[Spaceships] Reactionless Drives, Pseudovelocity, and NOT breaking a setting (much)

[lwcamp]

Originally Posted by lwcamp

Suppose you can pseudospeed yourself to 0.01 c. Now go park yourself over a planet. Say, just above Earth's exosphere. Make sure you're not in orbit - stay stationary and hover over the planet with pseudospeed. Earth's gravity is pulling you down. It is exerting a force on you, and since by definition your change in momentum is force integrated over time, you are gaining momentum toward the center of the Earth. No problem, though - you can pseudospeed upward to counter your downward real velocity. Every second, you gain another 9.8 m/s of downward velocity. After about 85 hours of this, you have picked up nearly 0.01 c of real velocity. Beyond this point, your pseudovelocity drive is going to have trouble keeping up, so maneuver away from Earth. Of course, you conveniently positioned yourself so that the real velocity you built up helps you get to your real destination - say, it points towards the eeevil base of eeevilness on Callisto. So you zip over to Callisto with real and pseudo velocity, and then plow into your target at an actual speed of 0.01 c. Kaboomie!

Just remembered - power is force times speed. So while you could pull the hovering trick at low altitude for a while, eventually the power requirement would exceed your reactor's output. Then you need to move further out in order to decrease the acceleration and reduce the power requirement, which slows down your accumulation of velocity.

Luke