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The thought occurred to me that if you had an engine with sufficiently high energy to pull a brachistochrone (thrust prograde halfway to your destination, then retrograde until you arrive) to Mars, the ideal plan for a manned Martian mission would be to start from LEO at 1 gee, then gradually taper off thrust through the full transfer to 0.3 gees to Martian orbit. That way, your crew would be smoothly acclimatized to Martian gravity and have no adjustment period. The same could be done in reverse, starting at 0.3 gees and thrusting harder and harder (no innuendo intended) until you reached Earth at exactly 1 gee retrograde. Unfortunately I have absolutely no idea how much dV would be required for such a maneuver, nor how long the transfer would take. It would require like four nested integrals, and trying to set it up for iterative solution in Excel would be a nightmare. I don't even know if outgoing dV would equal incoming dV, due to the influence of old Oberth. Any ideas on how to calculate that? Notably, such a thrust profile would be a prime candidate for beamed power...
