Mabuse Solar Spaceboat

This is the top view of the layout of the cabin of Mabuse's Solar Spaceboat, a spacecraft capable of exploring the solar system in hours or days rather than months or years. It's the space equivalent of a sailboat cruising around the Hawaiian Islands.

It uses a bias drive, which forms a gradient in the gravitational constant which warps spacetime. The gradient itself moves in the direction of the applied bias, but anything contained withing the warp is motionless as far as spacetime is concerned. As such, the boat does not experience any force of acceleration or dilation effect. Currently it has just a maximum speed of 15% the speed of light, but that's still 45,000 km/s. At that speed, you could cross an astronomical unit, the distance between the Earth and the Sun, in just an hour, and travel to the edge of the solar system in just four days!

It also has a standard rocket drive, called a nuclear salt-water rocket. It uses water that contains dissolved plutonium salts. When these are concentrated to criticality, an uncontrolled chain reaction starts. This heats the water, which is expelled as rocket exhaust. The reaction doesn't even reach maximum neutron density until the water is outside the boat, thus the boat is safe from any explosion. This drive can create a sustained acceleration equal to the acceleration of gravity of the Earth, or 9.8 m/s/s. At that rate, a nuclear salt-water rocket could travel to the Moon in about 2 hours, and to Mars in about 25 hours.

The spaceboat is built like a submarine. The cabin is surrounded by a shell that contains pipes and conduits and storage holds, and then another shell filled with water to act as a radiation shield.

Created using Photoshop.