On Fri, Nov 21, 2008 at 12:39:44AM -0600, Jeff Wilson wrote: >Maybe your best bet would be a Hohmann transfer orbit from the inner >system, rising up to meet Earth in an tangential ellipse. This >eliminates the 30 km/s solar orbit velocity, leaving only the infalling >11.2 km/s earth escape velocity, and a slingshot of the moon can >subtract it's 1km/s earth orbit velocity from that, so you've only got >10.2 km/s to get rid of.
Basically you're always going to need to dump the speed that would normally be lost in aerobraking by some other means (which means a lot of reaction mass, and a lot of flare). I think it ought to be possible for a conventionally-propelled spacecraft to be built to do this, and with enough baffling and stealthy materials it might not be entirely obvious. The next question is whether it's possible to drop from (say) 100 miles up without generating ionisation; I think it ought to be... R _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
