/sci/ - Science & Math

McCulloch posted the abstract of his final DARPA report on Patreon, suggests average thrust to power levels of 0.25N/kW across all groups running experiments. Pic related. This means short of a nuclear powerplant with suspiciously high specific power (fusion with droplet radiators maybe?) or having 20% of spacecraft mass be thin-film ~1W/g solar arrays it's not going to be capable of impulsive maneuvers without further refinement, but it would be a good replacement for ion drives.

>>15444473
Higher pressure means more mass flow per second which means faster acceleration which means less aerodynamic and gravity losses.