I have thought about this as well, but am unsure if what I was thinking would even work, but I will try and explain it anyway.

First you would need to setup a series of large Magnetic rings for say here to Mars. These rings would need to be quite large to accommodate a space craft designed to use them (No idea how big)

The rings should be able to direct the magnetic force so from one direction it would pull you through the ring and on the other side it would repel you. This should give you a nice acceleration. Also the rings should have the ability to slow you down as well.

The rings should be large enough to be able to contain rocket boosters to maintain position when the craft is being accelerated through and should also have some type of Ion drive with a Nuke reactor to be able to always align its self to the other rings and al to the orbits of the planets.

There should also be a set of rings within the orbit of each planet to boost the ship out of orbit and onto its destination. I suppose it would be kind of like a rail gun in a way

Now that the rings are built and in place you would need to build a craft to work with them. The craft would need to have magnetic plates built on it all around the craft and should have the ability to be either negative or positive at any given time.

The craft should only need to have enough propellant to do 3 things. Realign its self if necessary to aim with the rings, should have enough for orbital maneuvering and enough for an emergency burn. All three system should be able to feed off each other incase of an emergency.

Using this system would reduce the weight for fuel and increase the actual cargo capacity so that more supplies can be taken at one time instead of many smaller trips.

Now depending on the amount of travel you may need to build two sets of these rings. One for each direction.


Now someone that is good at math may be able to say what kind of speeds can be reached with this system and weather or not it would really help or not. I have really not done any research at all into it. I was just a thought I had one day.

Please feel free to poke as many holes in this as possible.