On Wed, May 02, 2007 at 04:02:37AM -0400, DataPacRat wrote: >I've recently purchased GVB, and have been playing around with it. My >most recent idea was to see if I could put together a design with the >criteria: TL8, no superscience, carrying at least two people in a >luxury suite from the Solar System to Alpha Centauri. To make it more >interesting, I wanted to do so in as little time as possible - which, >effectively, means maximizing the delta-vee.
In other words, picking the engine with the highest specific impulse (see VxII). >After some experimenting, the drive that seems to offer the most >delta-vee per pound of fuel at TL8 is the Orion... That has an (American-style) specific impulse of 400,000seconds at TL8 (maximum - you can't quite reach this, but you can get arbitrarily close). A fission fragment rocket from VxI has a specific impulse of 1,000,000seconds. Worth considering? (One "2% of drive mass" fuel load per 8,000 hours of operation.) >(Fully-loaded LWt times >burn time giving a delta-vee of 3,204,600 metres/second.) Um, no. The whole point is that you lose mass as you go along. See VxII again: delta_v=21.8 * ISp * ln (1 + (fuel weight / dry weight)) in mph. GVB can handle this - you just need to set vTOTAL_FUEL (I think) to the fuel mass, with a link node. You might want to think about a spin habitat too. R _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
