Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="TDRandall" data-source="post: 3196566" data-attributes="member: 4808">Two drives - graviton and planetaryMake the ships use two modes of propulsion.  The critical one is some sort of barely understood graviton drive - it's effectiveness is somehow directly proportional to how close it is to a gravity well, and the amount of gravitational tug in the space-time frabic isn't nearly as important (but might still have some influence) as how close you are to the "bottom" of the nearest well.  Best use is when you are "near" a planet or star, but too close would mean either the engine would rip off its moorings or crush the people inside when the engine was flipped on/off.  How close you can actually be to a celestial body for the changeover to be safe depends more on when the ship was made and by whom, as it relies more on the metallurgical constraints and/or internal inertial/gravitational field compensator technology at the time of construction then the engine itself.That forces ships to use a more dependable (but slower) drive both when too close to planets/stars and when too far away (interstellar).  Something lower tech like ion, chemical, maybe nuclear fusion.Only thing I'm not sure on is whether the "effectiveness" of the drive mentioned above should be its accelleration or speed.  I kind of like the techno-voodoo of affecting speed directly.  This would ironically make the ship (and trip) faster on both ends of the journey rather than at the midpoint of a conventional trip of accelleration/turn around/deceleration.  Inhabitants of your universe could easily find that hopping between planets that are only vageuly the same direction still results in a faster overall flight than heading straight for your end point.</blockquote>

Verification