Power failure in space

[Carlobrand]

So you're in space, and your power plant fails. Most likely you're about to be boarded, and that's it's own set of problems, but maybe it's something else. Main power is now gone. Any decent system will be able to send out rescue pretty quick, but you might be someplace where you can't expect a quick rescue.

First, you are not entirely without power. CT/MT canon says you have batteries normally used to start the fusion drive which can be tapped if you have no realistic expectation of getting the power plant started again. CT Book 2 p. 6 says, “Batteries will provide life support and basic lighting for 1D days.” One presumes they will also power vital emergency equipment like the radio. MT also talks about batteries: Starship Operator's Manual describes a warship working off batteries for two weeks. Other versions no doubt have their own emergency power arrangements. So, you have life support and lighting and maybe radio for a while. Life support is defined as oxygen and CO2 scrubbers and maintaining a livable temperature and water. You do not have artificial gravity; best start handing out the Dramamines. How that water is delivered might be limited to conserve power and prevent problems - water floating about is a pain and possibly hazardous. Don't expect the toilets or faucets to work, but the crew will have a way to fill bottles from which you can suck water, and there'll be some sort of emergency way to take care of the output issue. You'll most likely bring everyone together into one section so you can depower the other sections to conserve power for life support. That's not a problem for traversing through an unpowered section - no one's using the air in there - but it's likely to get hot in those unused sections

It's likely key emergency lighting systems have their own integral batteries, just in case something takes out the electric grid. The exit sign over the bulkhead door will stay lit, and there'll probably be something like little LEDs along the edge of walkways providing just enough light that people can find their way.

IMTU, there is a small emergency fusion generator located at the bridge: power output is meager compared to your main power plant but if your fuel tanks are intact you can keep life support going for months. Food is your only problem at that point; keep plenty of emergency rations in the Ship's Locker. if your fuel tanks are not intact, ships also carry solar cells integral to the hull. Most civilian ships are going to and from worlds in the Goldilocks zone. There's not a lot of power there, may vary quite a bit depending on your ship's position with respect to the local sun or if you're farther out, but it'll keep the lights on indefinitely and ease demand on the batteries. Other handy thing to carry in the Ship's Locker are chemical O2 generators and CO2 scrubbers and some bottled water in case the batteries give out or the ship's electrical grid is shot.

The low berths are a potential problem, 10 kilowatts each. That's about as much as each awake person is using for life support, assuming you've brought everyone together to the extent possible and aren't trying to keep the whole ship's life support running. Not much point waking them, it's not going to save you any power. A better idea is an alternate power source. I use radioisotope generators, drawn from existing real-world tech. They don't put out much power in the Traveller scheme of things, but there's enough there to power the low berths, and they can continue providing power for years, which means you've got a mechanism for players to survive something like a misjump to deep space: send a radio signal to the nearest inhabited star system, hope to heck they can pick up such an attenuated signal at that range - an adequately populated world with a decent starport should be able to if it's something they expect to happen - then take up residence in the low berth and wait a few years for the signal to get there and for a rescue to jump out.

 

[Condottiere]

Depends on how far the spacecraft design sequence allows you to micromanage it, instead of having equipment suites.

 

[Commander Truestar]

Personally, I read “Batteries will provide life support and basic lighting for 1D days.” as "just that and no more.....I feel your being kind

And the "Starship Operator's Manual describes a warship working off batteries for two weeks." means "to me" that warships have contingency systems built in, which can be pulled on-line when needed.

So, "in my opinion", you don't get all those extras unless you spent money in advance to have the ship built....or, upgraded, to provide that.

Where you say: "IMTU, there is a small emergency fusion generator located at the bridge"
You are being generous. Especially since that generator would "Have to" have fuel fed to it.
So, you'd have to re-work the under-deck engineering in order to deliver fuel from "some tank" to that generator.

