/sci/ - Science & Math

>>12029495
Probably less than 1 at the start, as the engine will demand enormous amounts of energy just to keep itself running, we're not going to be racing around the solar system so fast you could knock yourself out if you accidentally punch the accelerator or anything like you'd see in a sci-fi show.
You can "afterburn" some fusion torch drives though by dumping water (or some other reaction mass, but water is easy) doped with a ferromagnetic element into the plasma jet of your drive. This will of course mean your ship is hurling out more mass, and will thus accelerate it at a faster rate, however obviously this extra mass of propellant will reduce the overall speed of your drive plume's exhaust, and thus reduce the overall efficiency of your drive.
This isn't really a useful feature for anything but a warship, you can give yourself simulated gravity by using large counter-rotating habitat rings, and even if your TWR is something tiny like .1, you'll end up there faster than a ship accelerating with a TWR of 1 who has to stop ten times earlier than you and spend most of the trip coasting.

This is why it would be so useful to override the brainlet environmentalists and start sending large power producing nuclear reactors to space, because you could start using upscaled magnetoplasma rockets which, while they have absolutely pathetic TWRs, have massive ISPs. It doesn't matter if a chemical rocket can put out as much thrust in a few minutes as an MPD puts out in a week if the MPD can spend weeks on end continuously running to accelerate and more weeks later to decelerate again.