Idea is to lower the dry mass to achieve higher acceleration by shooting fuel pallets from a space based platform to be then collected and ingested by the accelerating spaceship "riding the fuel trail". Problem is kinetic energy of pallet impact on ship seems to equal energy density of monopropellant at relatively low speeds. Thoughts?
I had a similar idea previously for interstellar travel.
My idea was to fire fuel pellets ahead of the rocket so it would collect them up as it accelerated, relative velocity being not too much.<p>However Anything orbiting the sun wouldn’t be able to stay on target to fire the fuel for long. Calculating the trajectory to account for gravity would be problematic. The whole process would be too brittle, if something went wrong it could well be impossible to recover.<p>Nifty idea was to fire the pellets before and after, so when it flips mid-flight it could collect fuel pellets to decelerate.
Exploding fuel pallets. Here's one ton of fuel, a one-ton inert reaction mass, and an explosive charge that will fire at the right time to separate the two. It drives the fuel mass to nearly the velocity of the rocket ship (this also makes catching it easier). It preserves momentum by driving the reaction mass in the opposite direction.<p>Hint: Make sure the reaction mass misses the rocket ship.