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(SR-56) Computing Travel Times for Radial Orbits - SlideRule - 09-15-2024 10:06 PM
An excerpt from Destinies the science fiction magazine, Getting About In Space travel times, volume 2 issue 2 Spring 1980, pages 152-155
We can modify the pure ballistic method by supplying an in-flight thrust to the ship from an on-board rocket. If we assume a small thrust, so that the total mass of the ship does not change appreciably during its flight, it is easy to calculate the travel time for a continuous-thrust engine. The actual force of the thrust is less important than the acceleration that it produces, so we will express our results directly in terms of that acceleration.
The number of possible permutations of in-flight acceleration with initial velocity boosts is large (actually, infinite) and we will give just a couple of cases to illustrate the way that the two variables affect the resulting times. If you would like to develop some other case for yourself, Table 4 provides the instructions and data register contents for the calculation using a Texas Instruments SR-56 programmable calculator. …
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TABLE 4
COMPUTING TRAVEL TIMES FOR RADIAL ORBITS
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program steps and operating codes
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BEST!
SlideRule