Head in the sky

To the stars. I don't know how realistic this fusion rocket engine is, but its the most realistic and efficient among the other choices. I made an Open Office calc (practically an Exel program) calculating acceleration, time of travel, and fuel consumed. I'll leave it to the Pilot and Navigator's margin of success or failure to determined the tiny variables.

I'm having doubts about how I figured the final Velocity over a Given Acceleration. What I did was (Accel * time in sec. ^2)/ time in sec to get the final velocity. Please correct me, I'm still digging up physics info around the web to check myself.

I like the Age of Sail time of travel just between the moons of saturn and jupiter. I've just learned about the greek and trojan asteroid belts as well. There are is are several trillion tons worth of resources to process. Harvesting Gasses from Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune, Ice crystals from their rings, processing asteroids, and development of alternate production methods given the different resources found in untamed space.

The colonies have a much more vivid picture. With precision explosives and the millions of colonists sent to process the new worlds, much of the terra forming is done with man and machine. Like the building of the Great Wall or the Pyramids, these worlds are sculpted by the hand of forced labor. More hostile colonies are worked by the most hopeless of penal workers and some of these hostile worlds (like Io) are a home are made prison labor camps. Toxic mines that dig for valuable heavy metals. Sometimes these labor camps experience growth and over the a hundred years or so, branch out some nation of its own.

I'd imagine Neptune will have a floating station that processes it's gasses while keeping it afloat over a 1G distance. Basically a city over an endless horizon of blue. Triton will be the main support colony, sending supplies, processed fuel and workers back and forth.