[Spaceships] Million Merchant Marathon

[scc]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

I wouldn't move those quantities of nitrogen from Venus to either the Moon or Mars and I wouldn't use rocket ships in hohman orbits.

The best alternative I can think of off-hand is to move it from the moons of Neptune where its a solid and wrap it in enough aluminum (shiny side out) to keep it from melting and also provide the conductor necessary for use in a magnetic launcher.

Titan might also be an interesting source.

So I'm using Venus because I'm trying to terraform all three, Venus has too much atmosphere while the Moon and Mars have too little, either way I'm going to be moving that stuff off of Venus, might as well use to for these other terraforming projects as well.

Um, no rockets, either a mass driver to increase rotational speed to reactionless drives tailored to produce space fighters (They have a top speed).

Want liquid nitrogen because it's easier to handle (slightly)

EDIT:

Originally Posted by SydneyFreedberg

Can you terraform the Moon? I’d be surprised if it had enough gravity to retain nitrogen.

Atmosphere or lack there of is more a matter of capturing said atmosphere, Titan is only a bit bigger then our moon and has a greater atmospheric pressure then Earth.

Originally Posted by mlangsdorf

At TL9, does a 300,000 ton, SM+13 advanced fusion pulse drive system that costs $7.2 billion count as a family operated ship? Because it takes 1.2e10 trips by that kind of freighter to move that amount of nitrogen.

A cheaper, SM+10 version of the design only costs $240 million, so more family friendly, but requires 3.6e11 trips. Which is a crazy high number.

But I agree with Fred. It is going to decades, if not centuries, to move that much stuff, and there's no great reason to do it with manned (or even robotic) cargo ships. Build a ridiculously huge mass driver or laser launch system in orbit around Venus and send frozen N2 payloads to the inner system on ballistic paths.

First off, yes I realise about the time scale.

Using a pulse drive not only means fuel costs, which raises the cost of this whole program, which given that Earth will go through a dark age making fuel production impossible for part of this, is a big problem. Tt also goes my decision to use another method propulsion as the primary for this setting, one with some cool, or at least interesting, options.