The 4040 added some instructions to the 4004 and was a bit better. I seem to remember something about the stack, but it's been so long... Early BYTE magazine actually had articles with 8008 assembler I remember. The early flavors of micros were diverse. Feature rich machines were damn expensive in general. People would cobble together whatever they could, instruction sets and features of processors were actively debated. The major camps seemed to be:
-- RCA COSMAC 1802. You could build a minimal system cheaply. Speed wise this was fairly slow, but it was a real processor. Lots of registers. Architecturally it wasn't as bad as some people like to say. Yes, you could easily implement a CALL/JSR and RTS too.
-- Nat Semi PACE/IMP-16. Most of the folks who went this route seemed to want more 'mini' style features - e.g. 16 bit instruction sets. These were very slow performance wise. Minis based around them were cheaper than the big-name mini's but seemed super slow. Met people who said their early 8080 micro kicked the mini's butt in terms of performance.
-- Single & multi chip direct from mini architectures. Stuff like TI 990, DG NOVA DEC PDP 8 and PDP-11. The TMS9900 was a notable contender.
-- Motorola 6800 and Intel 8080 - Both were popular, and much faster than stuff like the PACE / IMP-16 / 1802. They were usually simpler to design against and often faster than the single chip mini's derived stuff too (excluding maybe the TMS 9900 ).
-- MOS Technology 6502 at the same clock speed was usually equal or faster than a 6800 / 8080 for most stuff. It was super cheap too.
-- Zilog Z-80 A notably enhanced 8080. Loads more instructions. Very non orthogonal. Easy to interface to DRAM. Very very popular. The Z-80 pretty much gobbled up the 8080 family. Even when the 8085 came out, people went for Z80's. CP/M & S100 bus stuff, but lots of other stuff used Z80's like home micros etc.
The 6502 also gobbled up a bunch of designs. Motorola responded with the 6809 which is a really nice 8 bit to program. But by then the world was moving on to 16/32 bit stuff.
One of the most interesting things (to me) is that the Mini folks totally screwed up and ended up being wiped out. One wonders what would have happened if DG or DEC had produced a decent microprocessor based on the NOVA or PDP-11 at a low cost. DEC sort of did this with the LSI-11, but there was always this tension of the high-margin mini stuff being eaten from the bottom up. What if they'd been smart enough to pragmatically say - our high margin business is going to get destroyed by microprocessors, do we want them to be our microprocessors or someone elses?
One thing people forget about Intel is they did a superb job of supporting their stuff / had great sample designs that made getting started easier. Motorola for the 68000 actually actively discouraged folks and banned their engineers from talking to people who wanted to use the 68000 in the early days. Read D-TACK GROUNDED for details. It seems absurd right?
The general thing seems to have been that everyone wanted the new micros to go into the nice old high-margin mini business. Except they didn't. Cheap powerful MPU's meant people didn't want to pay 10x the MPU cost for software licensing fees or other garbage. They figured out how to cheaply hook video up to the microprocessors and keyboards. They figure out how to cheaply hook up mass storage. They built what was needed, and what worked got used. Not always entirely fair - there are plenty of amazing designs that never got traction, but life ain't fair.
Don't forget the 4040 either. I think they might have expanded the stack, but I am pretty sure it had better clock support for external oscillators / there were a bunch of nice glue chips which had stuff like you mentioned for IO / RAM / expansion. I think a slightly larger address space / still done with the expansion style mentioned above.
I think the problem is that by the very nature of it, it can't produce falsifiable predictions (if I'm understanding the arguments correctly). If a beautiful string-theory framework could produce something that COULD produce a falsifiable prediction, I think everyone would be super-happy, but I don't think it can do that either - at least I don't think anyone has successfully demonstrated anything like that.
It been more than 40 years and nobody seems to have done that. Compare that with any number of other 'beautiful frameworks' that produced falsifiable predictions (e.g. Relativity (both Special and General)). Even the weird stuff has often produced falsifiable predictions.
I'm not even sure what string-theorists think the end-game is. Do they actually believe they will discover some new theory of everything? Or have they given up?
