Onno Meyer wrote: > Jon replied to me: >> Conversely, you could go anywhere of interest in the solar system >> within weeks, and anywhere in the inner solar system within days; and >> maneuvers in Earth orbit would take hours. You're not going to have >> interstellar empires under these conditions; and most spaceships won't >> be built for interstellar travel, even though it's conceivable that >> they could manage it. > >> Fuel limitations will be determined strictly by the power supply, as >> is the case with any reactionless drive. > > If a ship is well built and maintained for week-long trips, she > should be handle month-long trips without major trouble. Think > of crossing the Atlantic in in a 40' or 50' sailboat -- it would > be news if it fails, not if it works.
Right; but what about year-long trips? At 10G, a ship would take about 13 months to reach a destination that's one parsec away; 19 months for two parsecs; 23 months for three parsecs. These would be non-stop trips. I don't doubt that a ship that's designed with week-long trips in mind could manage such distances without breaking down; but there's the matter of food supplies: such ships probably won't be equipped with stasis tubes, and aren't likely to be carrying enough food to feed the crew for a year or two (or more, if you need to go more than three parsecs out in one hop). >> I cannot think of a reasonable justification for any sort of >> superluminal sensors. > > Do you need reason or plausible deniability? Somewhere between the two, but leaning toward "reason". Right now, I'm operating on the assumption that anything that moves at superluminal speeds does so because it's being conveyed by a warp bubble - which, as mentioned elsewhere, is highly unstable and needs constant maintenance by a bubble generator. I don't see how FTL sensors could be justified in a manner that feels like a natural extension of the superscience principles that would be at work here. >> > * What is the payload fraction of a typical starship? >> >> I don't know for sure; that's left to the engineers to figure out. > > It is an important design decision and should be made, not > figured. I've stated that the thrust-to-mass ratio of the drives is on the order of hundreds of Newtons per kg of drive; probably not more than 300N/kg, and possibly as low as 100N/kg. Power-to-thrust requirements should be somewhere between 1kW/10N and 1kW/100N, and field maintenance requirements should be negligible in interstellar space, and possibly in interplanetary space as well. With those assumptions, what sorts of spacecraft could you design? -- Jonathan "Dataweaver" Lang _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
