  Massive stars lose a large fraction of their mass to radiation-driven winds
throughout their entire life. These outflows impact both the life and death of
these stars and their surroundings. Theoretical mass-loss rates of hot, massive
stars are derived to be used in applications such as stellar evolution. The
behaviour of these rates in the OB-star regime is analysed, and their effects
on massive-star evolution predictions is studied. Dynamically-consistent models
are computed by solving the spherically symmetric, steady-state
equation-of-motion for a large grid of hot, massive stars. The radiative
acceleration is derived from non-local thermodynamic equilibrium radiative
transfer in the co-moving frame. The resulting mass-loss rates are used to
derive a simple scaling recipe with stellar parameters and to evaluate some
first impacts upon evolution tracks. We provide a new prescription for
steady-state, radiation-driven mass-loss from hot, massive stars depending on
their fundamental parameters. The rates for O-stars are lower by about a factor
~3 than the rates typically used in previous stellar-evolution calculations,
where differences generally decrease with increasing luminosity and
temperature. For cooler B-giants/supergiants we find larger discrepancies. This
arises because we do not find any systematic increase in mass-loss rates below
the so-called bi-stability region; indeed, our results do not show any sign of
a significant bi-stability jump within the parameter range covered by the grid.
Due to the lower mass-loss rates we find that envelopes are not easily stripped
by means of standard steady-state winds, making it difficult to create
classical Wolf-Rayet stars via this channel. However, a remaining key
uncertainty regarding these predictions concerns unsteady mass loss for very
high-luminosity stars close to the Eddington limit as well as the impact of
non-line-driven winds.
