ion drives

Ascen: so basically, the future of propulsion is thrust speed
Nivekaz: explain
Ascen: and effective lightweight solar panels
Ascen: so, imagine that you're expelling a mass from a ship to generate thrust
Nivekaz: gotta eject fast?
Ascen: you decide to expel it with magnetic force, which requires electricity
Ascen: so you need to be more efficient, what do you do? you downscale the mass by half, but you eject it at double the speed
Ascen: the thrust is the same, but there's less mess and more electrical requirementy
Ascen: now you follow that equation a couple of times until you're ejecting a tiny, tiny mass with a truly enourmous amount of electrical energy
Ascen: now your fuel lasts very long, but you need much more electricity
Nivekaz: hence the efficient solar pannels
Nivekaz: neat
Ascen: so you make a spaceship that has gigantic solar sails, and the thruster is basically a gatling railgun
Ascen: firing tiny amount of mass at ridiculous speeds
Ascen: if you can pull it off, your fuel can last a whole order of magnitudes longer
Ascen: you just need lightweight solar panels
Nivekaz: well fuel efficiency becomes exponential
Nivekaz: but so does power requirements
Ascen: yes, you see, in the vacuum of space, there's only one thing that actually does get supplied to you out there in the dark, sunlight
Ascen: the spaceship that turns sunlight into thrust, that's how you get efficient
Nivekaz: aye
Ascen: and one of the best ways to do that is by trying to eject fuel matter as forcefully as possible with sunlight powered engines
Nivekaz: maybe that's how the thrusters in ED work and how they seem to only use power
Nivekaz: headcanon accepted
Ascen: well, this is what the ion drive is built upon
Nivekaz: power requirements are retarded tho, nothing makes sense in ED power-wise
Ascen: instead of a chemical ejection, it uses ionization of xenon to generate thrust from electrically powered ejection
Ascen: and it's 12 times as efficient as chemical thrusters
Ascen: you can definitely upscale this technology if you make a bigger ship with a bigger, sturdier drive
Ascen: the reason planes are vastly more fuel efficient than rockets is because they grab a resource freely available to them, the oxygen of the atmosphere
Ascen: thus the next step of rocket evolution is to grab a resource available to them, sunlight
Nivekaz: clever
Ascen: we may make an even more efficient way of thrust in the future, but our next stepping stone is definitely ion thrusters
Ascen: the problem with ion thrusters is that while they are efficient, fuel is harder to find, more expensive, and their thrust is low, so it's completely uselss for leaving a planet
Ascen: they will be spacetravel engines though
Ascen: you need a source of magnetic/ionizable material in gas form
Ascen: that's not straightforward
Ascen: you can't just heat up a magnetic metal into gas form and thrust that, they will lose magnetism
Ascen: so the alternative is firing them with a railgun thruster