Added mass fluid quasi-momentum. Unsteady forces due to a change of the relative velocity of a body submerged in a fluid can be divided into two parts: the virtual mass effect and the Basset force. The origin of the force is that the fluid will gain kinetic energy at the expense of the work done by an accelerating submerged body. It can be shown that the virtual mass force, for a spherical particle submerged in an inviscid, incompressible fluid is where bold symbols denote vectors, formula_2 is the fluid flow velocity, formula_3 is the spherical particle velocity, formula_4 is the mass density
Mass driver velocity would rather be around 62.75% of total mission delta v if operating at constant specific impulse, except greater optimization could come from varying exhaust velocity during the mission profile (as possible with some thruster types, including mass drivers and variable specific impulse magnetoplasma rockets). Since a mass driver could use any type of mass for reaction mass to move the spacecraft, a mass driver or some variation seems ideal for deep-space vehicles that scavenge reaction mass from found resources. One possible drawback of the mass driver is that it has the potential to send solid reaction mass travelling at