Mass Drivers in Discovery?

[darthbeck]

Inertial dampers and G-Suits, think about how we are in space flight now, faster than a bullet isn't it?

yes, but the acceleration is kept under about 4-6 gee's, while a mass driver would well over 50 gee's for launching off a normal sized planet.

gonna go see if i can find a real figure on that.

edit:

have a length of hundreds of kilometers and therefore achieve acceleration without excessive g forces to the passengers. It can be constructed as a very long and mainly horizontally aligned launch track for spacelaunch, targeted upwards at the end, partly by bending of the track upwards and partly by Earth's curvature in the other direction.

wikipedia claims it would be possible without killing the occupents.


EDIT II:

A 1 km long mass driver made of superconducting coils can accelerate a 20kg vehicle to 10.5 km/s at a conversion efficiency of 80%, and average acceleration of 5,600 gee.[1] Even so, Earth-based Mass drivers for propelling one-tonne vehicles to orbit are unlikely to be cost effective in the near future.

given the length of a mass driver that would launch humans to space, it would be vary unlikely that the colonys would build them. fusion drives are much cheaper, and more efficent.

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