Secondary FTL Drive

[Whipsnade]

Andy,

The gas turbine 'peaking units' are IC types. Oddly enough, their exhaust feeds another OC turbine!

I did a job for FP&L at Indiantown, FL in the 90s. They were putting in several pairs of gas turbine-driven generators. The exhaust from each set was directed into a boiler which supplied a low pressure steam turbine which ran another generator. The thermal efficiency of the installation was very high relatively speaking.


Have fun,
Bill

 

[Whipsnade]

Gents,

How about an example from Real World history? Look at external combustion, steam producing, marine engines. For decades they were produced in two varieties; reciprocating and turbine. Why? Because each type met different needs.

Turbines have been around for centuries and Parsons did showed off Turbinia to great effect during Victoria's Diamond Jubilee. However, until the problems with reduction gears were ironed out and turbine construction techniques were learned, navies were long in adopting turbines for their warships. Cost and the 'learning curve' meant that some nations built capital ships with reciprocating engines until just before WW1 despite the turbine's well known benefits.

Even after most warships used turbines, merchant vessels continued to use reciprocating engines. The technology was mature, had been made very efficient, was easier to operate/maintain, and was much more cheap. Also, many of the benefits turbines gave warships were not the benefits looked for in merchant vessels.

Even after the turbine's wholesale adoption by navies for warships, the reciprocating engine made a come back due to specific circumstances. WW2 created a need for escorts that could be produced quickly and cheaply. Turbines would have been the chief bottleneck in the production of those vessels as turbine are neither cheap or can be produced rapidly. Therefore, whole classes of escorts with reciprocating engines were launched because reciprocating engines were the best choice for the specific job.

The sci-fi wargame Starfire plays with this idea too. In it, ship engines come in two varieties; military and commercial. While both types (apparently) work the same, the military drive has a higher speed while the commercial drive has a higher endurance. (IIRC, the commerical drive is also cheaper, requires less space, and less crew per installation then the military drive.)

It now becomes a matter of Hare vs. Tortoise. While a ship with a military drive can run rings around a ship with commerical drives, the commercial drive ship can keep plodding along well after the military drive vessel has stopped for 'repairs' or 'tuning'. It's a trade off between tactical speed and strategic movement. The commercial drive only comes into its own when you need to transit several systems/warp points and when you need to balance the company books.


Have fun,
Bill

 

[epicenter00]

IMTU, I plan to actually open the field to a variety of different FTL methods. However, Jump Drive as a type predominates.

Jump Drive is pretty much as it is in the OTU.

Wormholes exist but are very rare - rare enough not be to considered a method of travel but more like a (dangerous) novelty. The technology to drill wormholes won't exist until like TL18 or 19.

Stutterwarp theory was proposed on Earth pre-Jump drive. However, the team working on Jump Drive produced a working prototype first and Stutterwarp never moved beyond the theory stage. With a working FTL drive, interest in Stutterwarp dried up and was shelved until Terran colonists (descendants from a sleeper ship expedition) living in an area where Jump Drive didn't work revived the research. Stutterwarp is balanced by expense (stutterwarp isn't as durable as Jump because the technology isn't mature) and by its shorter range. Also, a cascade effect keeps an active Stutterwarp from being used on a Jumping starship - the coils of the Stutterwarp accmulate a charge as if it was working. So most ships don't carry both drives as most ships are unwilling to sit in space for like six hours to bring its Stutterwarp drive online. Stutterwarp has the aforementioned advantage of speed.

Psionic Shifting as a method of FTL travel also exists IMTU. In fact, the Zhodani have long known about it, but use Jump Drive instead, as it requires a "chorus" of psions linked together to visualize the destination and to contribute their psionic strength to move the vessel. However Psionic Shifting drive and causes operators premature aging and death due to the stresses involved - usually a year or two of operating a psionic shifting drive will age a man in his 20s to like his 70s. Clearly unacceptable for a people like the Zhodani, they've shelved the technology and use Jump Drive instead. The fact nobody in the 3I knows about this is that information interchange was never good between the 3I and the Consulate, and, frankly, "nobody ever asked."

 

[Ptah]

Originally posted by epicenter00:
Psionic Shifting as a method of FTL travel also exists IMTU. In fact, the Zhodani have long known about it, but use Jump Drive instead, as it requires a "chorus" of psions linked together to visualize the destination and to contribute their psionic strength to move the vessel. However Psionic Shifting drive and causes operators premature aging and death due to the stresses involved - usually a year or two of operating a psionic shifting drive will age a man in his 20s to like his 70s. Clearly unacceptable for a people like the Zhodani, they've shelved the technology and use Jump Drive instead. The fact nobody in the 3I knows about this is that information interchange was never good between the 3I and the Consulate, and, frankly, "nobody ever asked."

Interesting. Is it faster than CT jump drive and/or without the masking effect and/or longer range than J6? If so, it might not be for everyday use but some patriotic young Zhodani would surely volunteer in times of military necessity. A few hundred brave souls could put a Zhodani fleet where the 3I would never expect it.