A theory that can't predict anything, that has an automatic 'out' seems pathological. String theorists may point out that they have proven that there are only so many consistent parameters for their theories, but it still seems there are no falsifiable predictions.
It's like someone saying the time-complexity of an algorithm is O(m^a^b^c). You then say - wtf? and they say 'Great news, we've proved that c can only be between 9 and13!. You then say integers? and they say 'Uh, NOOOOOO you idiot, obviously they are rational numbers. Did you know that c=9 7/13 has some fascinating characteristics!. So you then say what about a, b and c and they say 'rational numbers between 4-8'... we think.
One thing I've always wanted to do was compile up with a really super-duper compiler an emulator for x32 on an IA64 first generation box and compare the performance to the built in emulation which was far from EPIC.
The explanation for the photons escaping the cavity sound similar to the comments by Tesla about longitudinal waves versus regular transverse waves being attenuated.
Super obscure. You'd want a different / patched DOS too to handle the different sector sizes and number of sectors too. Not impossible, but definitely not a stock or common alternative SIO attached drive.
This is great for defense. Unlike some people have said, you don't need to physically destroy the entire missile engaging you. For IR heat-seekers, you just have to blind the seeker. For radar guided missiles, deform the radome. Missiles tend to travel at high speeds, if you can screw up the radome or any part of the structure sufficiently it'll make a big difference to the attacking missiles pk (probability of a kill).
Your same offensive weapon makes an awesome countermeasure against HOBS (High-Off-Boresight) stuff that someone might launch using a HMCS (Helmet Mounted Cueing System). If you have decent secure networking, there's no reason why a bunch of your team couldn't target the same target too. So instead of being hit by one laser, you hit the target with N lasers. The enemy having better kinematics becomes moot too. A rotating mirror can rotate much faster than even the most maneuverable airframe.
The best countermeasure to this stuff if you don't have equivalent stealth? It's tough. You can't detect attackers well enough to get a firing-solution, you have nothing on your warning receivers for your team. Best case, let's say you know somethings up there due to VHF radar. So you send up your stuff, and all of them just get swatted from the sky. You ask your best engineers what to do about it, and they say 'Our best idea is to make the environment so nasty we deny the enemy access'. How do you do that? Nuke your own airspace. If you can't see the enemy but your assets start exploding, fire off a pile of SAMS (in nice solid reflective casings, no fine guidance necessary) and nuke your own the airspace.
If they are at altitude then that's one thing (not much fallout). If they are using terrain shadowing / strike teams going in to take out your ground assets, then you are talking about basically carpeting yourself with fallout.
I'm all for this. On cloudy days, we can both provide extra sunlight, reduce the nuclear weapons stockpiles, generate rooftop solar power, aaaand launch kilotons of hardy payload to the stars.
It's fascinating to me how many people who purport to believe in democracyare so keen to strip others rights the second the front-runners don't fit their views.
At least the right leaning people seem to admit what they want (less government, less taxes, leave me alone, less intervention). Yet many of the left-leaning "progressives" are in such a state of double-think they don't even realize they are sprouting propaganda.
Just the term "progressive" is propaganda. Being "progressive" about denying others their rights when the views don't align with their own is NOT progressive. It's repressive.
Thanks for sending that. I was thinking a little about Plumbbob and the steel-plate as I typed the Orion comment, but hadn't heard of Wang Bullet. It has all the advantages of artillery and NPP combined. Plus the reaction mass (steam) reduces the acceleration. It's awesome.
Exactly - not throwing everything away has advantages. SpaceX deserves to be congratulated for pulling this off. There's lots to be said for incremental improvement.
That's the analogy to think about with this. When is it best to use the artillery approach, and when is it best to use an airplane approach. An airplane approach implies refueling and re-use. You can amortize investments to improve capabilities over time. Artillery is all about cheap getting payload up there.
If you really want to get pure mass to LEO cheaply - it's hard to beat big artillery with a rocket stage. It has a few issues though. Your payload has to be able to handle the G's from firing. The payload is probably fairly small unless you build a really big gun. If you are interested - google Gerald Bull.
