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Like compound interest, constant acceleration is powerful. 10/m/s/s gets you to 30,000 m/s in 3,000s. That's .1c in less than an hour. The energy required is mv^2, m being the mass of your vehicle, and you can annihilate anti-matter to get, theoretically, Mc^2 of energy out of it. That means you can get to .1c with M=mv^2/c^2=.1^2 or 1% of your vehicle mass of anti-matter. That's a small enough number to leave a lot of wiggle room.

(Much smaller, and more realistic, accelerations are possible over longer periods of time, but require using the use of relativistic equations of motion.)




I think you mixed up m/s and km/s. The speed of light is 300,000,000 m/s, so 30,000 m/s is only .0001c. At 1g, it actually takes a month to reach .1c. (Still, your point stands.)


Thank you for the correction! 3 OOM off is...embarrassing.


So you'll be mortified to learn you were off by 4 OOM.


I would be, but I wasn't. Last I checked 1km = 1000m.


Yes sure, great and all for those on the ship. For everyone else back on Earth. We'll never know.




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