At some point someone is going to need to address how they’re expecting to get to Mars so quickly, or how they can leave whenever they want.
It’d take one helluva propulsion system to be able to ignore orbital dynamics and just motor straight to the destination in less than six months.
At best, Mars is, what, two light-hours away?
Hope they have some sort of FTL assistance along the lines of orbital Stargates…

Honestly, this place doesn’t strike me as earth. More like some hastily terraformed asteroid. Torchships, with a 1.5G constant burn will get around the inner solar system surprisingly quickly. http://www.projectrho.com/ has the math, and in another post or two I should be able to compute the time to Mars from either Earth or an Asteroid.

And FTL assistance with Stargates is real? Haw, haw. The whole thing with Science-Fiction is the fiction part. Great read.

Well, stylorouge, the point is that some SF concessions are easier to tolerate than others.
A power supply good enough for a commuter-flight-style rocket voyage from Earth to Mars (if Denubis is wrong, but it looks like he gets the math better than I do, so we’ll have to wait on that) would seem to imply a level of advancement over and above that one might expect for some FTL solutions.

Okay, we’ve got two options.
1) This commuter shuttle pushes them to orbit, where they transfer to a ship. The ship will take (at a reasonable continuous acceleration) around 3 days to get to Mars from Earth. (http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket3i.html)

2) They’re on some asteroid named Hope, or whatever, as it’s in the asteroid belt, it takes around 18 hours (give or take with a lot of handwavy) to get to Mars.

(Cont…)

Justifications:
The story shows them in an age of commodity spaceflight. This means that they’ve got nice happy fusion engines. (http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket3c2.html#icfusion) Therefore, they can boost in non Hohmann transfer orbits. Those are the paths around the solar system that exchange a little DeltaV (Thrust) for a lot of time. Instead, they can use the DeltaV expensive Brachistochrone transits.

(Cont…)

For assumption 1, we need to assume that we’ve terraformed Mars. If we have sufficent engine tech for torchships, we can do terraforming without too much difficulty.

For assumption 2, we need to assume we’re on an incredibly dense asteroid (which makes sense, since most asteroids are boring.)

Either way, we need a prequel looking at the universe. Feel free to contact me for specific research for your ficlet.

@Whitehat, FTL is an entire order of WTF than fusion based drives. We basically know what we have to do for torchships, though our engineering isn’t up to it. We don’t have the first clue what to do about FTL .

I wasn’t aware that fusion propulsion would be as good as you’re suggesting. Thought we were looking at needing something better than antimatter/photon rockets in this case.

Bloody wat?! First I’m reading a little story, and then BAM , back to physics class. Kind of cool actually. Me, I’d always assumed they’d make to Mars on pixie farts. They’re amazingly powerful, you know, and allow for FTI (faster than imagination) flight, though you do have to have a greater proportion of passengers whose level of belief is significantly higher than Pi…um, squared and stuff. Did everybody follow that? I have the math, but it involves, of course, imaginary numbers.
LoA

THX , I can fork the story to a less-hard sci-fi route. I’ve had a bad day, so I can’t interpret your tone very well.

Idk wat all the math and lingo in those comments but I really liked the story. Im takin denubis’s side on this one. Keep it up.
LoA