Another cheapish way to get lots of mass to orbit that is mostly politically acceptable would be *really* big rockets. Some of the plans for humungous solid rocket boosters etc. Big diameter solid rockets are hard to beat for cost if you are going to throw it all away.
The truth is it's a continuum. You can plot this stuff on a graph and it's very informative. You discover the above. Artillery to LEO is very cheap - but limits you to tiny payloads. Massive throw away solids are cheap too, but if the launch vehicle fails you lose a lot. For things you value a lot (like people) you may not want to use a huge solid.
If you want to launch truly huge amounts of stuff to orbit it's very difficult to beat Orion and nuclear pulse propulsion. Politically the only way you'd see that happen would be to save the planet.
OK - totally agree. I was trying to make it easy because I figured even pulling off a ship that could accelerate constantly (say a week or month or year) at about 1/100 of a g was a "significant" engineering feat. More is even better.
I'm pretty sure most people would understand what that means when I said 1/100g engine in the context of the article and ship. That means a ship that can be accelerated at 1/100g via some kind of a propulsion system (engine). The featured article was about nuclear-thermal rocket ships.
Since any useful ship will be composed of matter - it will have mass. If you know the mass, and you know the acceleration then you can figure out all the other boxes.
Constant acceleration ships have been built. Deep Space-1. So you clearly are either totally clueless, or purposely ignoring the fact w built a constant acceleration ship. It was part of the mission. You can google it and find all kinds of fascinating (OK I find it fascinating) stuff like the mass of it, or the thrust of the ion-drive.
BTW - If I am genuinely making you angry I apologize. I am assuming you are just messing with me now, because you seem smart, and must have heard of deep space 1 and fission fragment rockets, and I'm pretty sure you understand what I meant by a 1/100g engine ship. The only reason I keep responding is because I am so sick and tired of the crazies who say stuff like 'We could never do that!" or the almost-worse "Oh no nobody ever went to the moon". It drives me batshit crazy. I have no personal idea if we could build a 1/100g fission-fragment rocket. If someone wanted to try I'd applaud them. Assuming they didn't fire it up in my back-yard.
I'm thinking of things with very high ISP for all the reasons you are citing. The point I'm trying to make is that if we could build a 1/100g drive then we could do a hell of a lot, and low acceleration drives can accomplish lots.
So I didn't think your analogy was fair at all. It seemed, to be honest, the same kind of analogy used to prove that putting humans on the moon is impossible. It's like people saying the rocket equation directly proved that we couldn't possibly build a single-stage rocket that would take a person to the moon and back with any existing engineering.
We all know we got people to the moon, and back again multiple times, safely. Staging was used, and LOR. I'm not suggesting the EmDrive or breaking the laws of physics.
Nobody is suggesting that our constant-g rocket will run forever. That is obviously impossible. But it may well run for long enough to be useful, and better than a chemical or nuclear-thermal rocket.
Your argument about ignoring conservation of momentum is also wrong, as is your comment about the rocket equation. It's because of those two facts that we need really high ISP. That means nuclear. It probably means something like a fission-fragment rocket to get high enough ISP.
So go ahead, take the cheap-shot, make the pun, but honestly - your response sounded to me dumber than the vast majority of the prior posts.
It depends on the ISP of the Tug right? If the tug ISP is 10x that of the alternative for the fuel mass you climbed out of the gravity well with then it would be a win to use the tug right before you start up you light the candle on your *really* dirty *really* high ISP engine.
Explaining more and following up on MachineShedFred point. It's a given that you won't use a 1/100g constant drive as a booster toiget to LEO from Earth.
You are right - a 0.01g constant acceleration drive will take a while to get out of LEO. But it's still about 3 months to Mars. If we had a way to do 0.1g for a while that would be great. I just don't see it happening unless you use a nuclear-thermal or a chemical booster, in which-case your specific-impulse sucks. Maybe VASIMR, but even at the high end I don't think its ISP is enough.
Can you explain what you are trying to say more? It seems clear that you wouldn't use a 0.01G drive as a booster to LEO. The whole subject was Nuclear. If you tie the words Nuclear and constant acceleration drive - you pretty much mean things that are radiologically dirty. In Space (above LEO) it doesn't really matter. Space is big and has lots of hard-radiation anyway.
