Tanker Jump Points (or: how to make a subsector J-1 capable)

[Spinward Scout]

Hey Everybody!

I had an idea looking at the map for the Regina subsector. What if a corporation - say Tukera - came along and decided to make a refueling point in an empty hex between two worlds? I'm not sure if this has been brought up other than making a route across the Rift.

I'm thinking a very large Tanker (around 50,000 tons) jumps into the empty hex - or several even, then they use smaller 5,000 ton J-2 tankers to bring the fuel by hops. A decade down the line, this could build up into a large settlement, maybe even an advance base of sorts.

The questions are: Would you do this? Why would they do this - other than to extend the J-1 routes? Would it even work? What happens if you Jump to the empty hex and they're out of fuel?

I'm sure I could come up with other questions, but I want to see what everyone's opinion is.

SS

 

[jfetters]

I think while the concept is cool - and would definitely be of great use militarily, I can't see a corporation spending the money to haul fuel out into the middle of nowhere (literally) a few drops at a time to set up a non-self-perpetuating rest-stop. Between the cost of two jumps and the amount of fuel needed to keep a route like that alive for the large vessels, I just don't see that being cost effective. It may prove that a couple routes could pay for themselves like that, but I don't see it as economically sustainable.

A military refuel point (like the TNE "calibration points") on the other hand, would definitely be useful.

 

[deniable]

Agreed, it's more likely a military option. Arrival Vengeance mentions using a refuel point to cross the great rift.

I'm currently running a routing routine to pick routes between two systems. One of the things I want to try later is inserting two fuel points into Reft sector. This would allow a J4+ ship to cross the rift through Islands and New Islands sub-sectors. I have to determine if this is quicker than the route through corridor.

 

[Spinward Scout]

One of the things that came to mind was that if you make it commercial, you don't know how many ships are incoming at any given time. With the military option, that point is less - especially if the refuel point if classified.

I guess when I think about it, it's really not that different than having a Starport on a Size 1 (or less) planetoid with no Gas Giant insystem and the population being the people running the Starport. Everything pretty much has to be imported to run something like that anyway. Give the Navy 'priority fueling and docking access' and you have a protection rack... er... system defense.

How about a Modular Tanker Station? Easy addition of extra tankage. Hotel accomodations module. Or even a Modular Starport Station? I'm sure after 1,000 years, someone in the Imperium came up with a self-sufficient plan for putting a Starport someplace Frontier-ish.

Hmmm, I think I just gave myself a project...

 

[jfetters]

Well I was thinking a bit about that today - One way for a commercial venture to make this happen is to charge well above standard rates for the fuel. I think this could only work if the route that this station connects can generate an amazing amount of revenue.

 

[robject]

As far as non-replenishable goes... how about rigging a big old jump drive to a huge ice asteroid, and jumping it into position?

Or, if you're taking the long view, stick a little maneuver drive on it and wait for it to take up a proper position...

 

[jfetters]

As far as non-replenishable goes... how about rigging a big old jump drive to a huge ice asteroid, and jumping it into position?

Or, if you're taking the long view, stick a little maneuver drive on it and wait for it to take up a proper position...

Oddly enough, I had an idea a while ago about something similar - a bunch of iceballs are sent into the rift pre-virus via sublight, thus creating a commercial stepping stone path across, which would then be used by some groups to get from the Regency to the old Imperium.

What would the mass be on one of those things? Meaning, how much water does an ice comet contain for refueling purposes?

 

[Captain Midnight]

One of the things that came to mind was that if you make it commercial, you don't know how many ships are incoming at any given time. With the military option, that point is less - especially if the refuel point if classified.

You could require that a ship make a reservation in advance in order to use the refueling point. I'm thinking of either selling single-use certificates through the corporate sales facilities (perhaps saying something like "Bearer may purchase X tons of refined fuel between the following dates: XXX-XXXX to YYY-YYYY"), or you might sell memberships, and only members get to use the facility. This lets the owner of the facility forecast demand to some degree, and lets them make sure to stock enough fuel to meet the anticipated need. It's also not like the fuel is going to spoil if it isn't used, either.

