Fuel Purification Plant

[far-trader]

Yep, it's a massive gyro (the only way it makes sense) of superdense composite, spinning at ridiculous speed and the ship changes its orientation by focusing a surrounding cage of grav modules on it.

So not only the mass of the superdense and large gyroscope, and the power to spin it up to nearly 1 million rpm, but also a whole bunch more grav modules arranged around it and powered up to push off it.

Oh yes, and there is the necessary safety mechanism of more heavy duty inertial compensators to stop it in an emergency.

Though it does mention that on a small ship this is often replaced with a simple jettison system. Of course that means you have to have a tube running through your ship for it to jettison safely out of the ship.

Oh, and it further says the whole thing is expensive but gives no costs.

I think the whole thing was an exercise in verbiage for the sake of filling a column in the book

Do you still think this is some baseball or even basketball sized array that can be squeezed into a bulkhead or tween decks? Presuming your ship is so well designed and balanced that the center of mass ends up in such a space and not in say the middle of the Captain's fresher?

 

[far-trader]

Yep, it's a massive gyro (the only way it makes sense) of superdense composite, spinning at ridiculous speed and the ship changes its orientation by focusing a surrounding cage of grav modules on it.

So not only the mass of the superdense and large gyroscope, and the power to spin it up to nearly 1 million rpm, but also a whole bunch more grav modules arranged around it and powered up to push off it.

Oh yes, and there is the necessary safety mechanism of more heavy duty inertial compensators to stop it in an emergency.

Though it does mention that on a small ship this is often replaced with a simple jettison system. Of course that means you have to have a tube running through your ship for it to jettison safely out of the ship.

Oh, and it further says the whole thing is expensive but gives no costs.

I think the whole thing was an exercise in verbiage for the sake of filling a column in the book

Do you still think this is some baseball or even basketball sized array that can be squeezed into a bulkhead or tween decks? Presuming your ship is so well designed and balanced that the center of mass ends up in such a space and not in say the middle of the Captain's fresher?

 

[boomslang]

Originally posted by Merxiless:
I agree. Modern torpedoes are built like this, with a tiny gyro, so that it "knows" when it is off course, or what course to turn to, easily 1/2 of 1% of it's total size...(when it is not under direct wire control)

Don't modern guidance systems use laser gyros, though? Those will have insufficient inertia to serve as t-plate "pivot points" (I suppose we're technically talking fulcrums for t-plates to get leverage off of).

Modern space platforms like the Hubble and the ISS use massive, electrically-spun mechanical gyros for energy-efficient attitude control, but craft like the Shuttle and Soyuz don't bother because reaction control thrusters (which ironically use highly volatile and toxic propellants such as hydrazine) are considered safer than mechanical gyros which could seize and rupture the hull, tumble the ship, et cetera...

 

[boomslang]

Originally posted by Merxiless:
I agree. Modern torpedoes are built like this, with a tiny gyro, so that it "knows" when it is off course, or what course to turn to, easily 1/2 of 1% of it's total size...(when it is not under direct wire control)

Don't modern guidance systems use laser gyros, though? Those will have insufficient inertia to serve as t-plate "pivot points" (I suppose we're technically talking fulcrums for t-plates to get leverage off of).

Modern space platforms like the Hubble and the ISS use massive, electrically-spun mechanical gyros for energy-efficient attitude control, but craft like the Shuttle and Soyuz don't bother because reaction control thrusters (which ironically use highly volatile and toxic propellants such as hydrazine) are considered safer than mechanical gyros which could seize and rupture the hull, tumble the ship, et cetera...

 

[Supplement Four]

Originally posted by far-trader:
Yep, it's a massive gyro (the only way it makes sense) of superdense composite, spinning at ridiculous speed and the ship changes its orientation by focusing a surrounding cage of grav modules on it.

[snip]

Do you still think this is some baseball or even basketball sized array that can be squeezed into a bulkhead or tween decks?

I do.

