Weinbaum atomic engines

[ffutures]

Re. space travel in the Weinbaum RPG, I'm going with nuclear engines that give about 0.01-0.02g acceleration in sustained flight, which are the best fit for the travel times mentioned in the stories.

Now obviously this isn't going to be much use for takeoffs and landings, and I can either go with auxilliary engines that have higher power output but can't be run for a sustained time, or with an "emergency / takeoff / landing" setting on the main engines, like using the afterburners on a jet. A lot more power, but it burns through fuel extremely fast, say 200 times as much fuel for 100 times as much thrust. E.g. to get 2g for 10 minutes uses as much fuel as .02g for 2000 minutes, about 33 hours. And 33 hours at 0.02g will take you a LOT further than 10 minutes at 2g.

Does this sound reasonable for game purposes?

Later: To clarify this, my best guess for travel times is a few weeks for Earth-Mars and Earth-Venus, with Saturn to Neptune and beyond just on the edge of the possible. In The Red Peri they imply that Saturn-Pluto (about a billion miles) can be done in three months or possibly less, but they don't give exact times.

Assuming that it'll take three months for the 1 billion mile trip under normal circumstances, that's about 0.01g cruising acceleration /deceleration. Plugging in a range of values gives 1 billion mile trip times of:

0.01g = 93.7 days
0.015g = 76.5
0.02g = 66.3
0.025g = 59.3
0.03g = 54.1

And Earth-Mars times at conjunction of:

0.01g = 20.2 days
0.015g = 16.5
0.02g = 14.3
0.025g = 12.8
0.03g = 11.7

I think I'm going to go with 0.01g for the earlier ships in e.g. A Martian Odyssey, 0.02g to 0.03g for later ships.

Comments

[johnreiher.livejournal.com]

If you haven't been to this web site, and I think you have, take a look at the Atomic Rocket Page! There is a lot of information here. In particular:

Blast off!

and

Engines

I also know that the folks on the SFConsim-l would love to help you out on this as well. They are made crazy over Atomic Rockets. It is a Yahoo Group, but these folks live for this kind of stuff.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

I have had so many problems with Yahoo groups that I really don't want to go there, I'm afraid. I've seen the atomic rocket page, it's useful but Weinbaum's version of atomic power doesn't bear very close comparison with the real world, and there will be a certain amount of hand waving at the more technical stages.

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

One thing the atomic rocket page is good for is outlining the challenges of spaceflight -- which, in an early-to-mid-20th century SF universe, might be met with very different technologies, possibly based on different physical assumptions. Of course, in some universes, even the challenges might be different.

When it comes to nuclear physics, by the way, I'm far from convinced that we've figured out everything, in a science only about 100 and technology only about 65 years old. I don't think that we'll necessarily ever get anything like Golden Age "atomic converters" (feed any mass in, get out emm cee squared energy), but I wouldn't rule it out, either.

The astrophysical differences can be harder to explain logically. What I do is make a "parallel pasts" game using "resonance effects" to explain, for example, that Jane Austen wrote Pride and Prejudice in our world, Weinbaum's world, and Stapledon's world, even though the pasts and futures of those worlds, once you step beyond the period of history known to the writer.