[Spaceships] Can't find the right propulsion system

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by Anthony

Might want to just tune down your concept of decent thrust. For comparison, a NASA MMU has a total acceleration of about 0.009G with a total burn duration of 450s for a total delta-V of about 40 meters/sec. You might want a tad more performance, but reaching a safe walking speed of 1 yard per second takes 0.09s at 1G, so 0.05G is probably plenty.

Even 0.05G if you don't want a large fraction of the module's mass to be rocket gives fairly limited choices using Spaceships. Chemical, HEDM, NTR, light-bulb, fusion torch if available. I'm not counting nuclear pulse drives or nuclear salt-water because if anti-matter isn't desirable I very much doubt they would be either.

A smaller-system (1/3 size) NTR with a single 1/3rd size fuel tank would give 0.167G and 0.15 mps DV using hydrogen or 0.5G and 0.05 mps DV with water. I think you could probably make a pretty simple, reliable, and failsafe NTR unit at TL10, especially if getting optimal thrust/weight and specific impulse out of it wasn't the priority.