@[email protected] @nyrath @FredKiesche
What sort of vehicle should accelerate at 1 g or so, though? You get the benefits of the Oberth effect at much lower accelerations, and designing for lower accelerations provides a lot of benefits. You get reduced structural mass - especially for solar arrays and radiators, lower thruster/engine mass, and usefully better specific impulse.
@cstross @[email protected] @nyrath @FredKiesche
Depending on your definition of "unlimited thrust", you could squint and say artificial spin gravity qualifies. It obviously has no waste heat or fuel mass problem.
If your spacecraft spins, the most intuitively obvious thrust axis is parallel to the spin axis, but it's not a no-brainer. For example, with solar electric you probably want the spin axis pointed to the Sun, but you usually want thrust perpendicular to the Sun.
@60sRefugee @cstross @[email protected] @nyrath @FredKiesche
It's pretty easy to get the average thrust exactly through the center of spin if you simply spin the entire spacecraft (including the thruster). I actually prefer placing the thruster on the tip of the spacecraft opposite the crew module, because that lets you efficiently perform cyclic thrusts to alter spin axis (and thus, thrust direction).
It's more complex if you need main thrust to be in a different direction than spin axis, though.
Isaac Ji Kuo
Charlie Stross
60sRefugee