I plan on trying NaNoWriMo again this year, with a science fiction story that's been bouncing around in the back of my brain for a while; to prepare, I'm researching the science and designing the ship ahead of time, so I don't get bogged down in the details when I should be writing like a madman.

A search on Google revealed that to produce one gravity of thrust (thus obviating the need for artificial gravity), a spaceship must accelerate at 9.8 meters per second per second (9.8 m/s²). That looks like a fairly simplistic, straightforward equation; but in attempting to solve it, I ended up with the rather absurd conclusion that a ship accelerating at that rate for ninety-three minutes — 9.8 × (60 × 93)² — would, at the end of that span, be traveling at 305,136,720 meters per second.

Light speed, which mere matter cannot attain, much less exceed, is only 299,792,458 meters per second. Obviously, I was in error.

After much more Googling, in a not entirely serious computer science paper on Moore's Law (available here, though apparently only in PostScript format), I finally found a citation to a page which quite possibly could answer my question. Unfortunately, the URL contained a typographical error, but I was eventually able to find the actual page.

It's very rare for a Web page to make me feel stupid, but this page manages quite well. At least I came away from it knowing that after fourteen years of constant 1G acceleration, a vessel would be traveling very near light speed, though at that speed even a single free molecule could destroy an entire ship.