Spacecraft Design: Thruster Size matters

[Xavier Onassiss]

Here's an interesting post at DotPhysics which covers everything you ever wanted to know about the relative size spacecraft thrusters.

 

The basic conclusion seems to be that the size of a thruster needed for a given acceleration increases faster than the spacecraft it's mounted on. So if your really BIG starships aren't as quick as the smaller ones in your campaign, you can point to this post as a mathematical rationale.

 

Or you can just say those insanely fast little space fighters are all painted red!

[dmjalund]

Re: Spacecraft Design: Thruster Size matters

 

Force from the thruster is proportional to the area of the thruster. I know - you could come up with all sorts of reasons why this would not be true, but I am still going with this assumption.

if the above turns out not to be true, (and based on the volume of the thruster) you could feel better about "scaling it up"