers), or by message ships, in a fashion not unlike the setup in Pournelle's Empire of Man tales. (Or Niven's Known Space, for that matter.)
The other interesting facet of A-W warp theory is that since it depends on a vessel deforming space around it (that's the loophole in relativity; it addresses how quickly a mass may move through space, but not how rapidly space itself can contract and expand), it still does not permit an "ansible", an FTL communications device. Instead, any interstellar communications would have to be carried out either by lightspeed devices (lasers and masers), or by message ships, in a fashion not unlike the setup in Pournelle's Empire of Man tales. (Or Niven's Known Space, for that matter.)
I suppose one option would be to use wormholes...
Edit: Also, couldn't the experiment be conducted in orbit? I can't think of a lot of things that would disturb the laser there that wouldn't do it on Earth, but a lot of Earth-bound disturbances become less problematic.
Infinite possibilities have implications that could not be completely understood if you turned this entire universe into a giant supercomputer.
Except that the theory that describes Einstein-Rosen bridges requires at least one black hole, possibly two. And it's basic to black holes that once information goes in, it stays there.
Edit: Also, couldn't the experiment be conducted in orbit? I can't think of a lot of things that would disturb the laser there that wouldn't do it on Earth, but a lot of Earth-bound disturbances become less problematic.
Well, since you need people to monitor it, there's still the vibration of the station, and of course it would have to be assembled and calibrated in orbit because of launch stresses, but I take your meaning. I gather that NASA would love to put the experiment up there, perhaps in a separate module connected by a tether, but a) there's a waiting list for experiments to fly on the ISS, and b) everybody's all gun-shy about EVA activities since the incident last year where one suit sprung an internal leak in its cooling system while it was in use and an Italian astronaut almost drowned.
Airplanes turn by interacting with the surrounding air. In space there is no air (or rather, what "air" there is, is billions to trillions of times thinner than in a planetary atmosphere, so the aerodynamic forces would be that much less).
That said, there are two known types of ways that a spacecraft can change its orientation without RCS. First, you could use reaction wheels, which are basically big gyroscopes. Since rotational momentum is a conserved quantity, spinning your gyroscope in one direction will make your spacecraft spin in the opposite direction, and stopping the gyroscope will stop this rotation. Many unmanned Earth-orbital satellites and interplanetary probes use this method. The drawback is that for any reasonably sized gyroscope (and reasonable electrical power consumption to spin it up), it takes many minutes to re-orient your spacecraft, so for manned craft it is only suitable for station-keeping.
The second way is by pushing against something distant from the spacecraft. In practice, this takes one of two forms: either use the minute pressure from sunlight against your spacecraft to "steer" like a sailing ship (which can take hours to days to change your orientation), or use an on-board electromagnet to push against a planet's (or the sun's) magnetic field.
The second way is by pushing against something distant from the spacecraft. In practice, this takes one of two forms: either use the minute pressure from sunlight against your spacecraft to "steer" like a sailing ship (which can take hours to days to change your orientation), or use an on-board electromagnet to push against a planet's (or the sun's) magnetic field.
Or, as Jerry Pournelle suggested in The Mote In God's Eye, you could charge the skin of your ship up to about a million volts, and use the magnetic field of the galaxy itself to turn. Of course, any maneuver you make is going to cover several hundred million miles at least, but on the other hand you don't need to carry fuel for reaction thrusters...
I have two questions: first, would building a ship in space be do-able at present?
Second, could we use a dirigible to lift those new spacecraft that Virgin Galactic makes instead of using rockets?
Yes, we have the ability TODAY! to build a manned spacecraft thanks to advances science and technology. There are a lot of ideas, which you can find around the net, which people have already thought of for a spaceship such as Nautilus X which uses the inflatable space capsule and VASIMR or nuclear fusion drive rocket. One engineer says we can build the Enterprise, Constitution refit design with today's technology. The problem is money and some political views. But that is slowly changing!
As for using an airship yes i think it is do able as well but needs more testing and need to make it safe so the rocket won't damage the airship and vice-versa. Maybe with smaller rockets or rocket planes but not with big ones.
We don't actually have the infrastructure in place to support space construction yet - but it does seem inevitable. And we've had the technology to do so since Project Apollo made orbital docking and undocking routine.
As for dirigibles, not really. You need to get up pretty high to launch something like SpaceShipTwo, and the sorts of balloons that will get up that high won't carry enough payload to support a spacecraft. The WhiteKnightTwo launch system remains one of the better ways to get the ship most of the way up there. (At least it beats the old-fashioned step rockets - what Pournelle once termed "disintegrating totem poles".)
