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Re:Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner Announce $100M Initiative... by x5n1 on Monday July 20, 2015 @10:47AM (#9916381)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_%28nuclear_propu...

You could potentially replace fission with fusion and speed things up. And yes they were high level designs because of the supposedly immense expense.

Re:Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner Announce $100M Initiative... by bryondowd on Monday July 20, 2015 @12:52PM (#9917280)
Right. I'm sure fusion will one day allow us to do incredible things. We just haven't figured it out, yet. Right now, our best attempts at fusion (to my knowledge) put in orders of magnitude more energy than they get out. And the first applications of positive fusion energy would likely be to generate cheap power on Earth, long before it reaches a point where we could drive a ship with it.