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The idea of a black hole starship is that you carry the black hole around, just like any other engine. If you want to beam power from it, there isn't anything at all there to gain compared to beaming power from the Sun.

And if you want to carry it with your ship, it weighting 2 Earth masses is kind of a drawback.

You don't move the blackhole+ship, that's crazy. You'd simply move the universe around your ship.

Which is already possible by shoveling dark matter into an oven, right?

I always wondered why there's no episode where the implications of more than two dark matter engines working at once were explored :)

How would you move a black hole around?

Just get out and push

AFAIK, the most popular answer is to give it an electrical charge.

I really don't know how are you supposed to maintain that change long-term. But then, it's similar to the problem of deciding whether the emissions from the black hole are particles that you can focus around, so I guess it's an open problem.

There was a scifi story decades ago about using small but heavy objects (neutronium, IIRC) as an integral part of space ships. The idea was not to use them to generate energy, but to generate a gravitational field to counteract the effects on humans of high acceleration. The object was held in front of the spacecraft, and would be moved closer when high acceleration was needed.

I guess if the ship was just drifting, you'd have the heavy object at a sufficient distance to cause ~1g gravity.

I don't remember the story's title or author(s), but it likely appeared in Analog.

It's Charles Sheffield, in particular his McAndrew series.

Thank you! With that help, I was able to find the story: "Moment of Inertial." And here's a link to the story: https://www.baen.com/Chapters/067157857X/067157857X__2.htm

If I recall, he used that invention in several stories. They're quite enjoyable. Sheffield, as a writer with a hard science background, came up with some very interesting ideas, such as The Sturm Invocation, and the entire Proteus series was very well-considered. Sometimes I get a taste for the diamond-hard sf and he scratches that itch. Hal Clement, too, if you're into that; Half Life is probably the best novel where the concept of the scientific method itself is at the forefront.

I now have Half Life on order, your fault.

I was intrigued by another Hal Clement title, Trio for Slide Rule and Typewriter. I have a slide rule sitting a few feet from me as I write this, in case of emergency. No typewriter, though.

Pay especial attention to the General Order and such right at the very start. I literally have incorporated those two ideas into the highest levels of how I solve problems. Hopefully, you will enjoy the book as much as I.

There are far more feasible alternatives to deep space propulsion that could actually work now, and all you have to do is detonate a couple of nukes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propuls...