[TML] [Merchant Shipping] Some ideas I came up with to make merchant shipping more interesing

[Tom B]

>  > That is neighborhood generation, but not true microgeneration.
>
>  That's all I've been arguing for.  What's I've been arguing against is
>  huge remote plants in a transcontinental (or transplanetary) power grid.

I still think in many places, for reasons that I've cited in other
posts, you'd find central (to a city, to a region) power generation.
There are practical aspects of control that would make such an
approach very attractive for government types 6+. And there are a lot
of those in Traveller.

>  They're fusion plants.  There is no criticality threshold where it is
>  possible for the reaction to become uncontrolled and self-sustaining,
>  even if someone deliberately modifies the reactor.  They appear to
>  operate by aneutronic p-p fusion, so unlikely to even cause other
>  materials to become radioactive.  What special terrorism threat do you
>  see them posing?

Well, I'm not sure what a fusion plant can be modified to do or not
do. Do we have plants like Traveller uses running? Is there no way to
make them dangerous?

>  Or do you just mean as targets, terrorising the neighbourhood with the
>  threats of inconvenience and food spoilage?

They could well be targets for denial of service (which could be more
than annoying, it could be life threatening) attacks. There could be
ways to abuse their power generation capacity to damage other parts of
the grid (some form of cascade failure). There may be other
alternatives - like borrowing one to power something annoying like an
energy weapon or something.

I think you underestimate the issues.

There also may well be health and safety issues that have to do with
poor management or maintenance. If, instead of having to maintain a
few of these, I have to maintain one per neighborhood, it is quite
possible that I increase the odds of unfortunate accidents
unacceptably.

You can handwave away all risk by claiming foolproof control systems,
but I've yet to see that in any modern power grid and I don't really
think we'll see that anytime in our lifetimes. Traveller features TL
far enough advanced that who can say, yet when you look at the sorts
of technology as represented in canon, it doesn't strike me (for the
most part) as terribly capable or fool proof. This comes down to a
matter of personal taste I suspect.

>  Though I expect numerous households to also have at least a small
>  energy bank, 100 kW-hr or so.  They would be extremely useful for
>  quickly replenishing vehicle power, but would probably also function
>  as a household UPS as well as averaging power draw to reduce the need
>  for much more expensive power cabling.

Why do you suspect that, with energy storage so cheap, superconducting
(or other) forms of cabling are so much more expensive? That's the
puzzlement. I'm unware of what source you would derive figures for the
cost of an electricity grid in Traveller from. Power plants?
Certainly. But the grid itself? Some odd Supplement 17: Electrical
Grids that I somehow missed in my collection?

>  Following up on that last point: Really, the total cost of cabling
>  almost certainly outweighs all the costs of the power plant itself
>  here.

Why?

>  > But do hundred GW plants have better efficiency than hundred MW
>  > plants?
>
>  Fuel efficiency is a non-issue, other efficiencies seem to be rather
>  minor.

It's not *just* fuel efficiency. I'm not sure if the rating in all
Traveller systems is identical, but do the # of staff required to
support X MW (or GW) of generation remain the same regardless of if
you construe the plant as one large one or a bunch of small ones? I'd
have thought that you might well have to involve more staff to support
more distributed generation, which means more qualified people, which
means more expense, which means greater cost for electricity as a
consequence of manpower costs. (OR costs for robotic supervision) You
definitely have to provide security on more sites, even if just to
ensure low-end criminals and vandals don't just mess with the plants.