Is there a propulsion technology you are thinking of? I'm thinking of stuff that are as dirty as a fission-fragment rocket for the constant-g ship.
The only -single design drive I can think of that would satisfy booster and flight would be Orion. Technically doable but environmentally in-feasible unless it's an emergency to get significant mass to LEO or we all die. Nuclear thermal is OK for a booster maybe, but ISP is way too low to realistically use for a constant-g drive.
Do you mean - We need better propulsion technology for boosters to get all this nuclear stuff to LEO?
The better propulsion is implicit if you want a constant g ship (for any meaningful distance), so I think we are agreeing. I didn't make it explicit because it is implicit once you run the calculations that a chemical or nuclear-thermal rocket won't cut it due to fuel mass. To be more explicit, I'd love a propulsion system that can do better than 1/100g for months, but I doubt we will get there soon. A propulsion system that could do 1/100g is much more achievable with existing technology and a worthy goal. We could start with 1/1000g ship.
The ideal ship (for humans) would obviously be a 1g drive. Once you throw relativity in the mix that buys you pretty much everywhere. It gets you to Mars in a couple of days too.
Better propulsion I'm all for, but it's hard to beat a constant drive for long distances with a burst of acceleration. Every day the constant-g ship with a measly 1/100g is adding the equivalent of 8.6g for about 100 seconds. Or 1g for 864 seconds. The delta-v just keeps adding up.
A 0.01g constant acceleration ship gives you the Solar System.
A ship capable of a constant 0.01g acceleration would be a game-changer. Break the steps down as X-prizes. Build a 0.001g ship. Scale it up to a 0.005g ship. Next step is get it to 0.01g and you can reach Mars in three months and anywhere out to Pluto in just less than a year. First place to go? Prospecting the asteroid belt would be my vote. Find useful stuff, use it to build more useful stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
The 4040 added some instructions to the 4004 and was a bit better. I seem to remember something about the stack, but it's been so long... Early BYTE magazine actually had articles with 8008 assembler I remember. The early flavors of micros were diverse. Feature rich machines were damn expensive in general. People would cobble together whatever they could, instruction sets and features of processors were actively debated. The major camps seemed to be:
-- RCA COSMAC 1802. You could build a minimal system cheaply. Speed wise this was fairly slow, but it was a real processor. Lots of registers. Architecturally it wasn't as bad as some people like to say. Yes, you could easily implement a CALL/JSR and RTS too.
-- Nat Semi PACE/IMP-16. Most of the folks who went this route seemed to want more 'mini' style features - e.g. 16 bit instruction sets. These were very slow performance wise. Minis based around them were cheaper than the big-name mini's but seemed super slow. Met people who said their early 8080 micro kicked the mini's butt in terms of performance.
-- Single & multi chip direct from mini architectures. Stuff like TI 990, DG NOVA DEC PDP 8 and PDP-11. The TMS9900 was a notable contender.
-- Motorola 6800 and Intel 8080 - Both were popular, and much faster than stuff like the PACE / IMP-16 / 1802. They were usually simpler to design against and often faster than the single chip mini's derived stuff too (excluding maybe the TMS 9900 ).
-- MOS Technology 6502 at the same clock speed was usually equal or faster than a 6800 / 8080 for most stuff. It was super cheap too.
-- Zilog Z-80 A notably enhanced 8080. Loads more instructions. Very non orthogonal. Easy to interface to DRAM. Very very popular. The Z-80 pretty much gobbled up the 8080 family. Even when the 8085 came out, people went for Z80's. CP/M & S100 bus stuff, but lots of other stuff used Z80's like home micros etc.
The 6502 also gobbled up a bunch of designs. Motorola responded with the 6809 which is a really nice 8 bit to program. But by then the world was moving on to 16/32 bit stuff.
One of the most interesting things (to me) is that the Mini folks totally screwed up and ended up being wiped out. One wonders what would have happened if DG or DEC had produced a decent microprocessor based on the NOVA or PDP-11 at a low cost. DEC sort of did this with the LSI-11, but there was always this tension of the high-margin mini stuff being eaten from the bottom up. What if they'd been smart enough to pragmatically say - our high margin business is going to get destroyed by microprocessors, do we want them to be our microprocessors or someone elses?
