[Spaceships] with wings

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by MatthewVilter

Does this mean contragravity lifters are only good for unstreamlined craft?

No, it means contragravity lifters let you get into orbit with low acceleration.

Originally Posted by MatthewVilter

Does this mean I can put 1/3 of an Ion Drive (0.000167 Gs of acceleration) on my winged ship and fly to orbit in (5.6*.045/.000167)~=1509 hours??!!??!!

No, because your maximum speed is lower than your stall speed. Assume you need 0.1 Gs.

[MatthewVilter]

Originally Posted by Anthony

No, it means contragravity lifters let you get into orbit with low acceleration.

That's my point, as far as I can tell so do wings.

Originally Posted by Anthony

No, because your maximum speed is lower than your stall speed. Assume you need 0.1 Gs.

That sounds fine to me. Unless I get more info I will go with this. But where are you getting this number?

In this case I add 1/3 of a Jet Engine and 2/3 of a jet fuel tank to get 2 hours of ~.333 G acceleration in atmosphere. So now I need to know how long the Jet Engine is running during takeoff. I guess you find out how long it takes to get to max air-speed and turn the engine off after that. Okay:

Time to max speed (in sec) = Max speed (in mph)/Acceleration (in mph/sec)

Max speed (in mph) = 2,500 * SqRoot(Acceleration in Gs)

Acceleration (in mph/sec) = Acceleration in Gs * 20

So in my case:

Max speed (in mph) = 2,500 * SqRoot(.333) = 1443.38

Acceleration (in mph/sec) = .333 * 20 = 6.67

Time to max speed (in sec) = 1443.38/6.67 = 216.4 sec = 3.6 min = .06011 hours

That's 33 trips to orbit! (I will still need 5.2 delta-V in Hydrogen for each trip)

^ does this look right?

EDIT: I was ninja'd. :P

So yeah .1 Gs seems about right.

About Ram-Rockets, because air-speed is logarithmic adding the Ram-Rocket option to space drives if you already have .1+ Gs in atmo is not cost effective. But (not that I see this in the rules) don't ram-rockets need high air-speed to work in the first place? Why/how would you use a ram-rocket?