So, you are playing santa claus in that situation.
When my players misjumped and their engineering was aflame and dead.....they had emergency lighting ONLY
Then, when they got the fire out, they could switch to emergency power from the jump drive sub-system and get emergency lighting and life support

 

[Condottiere]

You could unfurl the solar panels.

And the oxygen tanks in the spacesuits should last two to six hours.

 

[kilemall]

Fast drug for when you have run out of low berths.

 

[Carlobrand]

Personally, I read “Batteries will provide life support and basic lighting for 1D days.” as "just that and no more.....I feel your being kind

And the "Starship Operator's Manual describes a warship working off batteries for two weeks." means "to me" that warships have contingency systems built in, which can be pulled on-line when needed.

So, "in my opinion", you don't get all those extras unless you spent money in advance to have the ship built....or, upgraded, to provide that.

Where you say: "IMTU, there is a small emergency fusion generator located at the bridge"
You are being generous. Especially since that generator would "Have to" have fuel fed to it.
So, you'd have to re-work the under-deck engineering in order to deliver fuel from "some tank" to that generator.

So, you are playing santa claus in that situation.
When my players misjumped and their engineering was aflame and dead.....they had emergency lighting ONLY
Then, when they got the fire out, they could switch to emergency power from the jump drive sub-system and get emergency lighting and life support

Well of course I'm being kind. This is IMTU, which allows me to depart from canon as my own logic sees fit, and my own logic says killing off PCs when there's an opportunity for drama is silly. First, PCs tend to go places where there's not likely to be rescue. Having them floating in the dimly lit common area, counting their ration packs and the weeks, debating who they'll eat first if the food runs out and wondering if their rescuer - if one ever shows up - will in fact rescue them or space them to claim salvage rights is a bit more interesting than, "Oops, you died."

The Vilani have been traveling between the stars for over 10,000 years as of 1105. Influential people don't tend to like to die in stupid ways unless it's something they've chosen themselves like sailing solo around the world, and someone spending 10,000 credits for a week's one-way trip through space either has spent a very long time saving up or can afford such trips. I tend to think a civilization that has been in space for over 10,000 years has gradually learned to do it right. And, yes, warships are much better prepared than merchantmen; that goes without saying.

I'm a little puzzled by the remark about emergency power plants. Presumably, if there's one built into the ship, the designer has made some provision for it to draw fuel. I waffle a bit on providing them to merchantmen since they're typically pretty close to rescue, but then there are ships like the Subsidized Merchant whose routes take them to odd places, and a TL12 mini-plant can be had for Cr50,000. Strikes me as pennywise and pound foolish not to spend an additional 0.13% of the price of a free trader to make sure it survives an emergency and can continue making payments or at least become subject to foreclosure rather than being found dead in space and available for salvage to the first person who finds it. (I limit tech on civilian ships to TL12-13 on the theory that higher tech equipment attracts pirates, the Vargr and Sword World neighbors being typically limited to TL 12-13.)

So, yes, I'm Santa Claus - with a sadistic streak.

(It hadn't occurred to me to have an engine room fire on a misjump. Per canon, the only sign of a misjump is usually some illness and the sickening realization that you should already have exited jump space if it goes longer than a week. I'm curious how you handled it, since the jump drive has to function through the jump to be able to shield them from jump space. Did the fire start as they exited jump space? )

(Also not sure what happens if the jump goes into week 5 and the power plant runs out of fuel. Per MT, the ship still emerges from jump space but with no survivors, but we already know from CT that they didn't account for emergency measures if life support fails. The crew on a submarine can survive for 6 days unpowered with emergency equipment such as O2 candles and emergency self-powered CO2 scrubbers and such; no reason a spacecraft couldn't carry such equipment in case the life support failed, and no reason they couldn't carry enough to last them through a 5 or 6 week misjump if needed. Is the jump field bubble maintained by the jump drive, or would a power plant failure result in collapse of the bubble and intrusion of jump space? Would the jump drive still be able to function in such conditions, or would a jump field collapse means the ship doesn't emerge from jump at all - which would contradict the MT assertion?)