It's going to be rare for the demand and the astrography to make such a thing profitable, but if the situation is right (and the GM rules that jumping to a point in deep space is permissible), it could work. I'd expect that J-1 traffic wouldn't be enough to make it profitable, but a station located between worlds 4 parsecs apart, thereby making trade between them possible with J-2 vessels... that might be a moneymaker. You might also think about offering repair facilities, or some of the other amenities normally associated with an actual port.

You could treat it for construction purposes like a highport, and GT:Starports gives detailed construction guidelines.

 

[flykiller]

The questions are: Would you do this? Why would they do this - other than to extend the J-1 routes?

well you can bet there will be one at spinward marches / mora / 0710. this would allow j6 comms in two weeks between mora and trin. right next to palique, plenty of fuel at nexine, puts palique right on a normal high-priority route between the major worlds.

there could be other places where deep-space refueling is thought necessary. if there's a major trade route that is entirely j1 and j2, except for one j3 hop that's hard to avoid, there'll be a refueling point to allow all the cargo vessels to be j2 and carry more cargo. plenty of profit to pay for that if the trade route is busy.

political reasons too. "every night charlie blows up this bridge, and every day we rebuild it just so the generals can say the road to da nang is still open."

make a good game. "soldier. do you know who the commanding officer is?" "yeah."

 

[aramis]

I once worked out the costs of getting to the islands. Cheap way is to skip the peripheral system, and put the way points at J2 in from each end.

This allows much cheaper J2 transit of the extra fuel, and a 3 week run for J4, 2 week for J6.

So, crossing rifts is another reason.

 

[deniable]

I'm just trying a fast comms route through Reft, so I've put two fuel stops in at 0719 and 2329. I've also added the comet at 3234 Deneb from Arrival Vengeance. This doesn't help traffic from Capital to the Spinward Marches or Deneb, but will help traffic from between two systems in the 'shadow' of the rift, such as Dlan and Deneb. An extreme example is between Reft 0416 and Reft 2731. Jump 6 takes about 6 jumps with and 22 jumps without the extra fuel stops. [1]

I can see these being used for fast military couriers and similar operations where speed outweighs cost, but most of the major hub / backbone routes seem to neatly avoid the rifts. Given the position of Dlan, if Dulinor were to take over and move the capitol to Dlan, this would be necessary.

[1] If anyone's interested:
With the fuel stops:
Reft0719 Reft1123 Reft1429 Reft1729 Reft2329 Reft2731

Without:
trojanreach3219 trojanreach2824 trojanreach2527 trojanreach2233 trojanreach1736 riftspanreaches1502 riftspanreaches1608 riftspanreaches1914 riftspanreaches2219 riftspanreaches2521 riftspanreaches3121 riftspanreaches3219 verge0520 verge0925 verge1426 verge1821 verge2115 verge2410 verge2406 Reft2740 Reft3035 Reft2731

 

[robject]

Oddly enough, I had an idea a while ago about something similar - a bunch of iceballs are sent into the rift pre-virus via sublight, thus creating a commercial stepping stone path across, which would then be used by some groups to get from the Regency to the old Imperium.

What would the mass be on one of those things? Meaning, how much water does an ice comet contain for refueling purposes?

I suspect the answer is: whatever size of an iceball you send in.

So, take the Sky Raiders as a guide, and make sure they send in ten-billion-ton iceballs, and pretend 50% of it is useable. Good for a start.

Another idea is to calculate the volume of water on the surface of a size 4 or 3 or 2 world with hydrographics 1 or 2, and send in an iceball with that volume. That should do ya.

So, maybe, the volume of a world with diameter 4001 km minus the volume of a world with diameter 4000 km?

 

[jfetters]

THere you go! That's an interesting approach.

Something else that became shaken out of my head from your response was looking at the sizes of the smaller bodies - a body from a size 0 or R belt, or a size S world.

Looking at the TNE rules (the most accessible to me at the moment), ring bodies are under 1km in diameter, asteroids are under 200km, and size S diameters are between 200 and 799 km.

