I'd have taken this to the IMTU forum except I can't see why most of these wouldn't work fine in the OTU. It occurs to me also that all that jump fuel might not be needed, at least not for a freighter on a regular run.
Item 1-A: draw on the High Guard II rule that a ship can take two turns to power up for jump and the TCS rule (page 39) that a ship can transfer fuel to another in two turns. The ship carries half the needed fuel for jump, connecting to a tanker to simultaneously draw in the second half while feeding the first half to the jump drive during the first turn of powering up, then disengaging from the tanker while burning the second half to initiate jump at the end of the second turn. The tanker would need tanks at least twice as big as the amount of fuel being sent over in order to transfer the needed volume in one turn, but that's not a serious handicap.
This allows a freighter to carry more cargo; the added space could be taken as cargo holds equipped with collapsible tanks, giving the freighter flexibility to use the tanker-assist method at the high quality starports and revert to the more standard fueling arrangement when visiting low quality starports. Also allows a war fleet to jump and arrive at target with partially filled tanks, giving them an ability to make a short jump out of the combat if needed.
(Following this idea, one could have an x-boat with the canon 40 dT fuel tank: 20 dT of power plant fuel for 2 weeks operation plus 20 dT jump fuel. The x-boat spends two turns revving up its jump drive per High Guard rules on breaking off by jump, but in the first turn it simultaneously draws 20 dT fuel from the tender while feeding its own 20 dT of jump fuel into the jump drive, then it jettisons the fuel line and draws on that newly delivered fuel to complete the fuel burn in the second turn and initiate jump. In this model, the X-boat comes in at 100 dT and has 9 dT available for a second stateroom and a bit of cargo, but it must draw on the x-boat tender to make any jump of more than 2 parsecs.)
Item 1-B: similar to 1-A but drawing on the drop tank rules to permit a ship to jump with no inboard jump fuel. If a ship can use drop tanks, then it can also suck fuel from a suitably equipped tanker via hosing, using the same methods that suck fuel quickly from the drop tank into the jump drive. Hosing can be ejected same way the drop tank is.
This allows a tanker to carry a lot more cargo (with, as in 1-A, the newly added cargo space equipped with collapsible tanks for flexibility). Also allows a warfleet to arrive on target with full tanks. It means a re-imagined X-boat could use the X-boat tender as its principal source of fuel, carrying only enough for the power plant (20 dT for two weeks operation) and using the saved space for communications equipment, data storage, room for high-priority passengers and such.
(Alternately, following this idea one could re-imagine the x-boat as an actual boat: a 65dT 12-meter diameter sphere with a telescoping boom extension deploying a conical jump net [Supplement 9, page 22] to fill it out to 100 dT and give it the classical x-boat ice-cream-cone profile during jump, the craft sucking in fuel from the tender as it might from a drop tank to perform the jump burn. On arrival, the craft draws in the boom and stows the jump net, becoming a more easily stored sphere.)
(Unrelated to that idea but possibly solving some of our problems with fitting boats in the tender, the rear cone could be treated as a 65 dT sphere socketed into a 40 dT demountable cone-shaped tank, with the sphere incapable of jump without the cone attached, but with the cone tank detaching to allow the two parts to be more easily loaded into an x-boat tender cargo bay.)
Item 2: MT, if one accepts Starship Operator's Manual description of the tech, has decided that the jump drive is at least in part a "high yield fusion power plant," consuming a prodigious (compared to the normal power plant) amount of fuel to generate a prodigious amount of power quickly, albeit at a much lower degree of efficiency than the normal plant. Unstated but presumably also important is that it accomplishes this with a vastly smaller plant than would be needed were the power generated by a normal power plant. Under this model, one could presumably dispense with the fuel and draw the power itself in from some external source, provided only that the external source provided the same volume of power and that the connections could be jettisoned quickly enough at the instant of jump.
How big the external power plant needs to be depends on how much power a jump drive is actually generating for all those dTons it burns: the consumption rate of a jump-1 drive for a 100 dT ship (10 dT) is about equal to that of a 10,000 EP power plant (10,000 dT over 28 days, or a bit under 10 dT in 40 minutes). Assuming the jump drive is AS efficient as the power plant in converting fuel to power, then you need an external power plant delivering EP equal to 100 times the mass of the ship times the jump rating. If it is less efficient, then you need less power plant. Of course, a power plant that big is mighty expensive: I'm getting something like Cr1120 times the mass of the ship times the jump rating to pay for the cost of that power plant, assuming the power plant is a TL15 model and in constant use 24/7. So, at minimum more than 20 times what it would cost to power the ship through option 1-B. Probably not an option unless there was some specific reason you wanted to power a jump by delivering power instead of fuel, but an interesting thought exercise.
