On Thu, Jan 15, 2015 at 11:44 PM, Kelly St. Clair <kellys@efn.org> wrote:
But I can't for the life of me remember the author or any of the actual
titles.

 Would that happen to be "The Expanse" series?  Leviathan Wakes, et al? It's recently been picked up for a TV show, so I've been reading a bit about it.

"Then Solomon Epstein had built his little modified fusion drive, popped it on the back of his three-man yacht, and turned it on. With a good scope, you could still see his ship going at a marginal percentage of the speed of light, heading out into the big empty. The best, longest funeral in the history of mankind. Fortunately, he'd left the plans on his home computer."


No. But that certainly sounds like an interesting series of books.

The one I'm thinking of starts out not with the inventor, but with a bunch of Redneck-Rocket-Fans/Shade-Tree-Mechanics who like to hang out to watch Cape Canaveral blast-offs, then (illegally) four-wheel along the beach in a monster truck named (IIRC) "The Blue Beast." Then one night, they think they run over some guy who's lying in edge of the surf.

When they go back to check on him, he turns out to be both uninjured and stone drunk (so he doesn't realize how close he came to dying). When they take him home, he turns out to be an ex-astronaut as well as a millionaire real estate developer (it's pre-bust Florida), whose brother is the Plot Device Mad Scientist.

The already-extant force field generator is accidentally revealed to the main protagonist (one of the RRF/STMs). The brothers have been keeping it a secret until they can figure out what practical use to make of it (it's got serious limitations as defensive device). It's the main protagonist who realizes that it would make a DANDY thruster. At which point the ex-astronaut/millionaire realizes that they can now build a small, vacuum-proof apartment building and boost it directly to Mars.

NOTE: "The Blue Beast" is - of course - rebuilt into a Redneck Mars Rover.

ADDITIONAL NOTE: I have a very strange memory . . . all these remembered details, but still no author or title . . .   

--
Richard Aiken

"Never insult anyone by accident."  Robert A. Heinlein
"A word to the wise ain't necessary -- it's the stupid ones that need the advice." - Bill Cosby
"We know a little about a lot of things; just enough to make us dangerous." Dean Winchester