One thing people forget about Intel is they did a superb job of supporting their stuff / had great sample designs that made getting started easier. Motorola for the 68000 actually actively discouraged folks and banned their engineers from talking to people who wanted to use the 68000 in the early days. Read D-TACK GROUNDED for details. It seems absurd right?
The general thing seems to have been that everyone wanted the new micros to go into the nice old high-margin mini business. Except they didn't. Cheap powerful MPU's meant people didn't want to pay 10x the MPU cost for software licensing fees or other garbage. They figured out how to cheaply hook video up to the microprocessors and keyboards. They figure out how to cheaply hook up mass storage. They built what was needed, and what worked got used. Not always entirely fair - there are plenty of amazing designs that never got traction, but life ain't fair.
Don't forget the 4040 either. I think they might have expanded the stack, but I am pretty sure it had better clock support for external oscillators / there were a bunch of nice glue chips which had stuff like you mentioned for IO / RAM / expansion. I think a slightly larger address space / still done with the expansion style mentioned above.
I think the problem is that by the very nature of it, it can't produce falsifiable predictions (if I'm understanding the arguments correctly). If a beautiful string-theory framework could produce something that COULD produce a falsifiable prediction, I think everyone would be super-happy, but I don't think it can do that either - at least I don't think anyone has successfully demonstrated anything like that.
It been more than 40 years and nobody seems to have done that. Compare that with any number of other 'beautiful frameworks' that produced falsifiable predictions (e.g. Relativity (both Special and General)). Even the weird stuff has often produced falsifiable predictions.
I'm not even sure what string-theorists think the end-game is. Do they actually believe they will discover some new theory of everything? Or have they given up?
A theory that can't predict anything, that has an automatic 'out' seems pathological. String theorists may point out that they have proven that there are only so many consistent parameters for their theories, but it still seems there are no falsifiable predictions.
It's like someone saying the time-complexity of an algorithm is O(m^a^b^c). You then say - wtf? and they say 'Great news, we've proved that c can only be between 9 and13!. You then say integers? and they say 'Uh, NOOOOOO you idiot, obviously they are rational numbers. Did you know that c=9 7/13 has some fascinating characteristics!. So you then say what about a, b and c and they say 'rational numbers between 4-8'... we think.
One thing I've always wanted to do was compile up with a really super-duper compiler an emulator for x32 on an IA64 first generation box and compare the performance to the built in emulation which was far from EPIC.
The explanation for the photons escaping the cavity sound similar to the comments by Tesla about longitudinal waves versus regular transverse waves being attenuated.
Super obscure. You'd want a different / patched DOS too to handle the different sector sizes and number of sectors too. Not impossible, but definitely not a stock or common alternative SIO attached drive.
Was it really an 8 inch floppy on an Atari 8 bit? That sounds like you must have had a sweet ATR 8000 attached...
AM? Blech - who needs sidebands. CW.
This is great for defense. Unlike some people have said, you don't need to physically destroy the entire missile engaging you. For IR heat-seekers, you just have to blind the seeker. For radar guided missiles, deform the radome. Missiles tend to travel at high speeds, if you can screw up the radome or any part of the structure sufficiently it'll make a big difference to the attacking missiles pk (probability of a kill).
Your same offensive weapon makes an awesome countermeasure against HOBS (High-Off-Boresight) stuff that someone might launch using a HMCS (Helmet Mounted Cueing System). If you have decent secure networking, there's no reason why a bunch of your team couldn't target the same target too. So instead of being hit by one laser, you hit the target with N lasers. The enemy having better kinematics becomes moot too. A rotating mirror can rotate much faster than even the most maneuverable airframe.
