It mentions Tau Zero, but actually just how often are Bussard Ramjets invoked in SF stories?
Where there's no travel over great distances (e.g. most Cyberpunk and other SF about what happens here in the near future) this doesn't come up at all. e.g. Diamond Age doesn't need a a way to do interstellar travel since the furthest anybody goes is an airship ride to Europe or America.
Today's soft SF generally invokes some means of FTL travel (and so no practical mechanism needed) if the story will involve travel between solar systems, maybe it's wormholes, or there's a "warp drive" or that sort of thing. Banks' Culture novels do periodically try to "explain" how FTL travel works in their world but it's basically just magic. No need for a Bussard ramjet when you have magic.
And most hard SF avoids interstellar travel altogether because it's such a problem. Greg Egan has it simply take an incredibly long time in the Amalgam stories, Stross doesn't have it in Saturn's Children, even travel between planets is exhausting and expensive - (and although I guess his short story "Bit Rot" sort of counts, I don't think they were using a Bussard Ramjet for whatever they were attempting before the rot set in)
Where there's no travel over great distances (e.g. most Cyberpunk and other SF about what happens here in the near future) this doesn't come up at all. e.g. Diamond Age doesn't need a a way to do interstellar travel since the furthest anybody goes is an airship ride to Europe or America.
Today's soft SF generally invokes some means of FTL travel (and so no practical mechanism needed) if the story will involve travel between solar systems, maybe it's wormholes, or there's a "warp drive" or that sort of thing. Banks' Culture novels do periodically try to "explain" how FTL travel works in their world but it's basically just magic. No need for a Bussard ramjet when you have magic.
And most hard SF avoids interstellar travel altogether because it's such a problem. Greg Egan has it simply take an incredibly long time in the Amalgam stories, Stross doesn't have it in Saturn's Children, even travel between planets is exhausting and expensive - (and although I guess his short story "Bit Rot" sort of counts, I don't think they were using a Bussard Ramjet for whatever they were attempting before the rot set in)