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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Umbran" data-source="post: 8220040" data-attributes="member: 177">I don't think you have the option to meet somewhere higher.  The laws of physics are a harsh mistress. We are talking about how much energy can be in a ship a few hundred yards across. Consider, if you managed to put all the mass (and so, all the energy) of a single Jupiter in a space about 6 meters across, it would collapse into a black hole.  If you put it all in a space between one and five kilometers across, it collapses into a ball of neutronium.Basicially, in order to power the ship, you need a ball of neutronium ten times larger than the ship!  The matter/energy you need cannot fit within the ship, much less be managed by the ship's systems.  Not going to the stars in that.If you bring it down by 30 orders of magnitude, we are talking about completely converting maybe a kilogram material into energy. For scale, all the energy released by the Hiroshima bomb was less than a gram of mass.  So, we are then still talking about containing a thousand Hiroshimas within a space of, say, a modern sports stadium.  Which may be possible, but still pretty fantastic. But, above that... you're not going to the stars if you vaporize the ship when you turn the engine on.</blockquote>