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Originally Posted by kreios
The acceleration, yes. If you only look at the departure burn, the Fusion Rocket needs more than eight hours thrust to produce the necessary dV (which means even more time spent on waiting for periapsis). The torch needs five minutes of thrust.
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hah, every time I did the math I was assuming three engines: that's how many you need to achieve orbit in 8 hours.
Of course now when I look at costs I realize that engines are among the most expensive things in the book, and two systems, the engine and the stardrive, cost around 70% of the ship already.
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Hm... maybe I should spend a post looking over that mechanism and computing the dV. It might be worth keeping.
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I've done some work. The amount of dv for a given orbit scales with the fourth root of mass and the square root of gravitational influence.
The equations got really complex and than all cancelled out. It was stunning. dv where a planet's influence is g and the mass is M is
dv = (GM)^.25 * g^.5 * .001
Where G is the gravitational constant.