Quick question about a STL trip
- From: sigidunum@xxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 19 Aug 2008 11:06:56 -0700 (PDT)
Assume our starship masses a cool one million tons. The trip is 100
light years. The ship's top acceleration is 20 cm/s^2, or 2% of a
gravity; its top speed is 0.25c. (These numbers chosen for story
purposes, obviously.)
So it accelerates for about 12.5 years, coasts for nearly a century,
then decelerates the same.
Questions:
1) Assume a straight fusion drive. What's the mass ratio?
2) Okay, what about an antimatter drive? How much better?
3) Is there any way to decelerate at least a little without carrying
reaction mass to do it? Assume there's no braking laser or such at
the target star, but can we use magnetic fields or a modified ramscoop
or something? (I have the impression that ramscoops are better at
slowing you down than at speeding you up...) I ask because even a
modest reduction in the reaction mass needed to decelerate helps a lot
with the mass ratio.
4) I was going to ask what's the power output, but I have just enough
math to do that myself. Let's just say you won't want to park this in
low Earth orbit... at a couple of hundred km up, the power output
would be enough that you'd feel the warmth on naked skin.
Thanks much in advance,
Doug M.
.
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