GypsyComet said:
Tom Kalbfus said:
Actually propeller driven aircraft is much lower tech than you think.
On most Traveller scales a practical airscrew is going to require about TL2 and an environment that actually allows experimentation. The Smoke Ring qualifies as the latter, certainly. The problem, which you spelled out in your very first post, is DISTANCE.
It is generally accepted that a prop-driven aircraft cannot exceed about Mach 0.85 for several reasons, and that is with TL7 materials and engines. At lower tech, with lesser materials and motive power, the attainable speeds will be lower. With no internal combustion available, that's going to be a LOT lower.
If we assume 40kph, which is
really hauling on muscle power (current record is around 30kph), travel even to the trojan rocks from near Gold is approaching generational.
and if you wanted to travel spinward, you'd point your aircraft antispinward in order to slow down, as you slowed down you'd fall towards Voy and pick up speed at a lower faster orbit, the winds at the lower altitude would carry you around the neutron star at a faster rate, that those at higher levels in the smoke ring, and this can be quite fast. Generally, you go lower to go faster and higher to go slower, and the various air currents are in orbit with you, so there is no relative wind.
That's another problem. No relative wind also means no relative motion compared to the other things that feel no wind.
But scale really defeats it all at primitive speeds.
You really need to think of a smoke ring like an asteroid belt: an environment far, FAR larger than a planet, with a little speck of human infection in one small spot.
I'm trying to explain to you, that you travel down to go fast and up to go slow, and by down, I mean towards the neutron star. The winds all travel in orbit around the star. And the orbits are all circular. Lets take an integral tree as an example, at the lower extremity, the wind is whipping by in the spinward direction, and you feel a one fifth downward pull on you due to gravity. If you jump off the Integral tree end, you fall for a little while, you feel the wind for a bit, but then you match the speed of that wind and you leave the integral tree behind. One could pedal a prop or even swim through the air with fan-flippers attached to your legs and arms, and as you pushed yourself against the rotation of the smoke ring, you would find yourself drawing closer to voy, the closer you got to voy, the faster you would travel, not relative to the air around you, but relative to the things you left behind. It really is not necessary to go at supersonic speeds relative to the winds, because if you did, you would not be in orbit, and if you did not generate lift while doing so, you would fall into a lower orbit, you turn off the engines and your craft would slow down again, but you would maintain your velocity relative to what you left behind and above you. You would not feel and "up" "down" of course, because you are weightless, of course the parts of your body that are closer to voy would be pulled more than those parts further way.
Okay, lets say you are in the Smoke ring at an orbital radius of 456,327 km
Using the circular orbit simulator:
http://orbitsimulator.com/formulas/vcirc.html
the mass of Voy is one half that of the Sun
Orbital velocity is 381.3344604167824 km/sec
If that pedal copter reduces the radius by 1 km to 456,326 km the orbital velocity is now
381.33487824773163 km/sec
reduce the radius to 456,316 km and the orbital velocity is
381.33905663276596 km/sec, this is an increase in velocity by 5 meters per second
reduce the radius to 456,216 km and the orbital velocity is
381.38084803881867, a difference of 41 meters per second.
Reduce radius by 1000 km to 455,216 and were traveling at
381.7995192051381, a difference of 419 meters per second
Cut the radius by 10,000 km to 445,216 km and we are going at
386.06350975166526 km per second, a difference of 4 km/sec.
For a total circumference of 2,797,375 km, traveling at a rate of 4 km/sec it would take 699,343 seconds to travel a full circle, thus it would take 1943 seconds to travel an entire degree of the circle or 32 minutes. So lets say you started out at 455,216 km and went to 445,216 km radius. Lets say you can manage 60 km/hour to travel 10,000 km, it would take you 7 days to cover the distance, and to travel 180 degrees it would take about 90 hours or 3.75 days, and then another 7 days to get back out to 455,216 km radius for a total of 17 days journey. of course I am ignoring the fact that as you slip closer to voy you are going faster and faster as you reduce your orbital radius, so it should in fact take less than 17 days to travel between any two points in the Smoke Ring if you can manage an airspeed of 60 km/hour which is really a modest velocity achievable by pedal gliders.