(Per CT High Guard, the jump requires energy equal to two turns of a power plant of the same rating as the jump, as well as a functioning jump drive and jump fuel of course. Once the jump is initiated, is the power plant throttled back to PP-1 to conserve fuel, or must it maintain output equal to the jump rating - and why if the jump drive is powering the jump field? So many questions.)

Fast drug for when you have run out of low berths.

I have soooo many problems with Fast drug. That one deserves a thread all to itself.

 

[whartung]

Personally, I read “Batteries will provide life support and basic lighting for 1D days.” as "just that and no more.....I feel your being kind

Honestly that number seems low. Not saying there's no circumstance when the ship has a catastrophic breakdown, but since the downside is so high (i.e. loss of crew and passengers), I would think the backups would be more robust. Yes, the ships are large, but they're not operating on D cells like the Apollo mission were either.

2 Weeks would be the minimum, I would think.

 

[warwizard]

If the referee is willing to loot other rulesets... T4 FF&S minimal Fusion power plant at TL 15 is .1m3 .2mt produces .6MW and costs Cr20k and uses .06m3 of lHg per year. The minimal Fusion+ TL 15 plant is .004m3 .004mt produces 39.2 kW/h costs Cr40 and uses 52l of heavy water per year. Frankly one or the other should be built into the low berth bay with 10 years of fuel. Checked and refulled at every annual maintence.

 

[Dragoner]

This is like Voyager where Chakotay says to Janeway: "We have lost all power except to artificial gravity." 1d6 days is good enough as it likely is not going to be the end of the characters, as that is rather boring. Real power systems would have a battery system for starting and used as ballast or a buffer, and likely a ship will have an emergency generator.

 

[Enoki]

Yea, but the real question is Will the toilets on your ship still flush...?

 

[Dragoner]

Pretty much, nobody wants to have to use the emergency system.

 

[Condottiere]

That's why you have a bucket.

 

[Rupert]

First, you are not entirely without power. CT/MT canon says you have batteries normally used to start the fusion drive which can be tapped if you have no realistic expectation of getting the power plant started again. CT Book 2 p. 6 says, “Batteries will provide life support and basic lighting for 1D days.” One presumes they will also power vital emergency equipment like the radio. MT also talks about batteries: Starship Operator's Manual describes a warship working off batteries for two weeks. Other versions no doubt have their own emergency power arrangements. So, you have life support and lighting and maybe radio for a while. Life support is defined as oxygen and CO2 scrubbers and maintaining a livable temperature and water. You do not have artificial gravity; best start handing out the Dramamines. How that water is delivered might be limited to conserve power and prevent problems - water floating about is a pain and possibly hazardous. Don't expect the toilets or faucets to work, but the crew will have a way to fill bottles from which you can suck water, and there'll be some sort of emergency way to take care of the output issue. You'll most likely bring everyone together into one section so you can depower the other sections to conserve power for life support. That's not a problem for traversing through an unpowered section - no one's using the air in there - but it's likely to get hot in those unused sections

I don't think will be too bad, at least for many hours, if not some days - it's not like the major sources of heat are operational - power plant, drives, main computer and control systems. It will most likely use less power to pump life support heat to the radiators as normal than to dump it on-board (and have it keep coming back into the areas you're cooling.

IMTU, there is a small emergency fusion generator located at the bridge: power output is meager compared to your main power plant but if your fuel tanks are intact you can keep life support going for months. Food is your only problem at that point; keep plenty of emergency rations in the Ship's Locker. if your fuel tanks are not intact, ships also carry solar cells integral to the hull. Most civilian ships are going to and from worlds in the Goldilocks zone. There's not a lot of power there, may vary quite a bit depending on your ship's position with respect to the local sun or if you're farther out, but it'll keep the lights on indefinitely and ease demand on the batteries. Other handy thing to carry in the Ship's Locker are chemical O2 generators and CO2 scrubbers and some bottled water in case the batteries give out or the ship's electrical grid is shot.

