Quote:
Originally Posted by soltakss
But near weightless conditions (1/20th g) although it does reach 178000 Km/Hr or 49.5 km/sec at its fastest, which is quite quick.
The NSTAR Ion Drive used in the Deep Space mission has a thrust of 0.096N which accelerates 1 Kg at 0.096m/s^2, or 1/50th of your calculated acceleration, so it's a lot faster than current ion drives, but at 328,000 Kg, you'd have to use 1.64 million times as much fuel as the current ion drives.
So, if you want high velocity over long periods of time then current technology is fine. If you want to cover long distances over short periods of time then you need lowish acceleration, if you need to move large objects you ned massive amounts of fuel or some new-fangled or made-up technology.
But, the point of SciFi is that it is Fiction, so made-up technology is fine.
|
Yeah, just from design considerations I need the ship to be able to do the sort of things in game that it does on screen. Based on some of the other travel times given, at least a 4g acceleration is required. Plus, there is a real world problem with low acceleration. It takes much more fuel.
I'm just going to look at a few more episodes to dig up some more references, and see what works best.
For this case it could be just as easily assumed that they did the one thing that almost never happens on TV sci-fi shows. Did enough burn to reach the desired velocity and then cut their thrusters. A short, high burn, let's say 10gs, since the eagle hast anti-grav, would let the Eagle hit a speed sufficient to reach Alpha in a matter of minutes or hours, then it could cruise most of the way and apply breaking power toward the end. It's actually the way NASA does it.
Of course if it were me, I'd used the gravity projected to cancel out part of the Eagle's mass to allow for some massive acceleration at low thrust, as would anyone who had such a device.
But, yeah, it is a Sci-Fi TV show, and one that has a fairly shaky premise to begin with, so there is only so much I can expect from made up tech.
I'm just trying to make sure the Eagles can do in the game what they can do on the show. More or less. And trying to made some sort of consistent framework for itself. Space:1999 is one of the few Sci-Fi series without FTL drives so the sublight speeds are a bit more important.
The starship combat maneuvers system I've got in the works uses abstract range bands and movement anyway so the final numbers won't make much of a difference in combat terms.