How badly do BT fusion rockets break physics?

[Daryk]

That business case sounds like a winner to me.  As long as the system hasn't been raided, the initial investment could have been paid off long ago, leaving the 10-12% profit margin.

[kato]

You run the 10-12% profit margin while you service the debt for the initial investment in the first 20 or so years. After that you'd make up to one million C-Bills per month on a single Dropshuttle. As said, enough to operate a small spaceport on - and a viable reason for maintaining a proper spaceport instead of leaving random craters out in the sticks - but not much financial impact beyond that.

[Daryk]

Nice... once you've got a proper spaceport, you open all kinds of other opportunities to make even more money.

[Von Jankmon]

Relative thrust ratings fr units look reasonable, so the next step s to remove the aerotech orbital mapsheet and leave the the scale/ranges ambiguous.

The absolute scale is not really important as any range unit is going to be a long long way on a human scale.

It would pay to tactically abstract the scales anyway even for an in canon answer it would make sense, scales can even fluctuate for deep space versus low orbit battles.  I can honestly see a dropship captain saying something like "combat shuttle detected, range band thirty and closing".  The range in km will still appear on a screen readout somewhere.

Strategic speeds are very high but not impossible, fuel being the main consideration and the main issue to be ignored.  Once combat scales are abstracted away into tactical range bands everything else more or less fits into place.

[SCC]

You say "isolated outpost" I say "important transportation infrastructure speeding interstellar commerce." Recharge stations are in the middle of cargo transfer from JumpShips to DropShips to the local habitable planet. Any of the next dozen passing DropShips could drop off some spare hydrogen.

See p. 138 Strategic Operations for a discussion of the utility of Recharge stations.

The local planetary government's Department of Transportation, who wants the benefits of recharge stations on interstellar shipping? Like StratOps points out, besides recharging, "Recharge stations almost always have additional duties. They act as refueling platforms, cargo transshipment points, entrepôts and customs checkpoints." They're busy, lucrative space ports.

Cray, I was SPECIFICALLY talking about Rest Stop, as system with NO habitable planet, in fact none of the systems with a single jump have inhabited planets

[Nebfer]

Personally I would modify the fuel use per day from a max of 40 tons to 1/2000 of the ships mass per day in strategic mode, so a 100,000 ton ship needs 50 tons per day and goes up from their.

Not perfect but reduces it a bit, and makes refueling a bit more important, as now every 20 days is 1 percent of the ships overall mass in terms of fuel (vs 1/6th of a percent of the ships mass or less).

[Cannonshop]

hey guys, at least you're not dealing with a anime derived constant thrust=constant velocity setting.

[Dayton3]

According to the book "Mirror Magic: Pioneering Antimatter Physics" the only way you could ever have small spacecraft zipping around like X-Wing fighters in Star Wars (which face it,  is much like the aerospace fighters in BT behave) is if they had antimatter augmented engines. 

Fusion engines on small fighter type spacecraft wouldn't do much more than allow them to fly to one point,  turn around and fly back without refueling.    Though to be fair that is more than todays chemical rocket powered spacecraft can do.