(spaceships) rocket (super)science

[ericbsmith]

Originally Posted by jacobmuller

Inertia is telling me I should just accept that space travel is going to take a while - excepting the "jump drive" option.

"Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space." - Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Any realistic propulsion system is going to take a long time to travel to other planets, let alone to the stars. The quickest travel times to Mars right now are on the order of 9 months each way when the planets are in correct alignment to use Hohmann transfer orbits. An advanced realistic propulsion system might get that down to a couple months. A superscience rocket/reactionless drive with 1G thrust can go from Earth to Mars in 2-4 days using constant acceleration, which is quite fast all things considered.

The 3000G acceleration you were thinking of using just means that a ship can get to light speed in a few minutes, making travel times between planets on the order of minutes for the inner solar system of a few hours for the outer solar system. If you're going to go that far just use a lightspeed drive of some wort, whether it's warp, jump, or hyperspace.