General Collector Discussion

[mike wightman]

Renaissance is TL3.

Science in the Renaissance - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Renaissance technology - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Your list of Curies through to Einstein - TL5 - these are the various threads that have to come together to understand and then build nuclear reactors.

Nuclear reactors TL6 - the T5 experimental TL3 is not even remotely possible.

 

[Condottiere]

Technological Level Table
TL Lvl Historical Era IC CE Remarks
TL 0-9
0 Xlow Neolithic Age TBD 6000 BCE Polished tools, fire, agriculture.
1 Vlow Bronze Age TBD 3500 BCE Water power, abacus.
1.3 Vlow Iron Age TBD 1300 BCE Wheel, writing.
2 Vlow Age of Sail TBD 1500 CE Sailing ships, printing,
3 Vlow Industrial Revolution TBD 1730 CE Coal, steam, calculus, musket.
4 Low Mechanized Age TBD 1900 CE Electricity, skyscrapers, image capture, antiseptics.
5 Low Broadcast Age TBD 1930 CE Oil, electronic calculators, machine guns.
6 Low Atomic Age TBD 1940 CE Broadcast video, computers.

 

[Spinward Flow]

People with "big brains" who were ahead of their time came up with the theories of radiation and nuclear power around TL=4.
Actual attempts at research into nuclear engineering didn't start until TL=5.
The first successful uses of nuclear power didn't happen until TL=6.

The theories can come early.
The engineering to test those theories though ...

 

[Condottiere]

Depending on the edition, it's conceivable that da Vinci can build an early prototype of an electrical engine; he certainly shouldn't have much trouble with mechanical devices and steam power, if he conceives of the idea.

He's a fortress engineer, so he could figure out how to build a skyscraper.

He's interested in biology, so he could design a microscope, collect fungus and molds, and discover penicillin.

Electronic calculators may be a tad out of his reach, considering the tools available to him at that time.

 

[Spinward Flow]

Electronic calculators may be a tad out of his reach, considering the tools available to him at that time.

He would have done it using fluidics for calculations, rather than electronics.

 

[aramis]

Renaissance is TL3.

Science in the Renaissance - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Renaissance technology - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Your list of Curies through to Einstein - TL5 - these are the various threads that have to come together to understand and then build nuclear reactors.

Nuclear reactors TL6 - the T5 experimental TL3 is not even remotely possible.

A TL3 nuclear reactor can be created - after all, there's a natural reactor in Africa. ( https://blogs.scientificamerican.co...ral-fission-reactors-in-gabon-western-africa/ )

It's not practical, it's insanely lethal, but it's doable.

 

[Condottiere]

Mechanical calculators are possible, and the Greeks appear to have had made a rather sophisticated one with gears.

The electronic ones mentioned in the technological level table, may be out of reach for da Vinci.

 

[Grav_Moped]

I have a problem with that, could see 2 TL at the outside…

If that's true, then you can have:

• TL=14 Experimental Anti-Matter Power Plants and Artificial Intelligence
• TL=15 Prototype Anti-Matter Power Plants and Artificial Intelligence
• TL=16 Early Anti-Matter Power Plants and Artificial Intelligence

Fortunately, all three of those things are absolute bunk.

My thought is that you can only do research into +1 TL above what you've already got, and even that is cutting edge experimental (and by no means ready for prime time mass production under any circumstances). You need to be successful in LOTS of different areas before the baseline TL goes up by +1 for the entire world thanks to the diffusion of research and development into the broader public/private sphere.

Any of the precocious TL stages are painful.

For Jump Drives, it means no jump governor (burn all fuel regardless of distance) and you need a far more expensive hull. Sort of a moot point for Collectors, since they act like ungoverned drives by design and by the time you can do Collectors, any matched Jump Drive is at least Standard.
On the other hand, the cost, tonnage, and efficiency modifiers to the Collectors themselves hurt.

The "Experimental" TL stage REALLY hurts. . .

