Probably part of the fusion-torch M-Drive tonnage.
Hard Space Redux
- Thread starter Golan2072
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That MgT cost seems unreasonable to me. The way I have it, each fission 'refuelling' is Cr100000 per ton of power plant and lasts TL years.
So assuming TL10 and say a 10 ton power plant, that's MCr1 working out to Cr100000 per year or Cr3846 per two weeks. I don't know how tight CE economics are but it shouldn't break the bank.
IMTU there was a jump up to He3 fusion at TL9 which is 10x as expensive to fuel as fission but is cheaper to build since it requires far less shielding, no fuel (in a CT L-Hyd sense) and frees precious space on ships, making it a continuing choice for warships not wedded to practical mercantile considerations. Practical L-Hyd fusion is invented at TL10 and everyone is switching to it.
Necessary for my He3 space gold rush/moon regolith city colony narrative, which you don't have, but could be reusable elements. The capacitor start and constant 'never shut down never EMF/IR stealth' drawback of He3 fusion in particular sounds like something usable for your MHD version.
Of course, a major reason to kick the fission habit is the nasty business of carrying around your own radioactive death machine in case of taking damage.
IMTU I've got a bunch of old neutron-embrittled rattlebuckets cruising around in-system and out in the Oort clouds, just waiting for a little something to go wrong to start spewing radiation or be some very hazardous salvage.
More here- http://www.travellerrpg.com/CotI/Discuss/showpost.php?p=506825&postcount=15
Which begs a question- just how much damage would an Old One take from radiation? Or nukes?
The problem is that in CT and CE (for the very least), (refined?) radioactives are a trade good costing Cr1,000,000 per tons. So radioactive fuel should be at least that expensive.
So 10-year endurance seems like a more consistent solution.
Tough question!
The old CoC saying is "if you nuke Cthulhu, you have a radioactive Cthulhu". But that ignores the fact that ramming by a friggin' TL5 1920's steamer damaged Cthulhu enough to foil his world-domination plans and force him back into sleep!
So, the easiest answer is: nuke him from orbit, it's the only way to be sure!
However, that would be too easy; a late-TL6 weapon practically destroying a mini-"god".
So a nuke will probably destroy Cthulhu's physical (real-space) body while keeping his "spiritual" (jump-space) "shadow" intact. He will eventually re-form in real-space from that "shadow"...
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Assuming you can find his J-Space trajectory... That could be an interesting question. And a complicated one. J-Space is... Weird.
And that "fact" ignores the actual story. Don't confuse what trolls post in Lovecraft threads on various fora with what occurs in the book.
R'lyeh is lifted from the sea bed by an earthquake. It doesn't rise because Cthulhu has decided it's time or because the stars are right. After a violent storm linked to the earthquake drives her off course, a small schooner encounters an armed steamed yacht manned by cultists patrolling the area to prevent anyone from landing on R'lyeh and interrupting Cthulhu's slumber.
A sea battle ensues and the schooner sinks, but the survivors manage to seize the yacht killing all the cultists. They survivors land on R'lyeh, explore it's otherworldly architecture, and ,just as the cultists had tried to prevent, inadvertently wake Cthulhu. Ol' Squid Head eats most of them, another gets "lost" in a non-Euclidean angle, and two survivors manage to get back to the yacht. As Cthulhu wades out towards them, they ram it with the yacht producing a result which is perhaps my favorite Lovecraft line "... a slushy nastiness of a cloven sunfish...".
As the two survivors steam away, Cthulhu recombines, abandons it's pursuit, and returns to it's temple and it's sleep. Another violent storm then occurs along with eerie effects indicating Cthulhu reversing the work of the earthquake and returning R'lyeh to the ocean's depths.
Hmm, if we accept the narrative that 1 dton of any item is either 14m3 volume or 1000kg of weight, then that works out to Cr1000 per kg.
Which actually is not that far off from current fueling costs- US $1390 per kg according to this site.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-aspects/economics-of-nuclear-power.aspx
But power plants are not made out of pure radioactives, the fuel component is a tiny portion of the reactor.
Here we go, one site that gets everything we want, fuel rates, raw radioactive tonnage to go into fuel, etc.
https://www.nuclear-power.net/nucle...uel/fuel-consumption-of-conventional-reactor/
Now the interesting question is, does a ton of radioactives as per the typical Traveller trade quote refer to enriched/prepped or raw ore? I would argue the former, as the per kg cost of enriched fuel already reasonably validates for our purposes.
Anyway, the site shows us that a 1000MW plant running at full power eats 1 metric ton of fuel per year. So a readily derived ratio assuming Traveller economics is MCr1 per 1000MW per year. Using the Striker rule that's 4 EPs, or Cr250000 per EP-year.
However, two variables to consider before using that as a hard standard.
A starship isn't using the reactor at full power, at most typically 50-55% for commercial ships and warships perhaps a lot less as more of the power plant capacity is intended for weapons/shield use.
The other is breeder designs that creates plutonium in the reactor, as noted in the article sometimes being half the fuel in use.
So on average we could say fuel use would be more like 40% of a full EP-year. That gives us a figure of Cr100000 per EP-year, or Cr200000 for a Free Trader/Scout power plant. Still does NOT compare favorably with even refined fuel Cr500 x 12 months Cr6000 for fusion.