From there, we can calculate the volume of the object (assuming a sphere for simplicity's sake) to figure out a) how much energy would be needed to move the thing into place (either by jump or by normal propulsion) AND how much one of these things can serve.

So a mid size ice ball from ring (say, 500m in diameter) would yeild close to 66 million cubic meters in volume (again for a regular sphere, if I have my math right - an actual asteroid would vary greatly based on its irregularities).

And given the size, something of size R or much smaller is probably the only thing that could be effectively moved. And even that could be problematic.

 

[robject]

Sure thing.

By the way, this is also how I calculated how the Ziru Sirka may have terraformed some worlds - by bombarding it with enough ice to bring up the water level. For example, from a 3 to a 4, making it eligible to become an Ag world.

Assuming the ZS took the long view, of course.

 

[Whipsnade]

Gents,

The original "gap" between the Islands Cluster and the Imperium (on either side) was 6 parsecs. It's stated quite explicitly in A:5 TCS that jump6 ships can reach the Islands Cluster directly and jump3 ships can do so "with tanks".

When MT rolled in and DGP published all those maps, they changed those 6 parsec gaps to 7 and 8 parsecs for reasons unknown. I guess they could so they did; not a very good reason but an entirely human one.

Many, many, many years ago, back when dinosaurs ruled the Earth and i was running multiple TCS tournies, I budgeted a Sternbahn project for the Islands. Using HG2's construction rules I built a mid-Rift "port" and a fleet of jump3 tankers to supply it. IIRC, the price came out to a little under 25% of either Amondiage's or Santerre's naval budget. A consortium or the 57th Century's Island version of the 20th Century's European Common Market(1) could easily swing the cost of mid-rift fuel stops in CT's jump3 gaps.


Have fun,
Bill

1 - many of the TCS tournies I ran ended up as coalition victories rather than single polity victories. Why a group of 3 or 4 Island powers wouldn't see the benefits of both collective security and increased contact with the outside universe is beyond me. Then again, the Islands were created solely as an isolated "sandbox" in which to play strategic level HG2 ship combat and not as a plausible and/or likely situation.

P.S. When musing about moving an "ice-teroid" to a mid-rift location, check out the story around the monitor Empress Troyune(sic) in CT's "Fighting Ships" supplement. There are rider tenders who can "lift" HUGE numbers of dTons. One of them could easily place lots and lots of ice where it's most needed.

 

[Jeff M. Hopper]

Just an additional point from an essay I wrote a while ago:

. Empty hexes are only empty relative to a hex with a world in it. The empty hex will still have stray comets, clouds of gas or dust, and other nonluminous and dim objects that are difficult to detect (some as large as brown dwarf stars). Most empty hexes are not mapped because these objects are of too little economic or strategic value to justify the effort. How empty is an empty hex? Based on average separation of comets within the Oort Cloud of 20 AU and saying that the separation of cometary bodies in interstellar space will be greater by a factor of a thousand, gives a general separation of 20,000 AU for cometary bodies in an empty hex. This means that there will be about 100 cometary bodies in an empty hex. That's quite a few, however even by randomly jumping into different locations of that empty hex means that you would only encounter one of these objects accidentally on a result of a 4d6 roll of 24. Possible, just not very likely.
So how do you go about finding these? Well, using both active and passive sensors. The active has to use a pulse of energy and then wait for a return signal reflected back at the emitter while the passive has to wait for an object to pass in front of a source of light, like a star. Now the average time it takes for these sensors to give good information is 60 days, which is a reflection of how much empty there is between objects in an empty hex. To fully survey an empty hex, you have to do it in sections of about 20,000 AU across - each taking an average of 60 days to check. Factoring travel time using a jump drive and refueling and maintenance, a single empty hex can be completely surveyed in about 21.5 years by one ship. So to survey an entire subsector of empty hexes, like in a rift, would take a single ship 1720 years. This is why most empty hexes remain unexplored.

