Implying that the air/raft must be capable of forward thrust as well and a significant amount. It is called out in T5 as well "An air/raft can conceivably Safe Boost to Orbit (or Safe ReEntry from Orbit) in Hours = 5 xWorld Size". T5 identifies four kinds of gravity based drives, "M-Drives", "G-Drives", "Z-Drives" (Lifters) and "N-Drives" (interstellar not as fast as light drives). If the air/raft were powered by an M-Drive or G-drive it would be able to make interplanetary travel so presumably the drive is a Z-Drive, which only works to 1 diameter distant from a world and is limited to Speed-5 (50 kph). It could reach orbital altitude but not enter orbit. Unless the air/raft is actually driven by some other kind of mechanism or a combination of Z-drive and a different forward thruster.
 

On Fri, May 8, 2020 at 2:54 PM James Davies <xxxxxx@hotmail.com> wrote:
CT Book 3, page 23 says:  An air/raft can reach orbit in several hours (number of hours equal to planetary size digit in the UPP); passengers must wear vacc suits and
interplanetary travel in an air/raft is not possible. 


From: xxxxxx@simplelists.com <xxxxxx@simplelists.com> on behalf of Vareck Bostrom <xxxxxx@gmail.com>
Sent: 08 May 2020 9:44 PM
To: xxxxxx@simplelists.com <xxxxxx@simplelists.com>
Subject: Re: [TML] Lifting off from planets
 
Which might have resulted from a misunderstanding of what "orbit" is. The car can lift itself to orbital distance but not attain orbital velocity and just fall back down again. 

On Fri, May 8, 2020 at 12:46 PM Phil Pugliese - philpugliese at yahoo.com (via tml list) <xxxxxx@simplelists.com> wrote:
Yeah, that's what it said!

As I recall. it took a number of hours to get into 'space' but the basic idea was that the craft would start rising & just keep going up & up & up.

I remember thinking how weird it would be to see something like that.

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On Friday, May 8, 2020, 11:40:40 AM MST, Ethan McKinney <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:


Which is ... insane. You can take your family car to orbit?

I guess the Tesla Roadster SpaceX edition isn't that far off.

On Thu, May 7, 2020 at 3:52 PM Phil Pugliese - philpugliese at yahoo.com (via tml list) <xxxxxx@simplelists.com> wrote:
On Wednesday, May 6, 2020, 05:01:02 PM MST, Rupert Boleyn <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:

On 07May2020 1007, Ethan McKinney wrote:
> Without contragravity, you get grav tanks with astounding acceleration ...
It's also been an explicit part of the OTU for a long, long time.
Air/rafts have always used it, and they date from the original LBBs. 
Rupert Boleyn <xxxxxx@gmail.com>

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Yep, and there's even an explicit description of how to use an air/raft to get into orbit in one of the early pubs.
All that's needed extra is a vaccsuit!

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