Hello,

Get a better starship engine, like mine! Go faster, get their sooner, go
further.

Chris.

"Peter Munn" wrote in message
news
Leafing through uk.sci.astronomy, I read Abdul Ahad's message of Tue, 25
Apr 2006:
Peter Munn wrote:
[...]
This final assist will need to occur when Jupiter is in the part of its
orbit where its velocity is directed in the general direction of where
Alpha Centauri will be in 50,000 years' time.

Thanks very much for these pointers, really appreciated.
They should come in handy if someone actually decides to build this
thing (for real!) one day... who knows!?

Thankyou, but I doubt the world needs my help to calculate gravity
assists - there are plenty of others more capable. And, my own best bet
is we will get to nearby star-systems by sending nano-robots to do the
colonising (and their journey velocity will be perhaps 5% light speed),
and our descendants will follow on somewhat later, but at the speed of
light, as codified DNA sequences.

However, I am prepared to offer help with your story-line for the heck
of it. For instance, the orbits you show on
http://www.astroscience.org/abdul-ah...ntauri/escape-
sequence.htm would take over 300 years to complete. (So "several
decades", as you put it, could be read as a significant underestimate.)
The final orbit which loops out beyond Neptune, to nearly 50 AU it
seems, would take about 125 years.
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