On 02/05/07, Captain Joy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On Wednesday, May 2, 2007, at 04:25 AM, DataPacRat wrote: > On 02/05/07, Roger Burton West <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> After some further fiddling, I arrive at these numbers: > > * engine: 420,000,200 lbs > * fuel: 8,400,004 lbs gives Burn Endurance of 8,000 hours > * 50,000,000,000 lbs fuel gives Burn Endurance of 47,619,024.9 hours > = 5,432.33379 years > * Thrust: 300,000 lbs > * LWt: 50,698,137,445 lbs > * Delta-Vee: > 21.8 * 1,000,000 * ln (1+(50,000,000,000/698,137,445)) miles/hour in > metres/second = 41,761,573.9 meters / second > > 2.15 lightyears / (0.5 * 41,761,573.9 meters / second) in years > = 30.8682707 years > * 2 = total trip time of 61 years. I've never designed a vehicle, so I may comment may not carry any weight, but if you design a ship with a Delta-Vee of 10 meters/sec (i.e. 1G, as in no need for artificial gravity to the human occupants) and spend half your trip accelerating 1G and the other half decelerating at 1G, you can get from here to the galactic center in a human lifetime AS FAR AS THE OCCUPANTS are concerned, due to time dilation.
I think you might be mixing up delta-vee with acceleration. If you accelerate at 1 G for 10 hours, you'll get the same delta vee as if you accelerate at 10 Gs for 1 hour. Without superscience no-fuel-needed reactionless drives (or other neat trickery, such as bussard ramjets), interstellar trips tend to have relatively low accelerations, but ones which last for years... up to, yes, accelerating half way, decelerating the other half. At TL8, though, it's a little hard to get a constant 1G accel for the number of years needed. Thank you for your time, -- DataPacRat VA3BOS "You shall not accept any information, unless you verify it for yourself. I have given you the hearing, the eyesight, and the brain, and you are responsible for using them." -- Qur'an 17:36. _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
