First get me a high-g engine/ship setup, then we'll talk about being able to talk about taking advantage of that by buffering the crew's bodies against the force. Personally I think the first attempts will be a more fractional g (minimum 1/6th, i.e. the moon, but preferably at least .5, and maybe as high as .75 if we can manage it?), trading off an expeditious expedition (at least from the crew's POV, although it also affects 'absolute' time as well) that needs more fuel/equivalent because it burns more quickly against one that can be more easily sustained (wear and tear on drive components, and ship structure) that needs more fuel because it's a
longer pair of burns.
Without a concrete idea of the eventual drive parameters, I've no idea if there's a minima in the fuel/propellent use[1] that could influence that decision, or at least pull it one way or another (above
or below 1g, which would be the absolute best for the crew asuming we weren't also wanting to acclimatise them to a higher-g landfall point, along the way), alongside possibly competing concerns about the structure of the station and the consumable supplies issue.
If it's something 'reactionless' (or refillable en-route, like the much vaunted Bussard Ramscoop of my youth) then perhaps slower acceleration[2] (or, at least, not
quite so fast) is better because of the practical limits of power gain/through-put (and the margins and safety limits involved), rather than any other system. Although "What if we had more and/or bigger engines?" could always apply, as long as they're not (barring the sought-after relativistic effects) reality-bending engines where putting too much power together this way causes 'problems'.
[1] Of course a
more fuel-saving solution would be to burn half (or quarter) of fuel, coast then slow down with the other half (or another quarter, leaving remaining half for return, if intended, and not optimistic about far-end harvesting of fuel/power-source). But that'd not be a constant-g expedition, then, and would take longer and wouldn't reach the more relativistic speeds that we're contemplating making these a more 'livable' experience for the pioneers involved. But I mention this so you don't think I've forgotten.
[2] Or slower
further acceleration once you've started to approach the relative speed at which the ramscoop best gathers and uses the interstellar whisps, because I can only imagine the effective extended collection-cone is going to be more acute at really high speeds... Perhaps it'd be self-regulating, in that regard, and yet another aspect to the asymptotic barrier to speed that our ship must nudge against. (But how would a Ramscoop
decelerate? Gather from (most of) the front 'cone' put redirect its energies back forward in a central spike of thrust? Or used fuel gathered and stored from the initial phase?)
Author
Topic: SCIENCE, Gravitational waves, and the whole LIGO OST! (Read 490670 times)