Math Help

[TheDarkestOfAngels]

So you first need to know the distance your spaceship needs to travel (in metres) and then multiply that value by 220 billion Newtons to get the correct amount in Joules.

That's another thing I keep having trouble with that's gotten a great deal of my data wrong in the past. I keep forgetting to convert a number on one order of power in the SI scale for another. Thanks, this actually changes a number of measurements I needed to have. Turns out my ship apparently doesn't need to generate nearly as much power as I thought it did.

Full disclosure:
My story is about the first faster-than-light travel to a nearby solar system - Epsilon Eridani in this case. Other than breaking the 'light barrier' I'm trying to keep everything as Kosher with actual science as possible. No resolving overheating by letting in the "space air" or anything like that.

So I figure this ship can easily generate enough power (10 fusion generators and a matter-anti-matter reactor) as most of the ship's mass is dedicated to power generation, thrust, and it's enormously powerful magnetic field - which protects the ship and bends space/time around the ship enough to allow the ship go faster than light (essentially a modified alcubierre drive that manages to stifle the mass-increase that going relativistic speeds would bring, essentially raising the light speed limit over a local area).

So, given the above and a few other calculations I've already done, I've figured out that a 100 meters/second acceleration would only need to be done for 52 days and 2 hours over 1,012,500,000 kilometers exactly four times for a round trip between acceleration and deceleration with almost no adjustment needed for the journey when it's just cruising near it's maximum speed of 450,000 km/second (92% speed of light, locally.)

In any case, I only really needed to know how much energy per second I need, which I think is already done for me since the 220 billion joules is per second (since it's figured in kilometers/second) so I could understand how much power the ship needs to generate per second so I can start assigning numbers to the power generators, which is why I'm still working to solve my other problem of the magnetic field.

I'm reasonably certain that a magnetic field as powerful as the one I'm using in the story is going to consume at least as much energy as the engines assuming that a human-made device could even withstand the forces necessary to maintain a field strength of 800 petateslas continuously for a 14~15 year round trip space flight @ 1.5c.

Interestingly, when I assumed the ship needed to generate 220 trillion joules of power, the ship actually needed far less fuel than I anticipated by several orders of magntitude. So... good on me and a neat prospect for human space travel in the future, assuming we can get off our asses and perfect fusion and later matter/antimatter generators.

EDIT: Well, I multiplied the distance by the 220 billion joules and divided the result by the amount of time in seconds it takes to cross that distance to get the joules requirement every second: 49,500,000,000,000.000000000000000003 joules/second.