On Tue, Oct 10, 2017 at 7:34 PM, C. Berry <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:

I like that for the cinematics, but a ship that relies on turbojets to achieve escape velocity is going to be unable to take off from a vacuum (or even non-oxygen-atmosphere) world -- which again plays hell with canon in general, and the various design sequences in particular.

Naw.

My manuever thrusters are multi-mode nacelles, with the bit turning the fan blades being a small reactor incorporated into each nacelle. Over the course of a flight from surface to orbit/jump point, the nacelles transition from working as turofans to turbojets to ramjets to scramjets and finally - when the atmosphere becomes too thin to provide reaction mass - to a fusion rockets (e.g. water from fuel tanks is vaporized into combustion chambers in the reactors).

Type of atmosphere doesn't matter, although fuel economy is substantially greater in an oxygen one and using the "lower" forms of thruster in a corrosive

Richard Aiken

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