[TML] Freelance Traveller Contest 2008-01: Lead to some other thoughts, questions and inventions about gravity generators.

[Richard Aiken]

On Wed, Apr 23, 2008 at 8:25 PM, Jerry W Barrington
<jerry.barrington at gmail.com> wrote:
> That would throw out cities that float by CG, airrafts and tanks that float
> by CG, constant 1 gee aboard ships & stations, zero gee rooms on the ground,
> grav-based manuever drives...

Myself, I've about settled on using "repulsors."  I don't know how
I'll handwave how they do it, but *what* they do is push against the
force of gravity and hold the boat/car/building they are attached to
aloft.  But they don't - usually - hold it very high!  Their
efficiency falls off with the inverse square law, though.  So in order
to get any altitude using *just* repulsors, you need a truly massive
system.  So massive that most flying craft either settle for flying
only a foot or so above the world surface or else use the repulsors
only as part of their necessary lift (getting the rest the old
fashioned way, with wings or rotors or directed thrust).

Note that this makes the Imperial Palace - suspended as it is in
midair over the center of Capital City - one of the Several Wonders of
Charted Space.  Which is as it should be . . . :-)

> While I'm at it, I don't like:
>    impossibly good sensors and lasers (performance is based on extent and
> area of aperture, there's limits you simply can't get around)

Agreed.  My Type S scouts use 30-dton modular sockets that allow them
to be specialized for particular missions, inserted through the aft
end, between the engines (which have been moved out into the
triangular edges of the hull shape).  The actual *scout* Scout uses a
module which has it's entire aft surface dedicated to sensor ports.
So it looks at planets/etc through it's own a$$.  :)

>    huge neo-feudal empires

Eh.  Me, I'm going for the nobles being a lot more powerful that canon
makes them.  My Third (or maybe Fourth . . . I'm currently intrigued
by what I've heard about the 1248 project) Imperium is more a set of
loosely-allied satrapies than it is a monolithic empire.

>    cultures that can remain essentially static for 5 millenia, will
> competing with each other

I will definitely divide the canon timeline by five.

>    mesons that decay at a set time

Yeah.  But did you ever hear the JTAS solution to that one?  The
particle concerned isn't actually a meson.  The physicist who
discovered it was simply named Dr. Bob Meson.  :-)

>    maneuver drives that run for a long time on almost no fuel

Agreed.  I'm going with total conversion fusion drives, which
nevertheless run as fusion air rams when within any sort of atmosphere
(to save on fuel).  They still burn hydrogen pretty quick, but they do
let you go from planet to jump limit and back a couple of times
between refills.

> Suffice to say, MTU would look nothing like OTU.

Then I guess I'm just basically giving the OTU a facelift . . . :P

-- 
Richard Aiken

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