 

[Grav_Moped]

Well, my current IMTU explanation for Annic Nova is that it fell into the OTU from a parallel universe with different laws of physics -- that is, the First Edition LBB rules apply there. Some of that universe is trapped inside the accumulators, so they still work "normally" (that is, as described in DA1/JTAS) in the OTU -- but if they're ever completely powered down and disassembled for the purpose of reverse-engineering them, they'll quit working like that.

"What do you mean, 'the accumulator imploded'?!"

 

[Grav_Moped]

Reaching back a bit (and I forgot that I left the thread with the preceding comments)....

It occurs to me that another way that Annic Nova and its Collectors are an artifact of the LBB2 '77 rules are that if you don't have a military or scout ship, this is really the only way to safely get around in regions where there aren't any starports of Class B or better. The rules didn't yet provide for onboard fuel processors, and '77 rules didn't have Jump Governors so you'd burn all of your Jump fuel every time. Nor did they have drop tanks.

Above Jump-3, there's no way to carry your return fuel with you; and even at Jump-3, it's a huge payload hit to do so.

Drop tanks make it easy. Safe wilderness refueling even more so.

 

[Grav_Moped]

Quoting myself from a discussion of shifting the power generation function of Jump Drives from the drives themselves to the power plant running in extreme overload:

The requirement for Jump from the power plant is only 2EP/Jn/100Td. The capacitors hold 18EP/Jn/100Td, and need to be fully charged to Jump. Those extra 16EP/Jn/100Td have to come from somewhere, and the only plausible energy source is the jump fuel burn (or input from a black globe, if present).

The nominal requirement for the Jump fuel may just be that if you're charging the caps from a black globe instead of overdriving the power plant, you still need to dump that fuel through the drives as a total-loss cooling method to keep things from going boom. Perhaps it's not absolutely necessary to do this, but nobody's tested to find out exactly how little fuel is actually needed for cooling. Each failed attempt requires expending a difficult-if-not-impossible-to-replace black globe generator, after all.

It's not consistent with Collector-Drive powered Jump Drives though. Maybe those use the canopy as a heat sink/radiator, explaining why you can't just unplug the accumulator and leave the canopy behind? //handwaves frantically because Collectors already break physics under most rule sets after 1977//

Wait. That makes too much sense. You need to minimize volume to get into Jumpspace efficiently, but once there the canopy can be extended (because the canopy material has the properties of a hull's jump grid in addition to its ability to pull energy out of nowhere) and used as a radiator. So you can't use just the "magic particle tank" as a small replacement for the normal jump fuel load.

That's been a recurring question: why can't you just use a pre-charged accumulator as a power source for your Jump Drive, without needing to carry the collector canopy as well? Someone else could hook up a bunch of spare accumulators to canopy assemblies to charge them ahead of time, and then trade a charged one for your discharged one -- enabling you to jump again almost immediately instead of having to wait a week to recharge your own.

The answer here is that the canopy is deployed in jump space as a radiator, substituting for the part of the jump fuel expenditure that would have been used to cool the power plant and jump drive.

No, the thermodynamics doesn't really work out, but I think it's a plausible handwave to explain why the canopy has to stay with the accumulator.

 

[Condottiere]

I don't know about Classic, but I do believe you have to close the canopy in order to jump.

 

[mike wightman]

I think people have an image of the canopy based on the artwork rather than the actual dimensions. It is one kilometre in diameter and takes an hour to unfurl.

 

[Spinward Flow]

The funny thing is ... if you're using the MgT2 rules for a Collector, you wind up actually wanting a dispersed structure "jump sled" that operates very much like the ANNIC NOVA were you don't bring the ship in from the jump point, but instead let shuttles do all the normal space maneuvering and transfers. That way, you keep the ship out past the 100 diameters jump point and just use high-G small craft that you can load up with modules.

