At Traveller accelerations, you don't need anything close to two weeks of acceleration to put something on a minimum-energy transfer orbit. Those have delta vees in the 10s of km/sec. At 1g (which we'll round to 10 m/s2), and assuming a required dv of 10 m/s:

v = at
t = v/a
  = 10000 m/s / 10 m/s2
  = 1000 s

Or a bit less than three hours.

So the tugs spend three hours or so boosting a cargo onto a Hohmann transfer orbit, then another six boosting back roughly the opposite way to intercept an incoming shipment and decelerate it into orbit at the destination. Tug pilots would get home in time for a late dinner. :)


On Wed, May 25, 2016 at 9:59 AM, Jeffrey Schwartz <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:
I could see two tugs...
One accels the cargo out for two weeks, then detaches, slides a few
thousand KM to the side, and catches the incoming cargo, decels it to
orbital around the destination, and picks up the new outbound.


On Wed, May 25, 2016 at 12:53 PM, Craig Berry <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:
> For really low-margin, high-bulk, non-perishable cargoes, I can easily see
> ballistic trajectories being used, with tugs pushing "barges" onto the right
> transfer trajectory, and other tugs catching them at the destination. The
> "barge" would just need to be a framework to hold the cargo together.
> Depending on your m-drive and g-compensator model, it would probably not
> even have to deal with acceleration stresses.
>
> On Wed, May 25, 2016 at 7:30 AM, Jeffrey Schwartz
> <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> On Wed, May 25, 2016 at 1:57 AM, Tim <xxxxxx@little-possums.net> wrote:
>> > On Tue, May 24, 2016 at 10:36:45PM -0700,  (via tml list) wrote:
>> >> On 24 May 2016 at 0:15, Phil Pugliese (via tml list) wrote:
>> >> > How far would you have to be travelling in order to require, let's
>> >> > say
>> >> > it's the standard 'scout ship', a two-week constant 2G accell
>> >> > (towards
>> >> > the 'target'), a coasting time of one week, & then a two-week decell
>> >> > in order to arrive w/ only a small relative diff in velocity?
>> >>
>> >> If you have jump drive you'd never do this unless you *wanted* to
>> >> waste a month for some reason. Because you can do it in a week by
>> >> using the jump drive.
>> >
>> > If you have the jump fuel to waste, yes.  There are plenty of reasons
>> > why you might want to get to the destination with full tanks.
>> >
>>
>> Or it might be an in-system cargo hauler, where there's economic
>> advantage to not having 10% of the hull taken up by fuel and the
>> expense of a J-drive
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>
>
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