Here's why:

(1) The SOM makes no mention of size.

(2) The DGP folks are some pretty crafty cookies who loved Traveller. They consistently turned out the best Traveller of any other CT publisher, including GDW (and don't get me started on the errata in MT....acording to DGP, that was GDW's fault).

I don't see these crafty, Traveller loving, cookies as doing something as universe-changing as requiring all the CT deckplans to be re-vamped because there's a damn big gyro sphere that how has to be included in the center of every spacecraft. They would have thought about size and such. And, given their past work, I trust them to deliver a well-thought-out answer.

(3) You're not giving the technology enough credit. Grav modules are very small. Think of the GDW grav modules in Striker Vehicle design. Think of the small grav modules in a grav belt!

The grav belt can have the same speed characteristics as an air/raft! Have you seen the descriptios of gravbelts? They're harnesses with basically "battery" pockets lined on it.

(4) Next, think of the same technology applied to the deck plates, interior G field, and the inertial compensator on a spaceship or starship. That's a pretty spectacular technology. And, it's applications drive air/rafts, G-Carriers, keep cities floating in the sky, keep people from turning into mush while the ship does 6G maneuvers, etc, etc.

(5) The thruster plate technology is an off-shoot of the grav tech. It's particle manipulation. CT has reactionless drives. This particle manipulation makes for a pretty doggone good explaination if you've got to explain an reactionless drive.

(6) So, given all this, I don't think it's a stretch at all to think the same particle manipulation that goes on with grav craft, air/rafts, G-Carriers, grav belts, building grav suspension, inertial compensators, spacecraft gravity fields, and reactionless drives can also be applied to the gyro.

So, it's an expensive (probably part of the M-Drive cost...an expensive component already figured in the cost) small gyro, spinning at incredible speeds, with a shell of grav modules around it.

What if the gyro gives off particles like the T-Plates? All of a sudden, the force it creates is much stronger than a gyro of that size should have.

Gravitic-enhanced gyros? Sure, I can buy that. I can buy it if I can buy jumpspace, or even making jumps without time dilation effects...or anti-gravity...or lasers that shoot for tens of thousands of kilometers and burn into superdense starship hulls.

Yeah, I can buy it.




BTW, I just re-read the gyro in the SOM too. I thought it did, but it doesn't say the gyro has to be in the center of the ship.

Heck, maybe it is a bit bigger than a basketball, but it's housed in the M-Drive.

Could be.

 

[Supplement Four]

Originally posted by far-trader:
Yep, it's a massive gyro (the only way it makes sense) of superdense composite, spinning at ridiculous speed and the ship changes its orientation by focusing a surrounding cage of grav modules on it.

[snip]

Do you still think this is some baseball or even basketball sized array that can be squeezed into a bulkhead or tween decks?

I do.

Here's why:

(1) The SOM makes no mention of size.

(2) The DGP folks are some pretty crafty cookies who loved Traveller. They consistently turned out the best Traveller of any other CT publisher, including GDW (and don't get me started on the errata in MT....acording to DGP, that was GDW's fault).

I don't see these crafty, Traveller loving, cookies as doing something as universe-changing as requiring all the CT deckplans to be re-vamped because there's a damn big gyro sphere that how has to be included in the center of every spacecraft. They would have thought about size and such. And, given their past work, I trust them to deliver a well-thought-out answer.

(3) You're not giving the technology enough credit. Grav modules are very small. Think of the GDW grav modules in Striker Vehicle design. Think of the small grav modules in a grav belt!

The grav belt can have the same speed characteristics as an air/raft! Have you seen the descriptios of gravbelts? They're harnesses with basically "battery" pockets lined on it.

(4) Next, think of the same technology applied to the deck plates, interior G field, and the inertial compensator on a spaceship or starship. That's a pretty spectacular technology. And, it's applications drive air/rafts, G-Carriers, keep cities floating in the sky, keep people from turning into mush while the ship does 6G maneuvers, etc, etc.