I have some questions for all of your ladies and gentlemen, if someone gave you a chance to build a spaceship what would its purpose be? what would it be made out of? what type of propulsion will it have? how big will you make it? what other technologies would you add to it? why did you choose that for a spaceship? All with current technologies or being researched.
My design will look like the venturestar design for atmospheric and deep space exploration. Propulsions, possibly the Sabre engines from Skylon, linear aerospike engines, electric propulsion e.g. VASIMR, If fusion drive propulsion works i'll add that as well, project orion and also warp drive. Made out of metamaterials which can heal itself, if it works. Also add magnetic fields for space shielding. Maybe use the same materials for the inflatable space capsule. Maybe add graphene in there and carbon nanotubes. It will be big enough to support a crew of 50 men and women. Have advanced sensors. Maybe through in a rail gun and laser. High resolution screens. Medical bay and sports bay. I choose this because it will I think it will cut costs down, save time, easy to repair. Nice all purpose spaceship.
My second design will be the starship Enterprise, constitution refit design or sovereign class design. Or millennium falcon or daedalus class from stargate. Same details as above.
Before I could design a ship, I'd need to know its purpose. Does it need to enter an atmosphere at any point? Is it for interplanetary or interstellar travel? (And if interstellar, are we going to assume the Alcubierre-White experiments bear fruit, and we discover a way to produce exotic matter?) Will there be excessive political difficulties with assembling a nuclear reactor in orbit? (They're too heavy to lift whole, and political difficulties are exactly why we're not going to see an Orion drive until we perfect inertial-confinement fusion explosives, because nobody's ever going to let anyone else put nuclear weapons in orbit.)
Now, given a 200MW-output VASIMR thruster, and the presence of a nuclear reactor, at least I wouldn't have to worry about designing a spin chamber for effective gravity, as I'd be able to run the ship at constant boost at a respectable fraction of a gee...
Before I could design a ship, I'd need to know its purpose. Does it need to enter an atmosphere at any point? Is it for interplanetary or interstellar travel? (And if interstellar, are we going to assume the Alcubierre-White experiments bear fruit, and we discover a way to produce exotic matter?) Will there be excessive political difficulties with assembling a nuclear reactor in orbit? (They're too heavy to lift whole, and political difficulties are exactly why we're not going to see an Orion drive until we perfect inertial-confinement fusion explosives, because nobody's ever going to let anyone else put nuclear weapons in orbit.)
Now, given a 200MW-output VASIMR thruster, and the presence of a nuclear reactor, at least I wouldn't have to worry about designing a spin chamber for effective gravity, as I'd be able to run the ship at constant boost at a respectable fraction of a gee...
Okay, lets says you had the choice of designing your own ship what will it be? Exotic matter? Would you know if an matter/antimatter reactor could be possible to make? I read an article that the Cern has managed to produce antihydrogen atoms, has anyone figured how to store it? With the Orion drive they could make at a safe distance from Earth, and use robots or computer controls from down here in the mean time.
Well, assuming Alcubierre-White warp theory is correct, I'll need about seven hundred kilos of exotic matter to make the warp torus. Then my ship will be an oblate elongated spheroid, about 30 meters across, inside a ring of exotic matter (which, by an extension of that theory, should also be able to contain quantum impellers to propel the craft). That's White's design, roughly, for a ship able to maintain 10c for a sustained period, which will get me to the orbit of Alpha Centauri Bb (a gas giant in the Goldilocks zone for Alpha Centauri in about four months. Then I could take a nice leisurely look at its moons, see if maybe one of them is suitable for colonization...
Supplemental: Okay, an effective velocity of 10c, since, as my inner pedant insists on noting, the ship itself doesn't actually move - the space it's in surfs a shift in metric, as the space before the bubble compresses and the space behind expands... Which also reminds me, I need to make sure that when I pop my bubble, I'm facing away from the planet and not in its orbital plane, so the wave of Hawking radiation that's released doesn't sterilize the place.
Comments
What we have are cars that you can strap wings onto. They still require runways to take off or land. There are also helicopter variants, but the ones that aren't traditional copters, using several smaller rotors to eliminate the need for a tail stabilizer, tend to be rather larger than automobiles, and still require special training to operate.
I still don't think flying cars would be a great idea anyway; people seem to be afraid of letting machines drive them (witness the mockery of, and resistance to, self-driving autos), and Humans can't seem to handle driving in two dimensions, much less three (see your local traffic reports for details).
Helios is the fastest in terms of absolute speed (in a Sun-centered reference frame), but Voyager 1 is the human-made object that is escaping from the Sun the fastest (i.e. making the most progress towards getting anywhere).
