Quote:
Originally Posted by Fred Brackin
It's definitely a long way out. If it was 80 AU that'd be about a month at 1G and turnover velocity would be enormous. WMD issues are a definite thing and a drive that can do it makes STL interstellar flight pretty reasonable.
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For the original generation ships, I haven't designed them yet, but the current intent is for them to be roughly 50% fuel, and they had a delta-v a bit north of 2% light speed, but rather low acceleration - something like 0.05G IIRC - thanks to their small drives (the amount of time spent accelerating is so small compared to the whole trip, using sub-system engines doesn't make a lot of difference). They accelerated to 1% light speed, then traveled for 500 years to reach Harpyia Mati. Modern ships of a similar design can manage delta-v's of around 5% light speed, and as the drives can function in a pseudovelocity "boost drive" mode once they enter an aetheric star's heliosphere that also sync's them to the system they are in (functioning as a rather efficient braking system), modern ships coming from Earth can make the journey in "only" 100 years.
One thing I intend to use the heliopause distance to determine is actually the speed of the pseudovelocity boost drives - I want a typical freighter to take roughly 1 month to go from 1.11 AU to the heliopause, making interstellar journeys typically take 2 months, plus the time in hyperspace. With my initial estimate of 88 AU for the heliosphere, that's 86.89 AU per month, or right around 3000 mps. That's roughly Earth's solar orbit to Mars' solar orbit in 4 hours, 20 minutes (or Gateway to the next furthest orbit in 6 hours, 20 minutes).