[Spaceships] Million Merchant Marathon

[scc]

Originally Posted by mlangsdorf

Okay, what was your original, gaming related question? You seem to have this all worked out to your satisfaction.

I want to know if people think it would make for a good game, I'm not sure it last beyond one or two sessions, but it's repeatable and there are other places to go in the system and do the usual Traveler inspired tramp freighter things

Originally Posted by johndallman

How are you planning to lift all that mass to Venus orbit? You'd have to speed up Venus' rotation a lot to let you use orbital elevators.

Originally Posted by scc

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

Originally Posted by Varyon

How are you seeing this marathon work? Are we talking a race to see who goes from Venus to the Moon fastest with everyone starting in Venus' orbit? A staggered race where you just track how long it takes each vessel for a single trip? A variant of one of the previous where how much mass of nitrogen the vessel is transporting is factored in? A "race" where victory goes to the vessel that transports the most nitrogen to the Moon during the "nitrogen transport" phase of the terraforming project? Something else? And do you see the Mars project involving a separate race, or would it be something like the above where transporting to Mars instead of the Moon is worth more points?

Yes an actual race, the races by clipper ships to bring tea to England was on my mind when I came up with this. The event is annual and the first across the line wins. Vessels get around by Mag-Sail assisted by particle accelerator stations so there's something of a starting whistle when that fires up but starting early is allowed (Because it doesn't automatically give you an advantage). At this point I'm not sure then carting stuff to Mars would begin, it could start at the same time or later on, I'm not sure.

Originally Posted by whswhs

The pressure part makes sense. Atmospheric pressure is the weight of atmospheric gases, which is the mass of those gases times the acceleration of gravity. The moon has 1/6 g, so if you have six times as much atmosphere, you'll have the same pressure. (The scale height is inversely proportional to gravitational acceleration, so it will be six times as great.)

But with the lower gravity the atmosphere will escape far faster.

I calculated how much would be needed based upon Titan's atmospheric pressure.