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In an edge case (I'm writing up a 100Td ship with maybe a 2-man crew, so the gravity-pod would be 2 staterooms plus 2 tons of the bridge, for 10Td total) I could believe a 1/5 EP spin-up cost. It's accelerating 10Td to 1G by playing "crack the whip" (wikipedia) with the tether cable.
Ok, looked it up. at 15m radius you're not getting 1G without nauseous spacemen. 2RPM is easily tolerated; above that, Coriolis force causes nausea in non-adapted personnel. At a 15m radius, 0.5G needs about 6RPM. Drop to 0.1G and it might work...
An easily-tolerated 1G from 2RPM needs a 224m radius. You're going to need to do this with a tethered pod, because even a 3m x 4.5m cross-section makes for a 1400Td ring at that radius.
That "accelerating 10Td to 1G" is actually more like the effort needed to accelerate a large city bus up to 84kph (50MPH), at a 224m radius.
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