I’m confused. Suppose your ring-shaped space hotel gets to Mars with people and cargo that weighs equal to the cargo capacity of 1000 Starships. How do you get it down? First you have to slow down the hotel, which takes roughly as much fuel as it took to accelerate it. Using Starships you can aerobrake from interplanetary velocity, costing negligible fuel. In the hotel scenario, it’s not efficient to land using a small number of Starships flying up and down, because they will use a lot of fuel to get back up, even empty.
Would you care to specify your scenario more precisely? I suspect you’re neglecting the fuel cost at some stage.
I’m confused. Suppose your ring-shaped space hotel gets to Mars with people and cargo that weighs equal to the cargo capacity of 1000 Starships. How do you get it down? First you have to slow down the hotel, which takes roughly as much fuel as it took to accelerate it. Using Starships you can aerobrake from interplanetary velocity, costing negligible fuel. In the hotel scenario, it’s not efficient to land using a small number of Starships flying up and down, because they will use a lot of fuel to get back up, even empty.
Would you care to specify your scenario more precisely? I suspect you’re neglecting the fuel cost at some stage.