[TML] Transportation solutions.

[Richard Aiken]

On 10/17/07, shadow at shadowgard.com <shadow at shadowgard.com> wrote:
> You still have the weight problem. And I somehow doubt that even with
> that sort of processing that platinum group metals are cheap.

Well . . . since I still want to keep some of the Wild West flavor of
Serenity (which has its Rim Worlds using precious metal coinage) . . .
I don't want *really* cheap gold and platinum.  So what sort of
powerplant should I put into my mules (ship's vehicles)?

My boats (PC-scale spaceships) run on fusion plants that also serve as
thrusters.  I'm taking the fusion plants themselves from GT rules:
they have internal fuel (I'm assuming tritium?) to last for 200 years
(the expected service life of the plant).  But - as per the Serenity
rules - I'm using the heat provided by the fusion chamber to power a
combination jet/ramjet/scramjet/rocket thruster.  The thruster runs as
a jet at low altitudes and low speeds (helped along by an electric
turbofan at extremely low speeds), as a ramjet at
mid-altitudes/speeds, as a scramjet at high-altitudes/speeds and
finally as a pure rocket once in vacuum.  It can do all this - I think
- with reasonably low fuel consumption because I'm also using "grav
tech" (a catch-all for contragravity, artificial gravity and inertial
damping technologies).

Now, Serenity (like Traveller) assumes that the fuel for the thruster
should be hydrogen.  But after reading (in this thread and others)
about all the issues with hydrogen, I'm not sure that this makes much
sense any longer.  It would seem to require a very high-tech boat to
do it routinely.  I don't want that.  I see my boats as being rather
low-tech (at least compared standard Traveller ships).  Basically, I'm
aiming for "1930s tramp steamers in space."  Besides the fusion
reactor, the only high-tech on my "jump-1" boats will be the "grav"
unit.

So should I go with plain water instead of hydrogen as my thruster
fuel?  This would fit the "1930's" tech feel better, I think.  That
way, "refined" fuel would be carefully distilled or filtered water and
"unrefined" fuel would be water that's pumped in straight from a
natural source (with all the trace impurities intact).  Using
unrefined fuel would no longer potentially cause misjump - because of
the way I've changed jump IMNewTU - but it could still cause the
thrusters to "burp" at just the wrong moment or impurities could even
build up inside the fuel injectors and cause thrusters to stall out.

The rest of this has nothing to do directly with hydrogen vs water
fuels or with real-world technology.  But I got inspired and work is
slow right now, so I just kept on typing . . .

IMNewTU, it's the independent development of grav tech - rather than
jump - which divides minor races from major ones (since I'm using
wormholes/stargates - with a week spent inside - rather than jump).
Without grav tech, getting into orbit and to/from the wormholes with a
[militarily or economically] useful payload takes an extreme effort.
Given grav tech, such payloads become routine.

In my new (divided by 5) Imperial timeline, the power of the Vilani
Imperium ultimately rested upon their exclusive access to grav tech.
The Vilani were the first race to re-develop it following the demise
of the Ancients and they managed to hang onto the monopoly for a few
centuries.  IMNewTU, their imposition of a caste system was (at least
in part) an effort to retain this monopoly, since only members of the
"Grav Technician" class knew how the tech actually worked; to everyone
else, the generators were black boxes.  Once the Vilani lost the grav
monopoly to the "barbarians," the loss of their empire was inevitable.

Also - again IMNewTU - the Vilani never developed more than the
"jump-1" drive.  More precisely, the Vilani only used the wormholes as
they found them.  They only used the default exit setting - which was
the one that used the least effort for the system and led only to the
"nearest" neighboring wormholes.  The Vilani *did* experiment enough
to discover that different entry vectors let them out at different
neighboring systems.  But once they discovered this, the Vilani were
satisfied that they knew everything there was to know about the
Ancient's wormhole network and stopped looking for anything more.

So it wasn't until Earth's wormholes re-opened in the late 21st
century AD - and Terrans started using them - that anyone thought to
try and "re-set" a given wormhole's exit.  The idea to try occurred
after someone noticed how neatly the Vilani wormhole maps fell out
into a simple hexagonal grid.  I imagine some version of the following
conversation taking place, sometime early in *my* IW era:

Terran Pilot: "If we can go from here [origin hex] to here [next-door
hex], why can't we go from here to there [hex in the same straight
line from origin hex, but one hex away]?"

Vilani Pilot: "Because you can't, that's why.  That just isn't the way
wormholes work."

Terran Pilot: "Hmmmm . . ."

It turned out that it was possible - by running an electrical current
through a certain naturally-occurring crystal which had been set into
a coil made from a particular type of rare-earth - to "dial-in" a new
exit.  BUT you could only do it after wormhole entry (that is, after
committing to a particular vector) and then only (at first) as far as
one additional hex.  It was this discovery of "jump-2" which
contributed to the ultimate Solomani victory in the Interstellar Wars.
 Note: This means that - IMNewTU - higher jump numbers only allow
travel in a straight line across the hex map, which often leads to
radically different strategic implications.

Under the pressure of war, this initial discovery was "good enough"
and the tuner units were put into use as fast as they could be
produced.  But after the war, research into *why* they worked led to a
practical theory.  The crystals - called "zucchai crystals" after
their initial discoverer, Dr. Leonard Zucchai - proved to be teseracts
(sp?), objects which reach into many more dimensions than the normal
four.  While in normal space, the crystals are nothing special.  But
taken into an Ancient wormhole and energized, they can be used like a
TV remote control to re-tune the current "channel" of that wormhole
(at least as far as the using ship is concerned).  The original
crystals only let ships switch between two "channels" (either jump-1
or jump-2).  But the possibility for "higher [longer-range] channels"
was recognized and research efforts in that direction began.  But
further progress was halted by the difficulties which eventually led
to the Long Night.  [In my "divided by 5" timeline, it's only about 80
years from initial declaration of the Rule of Man to its complete
financial collapse].

There the technology rested - at jump-1 for the masses and jump-2 for
those with access to the increasingly-rare IW-era "tuners" - until the
Cleon got into the act.  IMNewTU, it was his development of "jump-3" -
and his consequent ability to sneak up "behind" rival systems and
pirate forces (along routes which he shouldn't have been able to use)
- which helped him create the Third Imperium.  Since then, extending
the reach of wormhole "tuners" has been a continual top-priority with
the Empire, with new tuner models coming out steadily every few
decades.  By the opening date of my campaign (001-226), the latest
"jump-6" model tuners have been in use on the newest classes of IN
ships for several years.

-- 
Richard Aiken

"Never insult anyone by accident."  Robert A. Heinlein