(5) The thruster plate technology is an off-shoot of the grav tech. It's particle manipulation. CT has reactionless drives. This particle manipulation makes for a pretty doggone good explaination if you've got to explain an reactionless drive.

(6) So, given all this, I don't think it's a stretch at all to think the same particle manipulation that goes on with grav craft, air/rafts, G-Carriers, grav belts, building grav suspension, inertial compensators, spacecraft gravity fields, and reactionless drives can also be applied to the gyro.

So, it's an expensive (probably part of the M-Drive cost...an expensive component already figured in the cost) small gyro, spinning at incredible speeds, with a shell of grav modules around it.

What if the gyro gives off particles like the T-Plates? All of a sudden, the force it creates is much stronger than a gyro of that size should have.

Gravitic-enhanced gyros? Sure, I can buy that. I can buy it if I can buy jumpspace, or even making jumps without time dilation effects...or anti-gravity...or lasers that shoot for tens of thousands of kilometers and burn into superdense starship hulls.

Yeah, I can buy it.




BTW, I just re-read the gyro in the SOM too. I thought it did, but it doesn't say the gyro has to be in the center of the ship.

Heck, maybe it is a bit bigger than a basketball, but it's housed in the M-Drive.

Could be.

 

[Supplement Four]

Originally posted by Supplement Four:
It's not the gyro that turns the ship. It's the thrust from the T-Plates. All the gyro does is give the ship a pivot point.

Remember this too: The T-Plate thrust drops off, but there's still a lot of thrust there.

</font><blockquote>code:</font><hr /><pre style="font-size:x-small; font-family: monospace;">Thrust on T-Plates
------------------------------------------------
Direction of Thrust Percentage of full thrust
------------------- -------------------------
Aft 100%
Port/Starboard 25%
Dorsal/Ventral 25%
Bow 10% </pre>[/QUOTE]So, a ship with an M-Drive rated at 4Gs can blow that thrust aft by 100%, accelerating the ship at 4Gs.

Turns, "up, down, right, or left", can be done at 1G.

And, the ship can "back up" at a little less than half a G (.4 Gs).

This is without the gyro.

Slap the gyro into the mix, and the ship's performance increases to typical CT performance seen in Book 2 space combat and Mayday.

 

[Supplement Four]

Originally posted by Supplement Four:
It's not the gyro that turns the ship. It's the thrust from the T-Plates. All the gyro does is give the ship a pivot point.

Remember this too: The T-Plate thrust drops off, but there's still a lot of thrust there.

</font><blockquote>code:</font><hr /><pre style="font-size:x-small; font-family: monospace;">Thrust on T-Plates
------------------------------------------------
Direction of Thrust Percentage of full thrust
------------------- -------------------------
Aft 100%
Port/Starboard 25%
Dorsal/Ventral 25%
Bow 10% </pre>[/QUOTE]So, a ship with an M-Drive rated at 4Gs can blow that thrust aft by 100%, accelerating the ship at 4Gs.

Turns, "up, down, right, or left", can be done at 1G.

And, the ship can "back up" at a little less than half a G (.4 Gs).

This is without the gyro.

Slap the gyro into the mix, and the ship's performance increases to typical CT performance seen in Book 2 space combat and Mayday.

 

[far-trader]

Originally posted by Supplement Four:
(3) You're not giving the technology enough credit. Grav modules are very small. Think of the GDW grav modules in Striker Vehicle design. Think of the small grav modules in a grav belt!

The grav belt can have the same speed characteristics as an air/raft! Have you seen the descriptios of gravbelts? They're harnesses with basically "battery" pockets lined on it.

Yeah, for a bleeding person! Not for a whole freaking spaceship!! Multiply the grav belt by at least 100,000 for a type S and you might be getting close to what you need to fly a type S with grav belts.

