Hello everybody, regarding the comments by Anthony and Hal, I was assuming a Hohmann transfer orbit with a hefty murphy factor for low trust engines and another fudge factor to reduce the timeframe a bit. The goal is to get the asteroid into Earth orbit, or perhaps L5 or an orbit around the sun very similar to that of Earth.
Earth to Ceres is a minimum of 17 kps, while Earth to Pluto (as a stand-in for a generic comet) is 22 kps. Call it 15 mps, then. The massdriver engine would need something like 97% of the rock as reaction mass, as opposed to more than 99% in the earlier case. Regarding the fusion bomb drive suggested by Zan, maybe it is an Orion drive from VE37. A megaton bomb every second provides 200,000 tons of thrust, or 0.00001 G initial acceleration. This requires 918 tons of thrust bombs per hour, so the Isp is approx. 784,313. The delta-V of 15 mps requires 60,000,000 tons of thrust bombs, or something like 240,000,000 individual bombs. Obviously what Zan describes from Ringo is not quite an Orion. The use of a few hundred million tons of rock as extra reaction mass might really reduce the bomb requirements. But 24 million bombs or 2.4 million bombs are still an insanely high number. What society can produce that many bombs, and not misfile a few every now and then? Regards, Onno _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
