What is an Ion Engine and what is its theoretical speed limit?
Ok, here we go in to the realm of Relativity and theoretical physics. An Ion Engine is, well, an Engine. Rather then burning fuel like traditional rockets, it “burns” positive Ions. It ejects a very fine thrust that actually has VERY little moving power. In fact, from “cold start” it takes an Ion Engine almost 4 days to reach 60kph!! However, while it does take an Ion Engine a long time to get moving, the great thing about them is that they never stop accelerating until they have no more fuel. They just keep getting faster and faster. The reason that Ion Engines look so good to Scientists is that they are incredibly efficient! They can take a VERY small amount of Xeon as fuel and use it for extremely long periods of time. Now, as for a speed limit… The actual answer is that the Ion Engine (Assuming it never ran out of Xeon) has no speed limit. It will just keep accelerating forever. Now, you would think that at SOME point, it would have to reach terminal velocity (Which isn’t actuall
