Summary Message 3/20/96 - This is a summary of some of the suggestions I
received after the first message, and of some info I found on my own.

>Date: Wed, 20 Mar 1996 23:59:20
>To: GURPSNet
>From: Chuck & Kathy Bennett <bennett@rollanet.org>
>Subject: Realistic Interplanetary Travel
>
>Last night (3/19) at about 10pm I posted a request for help in finding 
materials to simulate interplanetary travel for a game/story setting using 
realistic space transport - no reactionless drives.  The response has been 
really great.  I still plan to post some kind of summary of what all I find, 
including a bibliography of sources, but here is a preliminary report with 
some neat stuff for those who are interested:
>
>Jordan Orzoff in the RPGames forum on Compu$erve suggested the NASA website 
in general, and the JPL Basics of Space Flight workbook in particular.  I 
found NASA at http://www.nasa.gov and Jet Propulsion Laboratories at 
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov.  The JPL Basics of Space Flight workbook is 
available in Acrobat format (about 2MB) at 
ftp://jplinfo.jpl.nasa.gov/pub/misc/spaceflt.pdf.  It is also available as 
a website at http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/basics.  The Introduction section at 
that website also has info for ordering hardcopy by snailmail - I'm waiting 
for a response from JPL to tell me what the "nominal charge" is for the 
hardcopy.
>
>Along the way searching for the JPL Basics of Space Flight workbook, I 
found an FTP site with some programs to figure orbital transfers - I DLed 
a couple of these, but haven't had time yet to virus-check them and try 
them out.  They are at ftp://seds.lpl.arizona.edu/pub/software/pc/sat.
>
>I found some good info on reaction drives of various TLs on a =Traveller= 
site (of all places!) - apparently Traveller in its most recent incarnation 
(The New Era) had a supplement called Fire, Fusion and Steel with some stuff 
that =almost= passes reality-testing - and some Trav fans with knowledge of 
physics and rocketry have made adjustments to correct the mistakes. The 
document is at http://www.missouri.edu/~ccjoe/traveller/thruster.html. 
(Timothy Park in the SFLit forum on CI$ also suggested Fire, Fusion and 
Steel, and I had the poor judgment to question him as to its realism.)
>
>Many folks have suggested books and articles, and MA Lloyd on the 
GURPSnet-L mailing list posted a bibliography so =huge= that I haven't 
even had time to read the whole thing, much less start on any of the texts 
he suggested.
>
>Many thanks to all who are helping with this!
>
>Chuck Bennett
>(Ursus in CI$ RPGames forum)
>home: bennett@rollanet.org
>office: 74670.432@compuserve.com
>
>