Quote:
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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I ran into this issue with my own setting, which seems fairly similar to yours. My solution was to create a variant fusion torch with 0.2g per system and 1.5 mps delta-V per tank of water. This is the same basic performance as the fusion rocket (acceleration * ISP = a constant, in this case 0.3 at TL10, vs. 7.5 for the torch as written). It's still limited superscience, due to the temperatures involved, but makes for a more interesting set of tradeoffs.