Quote:
Originally Posted by ericthered
You CAN use a star directly, but you'll want really big fuel tanks to pull that off. A minimal red dwarf requires 50 kps to stabilize, and twice that if you ever want to leave. The sun requires 107 kps to stabilize. I think the minimum vessel I'd try jumping to a star would have 3 Advanced pulsed fusion drives, 2 fusion engines, and 11 tanks of fuel at TL9. The remaining fifth of the ship is probably shielding, control, life support, and living quarters for the nuts trying this out. And two weeks worth of food.
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I just realized what this ship is: its a surveyor. Detecting planets around stars from light years away is something of a hit and miss proposition that takes big equipment and a ton of analysis. If you're in the system, it becomes much easier. So you send a ship to the next star you need mapped, it maps everything, and you can extend your charts with only a week or two of effort. You need to stay for about that amount of time to calculate the orbits of the moons in sol system anyway, unless you have really good gear (which is heavy, and you probably have to stay that long anyways).
Unless there is a way to fire the FTL twice in quick succession. Then that might become the best way to do surveys.
Quote:
Originally Posted by kreios
Also very interesting. My assumption is that the range is sufficiently high that there's almost always going to be a few stars in range, and that brown dwarfs would be too inefficient to stop at for a commercial route.
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Brown dwarfs are a pretty expensive option, yeah. Its actually shorter to use the moon 10 times than to use jupiter once. I wasn't thinking of brown dwarves. I was thinking of some Icy body like Pluto or Eris orbiting a star at long distance. Eris is within 20% gravity of letting you recharge your drive. Such a body is going to be hard to find and cheap to travel to: great for smugglers, pirates, and military forces.