Item 1-A: draw on the High Guard II rule that a ship can take two turns to power up for jump and the TCS rule (page 39) that a ship can transfer fuel to another in two turns. The ship carries half the needed fuel for jump, connecting to a tanker to simultaneously draw in the second half while feeding the first half to the jump drive during the first turn of powering up, then disengaging from the tanker while burning the second half to initiate jump at the end of the second turn. The tanker would need tanks at least twice as big as the amount of fuel being sent over in order to transfer the needed volume in one turn, but that's not a serious handicap.
This allows a freighter to carry more cargo; the added space could be taken as cargo holds equipped with collapsible tanks, giving the freighter flexibility to use the tanker-assist method at the high quality starports and revert to the more standard fueling arrangement when visiting low quality starports. Also allows a war fleet to jump and arrive at target with partially filled tanks, giving them an ability to make a short jump out of the combat if needed.
(Following this idea, one could have an x-boat with the canon 40 dT fuel tank: 20 dT of power plant fuel for 2 weeks operation plus 20 dT jump fuel. The x-boat spends two turns revving up its jump drive per High Guard rules on breaking off by jump, but in the first turn it simultaneously draws 20 dT fuel from the tender while feeding its own 20 dT of jump fuel into the jump drive, then it jettisons the fuel line and draws on that newly delivered fuel to complete the fuel burn in the second turn and initiate jump. In this model, the X-boat comes in at 100 dT and has 9 dT available for a second stateroom and a bit of cargo, but it must draw on the x-boat tender to make any jump of more than 2 parsecs.)
Item 1-B: similar to 1-A but drawing on the drop tank rules to permit a ship to jump with no inboard jump fuel. If a ship can use drop tanks, then it can also suck fuel from a suitably equipped tanker via hosing, using the same methods that suck fuel quickly from the drop tank into the jump drive. Hosing can be ejected same way the drop tank is.
This allows a tanker to carry a lot more cargo (with, as in 1-A, the newly added cargo space equipped with collapsible tanks for flexibility). Also allows a warfleet to arrive on target with full tanks. It means a re-imagined X-boat could use the X-boat tender as its principal source of fuel, carrying only enough for the power plant (20 dT for two weeks operation) and using the saved space for communications equipment, data storage, room for high-priority passengers and such.
(Alternately, following this idea one could re-imagine the x-boat as an actual boat: a 65dT 12-meter diameter sphere with a telescoping boom extension deploying a conical jump net [Supplement 9, page 22] to fill it out to 100 dT and give it the classical x-boat ice-cream-cone profile during jump, the craft sucking in fuel from the tender as it might from a drop tank to perform the jump burn. On arrival, the craft draws in the boom and stows the jump net, becoming a more easily stored sphere.)
(Unrelated to that idea but possibly solving some of our problems with fitting boats in the tender, the rear cone could be treated as a 65 dT sphere socketed into a 40 dT demountable cone-shaped tank, with the sphere incapable of jump without the cone attached, but with the cone tank detaching to allow the two parts to be more easily loaded into an x-boat tender cargo bay.)
Item 2: MT, if one accepts Starship Operator's Manual description of the tech, has decided that the jump drive is at least in part a "high yield fusion power plant," consuming a prodigious (compared to the normal power plant) amount of fuel to generate a prodigious amount of power quickly, albeit at a much lower degree of efficiency than the normal plant. Unstated but presumably also important is that it accomplishes this with a vastly smaller plant than would be needed were the power generated by a normal power plant. Under this model, one could presumably dispense with the fuel and draw the power itself in from some external source, provided only that the external source provided the same volume of power and that the connections could be jettisoned quickly enough at the instant of jump.
How big the external power plant needs to be depends on how much power a jump drive is actually generating for all those dTons it burns: the consumption rate of a jump-1 drive for a 100 dT ship (10 dT) is about equal to that of a 10,000 EP power plant (10,000 dT over 28 days, or a bit under 10 dT in 40 minutes). Assuming the jump drive is AS efficient as the power plant in converting fuel to power, then you need an external power plant delivering EP equal to 100 times the mass of the ship times the jump rating. If it is less efficient, then you need less power plant. Of course, a power plant that big is mighty expensive: I'm getting something like Cr1120 times the mass of the ship times the jump rating to pay for the cost of that power plant, assuming the power plant is a TL15 model and in constant use 24/7. So, at minimum more than 20 times what it would cost to power the ship through option 1-B. Probably not an option unless there was some specific reason you wanted to power a jump by delivering power instead of fuel, but an interesting thought exercise.