The best countermeasure to this stuff if you don't have equivalent stealth? It's tough. You can't detect attackers well enough to get a firing-solution, you have nothing on your warning receivers for your team. Best case, let's say you know somethings up there due to VHF radar. So you send up your stuff, and all of them just get swatted from the sky. You ask your best engineers what to do about it, and they say 'Our best idea is to make the environment so nasty we deny the enemy access'. How do you do that? Nuke your own airspace. If you can't see the enemy but your assets start exploding, fire off a pile of SAMS (in nice solid reflective casings, no fine guidance necessary) and nuke your own the airspace.
If they are at altitude then that's one thing (not much fallout). If they are using terrain shadowing / strike teams going in to take out your ground assets, then you are talking about basically carpeting yourself with fallout.
I'm all for this. On cloudy days, we can both provide extra sunlight, reduce the nuclear weapons stockpiles, generate rooftop solar power, aaaand launch kilotons of hardy payload to the stars.
It's fascinating to me how many people who purport to believe in democracyare so keen to strip others rights the second the front-runners don't fit their views.
At least the right leaning people seem to admit what they want (less government, less taxes, leave me alone, less intervention). Yet many of the left-leaning "progressives" are in such a state of double-think they don't even realize they are sprouting propaganda.
Just the term "progressive" is propaganda. Being "progressive" about denying others their rights when the views don't align with their own is NOT progressive. It's repressive.
Thanks for sending that. I was thinking a little about Plumbbob and the steel-plate as I typed the Orion comment, but hadn't heard of Wang Bullet. It has all the advantages of artillery and NPP combined. Plus the reaction mass (steam) reduces the acceleration. It's awesome.
Exactly - not throwing everything away has advantages. SpaceX deserves to be congratulated for pulling this off. There's lots to be said for incremental improvement.
That's the analogy to think about with this. When is it best to use the artillery approach, and when is it best to use an airplane approach. An airplane approach implies refueling and re-use. You can amortize investments to improve capabilities over time. Artillery is all about cheap getting payload up there.
If you really want to get pure mass to LEO cheaply - it's hard to beat big artillery with a rocket stage. It has a few issues though.
Your payload has to be able to handle the G's from firing. The payload is probably fairly small unless you build a really big gun. If you are interested - google Gerald Bull.
Another cheapish way to get lots of mass to orbit that is mostly politically acceptable would be *really* big rockets. Some of the plans for humungous solid rocket boosters etc. Big diameter solid rockets are hard to beat for cost if you are going to throw it all away.
The truth is it's a continuum. You can plot this stuff on a graph and it's very informative. You discover the above. Artillery to LEO is very cheap - but limits you to tiny payloads. Massive throw away solids are cheap too, but if the launch vehicle fails you lose a lot. For things you value a lot (like people) you may not want to use a huge solid.
If you want to launch truly huge amounts of stuff to orbit it's very difficult to beat Orion and nuclear pulse propulsion. Politically the only way you'd see that happen would be to save the planet.
Those were really interesting points. I was actually thinking of a fission fragment rocket or stuff like nuclear electric.
OK - totally agree. I was trying to make it easy because I figured even pulling off a ship that could accelerate constantly (say a week or month or year) at about 1/100 of a g was a "significant" engineering feat. More is even better.
I'm pretty sure most people would understand what that means when I said 1/100g engine in the context of the article and ship. That means a ship that can be accelerated at 1/100g via some kind of a propulsion system (engine). The featured article was about nuclear-thermal rocket ships.
Since any useful ship will be composed of matter - it will have mass. If you know the mass, and you know the acceleration then you can figure out all the other boxes.
Constant acceleration ships have been built. Deep Space-1. So you clearly are either totally clueless, or purposely ignoring the fact w built a constant acceleration ship. It was part of the mission. You can google it and find all kinds of fascinating (OK I find it fascinating) stuff like the mass of it, or the thrust of the ion-drive.
BTW - If I am genuinely making you angry I apologize. I am assuming you are just messing with me now, because you seem smart, and must have heard of deep space 1 and fission fragment rockets, and I'm pretty sure you understand what I meant by a 1/100g engine ship. The only reason I keep responding is because I am so sick and tired of the crazies who say stuff like 'We could never do that!" or the almost-worse "Oh no nobody ever went to the moon". It drives me batshit crazy. I have no personal idea if we could build a 1/100g fission-fragment rocket. If someone wanted to try I'd applaud them. Assuming they didn't fire it up in my back-yard.
