Nobody's ever discussed what happens when a fully-charged Collector gets cracked open.
I'd rather not be there when it happens.
Annic Nova: review and ideas
- Thread starter jackleg
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Nobody's ever discussed what happens when a fully-charged Collector gets cracked open.
I'd rather not be there when it happens.
A battery to power 100 MW for a bit over a week, say 200 h, is 20 000 MWh:
Much too large and expensive to fit into a small ship...
The battery would also require a few hundred engineers.
Note: A 20 000 MWh = 20 000 000 kWh battery is about 1.5 million Tesla PowerWall 2. At about $6500 and 114 kg a piece that would be 10 billion dollars and 170 000 tonnes.
Sure, batteries as they exist now are not going to work for us.
This gets into what IS an EP in HG terms, I take it to be 250 MW x 1000 seconds or 250 Gigawatt-seconds. Multiply x 36EP capacity, 9 Terawatt-seconds or 2.5 gigawatt-hours. Pretty crazy power especially for a TL9 invention. 8 dtons for your example.
Of course it's a capacitor so no way could it be used for a battery for a week. But there is some crazy energy density already baked into our system, I like rolling with it cause again play options.
I was reading where Tesla battery tech is currently 250 watt-hours per kg., but they expect to get to 400 watt-hours/kg within a few years. While I expect that functional levels are not going to necessarily follow a Moore's Law curve and hit some material technology and physics snags, I don't think we can easily dismiss the advancing power of tech dev. Comparing current battery tech to Traveller TLs would be something like projecting incremental improvement using the steam engine as the baseline tech.
The reality is we're running a game here, so the more relevant question is why do our games have the assumptions they do and does breaking or stretching the assumptions provide game value/flavor or do damage taking them to their logical conclusions?
It's not watt-hours that count, it's play-hours.
Well I've thought about, more along the lines of perhaps I should load up capacitors as warheads and looking into capacitor grenades (or capnades, I guess).
I got that number in the post above, one dton of capacitor is 9 terawatt-seconds or 2.5 gigawatt-hours. So, 1 for 1 9 terawatt-seconds to joules, let's go to Ye Olde Boom Table.
http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/usefultables.php
Hmm, that works out to be a little more powerful then a Casaba Howitzer Bolt, or something like a 2.5 kt nuke.
The Allamu made a bright shiny explosion, I'm sure.
Handy for scuttling too, or at least detonating the jump capacitors if you have power left but not enough fuel to jump.
Of course that's pretty weak sauce compared to a proper nuke that you would have to fit into a much smaller space, and you would have the odd experience of having to charge your missiles before firing them.
OTOH they would be perfectly safe for storage, non-radioactive and avoid tritium half-life issues
THIS.
The point is to get outcomes that are consistent with both the assumptions of the game universe and with common sense. In order to do this, you need to discover those assumptions and determine why they are in place.
AnotherDilbert
SOC-14 1K
Then we can go directly to:
Code:
FM-A1666J2-F82900-45009-0 MCr 1 325 1 920 Dton
bearing 1 11 1 Crew=37
batteries 1 11 1 TL=15
Cargo=270 Fuel=828 EP=115,2 Agility=0
Dual Occupancy 271 1 656
USP # Dton Cost
Hull, Streamlined Custom A 1 920
Configuration Needle/Wedge 1 230
Scoops Streamlined 2
Armour 15 F 307 553
Jump Drive Z 6 1 125 240
Manoeuvre D Z 6 1 47 96
Power Plant Z 6 1 73 192
Fuel, #J, #weeks J-4, 4 weeks 4 828
Purifier 1 12 0
Bridge 1 38 10
Computer m/9fib J 1 26 200
Staterooms 4 16 2
Staterooms, Half 33 66 8
Cargo 271
Bay Missile, 50 t 9 1 50 13
Triple Turret Beam 4 1 1 3
Single Turret Fusion 5 1 2 2
Triple Turret 7/bat Sand 8 1 7 5 7 mounts organised into 1 battery.
Nuclear Damper 9 1 20 50
Meson Screen 2 1 30 50
Nominal Cost MCr 1 656,00 Sum: 271 1 656
Class Cost MCr 347,76 Valid ≥0 ≥0
Ship Cost MCr 1 324,80But we can charge the jump drives built-in capacitors to store 1920 × 6 × 0.5% × 36 = 2073 EP for 18 turns of agility 6, for free. Once the power runs out, spend some time in the reserve to recharge, and go again.
Dirt cheap and very effective. No regular ship can compete.
Note that it's a J-4 & 6 G armoured warship with lots of space free...
Again, I'm not saying it's unreasonable, just making regular ships obsolete, and very definitely a house-rule.
For a real exploit, use a small black globe and fire nukes into the globe to power the ship. Barely any power plant needed...
Agreed, but if the jump drive is damaged, then spinals are hitting and the ship will incinerate quite nicely anyway, no need to add drama...
AnotherDilbert
SOC-14 1K
Even better, since it is defined in HG with 20 minute = 1200 second turns. So an EPturn is 250 MW × 1200 s / 3600 s/h = 83 MWh.
