This is better than the Vegas proposal (real Enterprise) http://www.universetoday.com/95099/...build-a-real-starship-enterprise-in-20-years/ Would love to see it, but who is going to pay for it?
Here is the guy's website. http://www.buildtheenterprise.org/ However, it appears to have been slashdotted at the moment.
Okay, I'll be the turd in the punchbowl: [Jackie Gleason] This is about the stupidest thing I have ever heard of! [/JG] First of all, this is a suboptimal design for a craft to do what he wants it to do. 90 days to Mars? There's better nuke powered engine designs out there which could have us to Mars in one tenth the amount of time. Its size puts it about triple the size of the TOS Enterprise, and it looks like there's lots of empty space in it. (Hard to tell because of how damned long it takes his site to load.) Not to mention that I can't see anything on his design which indicates that the thrust from the engines will pass through on the center of mass. This means that the crew will having to make a lot of course corrections due to the thrust pushing from the wrong spot. It reminds me of those folks trying to raise $30 million to keep Enterprise on the air. For that kind of money, they could have had a real spacecraft.
You should maybe write the guy so that he can improve the design. Making it look like Enterprise is probably mostly to get interest from the public.
Except that if you change the design, then the interest evaporates. This is the same kind of vapid interest in space which gets a prototype shuttle named Enterprise and not one that actually flies in space. There's a whole host of problems with his design, which would no doubt be hand waved away by him, because they don't prove its impossible to build it, but like a flying lawnmower, just because you can do it, doesn't mean that its the best way to do it.
There is a poster there that's posting links to that site and talking about the project. But you may be talking about a poster named "Tri" that was there several years ago. He was always yapping about building a life-sized replica of the Enterprise on the ground (as an amusement park or hotel or something). He was either a troll or severely retarded.
If you really wanted to unleash your inner nutball and try to do that, why not do it with something smaller, like the Defiant?