What fraction of that sounds reasonable to you to turn the momentum of the type S and stop on a dime PDQ? It's not a trivial bit of mechanics. Is 1% too much? How about 0.1%? That would still be 100 grav belts worth of gear to put somewhere. Not exactly a small closet. And that's just for a 100ton ship.

Ah, forget it, I'll just give up. There's no convincing either of us the other is right I expect. You credit far too much magic to grav tech for my taste. I stand by my statement that it looks like a throwaway idea simply added for the word count without much consideration to the physics.

 

[far-trader]

Originally posted by Supplement Four:
(3) You're not giving the technology enough credit. Grav modules are very small. Think of the GDW grav modules in Striker Vehicle design. Think of the small grav modules in a grav belt!

The grav belt can have the same speed characteristics as an air/raft! Have you seen the descriptios of gravbelts? They're harnesses with basically "battery" pockets lined on it.

Yeah, for a bleeding person! Not for a whole freaking spaceship!! Multiply the grav belt by at least 100,000 for a type S and you might be getting close to what you need to fly a type S with grav belts.

What fraction of that sounds reasonable to you to turn the momentum of the type S and stop on a dime PDQ? It's not a trivial bit of mechanics. Is 1% too much? How about 0.1%? That would still be 100 grav belts worth of gear to put somewhere. Not exactly a small closet. And that's just for a 100ton ship.

Ah, forget it, I'll just give up. There's no convincing either of us the other is right I expect. You credit far too much magic to grav tech for my taste. I stand by my statement that it looks like a throwaway idea simply added for the word count without much consideration to the physics.

 

[far-trader]

Originally posted by Supplement Four:
</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by Supplement Four:
It's not the gyro that turns the ship. It's the thrust from the T-Plates. All the gyro does is give the ship a pivot point.

Remember this too: The T-Plate thrust drops off, but there's still a lot of thrust there.

</font><blockquote>code:</font><hr /><pre style="font-size:x-small; font-family: monospace;">Thrust on T-Plates
------------------------------------------------
Direction of Thrust Percentage of full thrust
------------------- -------------------------
Aft 100%
Port/Starboard 25%
Dorsal/Ventral 25%
Bow 10% </pre>[/QUOTE]So, a ship with an M-Drive rated at 4Gs can blow that thrust aft by 100%, accelerating the ship at 4Gs.

Turns, "up, down, right, or left", can be done at 1G.

And, the ship can "back up" at a little less than half a G (.4 Gs).

This is without the gyro.

</font>[/QUOTE]Precisely. Why the hell add the whole gyro mess? It just isn't needed. Period. Even a 1G ship in MT can produce 4G for a brief period, which should be enough to make very radical maneuvers even without changing orientation. I'll repeat, the whole gyro thing just isn't needed.

 

[far-trader]

Originally posted by Supplement Four:
</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by Supplement Four:
It's not the gyro that turns the ship. It's the thrust from the T-Plates. All the gyro does is give the ship a pivot point.

Remember this too: The T-Plate thrust drops off, but there's still a lot of thrust there.

</font><blockquote>code:</font><hr /><pre style="font-size:x-small; font-family: monospace;">Thrust on T-Plates
------------------------------------------------
Direction of Thrust Percentage of full thrust
------------------- -------------------------
Aft 100%
Port/Starboard 25%
Dorsal/Ventral 25%
Bow 10% </pre>[/QUOTE]So, a ship with an M-Drive rated at 4Gs can blow that thrust aft by 100%, accelerating the ship at 4Gs.

Turns, "up, down, right, or left", can be done at 1G.

And, the ship can "back up" at a little less than half a G (.4 Gs).

This is without the gyro.

</font>[/QUOTE]Precisely. Why the hell add the whole gyro mess? It just isn't needed. Period. Even a 1G ship in MT can produce 4G for a brief period, which should be enough to make very radical maneuvers even without changing orientation. I'll repeat, the whole gyro thing just isn't needed.

 

[Supplement Four]

Originally posted by far-trader:
Precisely. Why the hell add the whole gyro mess? It just isn't needed. Period.