In many design systems fusion plants are more volume and mass efficient than batteries once you need more than an hour or so's power. Their drawback is their large minimum size. Once you remove that, fusion beats batteries almost always.

The low berths are a potential problem, 10 kilowatts each. That's about as much as each awake person is using for life support, assuming you've brought everyone together to the extent possible and aren't trying to keep the whole ship's life support running. Not much point waking them, it's not going to save you any power. A better idea is an alternate power source. I use radioisotope generators, drawn from existing real-world tech. They don't put out much power in the Traveller scheme of things, but there's enough there to power the low berths, and they can continue providing power for years, which means you've got a mechanism for players to survive something like a misjump to deep space: send a radio signal to the nearest inhabited star system, hope to heck they can pick up such an attenuated signal at that range - an adequately populated world with a decent starport should be able to if it's something they expect to happen - then take up residence in the low berth and wait a few years for the signal to get there and for a rescue to jump out.

RTGs/NPUs are great, and they can provide an interesting plot element - while they are low/no maintenance and just push out power for years or decades, you can't turn them off to save duration, and replacing them is likely to be moderately annoying and expensive. That means hard-up independents might well skip replacing them for so long they effectively forget about them. Then something goes wrong, and you realise that some of the low berths have reserve power units that are producing rather less power than they should be...

 

[Rupert]

And the "Starship Operator's Manual describes a warship working off batteries for two weeks." means "to me" that warships have contingency systems built in, which can be pulled on-line when needed.

To me that means "There's a story about some warship's crew that managed to keep their life support running for two weeks after they lost power. Somehow."

Where you say: "IMTU, there is a small emergency fusion generator located at the bridge"
You are being generous. Especially since that generator would "Have to" have fuel fed to it.
So, you'd have to re-work the under-deck engineering in order to deliver fuel from "some tank" to that generator.

Or have a little local tank for it - and that still needs to be hooked into the fuel feeds so it can be kept topped up.

 

[Condottiere]

It probably varies across editions.

Asphyxiation rules in Mongoose don't seem consistent.

 

[whartung]

Yea, but the real question is Will the toilets on your ship still flush...?

If you roll down the window, everything will flush.

 

[Enoki]

That's why you have a bucket.

 

[McPerth]

And the "Starship Operator's Manual describes a warship working off batteries for two weeks." means "to me" that warships have contingency systems built in, which can be pulled on-line when needed.

Just one detail: MT:SOM mainly talks about civilian ships, not about military ones. So, what is written there should apply, IMHO, to civilian ships.

 

[Commander Truestar]

@Carlobrand and @Rupert
Kurt Vonnegut famously said: "We'll go down in history as the first society that wouldn't save itself because it wasn't cost-effective"

You are, and yes, you have the right to, base your judgement on the same logic behind US laws which expect US Corporations to operate in
their own self-benefit. These laws all too often find that the corporations in question operate on the personal greed of their leaderships.

Especially, @Rupert, where they can because no one will find out or complain....
.....So, they may "say" they put in an auxiliary power system
.....And then, the client never tests it until it is too late and.....

How do I know owners will work that way? I recently found a man who was paying $150 a month for a "Sump Pump Endorsement" in the insurance for his third-Floor Condominium.

I'll let that sink in rather than explain it.

The "hard fact" about Traveller is that it must be accounted for in the construction.
And we've all looked at the various ship construction rules.....and NONE of them specify backup systems.

That said, I was commenting on @Carlobrand's statements as they relate to my point of view.

Of course, I have differences......because I do not share your point of view.
We both have that right.....so no one should be getting defensive.

That said, I don't agree but you have every right to pretend the way you want to pretend...
...but I still don't want my turrets to flush!!

 

[Condottiere]

There's this issue where the Navy insists on twin engined fighters.

Someone pointed out, that statistically, if one engine fails, so does the other.