Reference:
To make things a little easier, while an air/raft may take [World size code] hours to reach a particular orbit, it can reach orbital altitude a lot more quickly than that.
Starship enters low orbit, then slams on the brakes with the maneuver drive and hovers on lifters. Air/raft slides out of cargo hold and drops straight down, just using the antigrav to keep velocity at atmospheric entry manageable. Probably an hour and a half to touchdown, and most of that's spent getting down through the last 30km of atmosphere. Getting back up takes a few hours since while it can descend at 1G (falling) it's only got 0.1G going up, and it's drag-limited to 30kph in vertical ascent below 30km altitude (assuming its ascending in a horizontal orientation).
If memory serves -- the site's search function doesn't work all that well so I'm relying on memory -- getting to orbital velocity takes as long as getting up to orbital altitude.
And of course, once you're above the Karman Line, drag isn't an issue. Air/rafts can cover a lot of ground in vacuum -- the limiting factor is actually escape velocity!
But I suppose that if you want a hot rod lifeboat here, you can have one. It just can't be a very large one.![Smile :) :)](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)
Boughene Station would have a few of them kicking around.
To make things a little easier, while an air/raft may take [World size code] hours to reach a particular orbit, it can reach orbital altitude a lot more quickly than that.
Starship enters low orbit, then slams on the brakes with the maneuver drive and hovers on lifters. Air/raft slides out of cargo hold and drops straight down, just using the antigrav to keep velocity at atmospheric entry manageable. Probably an hour and a half to touchdown, and most of that's spent getting down through the last 30km of atmosphere. Getting back up takes a few hours since while it can descend at 1G (falling) it's only got 0.1G going up, and it's drag-limited to 30kph in vertical ascent below 30km altitude (assuming its ascending in a horizontal orientation).
If memory serves -- the site's search function doesn't work all that well so I'm relying on memory -- getting to orbital velocity takes as long as getting up to orbital altitude.
And of course, once you're above the Karman Line, drag isn't an issue. Air/rafts can cover a lot of ground in vacuum -- the limiting factor is actually escape velocity!
But I suppose that if you want a hot rod lifeboat here, you can have one. It just can't be a very large one.
Boughene Station would have a few of them kicking around.