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/astronomers-capture-first-image-mysterious-180000277.html
Also what do you all think of this http://www.space.com/24268-manned-mars-mission-nasa-feasibility.html
and this http://www.space.com/24306-interstellar-flight-black-hole-power.html ???
I think it will be great when this happens, travel to Mars but not as a single country but as a whole of humanity. Every country with a space program or who wants to be part of this should be. It should make relationships with other countries stronger and produce even more amazing technology plus it should bring down the cost.
As for for powering a starship with a black hole, WOW! if this even possible, will this be better than matter- antimatter power? From what I have heard a reactor fueled by matter-antimatter should be 100% efficient. But a black hole! The destructive thing in nature!
Why did the Romulans use a black hole to power there starships?
Because there were no white holes available?
lol, but seriously. Do white holes even exist? Also do you think if other dimension exist will hyperspace travel exist? What is the difference between hyperspace travel to what Einstein theorised, the Einstein-rosen bridge?
No one knows if white holes exist. If Einstein-Rosen theory is correct, it's one of the two possible solutions for a bridge end-point, but thus far we've found no evidence of any such phenomena. (The bridge itself would, of course, be undetectable; at least one end must also be cloaked behind a black hole, as that's the kind of stress that breaks the universe enough to bring Einstein and Rosen into the picture in the first place. It's possible that both endpoints are black holes, which makes them both undetectable and useless for our purposes, unless such a bridge might be located between a pair of rapidly-rotating Kerr black holes of sufficient mass, where the Schwarzchild radius might be expressed as a torus rather than a spheroid. Needless to say, our odds of actually developing a practical FTL drive are better than the odds of finding a random pair of Kerr holes in the correct configuration.)
Fascinating, also take a look at this beauty ladies and gentlemen! http://www.space.com/22004-skylon-space-plane-rocket-engine.html .
Also do you think aerospace companies should start making winged aircraft.
as the British Gov has chucked more money at the project.
And as each plane/rocket type thingy me bob (what ever ya want to call it lol) can be used up to maybe 200 times the price of moving large amount of material in to space to build large craft to travel to say Mars and make a station there is much creeper and easier. So who knows we could have a true Mars colony in our life time thanks to the Brits in this case.
The handwaving has a name in this case. It's called an inertial dampener. :P
Infinite possibilities have implications that could not be completely understood if you turned this entire universe into a giant supercomputer.
The artificial black hole is the "singularity" in the Singularity Warp Cores.
I read that the theoretical upper limit on the amount of energy extractable by feeding matter to a black hole is around 40% of the rest mass (vs. 100% for matter-antimatter). Given that a black hole is less volatile than antimatter, it seems to be a viable means of getting such high levels of energy from your fuel.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole#Accretion_of_matter
Here is also an article about hypothetical black-hole-powered starships:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_starship
Look what I found, someone posted this earlier and it got me thinking this could help make matter-antimatter reactors! Warp Speed anyone.
well yeah, politics and money is what is holding us back or slowing us down but we are slowly moving in the direction of us as humanity joining together, there will be some who won't agree. Following the ISS is a good example and united nations to.
What is the point again with flying wing aircraft/spacecraft? was it extra room, fuel efficiency and creates more lift? If so they should really use them, if the engines go they can just glide back down, right?
At present, we have precisely one theory that might enable FTL travel - Alcubierre-White warp theory. NASA's experiments to detect such warps have not succeeded so far, in large part because the experiments involve aiming a laser through a space between two metal blocks that is measured in microns, and any disturbances throw the laser off. (It's reminiscent of Forward's early attempts at developing a mass detector to find gravity waves. He got a pattern that had him really excited - until he found out that it was being caused by the vibration of semis passing by on the freeway a few miles away.) Of course, even if Alcubierre and White are correct, we still need to find some way of making several hundred kilograms of exotic matter, which we haven't even proved exists yet...
The other interesting facet of A-W warp theory is that since it depends on a vessel deforming space around it (that's the loophole in relativity; it addresses how quickly a mass may move through space, but not how rapidly space itself can contract and expand), it still does not permit an "ansible", an FTL communications device. Instead, any interstellar communications would have to be carried out either by lightspeed devices (lasers and masers), or by message ships, in a fashion not unlike the setup in Pournelle's Empire of Man tales. (Or Niven's Known Space, for that matter.)
I suppose one option would be to use wormholes...
Edit: Also, couldn't the experiment be conducted in orbit? I can't think of a lot of things that would disturb the laser there that wouldn't do it on Earth, but a lot of Earth-bound disturbances become less problematic.
