The answer is two fold. First, the faster the ship moves, the more volume of space it passes through, and thus the more atoms of hydrogen it can collect for fuel in a given amount of time. Second, if the ship has a sufficiently large fuel scoop, it can gather a larger volume of hydrogen. In round numbers, a ship needs a scoop area of about 35,000 square kilometers per metric tonne of ship's mass per G of constant acceleration, and needs to reach about 1 % of light speed before it is scooping enough hydrogen for the ram to sustain a continuous fusion reaction. By way of illustration, this means that a fairly tiny ship, of about 1000 tonnes mass, would require a scoop over 2000 kilometers in diameter.
It is clearly not feasible to build a solid scoop that large, given the weight limitations of the craft. The answer is instead to use a network of superconducting magnets as the base of the scoop and use their magnetic fields as the scoop itself. That is, the ship's scoop is not a physical presence but rather a large magnetic field projecting from the front of the ship."
On Tue, Feb 16, 2016 at 03:16:11PM -0800, Craig Berry wrote:
> Also, factor into your "indefinitely" that even at TL15, systems need
> maintenance (including swapping in replacements for worn-out components),
I'm presuming that the ship has a well-equipped TL15 engineering
section, and can make most of the replacement parts as required --
given enough time and engineering expertise. At the very least, being
able to fashion some version that performs an equivalent function
adequately.
At least in some rules sets, that capability is available at TL13-14,
and should be fairly mature by TL15.
- Tim
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