Sunday, February 17, 2013

Sunday Six: Constant Acceleration

Today's Sunday Six comes from Chapter Seven of Rock Killer:

The Kyushu was an old ship.  It was roughly bullet shaped, a hundred meters in diameter and 200 meters long.  About seven years before, she'd been one of the first ships with the constant acceleration drives.  The power source was a tokamak fusion reactor, cooled by vaporizing lithium.  The lithium plasma was used by an MHD generator to produce electricity that the Masuka drives turned into thrust.  Before the diminutive Dr. Masuka invented his drive, ships had to get around the solar system via painfully slow Hohmann "low energy" orbits.

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