Rimward has some information on space travel times. The fastest way to move around physically seems to be with an anti-matter courier. Total time depends a lot on the current planet alignment but since it isn't stated which year the game takes place you could easily decide that it just "happens" to be a really good alignment for your campaign. With perfect alignment I think you can do a trip from Mars to Neptune with an anti-matter courier in 2 months. Add another week or two if the planets are further away from each other.

I'm pretty sure Creative Commons license allows you to post a screenshot of a book on this forum (or any other) as long as you don't charge money for doing so. You could even post a link to the entire pdf if you want. Eclipse Phase is awesome.

The thing is, the smaller a ship is the slower it will be. To go "fast" you need tons of fuel, and it is likely to really be tens of tons. As the others have said EP does not have fast ships. A Anti-matter courier is likely to be the best you will get. Which needs 6 tons of anti-matter inside a 100 ton magnetic container. With such a ship travel time from Luna to mars is right under 7 days.Here is a list of Luna to anywhere from Rimward. This is assuming the closest distance from point A to B * Mercury: 5.25 days * Venus: 5.5 days * Mars: 6.75 days * Main belt: 9 days * Jupiter: 14.25 days * Saturn: 23.5 days * Uranus: 44 days * Neptune: 67.75 days This is the best time you will get and the cost it likely to be more than the cost of a morph.

ORCACommander wrote:

as a point of courtesy Lorsa when i link the source books I do it by PM only on here. but ya the CC license in use would allow forum snippets

Yes absolutely. I'm just saying that one of the great things with EP is that you don't really have to worry as much about what or how you can post the various material.

The books (Rimward p.182-p.183) says it is average travel time and the GM can and should modify it depending on astronomical situation and how the ship does it's journey, and etc. As for Anti-matter courier, not only are they expensive but to keep them fast, they have very little mass and space of their own outside of propulsion systems. Cargo is very limited and usually only kept for very valuable stuff, like Qubits or unique artifacts. Which is the rule for long travel; only things that can't be manufactured at the destination are shipped this way.

Rimward wrote:

"The calculated values assume the ship takes the time to accelerate up to a good velocity, coasts along for most of the trip, and decelerates near the end point. A ship that is already moving at high velocity, such as pulling a slingshot maneuver at the starting point, will have a slightly reduced travel time. The same also applies to ships that do not need to decelerate and stop at the end point, simply passing it by. Ships that burn fuel all the way through the trip (half to accelerate, half to decelerate) will also arrive more quickly. Likewise, ships that must manage their fuel resources more carefully, burning less to increase/ decrease velocity, will take longer." p.182

[IMG]http://i61.tinypic.com/32zkoyp.jpg[/IMG]

Rocket maneuvers in space is all about fitting curves between other curves around a central point (often defined by the Sun). At its most basic, the Hohmann transfer orbit is trying to connect two points with an ellipse. A bi-elliptic orbit tries to connect two points with two ellipses. You can extend this further and further, to three, four, and any number of ellipses. In the end, you get an infinite number of ellipses, which actually turns out to be a form of spiral. To take the example given, Mars to Neptune will take about 32 years with a Hohmann transfer orbit, give or take a few years for the orbits to line up. However, the Hohmann orbit has always been [i]minimum[/i]-thrust. It's been the chief orbital transfer equation for some 60-ish years because real-life rockets are very limited by having to launch out of Earth's gravity, and rocket engines have generally not been very powerful. With more powerful engines, you can use more time-effective orbital solutions. As a general case, once we stop minimizing fuel-costs, there are an infinity of viable solutions. To narrow it down a bit, we may want to look at one particular set of solutions, the [i]hyperbolic[/i] trajectories. Those interested in the field of orbital mechanics I implore to go look that up and learn what they are. To the rest of you, if you put something in an elliptic orbit, it'll curve back and return to the original position eventually. Something on a hyperbolic trajectory has so much velocity that, by itself, it'll never turn back. Let's assume that we're fitting a hyperbola between two different points in space around the Sun, such as Neptune and Jupiter. In general terms, this will have zero, one, or two solutions. Zero solutions occurs whenever the Sun, Neptune, and Jupiter form a perfect line, which happens once every two years or so and lasts for an infinitesimal amount of time; we can safely disregard it. It's extremely difficult to figure out the two hyperbolic solutions for our three-point system, but there's one single solution that's always viable, and that is when Neptune is at the semi-latus rectum of the hyperbolic orbit. I've written a calculator that solves this for me for a given set of planets divided by a given angle. This can be used to easily find an approximate "lower" bound for time: At the worst, (94 degrees separation), Mars-Neptune will take 22.6 months of travel-time. In an EP antimatter rocket, this'll require a mass ratio of about 1.07, which means that for every kg of cargo, you'll need 70 grams of propellant. This is very impressive, all things considered. At 45 degrees separation, the travel will only take 15.3 months, but the mass ratio rises to 1.1.

Leng Plateau wrote:

Another option for shipping would be to use a synthmorph that you have the blueprint for and call ahead with your fab order This method does, of course, work best with new economy destinations

Actually, I would expect that to work best with hybrid economy destinations. In a new economy, you're asking the destination habitat to drop [i]everything[/i] their industrial fabrication was doing and launch an immediate crash program to construct your morph. You [i]may[/i] be able to pull that off if you have @-Rep 90 or something and are willing to call in your level 5 favor, but that kind of thing would be far simpler and faster to pull off by laying out credits to some profit-hungry construction-on-demand shop in a credit economy.

That's the way I'm inclined to run it MAD.

I'm assuming those times listed for travel between worlds on that chart are due to EM drives or solar sails, the cheapest of the propulsion methods, yes?

Standard Transports are described in [i]Eclipse Phase[/i], page 349. (4th printing verified, probably the same in every edition.)

Quote:

[b]Standard Transport:[/b] This vessel is one of the most common freighter and passenger vessel in the solar system. While egocasting is by far the most common form of inter-habitat transport, some people prefer to travel by ship and others do not wish to leave their current morph behind. In addition, some goods are easier or cheaper to physically transport rather than duplicating their templates. As a result, standard transports regularly travel to and from every large habitat and inhabited planet and moon in the solar system. These are modern [b]fusion-drive ships[/b] that offer fast and comfortable travel for passengers as well as relatively swift transport for small cargoes. One of the additional benefits of the standard transport is the fact that it contains four separate passenger compartments, each of which is mounted on a 90 meter-long booms that can extend and rotate to simulate gravity. When rotating at a comfortable 2 rpm, passengers experience Mars level gravity. Typically, the gravity maintained in these pods starts at the local gravity (or Mars gravity, if the local gravity is higher) and over the course of the journey gradually increases or decreases to the gravity of the destination. However, these pods cannot rotate to produce gravity higher than that found on Mars.

So, it's a fusion drive. An [i]Eclipse Phase[/i] fusion rocket, mind you, which is defined on page 347.

Quote:

[b]Fusion Rocket (F):[/b] Similar to a plasma rockets, fusion rockets require significantly higher temperatures and pressures, and the rocket also produces large amounts of power for the spacecraft. Fusion rockets are now the most common form of propulsion for spacecraft designed for long-distance voyages.

And the Escaping Gravity Wells sidebar on the same page indicates clearly that a fusion rocket of standard design can generate up to a maximum of 0.05g. That's pretty damn weak; to put it in perspective, it reaches slightly under 1/3rd of Titanian escape velocity. But if it's already in micrograv, that's [i]more than plenty[/i].

If you want some stats for EP ships this thread-http://eclipsephase.com/space-naval-combat-segway-antimatter-thread -is a goldmine !