Thanks for the reference, I wasn't aware of it. I presume you're talking
about his paper that appeared in "Interstellar Migration and the Human
Experience".
Well, I don't have Crisell's paper to compare with. But I suspect his work,
like that of Beech, was dedicated to *extending* the lifetime of the Sun,
whereas I want to *shorten* it. They want to carefully husband resources,
whereas I want to extract as much as possible as quickly as possible. By
making the whole mass of the Sun into fodder for controlled fusion, we
should be able to 'burn down' the Sun much more quickly than it is doing the
job by itself. (This assumes that it is possible to feed a fusion reactor
on protons, which might not be possible.)
Now I've got to track down these papers...
--CarlF