Infinite possibilities have implications that could not be completely understood if you turned this entire universe into a giant supercomputer.
Well, since you need people to monitor it, there's still the vibration of the station, and of course it would have to be assembled and calibrated in orbit because of launch stresses, but I take your meaning. I gather that NASA would love to put the experiment up there, perhaps in a separate module connected by a tether, but a) there's a waiting list for experiments to fly on the ISS, and b) everybody's all gun-shy about EVA activities since the incident last year where one suit sprung an internal leak in its cooling system while it was in use and an Italian astronaut almost drowned.
That said, there are two known types of ways that a spacecraft can change its orientation without RCS. First, you could use reaction wheels, which are basically big gyroscopes. Since rotational momentum is a conserved quantity, spinning your gyroscope in one direction will make your spacecraft spin in the opposite direction, and stopping the gyroscope will stop this rotation. Many unmanned Earth-orbital satellites and interplanetary probes use this method. The drawback is that for any reasonably sized gyroscope (and reasonable electrical power consumption to spin it up), it takes many minutes to re-orient your spacecraft, so for manned craft it is only suitable for station-keeping.
The second way is by pushing against something distant from the spacecraft. In practice, this takes one of two forms: either use the minute pressure from sunlight against your spacecraft to "steer" like a sailing ship (which can take hours to days to change your orientation), or use an on-board electromagnet to push against a planet's (or the sun's) magnetic field.
Second, could we use a dirigible to lift those new spacecraft that Virgin Galactic makes instead of using rockets?
Yes, we have the ability TODAY! to build a manned spacecraft thanks to advances science and technology. There are a lot of ideas, which you can find around the net, which people have already thought of for a spaceship such as Nautilus X which uses the inflatable space capsule and VASIMR or nuclear fusion drive rocket. One engineer says we can build the Enterprise, Constitution refit design with today's technology. The problem is money and some political views. But that is slowly changing!
As for using an airship yes i think it is do able as well but needs more testing and need to make it safe so the rocket won't damage the airship and vice-versa. Maybe with smaller rockets or rocket planes but not with big ones.
As for dirigibles, not really. You need to get up pretty high to launch something like SpaceShipTwo, and the sorts of balloons that will get up that high won't carry enough payload to support a spacecraft. The WhiteKnightTwo launch system remains one of the better ways to get the ship most of the way up there. (At least it beats the old-fashioned step rockets - what Pournelle once termed "disintegrating totem poles".)
My design will look like the venturestar design for atmospheric and deep space exploration. Propulsions, possibly the Sabre engines from Skylon, linear aerospike engines, electric propulsion e.g. VASIMR, If fusion drive propulsion works i'll add that as well, project orion and also warp drive. Made out of metamaterials which can heal itself, if it works. Also add magnetic fields for space shielding. Maybe use the same materials for the inflatable space capsule. Maybe add graphene in there and carbon nanotubes. It will be big enough to support a crew of 50 men and women. Have advanced sensors. Maybe through in a rail gun and laser. High resolution screens. Medical bay and sports bay. I choose this because it will I think it will cut costs down, save time, easy to repair. Nice all purpose spaceship.
My second design will be the starship Enterprise, constitution refit design or sovereign class design. Or millennium falcon or daedalus class from stargate. Same details as above.
Now, given a 200MW-output VASIMR thruster, and the presence of a nuclear reactor, at least I wouldn't have to worry about designing a spin chamber for effective gravity, as I'd be able to run the ship at constant boost at a respectable fraction of a gee...
Okay, lets says you had the choice of designing your own ship what will it be? Exotic matter? Would you know if an matter/antimatter reactor could be possible to make? I read an article that the Cern has managed to produce antihydrogen atoms, has anyone figured how to store it? With the Orion drive they could make at a safe distance from Earth, and use robots or computer controls from down here in the mean time.
Found this, http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/175232-cern-creates-and-studies-antihydrogen-antimatter-in-the-lab-for-the-first-time.
Take a look at this ladies and gentlemen, http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/174782-this-awesome-replicator-combines-industrial-machining-with-laser-3d-printing-to-create-just-about-anything . Thats the other item I world have on a spaceship, replicators.
Supplemental: Okay, an effective velocity of 10c, since, as my inner pedant insists on noting, the ship itself doesn't actually move - the space it's in surfs a shift in metric, as the space before the bubble compresses and the space behind expands... Which also reminds me, I need to make sure that when I pop my bubble, I'm facing away from the planet and not in its orbital plane, so the wave of Hawking radiation that's released doesn't sterilize the place.