Re: (1787) Bad News from the Physics Frontier!

Regarding your straightline vs. curve path for interplanetary travel: The
inefficiency factor is not worth considering as long as you actually have the
enrgy to do it...do you program an IBM compatible in machine language because
it gets you the extra performance?  No...because the performance that you get,
even wioth four layers of help programs and user interfaces that chew up a good
deal of machine speed and memory is still greater than most people can keep up
with.  (e.g. your word processeor input buffer won't overflow no matter how fast
you can type).  Do you turn off your car's engine when going downhill?  No,
because gas is (still) cheap enough to ignore minor economies like that.

If you were going to go Earth to Jupiter (refueling pattern) at 1-G constant
boost, it would take how long (assume an average distance between the two).
Less than two weeks?  If the actual variation in path in less than 10% of the
total lenght, I'd say ignore it for game purposes...now if you have an old
TL8 asteroid miner with an ion drive, and an acceleration in the .001s of
Gs, this would be a different matter entirely.  I figured recently that Earth
to Mars at a constant accelration of .001G would take something like 289days,
which is a poor approximation, because I used the shortest straightline
difference between the two, and a course at this sort of acceleration would
be a much longer curve.  The Hohmann transfer time for mean separation of
the planets would be 360+ days (I forget the exact number).  Intuitively,
I should be able to trim SOMETHING off that by constant boost, however small.

Sorry about the typing today.  Much too tired.

Rob Dean