[Spaceships] Your preferences regarding plausible/playable Reactionless Drives

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by jason taylor

But why reactionless drive?

Well, you need a drive capable of relatively high accelerations for a long time before running out of fuel in order to cut interplanetary travel times down to reasonable levels - i.e. less than months. It is really convenient if you can continuously accelerate for the entire trip without running out of fuel, since that simplifies the math tremendously. Of course you can do that with amazing fuel efficiencies too, that's the concept of conversion drives, or Megatraveller HEPLAR thrusters.

It's also often convenient for the drive exhaust not to be hideously destructive, which is incompatable with the first peformance goal for a realistic reaction exhaust, though of course you can ignore that too.

For games, well, reactionless drives are a handy way to convert settings where fuel consumption and drive exhaust were ignored or unrealistically downplayed (that is, most fiction) to a system that would otherwise insist on tracking them, without making it impossible for the players to recreate something in the story.