>>11460226>>11460232I'm not talking about rockets, I'm talking about the craft itself and baking in escape from Earth is never going to be productive since it's a much crazier constraint than just zipping around the solar system. The size of the craft WILL be minimized for the smallest possible vehicle needed to do what it needs to do, regardless of the size of the rockets and fuel tanks. This will mostly likely mean cutting out humans entirely of most missions and in the case of exploratory missions, probes will ALWAYS reach celestial bodies decades if not centuries before any human sets foot.
>>11460233>large cargo shipments because transfer windows are infrequentok, I'll give you this one
>colony dropsand this, I guess, but only by necessity
the rest of these aren't constrained by mass because they just need to be parked in orbit somewhere, it's a different use case and in all of these scenarios can be assembled piecemeal instead of as a single craft.
>entire labs for studying other worlds>telescopes with lenses unbound by gravity>propellant depots>manufacturing plants 