I suspect the crafty Traveller loving DGP boys did some research on real world mechanics such as these, saw references like the afore mentioned gyros in missiles and space stations and such, and then added a sci-fi twist to it to keep it "Traveller" and interesting.

And, it is needed. A 4G vessel can swing around, port or starboard, at 1G without the gyro.

With the gyro, it swings around in those directions at 4Gs (which is how Book 2 plays them).

Like I said, it's like a swimming in a pool. You can swim down to the end of the pool and flip around under your own power without touching anything. But, if you can touch the side of the pool, then push off of it, it's much easier, and faster, to make that turn.

 

[Supplement Four]

Originally posted by far-trader:
Precisely. Why the hell add the whole gyro mess? It just isn't needed. Period.

I suspect the crafty Traveller loving DGP boys did some research on real world mechanics such as these, saw references like the afore mentioned gyros in missiles and space stations and such, and then added a sci-fi twist to it to keep it "Traveller" and interesting.

And, it is needed. A 4G vessel can swing around, port or starboard, at 1G without the gyro.

With the gyro, it swings around in those directions at 4Gs (which is how Book 2 plays them).

Like I said, it's like a swimming in a pool. You can swim down to the end of the pool and flip around under your own power without touching anything. But, if you can touch the side of the pool, then push off of it, it's much easier, and faster, to make that turn.

 

[Supplement Four]

Originally posted by far-trader:
I'll repeat, the whole gyro thing just isn't needed.

BTW, it's canon for MT. (Not so much for CT. But, CT really doesn't have any "canon" for the description of the M-Drives.)

 

[Supplement Four]

Originally posted by far-trader:
I'll repeat, the whole gyro thing just isn't needed.

BTW, it's canon for MT. (Not so much for CT. But, CT really doesn't have any "canon" for the description of the M-Drives.)

 

[Supplement Four]

Originally posted by far-trader:
Yeah, for a bleeding person! Not for a whole freaking spaceship!! Multiply the grav belt by at least 100,000 for a type S and you might be getting close to what you need to fly a type S with grav belts.

I never said anything about turning a Type S with a grav belt. I did say something about thrust-to-mass ratios.

 

[Supplement Four]

Originally posted by far-trader:
Yeah, for a bleeding person! Not for a whole freaking spaceship!! Multiply the grav belt by at least 100,000 for a type S and you might be getting close to what you need to fly a type S with grav belts.

I never said anything about turning a Type S with a grav belt. I did say something about thrust-to-mass ratios.

 

[tinker123]

Originally posted by far-trader:
</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by Supplement Four:
...Pretty cool description of the "mechanics" of the M-Drive, huh? I've always loved DGP's work.

While I didn't mind the bulk of it, they had to go and add that gyroscope thingy
</font>[/QUOTE]It breaks the deckplans, because you have to put part of the M-drive tonnage in the centre, with another part at the edge of the ship (the actual plates). The total drive tonnage could stay the same, though, in two smaller compartments.

On the other hand, it explains why you only need M-drive at the back-end of the ship, rather than small adjusters on the top, bottom & sides to allow the ship to steer. That's the aspect that has always bugged me about the classic canonical designs. Two big jet-like outlets at the back end, and nothing else.

 

[tinker123]

Originally posted by far-trader:
</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by Supplement Four:
...Pretty cool description of the "mechanics" of the M-Drive, huh? I've always loved DGP's work.

While I didn't mind the bulk of it, they had to go and add that gyroscope thingy
</font>[/QUOTE]It breaks the deckplans, because you have to put part of the M-drive tonnage in the centre, with another part at the edge of the ship (the actual plates). The total drive tonnage could stay the same, though, in two smaller compartments.

On the other hand, it explains why you only need M-drive at the back-end of the ship, rather than small adjusters on the top, bottom & sides to allow the ship to steer. That's the aspect that has always bugged me about the classic canonical designs. Two big jet-like outlets at the back end, and nothing else.