Air performance

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by Varyon

I'm pretty certain most modern fighter craft don't have a full 1G of acceleration, so they should absolutely be built with smaller systems. I think you'll still end up with too high of a top speed, however - IIRC top speed scales with the square root of acceleration, so something with 0.1G would have a top speed around Mach 2. That's Move 1/750, while the old P-51D Mustang had Move 3/218.

An F-16 moderately loaded has about 1G of acceleration. So did/does the MiG-19, the world's first supersonic fighter to enter production.

The jet engines in Spaceships have about four times the thrust they should, and about (at TL8) fifteen times the fuel efficiency. Mind you, Spaceships doesn't say whether it's making any allowances for the fuel savings from not flying at 100% power constantly.

As for the top speeds, the given airspeeds in Spaceships might not be unreasonable for a non-airbreathing craft with hypersonic streamlining. Modern supersonic jet fighters are neither of these.