I’ve been wanting to revisit getting people and their stuff off world again for a while and I want to give it yet another go right now… we want to grab and send a hectare of earth and people into space. Each hectare contains at least one house and the people in and around it, so we could abduct moving vehicles on the road. I’m thinking of something like my nanoslick technology, which is a bad idea, actually. This could be something like a skycrane… say ten tonnes per m^2 times 100^2 is 100,000 tonnes, an aircraft carrier, like that silly helicarrier!

This scheme is pretty stupid and would work better the lighter it is, so how about aerostats? We can lift the payload to a desired altitude and then blast them into orbit with lasers. Lasers could ablate the bottom of the payload into reaction mass, so the array of lasers needs to be below and to one side. The aerostat is the zeroth stage and the lasers ablating the bottom of the payload is the first stage, but we will want a rotovator dipping into the upper atmosphere and fishing out payloads.

Ugh!

I mentioned nanoslick and that fails because universal MNT is very unlikely. A general purpose micromechanical clanking replicator is not and is not nanoslick; it is mighty small and can be something the digital matter I used in one of my space opera campaigns all those years ago. So we don’t get people and their stuff offworld, we get people and make copies of their stuff, bring samples of things including whole specimens like pets, plants and such, including trees and whales. We blast them off the planet in fairly conventional cheap ass big dumb boosters with pressure fed rockets and heavy staging. The boosters and orbiters are additive manufacture, 3D printed and assembled in place, fueled, loaded with the payload and launched. We can keep the acceleration very low by accepting less efficiency, heavy redundancy and pacman boosters which overtake the payload and take over as needed on the way to orbit. As the payload(s) reach orbit we can have them link up into hamster wheel assemblies which whirl around for spin gravity.