Quote:
Originally Posted by scc
Yes, I know, a tall order. I can get to about 4% light speed, the the journey is just over 100 years, but I want to know if options other then just more fuel tanks would work, something like laser sails (Lasers hitting a solar sail) or maybe a similar idea involving Mag-Sails, maybe particle beams?
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The magsails are limited to the velocity of the solar wind (more or less) so that's not going to help. Laser pushed lightsails are possible, but imply *insanely* powerful lasers you may not want in your campaign. Realistically any engine that will get you to a fraction of the speed of light implies world-changing levels of energy are available more easily than a starship, but it's easier to ignore for onboard drives than for arrays of exawatt lasers.
The higher the specific impulse of your engine the faster you can ultimately get, so you want the highest Isp engine in your rule set includes - I believe that's Fusion Pulse for the "realistic" TL10 or less engines in Spaceships, and realistically is going to be some sort of fusion engine using the reaction products as the exhaust directly. Acceleration is almost irrelevant for these sorts of time scales so you might as well go with the smallest engine allowed with that high Isp.
In all probability the answer is going to turn out to be you can't do it within the rules. The simple fact is interstellar travel is *hard*, and sending something as inefficiently massive as actual crews is very possibly always going to be impossible in reality. Expect to need to compromise on the realism of the engine (I mean, even more than by ignoring the massive energy generation implications we already do) to get this to work.