Quote:
Originally Posted by Chaos2Frozen
Aircraft Carriers, Jets, Landing crafts and a big O Railgun to shoot spacecrafts out into space.
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It should be noted that the big advantage to a Mass Driver isn't getting this
up to space, it's getting them going fast enough to stay there; seven to eight kilometers per second tangent to the surface below you in low orbit.
Therefore, a launch mass driver would be much closer to horizontal, both because a longer weapon, er, system allows a higher muzzle velocity, and because a long acceleration distance allows a lower acceleration per second, making it easier for a fragile
warhead cargo to survive launch.
It should be noted that it would require an absurdly long railgun to make the launch survivable for humans; the advantage is that it can loft bulk cargo in greater volume and at lower cost than anything accept an actual space elevator (not to be confused with a laser launch 'elevator': the two are completely different).