I'm thinking of things with very high ISP for all the reasons you are citing. The point I'm trying to make is that if we could build a 1/100g drive then we could do a hell of a lot, and low acceleration drives can accomplish lots.
So I didn't think your analogy was fair at all. It seemed, to be honest, the same kind of analogy used to prove that putting humans on the moon is impossible. It's like people saying the rocket equation directly proved that we couldn't possibly build a single-stage rocket that would take a person to the moon and back with any existing engineering.
We all know we got people to the moon, and back again multiple times, safely. Staging was used, and LOR. I'm not suggesting the EmDrive or breaking the laws of physics.
Nobody is suggesting that our constant-g rocket will run forever. That is obviously impossible. But it may well run for long enough to be useful, and better than a chemical or nuclear-thermal rocket.
Your argument about ignoring conservation of momentum is also wrong, as is your comment about the rocket equation. It's because of those two facts that we need really high ISP. That means nuclear. It probably means something like a fission-fragment rocket to get high enough ISP.
So go ahead, take the cheap-shot, make the pun, but honestly - your response sounded to me dumber than the vast majority of the prior posts.
It depends on the ISP of the Tug right? If the tug ISP is 10x that of the alternative for the fuel mass you climbed out of the gravity well with then it would be a win to use the tug right before you start up you light the candle on your *really* dirty *really* high ISP engine.
Explaining more and following up on MachineShedFred point. It's a given that you won't use a 1/100g constant drive as a booster toiget to LEO from Earth.
You are right - a 0.01g constant acceleration drive will take a while to get out of LEO. But it's still about 3 months to Mars. If we had a way to do 0.1g for a while that would be great. I just don't see it happening unless you use a nuclear-thermal or a chemical booster, in which-case your specific-impulse sucks. Maybe VASIMR, but even at the high end I don't think its ISP is enough.
Can you explain what you are trying to say more? It seems clear that you wouldn't use a 0.01G drive as a booster to LEO. The whole subject was Nuclear. If you tie the words Nuclear and constant acceleration drive - you pretty much mean things that are radiologically dirty. In Space (above LEO) it doesn't really matter. Space is big and has lots of hard-radiation anyway.
Is there a propulsion technology you are thinking of? I'm thinking of stuff that are as dirty as a fission-fragment rocket for the constant-g ship.
The only -single design drive I can think of that would satisfy booster and flight would be Orion. Technically doable but environmentally in-feasible unless it's an emergency to get significant mass to LEO or we all die. Nuclear thermal is OK for a booster maybe, but ISP is way too low to realistically use for a constant-g drive.
Do you mean - We need better propulsion technology for boosters to get all this nuclear stuff to LEO?
The better propulsion is implicit if you want a constant g ship (for any meaningful distance), so I think we are agreeing. I didn't make it explicit because it is implicit once you run the calculations that a chemical or nuclear-thermal rocket won't cut it due to fuel mass. To be more explicit, I'd love a propulsion system that can do better than 1/100g for months, but I doubt we will get there soon. A propulsion system that could do 1/100g is much more achievable with existing technology and a worthy goal. We could start with 1/1000g ship.
The ideal ship (for humans) would obviously be a 1g drive. Once you throw relativity in the mix that buys you pretty much everywhere. It gets you to Mars in a couple of days too.
Better propulsion I'm all for, but it's hard to beat a constant drive for long distances with a burst of acceleration. Every day the constant-g ship with a measly 1/100g is adding the equivalent of 8.6g for about 100 seconds. Or 1g for 864 seconds. The delta-v just keeps adding up.
A 0.01g constant acceleration ship gives you the Solar System.
A ship capable of a constant 0.01g acceleration would be a game-changer. Break the steps down as X-prizes. Build a 0.001g ship. Scale it up to a 0.005g ship. Next step is get it to 0.01g and you can reach Mars in three months and anywhere out to Pluto in just less than a year. First place to go? Prospecting the asteroid belt would be my vote. Find useful stuff, use it to build more useful stuff.