"The beauty of 1G is that it provides normal gravity and you can go great distances in a human lifespan."
It like unicorns - beatifull and entirely fancifull. Fusion or fission cant do it, even a ship with pure antimatter drive cannot accelerate like that for decades
We will have hibernation before we have practical antimatter, and lets you travel intersteller without wasting enegy
> even a ship with pure antimatter drive cannot accelerate like that for decades
Sure it can. You just need a decently-sized asteroid and an equally-sized antimatter asteroid for fuel, and you can do it for decades, even with the price you pay early to accelerate the fuel you will use later.
What are you trying to do with an asteroid, and why does it need to be decently sized? Neither is relevant.
You calculate mass fraction, i.e. for a ship to get to orbit using kerosene, the ship must be 97% made of fuel my mass.
If you have an antimatter ship, if you can produce, store, and 100% efficiently use antimatter and carry nothing else as your reaction mass and don't have issues with waste heat or radiation, your ship will need to be over 90% fuel by mass to maintain 1G acceleration for years.
> What are you trying to do with an asteroid, and why does it need to be decently sized? Neither is relevant.
I'm using the asteroid for mass, to react with the antimatter. So, yeah, it's relevant.
> If you have an antimatter ship, if you can produce, store, and 100% efficiently use antimatter and carry nothing else as your reaction mass and don't have issues with waste heat or radiation, your ship will need to be over 90% fuel by mass to maintain 1G acceleration for years.
Yup. And it's exponential - if the non-fuel mass is 10% to be able to do 10 years, then to do 20 years, the non-fuel mass can only be 1%, and for 30 years it can only be 0.1%. That's why you need the asteroid.
Taking antimatter fuel out of your carefully designed, failsafe magnetic containment tanks and putting it into a highly-volatile asteroid of doom (attached with what? Antimatter-immune rope that can pull a billion tonns at 1G?) does not mean the rocket equasion gives you a free pass.
Its still the same formula, nothing has changed. Its combined weight of your ship and it's asteroids. All you are saying is "you need a big fuel tank"
It like unicorns - beatifull and entirely fancifull. Fusion or fission cant do it, even a ship with pure antimatter drive cannot accelerate like that for decades
We will have hibernation before we have practical antimatter, and lets you travel intersteller without wasting enegy