To be honest, having a TL=14-1=13 Prototype Collector with a Late Jump disadvantage that keeps the ship 150+ diameters out from destinations (where presumably the pirates wouldn't be roaming) might be something of a sweet spot for a merchant transport that uses "blockade runner" spec small craft as interface movers between ship and surface ... because the ship can't be accelerating while the collector is working for a week, but its subcraft can maneuver away just fine. The savings in fuel tankage alone would make the tradeoff worth it, exchanging fuel tank tonnage for small craft and extra crew tonnage. Also opens up the opportunity for a heavily modularized starship design if you want to go the merchant ship route with it. Even a TL=14-2=12 Early Prototype Collector might still make for a decent "a week in every port" merchantman (based out of a castle in the sky, so to speak).

Hmmm ... I might need to dip my toes into the MgT2 pool to see if there's even a credible possibility here to be pursued.

 

[mike wightman]

I suggested that MgT should include the drawback of requiring proximity to a star for the lower TL collectors to bring them in line with the 1d weeks charging time of the original.

For the truly masochistic you could vary the distance requirement based on the class of star it is collecting from.

 

[Grav_Moped]

I don't know about Classic, but I do believe you have to close the canopy in order to jump.

Yes. The trick here is that I'm "adding" that it doesn't stay closed once in jumpspace. It might need to be re-closed shortly before normal-space re-entry to ensure the jump bubble collapses evenly.

 

[Spinward Flow]

The trick here is that I'm "adding" that it doesn't stay closed once in jumpspace.

Um ... the jump bubble would need to be BIGGER then ...
A LOT BIGGER ...

Like "bigger enough to impact performance of the jump drive" BIGGER ...

Once you're in jump space, you can't "alter the dimensions" of your craft without incurring SERIOUS opportunities for mishap (starting with destruction of the entire ship and getting progressively darker from there...).



Total protonic reversal ... that's BAD™ ...

 

[Grav_Moped]

I think people have an image of the canopy based on the artwork rather than the actual dimensions. It is one kilometre in diameter and takes an hour to unfurl.

Absolutely. It's never depicted with the canopy deployed. Also, for what it's worth, I think the side view sectional drawing of the canopy on the deck plans cannot be accurate -- the support arms don't have enough hinges/segments.... LOL

 

[Grav_Moped]

Um ... the jump bubble would need to be BIGGER then ...
A LOT BIGGER ...

Like "bigger enough to impact performance of the jump drive" BIGGER ...

Once you're in jump space, you can't "alter the dimensions" of your craft without incurring SERIOUS opportunities for mishap (starting with destruction of the entire ship and getting progressively darker from there...).

No, the "trick" is that this is a hybrid bubble/grid system. The ship has a bubble around it, and the canopy contains a grid. As the canopy extends, the jump bubble conforms to the canopy surface instead of the volume where the retracted canopy was.

In the context of DA1, this would be flat-out terrifying. Ship jumps, jump drive temperature skyrockets off the charts, and then the canopy starts opening and disappearing into the jump bubble boundary as you watch from the hydroponics section windows...

....then the drive temps start dropping again towards normal.

 

[Grav_Moped]

I suggested that MgT should include the drawback of requiring proximity to a star for the lower TL collectors to bring them in line with the 1d weeks charging time of the original.

For the truly masochistic you could vary the distance requirement based on the class of star it is collecting from.

I'm pretty sure the 1D weeks is based on the class of star and the assumption that the Collector is at either 100D from the star or in the star's habitable zone; it just wasn't spelled out because before LBB6, there wasn't an official way to generate and track what kind of star a given world had.

I'm seeing a possible tactic of jumping into a system, leaving the Collector stowed while doing a long high-G burn to set up a course that's on a chord through the star's 100D radius sphere, coasting with the sails open until the ship's recharged, then folding them and making another high-G burn back out to the 100D limit for Jump.

Someone with a better grasp of orbital mechanics and the scale involved will probably drop in here to point out that it won't make much difference though... LOL