One Dt of capacitors would contain 36 × 83 MWh = 3 GWh.
AnotherDilbert
SOC-14 1K
I quite agree with kilemall, but the trick is to make rule-systems that are expressive without being crazy complicated. KISS.
Hence I would say avoid too complicated power games.
LBB5 is reasonably expressive, without being too complicated IMHO.
Otherwise we would all be playing TNE and discussing the finer points of FF&S?
We're mostly on the same page here, though I prefer the LBB2 drives and combat paradigm -- Jump is big and costly, maneuver is small and cheap but isn't necessarily decisive in combat.
The problem in this case is that LBB5's power rules aren't granular enough for edge cases (while LBB2 studiously averts its gaze from the topic). That's fine for nearly everything one would want to do.
Underpinning this is the assumption that power is cheap and easy because there's fusion. In LBB5, any power requirement less than 250MW (1EP) in a starship is treated as a rounding error (small craft maneuver drives are the exception). Even the power for 1G acceleration is free -- it's already subsumed in the minimum power plant requirement, and you don't save any power by not installing a maneuver drive.
The rules thus don't have to cover cases where "energy is not easy" is a design constraint, because in-universe it almost never is. This is distinct from "energy is not easy" resulting from a crisis (power plant failure, stranding after a misjump, fuel tank damage, and so forth).
As a case in point, the International Space Station has a pressurized volume of about 68 Traveller Td, and uses about 102 kilowatts. (This is the average power output of its solar array, buffered by batteries for the about 1/3 of the time it's in Earth's shadow). A Traveller spacecraft that size needs 175 megawatts baseline power...
Obviously, artificial gravity isn't free, and neither is the implicit radiation-shielding field that keeps spacers from getting cancer*. But 1700 times as much power as TL 7.5 basic life support and climate control seems a little steep. It really doesn't matter for most Traveller ships, since they'll always have a power plant that puts out that kind of energy just ticking over at idle speed. It only matters when you're building one that doesn't have drives and weapons that use power in quarter-gigawatt increments.
*But in most versions of Traveller, mass is free because drive effects are volume based. You could add layers of lead shielding around everything and it wouldn't make a performance difference...
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Hmm, those Traveller hulls at least by Striker standards are battleship level so quite a bit of radiation protection there, and then all those fuel tanks wrap around the whole hull (given how HG does surface damage) which in RL wouldn't be a bad double duty to rad blocking.
Bottom line, I'm not feeling the need for a radiation shield. Maybe a low powered thing to drive off nasty charged ions.
Turns out (from the other thread) that artificial gravity takes a LOT of power compared to basic thermal control and air scrubbers. You can run basic life support for quite a while on batteries, but not artificial gravity.
Sure, if you are an MT/TNE guy.
In my head I paid for artificial gravity with the maneuver drive, particularly the inertial compensator component for high Gs.
Besides, I really like the idea of having RTGs on board for emergency power, and having to make hard choices between the radio and life support.
Nice for drama.
The thing that most SF (and likely most Traveller games) miss is that if you're at the point of deciding between the radio and life support, the gravity's been off for weeks or months... you should't exercise 'cause it'll strain the life support, and free-fall will take a toll on your body no matter what you do. Strength decays over time (temporarily), and endurance will end up taking a permanent hit.
Condottiere
SOC-14 5K
Currently, artificial gravity is integrated (or not) in the hull.
Inertial compensation is still mythical.
The only way with surviving a shipwide blackout is if the crew can isolate and energize a small section of the starship.
Inertial compensation is still mythical.
The only way with surviving a shipwide blackout is if the crew can isolate and energize a small section of the starship.
Kininur Adventure explicitly mentioned inertial compensation. That doesn't mean it's automatically in EVERY artificial gravity setup. Could be a TL-x thing.
IMTU I do tailsitter 1-G for TL8-9, mess with the M-drive G TLs so it's
TL8 1G
TL9 2-3G
TL10 4-5G
TL11+ +1G possible, 3% tons per extra G
Inertial compensation/artificial gravity starts at TL10, 1G compensation and +1G per TL compensation afterwards. That means the fast movers will still be tailsitters but trad bellylanders start becoming possible.
Travel in excess of compensation/tailsitting and you get the encumbrance effects of higher grav per excess G, past that effectively pinned. Plus the loose things risk.
Staterooms should probably be a bulkhead in most instances for both safety and security, and be a separate life support section with localized power/processing. Maybe arguably mini-airlocks.
Most to-hit starship tables don't address stateroom hits explicitly, I do.
mike wightman
SOC-14 10K
Check out CT S7 - many of the capsule descriptions mention inertial compensators as well as grav plates (note I am paraphrasing for brevity), it is also worthy of note that the far trader capsule description also mentions a separate jump governor...
AnotherDilbert
SOC-14 1K
This defines inertial compensators, if not the name:
LBB5'79 said:
Condottiere
SOC-14 5K
Mythical in the sense we know there's something out there, but no idea how it actually is implemented, or installed.
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