But actually not that far off from my previous formula. An EP-2 HG plant for Type A/S at TL 9-12 is 6 tons, or Cr600000 for a 10-year fueling, the site derived figures would increase that to MCr2.
Some of the theoretical breeders could achieve full 1:1 breeding and use up most of the waste, that would probably be the only sort people would allow flying overhead or anywhere near an inhabited planet, reducing the EP-year expense.
The other economic possibility is that spent fuel has an economic price, lower then it's refined to-be-used value but enough to recoup expenses. In that scenario some of the fuel is pulled out and effectively 'resold' to be used in post-reactor processes, future fuel or other radioactives use.
In that case I would have that happen during annual maintenance, so the owner-operator only has to pay the full initial fueling or fueling replacement power plants, and then perhaps only has to pay 10-20% fueling rates per year as the rest is paid for by the spent fuel. So more like Cr20000-40000 for our intrepid Type A captain, and not that far off from regular fuel costs.
In fact if we look at LBB2 power plant fuel costs, fission starts looking like a good deal, getting back space AND cheaper then refined fuel buys!
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Well as per the website the standard nowadays is 5% enriched uranium fuel, derived from 10 times as much ore. If that were the standard, or say some thorium, I would expect the reactor-ready stuff to be available at any A or B starport, which can do maintenance and thus handle the stuff safely and routinely.
I wouldn't expect a refueling facility at C or below, although maybe an IND planet of TL7-8+ could be relied upon to be able to make the stuff, or maybe private processing plants in asteroid belts.
Still, it had an effect. And he did recombine, as this is not a mere real-space creature; nuke it, and it grows back. Now radioactive. I'm not sure we even have the technology to kill such a being.
Probably all reactor fuel is "refined" Hydrogen fusion-torch fuel may be unrefined or refined, and that determines torch performance.
You need at least Starport B for Uranium or Thorium for your reactor (or will Starport C be enough?). Or will that work based on world population size? I recall that refining Uranium or Thorium is not an easy process.
Thanks for the information! And don't forget the weapon use of depleted fuel rods:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depleted_uranium
Yes, but being rammed didn't "stop" Cthulhu's plans or force it back to sleep. Cthulhu woke because of the quake and the subsequent intrusion on R'lyeh, not because it chose to wake or because it was the right time to wake. Also, the steamer wasn't the freighter so often depicted in illustrations or suggested by trolls. It was a yacht small enough for 11 men from a schooner to board and capture.
I've read the third chapter of Call of Cthulhu be likened to a sleeper being partially wakened by a noise, swatting a few mosquitoes of which one has drawn blood, and then falling back to sleep. Being rammed didn't prevent Cthulhu's pursuit. It merely slapped at some flies before rolling back over
I agree with your contention that we don't and won't have the weapons to kill such entities, I wanted to point out that such entities are more likely to be inconvenienced by human and actions technology than actually injured.
Winged Cat
SOC-10
I'm not sure if it makes a difference even for fusion reactors (though using refined fuel is recommended to reduce wear). The difference is mainly for jump engines, whether the jump is powered by fission or by fusion.
However, fusion reactors can use the same fuel as jump engines: hydrogen. Fission reactors can't. So there is no equivalent - which is to say, there is refined fuel, unrefined fuel, and fission fuel, and these are three different things (though refined and unrefined fuel are much more similar to each other than either is to fission fuel).
BRJN
SOC-12
True: it took the Manhattan Project and the pressure of a World War to figure out how to handle uranium. Even today, it takes years of work and a Government's resources to build the infrastructure that supports an atomic program of any sort.
I know almost nothing about Thorium, having only read a single book which rather minimized any practical difficulties. (How do you casually discuss using liquid salts as a coolant?)
All I know is that breeder reactors can produce more thorium or plutonium or something, and sort of help reduce radioactive waste?
EDIT: Just found this. You might find this interesting Golan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_uranium#Seawater
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining#Recovery_from_seawater
In fact, maybe in the Sol System, and on other worlds, this may be a viable means of producing fission fuel for ship reactors?
epicenter00
SOC-13
That value seems very high.
I suspect it was an arbitrary cost assigned by GDW's writers without much thought for what a cost like that would do to the economics of fissionables. Mind you, I'm not casting shade at them for this - I can't expect writers to research every little thing. But in this case, it makes the economics of fission reactors wonky.
Assuming that the cost is way too high, can't you lower it until the fission becomes competitive? I'd think is exactly the kind of market correction that would actually occur - nobody is going to enrich radioactives unless someone is willing to buy it. And nobody is going to buy it unless there's a use.
As a result, if there's other alternatives, fissionable prices are going to drop until it hits a point where people will buy it after weighing the various costs. If that competitive price point is so low that it isn't worth it for companies to enrich it, then fission vanishes as a marketable power source.
Yes, especially with what has been mentioned here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_uranium#Seawater
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining#Recovery_from_seawater
Do you think that might lower the cost per ton of fissionable material here?
The estimated cost using present day techniques is reportedly still slightly higher than the cost of mining the materials out of the earth. That takes into account economies of scale, amortizing the cost of infrastructure against the mass of product over time. On a pre-industrial world, extraction and refining from seawater might be a practical "solution" (sorry, couldn't resist) for a visiting ship low on fuel.
