Comment by adrianN
2 days ago
Space ship speeds are unlikely to keep ever increasing. In the limit you can’t do much better than turning part of the ships mass into energy optimally, eg via antimatter annihilation or Hawking radiation, unless you already have infrastructure in place to transfer energy to the ship that is not part of the ship’s mass, eg lots of lasers.
Mass drivers on a asteroids or the Moon could change the game
Accelerating something macroscopic to hundreds or thousands of km/s (i.e. the speeds you can achieve with nuclear pulse propulsion) on a ramp that fits on the moon seems quite difficult to me.
Mass drivers don't need to be a linear ramp, portions can be circular
It would work better for smaller, unmanned craft, especially when you consider g force limitations
NPP is only theoretical, and still has major problems such as finding a material that can withstand a nuclear detonation at point blank range. Mass drivers have been proven to work, albeit at a smaller scale