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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ryujin" data-source="post: 6782471" data-attributes="member: 27897">It's also how you need to perform evasive manoeuvres; vector thrust. I can't remember how long they had been moving away from the asteroid, but it was presumably hours at least. That's hours of acceleration. Running in front of the debris from the explosion therefore first entails decelerating enough to bring effective speed to zero, then accelerating away from the debris. They could well have still been travelling toward the debris, while madly trying to accelerate away from it. My first year in college was general sciences, including a hefty dose of Statics and Kinetics, so my brain tends to work in vectors. Most SciFi like Star Trek and Star Wars gives us aviation style manoeuvring, rather than thrust vectors. I think that Babylon 5's Star Furies gave us the most realistic style of space flight that I can recall, other than this.Missiles don't have to keep a payload alive, nor return it, and so can accelerate at truly horrific rates that would turn a human body to Jell-o. A 50G straight burn would go far, fast. A standard travelling acceleration isn't likely to be more than 1-1.5G, for practical reasons. A "high G burn", for a ship that contains humans, would be maybe 7G. In this universe, at least so far, there is no artificial gravity nor 'inertial dampers.'Accel/decel gets you places fast. The ion drive, that is currently being experimented with, has relatively tiny amounts of thrust but can maintain them for incredibly long periods of time, using small amounts of propellant matter. This makes them effectively faster AND more efficient than conventional rockets. What we currently do is accelerate up to a speed and then largely coast, using gravity wells to change trajectories.</blockquote>

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