Quote:
Originally Posted by Fred Brackin
This is about 43 miles per second per day and you'd use up 5% of your ship's mass in antimatter fuel every 79 days. I don't think you can do this for 10 years even with using multiple stages.
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I'm kind of half-assing a beam riding spacecraft (i.e. ground station accelerates small amounts of matter to relativistic velocities, which impact the spacecraft, pushing it along without need for reaction mass) and hand-waving all the implications with regard to the engineering steps here. Given the assumption is, "THS but they really
really want starships guys" I think that it could be doable.
Though it could plausibly take much longer to get the ship moving. If we're going with a 20 year lead time on the probe, that implies a ship that can stop would take about 29 years, and with a 30 year lead time, the ship would take 36.5 years.