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Originally Posted by Humabout
A note on your lift-off requirements and acceleration: as you decrease acceleration, the delta-v needed to attain orbit increases, thanks to gravity drag. Thus, blasting off at 3g takes less delta-v worth of fuel than doing it at 1.1g. To that end, if you correct for this, you'll find your assessment of boosters is off. You'll also (correctly) find that SSTO is just a dream for hlox, kerolox, and metholox engines.
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A good point. It's just a rough estimate, but the conclusion stays valid in my opinion: Forget launching anything with conventional rockets if you want to remain economical.
Speaking of which: Next post!
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Originally Posted by Space Propulsion
Now we’re moving to the interesting topic of space propulsion, and which one to use. Since GURPS Spaceships offers a large number of them, I’m only going to look at the best ones - some, like ion drives or chemical rockets, are simply going to lack in either thrust or efficiency to be useful.
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