Precessing takes a long time. Fortunately, we are in a long, slow orbit.
We also want to catch the right moment in our orbit. The less fuel we use to break free of Mars, the more we’ll have to maneuver with among the asteroids.
Not that we’ll be moving around much. Once we park it, it’s going to stay parked.
We’ll bring in some small stuff using our shuttle thrusters, but we have to be careful with that. They use maneuvering fuel too.
The most efficient usages will involve trips to Mars and back to steal atmosphere, when it is close enough in its orbit for that to work. Otherwise, we’ll be heading out to the gas giants.
They’ll have plenty of volatiles, and a major expedition is warranted. Even the best spacecraft has leakages, and we have a lot of surface area, junctions, and seals that can’t help but leak a little bit.
The lighter gases are the most critical, but we keep our hydrogen bound up as water. So we’re looking at replacement volumes for oxygen, nitrogen, and of course carbon dioxide. We’ll be willing to take on ammonia as well. With carbon dioxide, the ammonia can be converted to water, nitrogen gas, and carbon for building materials.
But that is in the future. Right now, we have to break orbit and head out to the asteroid belt.
We’ve selected a location about fifty million miles behind Ceres in its orbit. That puts us in a stable area in the main asteroid belt. At that distance, our year will be about four Earth-years long, and the sunlight a wan one-third of its Earth normal intensity.
We’ll simply use a bigger mirror. The environment around the Castle will be its perennial Spring/Summer, except for that cooler area I’ve been developing to the left of the Castle gate.
That means the shooting range will tend to be cooler, but the shooters usually have jackets anyway. Eventually, I may be able to get snow to fall in the upper part of that “North” area. The kids will need it.
Where was I? Oh, yeah. We’re precessing to allow the Thrust Ring to be rotating around our direction of acceleration. In this way, we’ll simply swing down a bit as the thrust continues, and down will remain down, as it does on an airplane when it banks.
We’re going to be using those shuttles which have been retrofitted with the so-called “afterburner” -- a device to boost the exhaust velocity of the rocket propellant by using electrical and magnetic fields. It’s the opposite of producing energy through magnetohydrodynamic chambers.
Instead of pulling energy from the flowing plasma, we’ll put energy into it, accelerating it far beyond what ordinary high-temperature exhaust velocities would achieve.
Those white-hot ceramic fins surrounding the rocket exhaust are only there to collimate the stream, trying to put it into a laminar flow.
All of this means the thrust will be gentle, and will continue for a long time. Then after drifting for a few months, we’ll need to reverse the thrust as well, to settle into a cozy position, and remain there.
This is as close to ionic drive as we can presently achieve. We’ll work on more advanced propulsion systems as we develop our other technologies.
Hang on to your hats! We’re about to increase the gravitational force by .002 percent!
The rocket exhaust will resemble a laser beam in atmosphere, rather like this ...
http://sciencematters.berkeley.edu/archives/volume2/issue13/images/story1-3.jpg
You can see why we nicknamed it an afterburner:
http://www.csar.cfs.ac.uk/csar/images/magnetohydrodynamic_fieldline_profile.jpg