/sci/ - Science & Math

>>3988744

You'd need to know how much is actually hitting them. Since Hydrogen is mostly ionized, some of it, if not most of it, would be deflected by the magnetic field, imparting lots of drag. The rest would go through and hit the tungsten shield, the rest would go through and hit the crew module, and some of that would get to them.

With our elongated, two-crew-member ship on a string, gamma shine and heat are spilled directly into the unfillable sink of outer space. A pulling rather than a pushing engine eliminates most of the structural girders that would not only, by their mere existence, add unwarranted mass, but would multiply that mass many times over by their need for shields and coolers. Valkyrie, in effect, is a fuel-efficient, twenty-first-century version of today's "ultralight" aircraft...

...Since antimatter and matter annihilate each other on contact, releasing enormous bursts of energy from literally microscopic amounts of propellant, you cannot simply fill a shuttle tank with liquid antihydrogen and let it slosh around inside.

The only storage method that has a hope of working is solid antihydrogen, supercooled within one degree of absolute zero (within one Kelvin of -273 degrees C). At this temperature, antihydrogen condenses into "white flake," with an extremely low evaporation rate.