Now, having ships cruising through empty hexes searching for stray comets makes sense if you want your waystation to be more economically viable. It also provides a good punishment duty for Scout or Navy personnel conducting the search.

Hauling fuel or ice into an empty hex and dropping it off is doable, but it may not be the first choice of the person building the waystation.

 

[jfetters]

Many, many, many years ago, back when dinosaurs ruled the Earth and i was running multiple TCS tournies, I budgeted a Sternbahn project for the Islands. Using HG2's construction rules I built a mid-Rift "port" and a fleet of jump3 tankers to supply it. IIRC, the price came out to a little under 25% of either Amondiage's or Santerre's naval budget. A consortium or the 57th Century's Island version of the 20th Century's European Common Market(1) could easily swing the cost of mid-rift fuel stops in CT's jump3 gaps.

...

P.S. When musing about moving an "ice-teroid" to a mid-rift location, check out the story around the monitor Empress Troyune(sic) in CT's "Fighting Ships" supplement. There are rider tenders who can "lift" HUGE numbers of dTons. One of them could easily place lots and lots of ice where it's most needed.

Thanks, Bill... I figured someone out there had to have done some calculations on this before. Interesting point about the Empress. I went back to S9 and took a look - they used the 1,000,000 ton fleet tender Gorodish to move it two parsecs. It would be fascinating to find out more about the tender and the riders. The only million ton ship I have ever seen detailed in the Exondias Starport.

Now, having ships cruising through empty hexes searching for stray comets makes sense if you want your waystation to be more economically viable. It also provides a good punishment duty for Scout or Navy personnel conducting the search.

Hauling fuel or ice into an empty hex and dropping it off is doable, but it may not be the first choice of the person building the waystation.

Cool - is the quote from the JTAS article? I am also envisioning a bunch of "amateur prospectors" in the worlds bordering the rift. A bunch of amateur (or not) astronomers scanning space to look for those objects, maybe sell the information to someone who can exploit it.

 

[jfetters]

Sure thing.

By the way, this is also how I calculated how the Ziru Sirka may have terraformed some worlds - by bombarding it with enough ice to bring up the water level. For example, from a 3 to a 4, making it eligible to become an Ag world.

Assuming the ZS took the long view, of course.

I think it's guaranteed that they took a long view. I ran some quick FFS calculations (as that the only spreadsheet I had handy at the time) and found that a J1 drive to move a 500,000 km diameter rock would cost something in the neighborhood of 400 billion credits. Not very cost effective...

 

[Spinward Scout]

Wow, I'm glad you all like working on this!



The refueling point I was thinking of designing was empty hex 1804 in the Regina subsector between Efate and Boughene and Uakye and Menorb. This seemed like a good spot to start as it would extend the Regina Spur into the Pixie Cluster (or whatever you call them IYTU). And you can get imports and replenishment from all four worlds converging on that refuel point. Two of the worlds have good Hydrographics and one has a Gas Giant - and none below a Starport C. And three of those are Tech Level D. (your rules version may vary in these stats - I'm looking at The Traveller Book) Not to mention that all four probably have Oort clouds to mine as well.

I'd have to say that Starport C would have to be the minimum for this type of thing. Possibly Starport B just to have the Refined Fuel aspect.

What about an artificial planetary ring/wheel without the planet? No bigger than Size 1. With modular fuel tankage as 'spokes' of the wheel. They could even extend 'outside' the wheel. Or stacked above or below the 'ecliptic' edge of the wheel. All the gathered comets could go 'inside' the wheel. Would it be enough tonnage to be a gravity well? You could enclose it as a sphere later after it shows to be successful or not.

I've got to write all of my thoughts down or I'll forget half of it. Time to dig out GURPS Starports.

 

[robject]

I think it's guaranteed that they took a long view. I ran some quick FFS calculations (as that the only spreadsheet I had handy at the time) and found that a J1 drive to move a 500,000 km diameter rock would cost something in the neighborhood of 400 billion credits. Not very cost effective...

Wow. Sounds like 'twould be better to design some sort of ice-prospecting bot that flung its finds at the target location...