You've made a significant adjustment to my motorised ping pong ball; you've mortor-ized it. Brilliant!!!
Any mathematicians around?
I'm double checking my calculations, and it appears to me that we have overbuilt by a sufficient factor, meaning that we will have as much power as we will require for our mission to Mars.
Here's the check factor, an analysis of Nuclear Rocket Engine performance. http://www.nuclearspace.com/a_liberty_ship10.htm
Now here's our data. The as yet not absolutely named vessel, henceforth dubbed UTS Stunehenge, consists of four sections.
1) The castle enclosure, also known as the flying castle. Formerly a piece of real estate that was lifted and flown away as previously described in "Moving" on my home page, the castle grounds occupy a circular area of one mile radius. That's 5280 feet, for those of you in Rio Linda.
The bottom of the castle looks like a two-mile diameter wok, with a transparent covering of the same shape, and a band about two hundred feet high at the circumference.
Assuming an average height of five hundred feet, I get this as about ninety million pounds. Does this figure seem to be in the ball-park?
2) The balancing pods, the IGGP and the HTM, would by definition have the same mass.
3) All of these elements are connected by the Thrust Ring, which I will estimate at thirty million pounds.
4) The weight of the Shuttle/Thrusters, 240,000 pounds each. A total of 600 of these, each with two GCNR motors, for another 144 million pounds.
This gives me a grand total of 444,000,000 pounds take-off weight, with total thrust equal to 1440,000,000 pounds thrust. My math tells me that our initial take-off thrust will be about three and a half gees.