Something so big and complex that after you add the warship's other systems - armor, weaponry, defense systems, sensors, propellant tanks - you might as well have a crew onboard because the mass of their accommodations isn't significant. Since a fusion exhaust engine just lets the hot plasma escape directly, as power output rises the mass of the equipment that handles the waste heat and so forth rises more slowly, because most of the heat and light reflects off other plasma and not off the engine walls.Īllegedly, other effects related to fusion I don't know about make the power output scale with something like the fifth power of the radius of the reactor core.Īnyways, at some point the scaling would stop because the engine core would be so hot that the engine walls would ablate away faster than you could practically repair or cool them.īut that power level might require a truly gigantic engine. This is generally true in Earth's atmosphere, because fast aircraft are extremely expensive and drag slows them down the larger they are.īut if you had a fusion engine, the bigger the engine is, the larger the internal core volume where the conditions permit fusion, and the smaller the mass ratio of magnets and other equipment relative to the power output of the engine. It's pretty much a trope of space opera that smaller space fighters are faster*.
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