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Message: <blockquote data-quote="slobster" data-source="post: 6016616" data-attributes="member: 6693711">In distance, yes. On the other hand, it might be much easier to travel great distances (perhaps abetted by advanced drive systems and suspended animation) and colonize a hospitable world in the Goldilocks zone than it would be to terraform the cold, sterile, microgravity outer planets.Well a planet's orbital period is directly dependent on its distance from the sun. The upshot of that is, if Mars is further out from the sun form earth, but you want it to have the same orbital period (same year length, such that it keeps pace with earth), you have to apply constant force. A lot of force. It would take far more energy than could be produced by detonating every nuclear weapon ever made at once, every second, to keep that planet in its orbit.If you want a scifi setting that has the technology to do this have at it, but keep in mind it's not very "hard" science fiction.Yup, just pull a 180 halfway through and decelerate for the rest of the trip. Other than the weightless period at the middle of the voyage, everyone on board experiences an entire trip at normal gravity (or more accurately, gravity equal to the acceleration your ship is pulling; 9.8 meters per second per second is earth-normal).Yeah, genre conventions back you up in not considering efficient drive systems to be weapons of mass destruction (as they would be). If you are trying to simulate the scifi genre as opposed to obsessing over hard scifi projection, do it. I've played games like that, and they are great.As an aside, your hypergun would be a terrifying weapon, but it doesn't really do anything that the other drive systems you have talked about wouldn't. A drive capable of sustaining a 1G acceleration for the entirety of the trip from Earth to Mars would be capable of accelerating a spacecraft to such speeds that, if it just pointed itself at a planet, it would also be an extinction-level event.Space travel tech is scary!</blockquote>

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