I assume you can't force criminals or undesirables to perform this psionic shifting.

 

[Fritz_Brown]

It sounds like it requires more than a few folks per craft, Ptah. But it certainly could be used to throw in that freak-out factor in a game.

I mentioned before my micro-jump. It is exactly what epicenter and Bill are talking about: it is terribly useful at the J1 level, but not terribly efficient above that (as it would move you at J1 "speed" regardless of distance). It is pretty handy, though for escaping the revenuers. And, unless you want to stack J-drives, you are stuck with a J1 ship.

Oh, Andy:

Originally posted by Andy Fralix:
[snip]the internal combustion version is not used very much for land purposes except maybe for setting land speed records and other non-productive purposes,[snip]

Do you call an Abrams M1A Main Battle Tank a non-productive purpose?

 

[JAFARR]

1. I did not know the Abrams was turbine powered.
2. Can I hide behind the "very much" part?

I was thinking about a jet powered go kart I saw at a monster truck show. It couldn't get wide open in the small space it had to operate in, the driver couldn't have controlled it if he had, and it really did not add anything to the show.

 

[aramis]

Many busses in Anchorage are diesel turbine driven.

The point tho, is that different regimes of a given basic theory will produce different implementations, but that different theories seldom fill similar niches.

 

[Fritz_Brown]

Originally posted by Andy Fralix:
1. I did not know the Abrams was turbine powered.
2. Can I hide behind the "very much" part?

No prob, Andy! You can hide most anyplace, just don't park here.

 

[epicenter00]

Originally posted by Ptah:
Interesting. Is it faster than CT jump drive and/or without the masking effect and/or longer range than J6? If so, it might not be for everyday use but some patriotic young Zhodani would surely volunteer in times of military necessity. A few hundred brave souls could put a Zhodani fleet where the 3I would never expect it.

I've always imagined after some initial research, the Zhodani haven't really looked into it since. Most Zhodani don't even know about it. It's like Tesla's research today - we know it was once done, those who know about Tesla's weird devices think they might have potential, but there's simply no interest in doing it today. It's just a historical curiousity. At least until 1240 when certain groups that could care less about the welfare of humanity desperately need some drive to offset fleets of Stutterwarp starships that are cutting their Jump drive fleets to shreds...

The principles and the gear used in the original research still exists. However, given that psions are considered so valuable in Zhodani society and form the upper classes, nobody really wants to expend their loved ones to move ships around. Requiring the rich and priviledged to give up their lives for something has always been a sure way for that something to not see the light of day. Now, if they could use some method to consume proles, I'm sure the Zhodani would see things differently.

As it exists, Psionic Shifting drives do have certain advantages over standard Jump Drive.

1. Standard 3I sensors can't really detect when the shifting drive is used (Zhodani have devices that can and psions who know what to look for can also identify the passage).

2. The drive has a certain masking effect in that the teleportation is instanteous to the ships and the crews being moved but there is a delay between when the ship vanishes from the starting point and when it appears at the destination - it's so short as to be nearly instanteous for in-system jumps but the time is noticable in jumps measured in light years and is somewhat relative to the distance being shifted but not completely - occasionally very close areas require days to jump there while further areas might only require a day. The Zhodani know how to estimate the times with great accuracy as they know the kind of conditions that affect the transit times, but it's not something that can be intuitively grasped by a "blunt" 3I'er.

3. The shifting drive is limited to about J2 performance, though that's not a hard-limit - further refinement of the technology and research would result in greater range.

4. Shifting drive is less energy efficient than jump drive - the devices that power the shifting drive are infamously power hungry.

5. The shifting drive is also requires a beacon psion at the destination or for the destination to be "visually observable" to the chorus for a 100% accurate jump (the definition of "visually observable" is relative depending on the psion). Unobserved or remotely viewed jumps are more like probability drive. The standard issues with delta-V remain unchaged - you could cancel it out, but the thermal differential would be passed through the psions first as a conduit, killing them by freezing them or making them burst into flame.

The reason why the Consulate has never used shifting drive against the 3I is that Frontier Wars were never a true threat to the Consulate that would result in such desperation. Their wars have always been "controlled burns" to clear a firebreak around the Consulate so that the raging brushfire known as the 3I wouldn't burn the Consulate down. Given that, the conflicts were never considered desperate enough to sacrifice nobles or intendants using such technologies.

Originally posted by Ptah:
I assume you can't force criminals or undesirables to perform this psionic shifting.

Well, that is the crux, isn't it? Zhodani society doesn't really have criminals or undesirables. Psionic criminals and undesirables might exist but they would have yet to be caught or be in exile, neither of which are suitable for using as drive operators. Otherwise, such traits would be seen as mental illness, right? The Thought Police show up, they fix your mind to remove those undesired tendencies and they release you again, right as rain.