Spaceship Tech in your Setting

Anthony · 08-11-2021, 01:51 PM

Oh, another thing I like for spaceship drives: warp drives function even at low altitudes, but they have a speed that is inversely dependent on the local gravitational field. A drive that can reach 100 m/s near Earth (G=10m/s^2) can reach 170 km/s in stellar orbit at 1 AU (G=5.9e-3 m/s) and more than 30c in deep space (G=1e-10m/s). This guarantees that most travel time is spent in relatively interesting locations (it works out that time to escape is linear in gravitational potential and can be computed as (speed at current distance) * (distance to center of object)).

08-11-2021, 01:51 PM	#18
Anthony Join Date: Feb 2005 Location: Berkeley, CA	Re: Spaceship Tech in your Setting Oh, another thing I like for spaceship drives: warp drives function even at low altitudes, but they have a speed that is inversely dependent on the local gravitational field. A drive that can reach 100 m/s near Earth (G=10m/s^2) can reach 170 km/s in stellar orbit at 1 AU (G=5.9e-3 m/s) and more than 30c in deep space (G=1e-10m/s). This guarantees that most travel time is spent in relatively interesting locations (it works out that time to escape is linear in gravitational potential and can be computed as (speed at current distance) * (distance to center of object)). __________________ My GURPS site and Blog.