Gravitational Tandem Starship?

Then it's BS.

I think this is somewhat like weaving a rope in a space shuttle and hooking it up on a black hole, use some sort of rudder on it.

Yes, the concept seems to be using a small black hole as a tug, with the crew module riding in continuous free-fall on the gravity well of the black hole. How it achieves huge accelerations and hyper-lightspeed is beyond me, tho. Maybe something like the NASA warp drive concept. The real mystery is why there is nothing to be found on the internet.

Wow heavy

"The real mystery is why there is nothing to be found on the internet."

No real mystery at all. The concept is really nothing more than science fiction.

If there was anything to it there would be scientific, peer-reviewed papers on the subject, but there is not.

If you look below your post, you'll see that Rixter has provided the link to Ad Astra which published the article in a recent issue. (The story is available on-line for subscribers only; many magazines have similar policies.) If you explore that site, you'll see that the organization that publishes Ad Astra (The National Space Society) is fairly respectable, having a board of governors that includes some well-known names in the fields of aerospace and astronautics (Freeman Dyson, Marvin Minsky, James Lovell, Harrison Schmidt, Buzz Aldrin...).

I have not read the article, but it appears to be one of those wildly speculative pieces that some tech-oriented magazine (like Popular Science) occasionally publish. Its' not so much 'science fiction' as highly projective science, kind of like Arthur C Clarke's original article on geosynchronous satellites, written in 1945, long before Sputnik.

Until it has been peer reviewed it is simply a Popular Science type story.

If there was any respectable science to it you would not hear about it in Ad Astra, but Nature, etc.

I don't have a subscription to Ad Astra, but it is an outgrowth of the L5 society, which is a grassroots social effort to expand into space. I do not put too much weight into the idea that the "club" has members such as you pointed out. Many times people will join, but it does not mean that they are part of a steering committee or endorse the various articles that are published.

I think the Alcubierre warp drive has much more peer review acceptance than this concept, whatever it is.

http://www.nss.org/adastra/volume26/v26n4.html

I'm surprised they didn't get a patent on the concept.

Now that the idea is published and in the public domain, anyone who wants to could build gravitational tandem starships, sell them, and not have to pay any royalty or licensing fees.

Black hole Tug Job? No wonder it's "well accepted"!

Oh, you so bad!

Without the article, it's difficult to discuss. I've asked Ad Astra if there is a way to share it, and waiting their reply. I can of course hack it, but that's a last resort.