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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<span style="font-family:Century Gothic">Violence is Golden</span>

[Dashiell]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T93uQ4nzuvk

that would be cool:P

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[Friday]

About the only situation you would use one is for moving bulk cargo like metals, water, fuel etc.

You would basically be loading automated pods of your material into the mass driver, then firing them up into orbit to be collected by transports.

Expensive to build, but dirt cheap to run as they could be powered by renewable energy sources.

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[jimmy Patterson]

Inertinal dampenig feilds(yes out of startrek)could solve the gee force issues they prolly have em in freelancer anyway due to the whole SUPERLUMINAL ACELERATION

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kudos tommeh for sig

[Sprolf]

If there is artificial gravity, shields, and supralight travel in Freelancer, it's safe to say that ships have some pretty advanced inertial dampeners.

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[Ogris]

Except, you never do travel supraluminal in freelancer. But yeah, just take a look at the turns that starfliers and other light fighters can pull, seriously?

I SEVERLY doubt limiting G forces is the issue here, it's more of the, docking rings are probably more cost effective so we dont use this kind of affair.

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[Sprolf]

Jumpgates are FTL travel.

Or, wait, are they, now?
You go from one point to another in less time than light would take...
But since it's some form of a wormhole, I don't think it would be FTL.

Interesting.

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[Ogris]

I think the infocard states you are instantly transported to another region of space, it does not however state how you get there, so you basically would have to be travelling infinitely fast in order to get there instantly, and you can only do that in a different space, but does it have light?

Eh screw it, physics are complicated, in the end, apart from jumpgates, nothing goes FTL.

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[MarvinCZ]

Except, you never do travel supraluminal in freelancer. But yeah, just take a look at the turns that starfliers and other light fighters can pull, seriously?

Trade lanes are used for superluminal travel. Check the infocard.

[Marcus Lindberg]

I'd just like to remind you all, FL does not use realistic physics. It uses arcade physics. I prefer to RP that the physics in different parts of the galaxy are different, in sirius it may be possible to have an actual speed of 0 M/S although in Earth that may be impossible (in RL it is impossible, too many other factors affecting it).