I literally found out it got deleted because I tried to rate your post as Winner.
Our third-gen interstellar craft, the
Rocinante Single, actually got off the ground.
I've become aware that this name is probably a The Expanse reference and not a Don Quixote one. But I've just been naming them after the engines and I don't intend to start thinking harder about it now (but I dislike that show).
Our first stop is the
Damysus Triple (our first-gen prototype, aborted due to an issue with the mining rigs), to transfer Valentina and her crew over.


I could take its antimatter too, but neither ship has docking gear and it'll be important to find out how long it takes to fill our own tanks.
Then off to Green Jupiter. Very carefully, because our radiation plume will kill everyone on the other ship if we point it directly at them (seriously).
We were on the opposite side of the sun so we couldn't fully open up the engines, but it still only took two months rather than 2 years.

skrrt
I'd have preferred to visit Saturn but we know this place has what fusion plants crave.
We've unlocked smaller exospheric gas scoops, but I put the fuckhuge version on a belly pivot instead because we know it works so well.


And, yeah. The onboard refinery couldn't keep up with the gas intake. It only took like a day to fill our tanks with fusion pellets for the engine.
Filling up the antimatter tank with our four magnetic collectors took a few more days. I could probably have gotten away with a smaller container. We're running a new, advanced antimatter-catalysed fusion reactor that can operate on plentiful gases, as well as the helium-3 and/or deuterium we use to make our fusion pellets if we want. At full thrust it'll take 3000 years to use up our antimatter, which seems like plenty.
I could test one of our deployable probes by dropping it to get crushed here, but we might need em. Also I don't wanna turn around and go home if they don't work.

We've got an actual starbridge instead of a command pod now. That probably makes us an actual starship. Also we're about to go to another star I guess.
seeya joop
Now we can point right at our destination and burn. We have so much goddamn thrust. This thing rules to fly. Even if it's one third the efficiency of the previous he3/D fusion engine, it's still ridiculous, and we've got one million delta-v and maximum charisma.
I decided to use one third of that, giving us a safety margin after slowing down at the other end. Finding a gas giant with the right composition to fill up will be a priority then. We can hypothetically land on a moon if we get desperate for helium-3 too, which will be much easier since this engine is also half the weight and size of the last one. But we haven't probed it so I haven't looked, and have no idea what we'll find.

We're moving at 0.1% of lightspeed. We should arrive in less than three years. In under a week we've almost caught up to Kerbager-7.

That angle is a little deceptive though; K-7 is probably less than 10% of the way there and it launched like three or four years ago.
Now we can do an experiment and EVA in interstellar space, finally completing the dang introductory quest of this mod's story after all this dang time and most of the dang tech tree.

