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.
After some experimenting, the drive that seems to offer the most
delta-vee per pound of fuel at TL8 is the Orion... but so far, my best
design has a flight time of around 500 years. (Fully-loaded LWt times
burn time giving a delta-vee of 3,204,600 metres/second.) I was really
hoping to get something under a century, but my Vehicles-fu doesn't
seem to be up to the task... am I going to have to go to a higher TL,
maybe throw in a ramscoop, or am I missing some obvious optimization
trick?
If cost-cutting is any kind of a priority, I guess the cheapest
TL8 way to go interstellar would be with bolting Fission Drives
onto a huge chunk of asteroid ice, like some typical Kuiper belt
object or a comet. Asteroid ice serves as armor and radiation
shielding as well as reaction mass. Combined with a magnetic
field, 14 yards of water ice is enough to stop cosmic rays, solar
flares and so forth. This kind of craft is also the easiest to
refuel at the travel destination - Mine some more radioactives,
just bolt the engines on a new chunk of ice and go again.
Don't know exactly what kinds of delta-V this kind of craft
could provide over interstellar distances, but an ice chunk
several miles long does have lots of reaction mass..
Another way to go would be to use up several ice chunks along
the way - the Oort Cloud is full of suitable targets, and
has a radius of several light-years.
-Pauli
--
"Accompanied only by the full moon, howling of
the nightwolf, and the path under my bare feet,
the elvenpath.."
-Nightwish, Angels Fall First: Elvenpath
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