Fusion Torches in CT

[far-trader]

From the heights to the depths so quickly! Alas, science makes a buffoon of me, as it always has. I should have stuck with T&T.

:rofl:

No, even fantasy isn't always safe from Mr Science

I was once in a game of D&D, somebody fell off a cliff and the mage quickly said "I cast feather fall!" Just BOOM, lightning reflex by the player. Caught everyone off guard. The mage had a useful spell? And USED it! Then a calculator appeared in one of my friends hands and he quickly figured the time to fall the 200 feet or whatever and found it was less than the time to cast the spell. SPLAT! And he wasn't even the GM o:

Ah, fun times :rofl:

 

[jawillroy]

Then a calculator appeared in one of my friends hands and he quickly figured the time to fall the 200 feet or whatever and found it was less than the time to cast the spell. SPLAT! And he wasn't even the GM o:

Ah, now. T&T doesn't fiddlyfart around with casting duration on most o' the spells. That were my game, nobody would have ended up delver <i>puree</i> on the dungeon floor. Not that time, anyhow.

 

[rancke]

I was once in a game of D&D, somebody fell off a cliff and the mage quickly said "I cast feather fall!" Just BOOM, lightning reflex by the player. Caught everyone off guard. The mage had a useful spell? And USED it! Then a calculator appeared in one of my friends hands and he quickly figured the time to fall the 200 feet or whatever and found it was less than the time to cast the spell.

I (as GM) would have concluded that the spell wouldn't exist if it didn't work in practice. I'd either ignore the inconvenient physics involved or have the spell cast instantly (but leaving the mage incapable of casting anything else for <casting time> seconds.


Hans

 

[jawillroy]

I (as GM) would have concluded that the spell wouldn't exist if it didn't work in practice. I'd either ignore the inconvenient physics involved or have the spell cast instantly (but leaving the mage incapable of casting anything else for <casting time> seconds.

And throw the mage a bonus fistful of experience points, AND encourage the rest of the group to chuck pretzels at mister persnickety, awarding EP for solid hits. What's he doing with that calculator, anyway? it's D&D, not High Guard.

 

[Jame]

Persistent radiation would certainly be a problem, if we assume it to be an inevitable by-product of a fusion drive. I'm not entirely convinced that this is a given, though: I don't recall that fusion and plasma weapons cause any radiation damage, either in their shipboard or their ground based applications.

Please tell that to the people at Mongoose.

 

[jawillroy]

Please tell that to the people at Mongoose.

Ooooh... did I just poke an open sore? What did the people at Mongoose say?

 

[jawillroy]

In any case, for the purposes of MTU (see the link below) I'm going to have to go with maneuver drives not being torches, since it's pretty clear that the fuel goes to the power plant and not the M-drive: hence, the drive makes things go some other way, thruster plates, whatever.

EDIT Unless one reads it this way: The fuel goes to the The P-plant (fusion reactor, containment bottle, all that) If one considers M-Drive to be an adjunct to the power plant, providing the mechanical/gravitic/handwavium apparatus for focusing and venting the plasma of the ship's power plant, then the "where does the fuel go" problem isn't a problem, necessarily...

So, back to questions like "does a fusion torch create great gobs of residual radiation, and if so, why doesn't your FGMP-15?" and "does a fusion torch provide enough thrust to make sense for LBB2 movement?"

 

[BraselC5048]

On the subject of fusion rockets, I ran some numbers on them a while back, and it works out pretty good if you handwave the drives as producing about 5000 times more thrust then they should (perhaps some kind of subatomic particle effect? Maybe using it to mess with the mass of the exhaust?). The default book 2 power plant fuel is enough for several weeks of normal power, and 100 hours of use of the maneuver drive. I figure that the power plant has an output (for maneuver only, it's not electricity) of 1 gigawatt per 200 tons of thrust.

On landing on a planet, I figure using the contra grav for lift and propulsion while in a atmosphere, and firing up the maneuver drive once you're outside the atmosphere.

 

[jawillroy]

5000 times more thrust then they should (perhaps some kind of subatomic particle effect? Maybe using it to mess with the mass of the exhaust?).

I'm trying to decide if that's more or less handwaving than thruster plates.

The default book 2 power plant fuel is enough for several weeks of normal power, and 100 hours of use of the maneuver drive.

Neat. Is that a 1st edition bit, regarding the 100 hours figure? My 2nd edition just gives a figure of "routine operations and maneuver for 4 weeks"

On landing on a planet, I figure using the contra grav for lift and propulsion while in a atmosphere, and firing up the maneuver drive once you're outside the atmosphere.

That seems to work - though it does leave one with the question of what element of the ship the CG is part of, and how it performs. Should a starship with a 6G maneuver drive behave like an air/raft in atmosphere? Maybe it should...

 

[BraselC5048]

The 100 hours bit I made up myself. It's a lot less fuel then 4 weeks of acceleration, and is good enough to be more or less consistent with the setting.
About starships behaving like air/rafts in an atmosphere, I agree, but with higher performance. I also figure air/raft movement is vector based.

 

[jawillroy]

The 100 hours bit I made up myself. It's a lot less fuel then 4 weeks of acceleration,

I think IMTU I'd be inclined to say that "routine operations and maneuver" wouldn't necessarily entail 4 weeks of constant acceleration: looking at a journey of a typical Traveller starship, there's sufficient time spent not accelerating that I'd be inclined to handwave actual fuel expenditure unless the ship was going flat out for a week at a time, you know? Even if we considered that a torch drive would burn up more mass.

About starships behaving like air/rafts in an atmosphere, I agree, but with higher performance. I also figure air/raft movement is vector based.

The one thing about adding starship gravitics to the mix is that, for me, it leads to the propagation of Unintended Quibble Zones. (For example, Jump Grids: if jump grids are so important to the function of the jump drive, why are the multitude of hull hits on my ship not affecting jump performance?) What part of the ship are the grav units? Part of the hull? A subsystem of the maneuver drive? And so on. I'd like to be able to keep things cleaner. Maybe just having the whole darn drive be gravitic is the cleanest way to do that, I dunno.

 

[jawillroy]

O should I speak to you most cattily,
Then won't you please forgive me, natalie,
but sure as I am
that you're nothing but spam
I request that they BAN you most STAT-ily.

Thank Mod!

 

[Mithras]

I'd swap the fuel requirements.

Manouevre Drive: 0.1x Mass x acceleration in G
Jump Drive: free, uses energy from PP, and requires 48 hours to recharge
Powerplant: Pnx10

 

[mike wightman]

That's exactly what I did for my near space campaign set before contact with the vilani.

And for a bit more 'realism' I divided the acceleration by a factor of 10 - until the advent of the acceleration compensation, artificial gravity, and inertia reduction that came out of jump drive research.