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By density do you just mean a ton of smaller thrusters? Does it have to be a ring shape?

Basically I am just imagining a ship with a ton of the tiniest realistically produced thrusters side by side - would be some wasted space between the rings but this seems like it could be a solid design (not to mention additional redundancy in case individual thrusters go out)

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I mean density in terms of amount of plasma through the device. You can cluster these together too but that gets complex from a systems design perspective. It's something that's being researched though

Is it additional redundancy or additional points of failure? Enquiring minds want to know!

Both of those, but also additional mass due to extra plumbing and such. It's definitely a thing we could do but it's not without it's problems. Also, Hall thrusters don't tile well as they're annular/ring-shaped devices. There are linear thrusters which would tile better but they tend to work fairly poorly.

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