stutterwarp tech
- Thread starter jcrocker
- Start date
Remember, a "power plant" is a lot more besides. It includes the cooling systems, heat radiators, chemical jets for maneuvre etc. So simply looking up IRL data won't cut it.
RTG is going to be a lot less efficient than fission. A 0.01MW RTG is going to have about 400kg of Plutonium (i.e. 40 nuclear warheads worth).
This is a dangerously large amount to have in a single unit. Even with the miniscule amount used in real RTG, they are cellular and each tiny packet of Pu has its own shielding.
IRL fission reactors are about 18 tons per MW, while SC NAM is 66.67, the rest being other stuff, and solar is 45 tons per MW (SC (errata'd) only gives the area of array per MW, 500m2, which works out about 100kg per square meter of panel).
At a guess of 400 tons per MW for RTG, you'd be looking at a 4 ton package for a 0.01MW drive, with 20 times this (.2MW) heat to dump, which without resorting to circulating liquid sodium through the radiators probably means about 120m2 of heat dump panels.
Bryn
PS I'd imagine that such probes would be a prime target for stealing, as you can take the high grade Plutonium for use in atomic weapons, and possibly some kind of improvised bomb pumped laser.
RTG is going to be a lot less efficient than fission. A 0.01MW RTG is going to have about 400kg of Plutonium (i.e. 40 nuclear warheads worth).
This is a dangerously large amount to have in a single unit. Even with the miniscule amount used in real RTG, they are cellular and each tiny packet of Pu has its own shielding.
IRL fission reactors are about 18 tons per MW, while SC NAM is 66.67, the rest being other stuff, and solar is 45 tons per MW (SC (errata'd) only gives the area of array per MW, 500m2, which works out about 100kg per square meter of panel).
At a guess of 400 tons per MW for RTG, you'd be looking at a 4 ton package for a 0.01MW drive, with 20 times this (.2MW) heat to dump, which without resorting to circulating liquid sodium through the radiators probably means about 120m2 of heat dump panels.
Bryn
PS I'd imagine that such probes would be a prime target for stealing, as you can take the high grade Plutonium for use in atomic weapons, and possibly some kind of improvised bomb pumped laser.
mike wightman
SOC-14 10K
A magnetic shield will not stop gamma rays either - they, gamma rays, are unaffected by magnetic fields.
Which is a lot more plutonium than I'd want sitting around in a drone like that.
I was originally thinking of having the drone being placed in position with an attatched fuel tank storing several months of fuel. It detects a GRB, drops the tank, and swims home.
When RTGs were mentioned, I was considering a two-stage power supply; a small RTG unit to provide power to the detection gear and computer control unit [and incidental heat to keep the whole thing from freezing solid] in addition to enough fuel for a fuel cell to power the drone on the trip home.
If the two-stage design isn't going to work [can drones power up their own stutterwarp?] I'll just go back to the big fuel tank. Which is still cheap, and the fuel cell running makes enough heat to keep things toasty warm.
Actually the fuel tank might make a good component to a radiation shield. Slap some lead sheeting on the outside, keep the drone and all the vulnerable bits in a bay surrounded by fuel tank, and you'll improve the survival chances a great deal.
Faraday cages sufficiently thick WILL shield against gamma; the thickness, however, is the problem, as most materials so used are fairly gamma-translucent.
Gamma is just very-high-energy EMR. If you can stop X-Rays, you can stop gamma.
And the real need on those drones is not 100% shielding, just high enough to reduce the fatal interaction with the computers.
Gamma is just very-high-energy EMR. If you can stop X-Rays, you can stop gamma.
And the real need on those drones is not 100% shielding, just high enough to reduce the fatal interaction with the computers.
TheEngineer
SOC-14 1K
The only real world way to protect something from gamma radiation is shielding. Diverting with electrical or magnetical fields does not work.
Anyway, thinking the Traveller way could allow to use special superdense materials, designed for gamma interaction and thus weakening of high energy radiation intensity.
So, a material 20 times as dense as lead might be quite efficient here.
OTOH you might use fiberoptical and hardwired components to be a bit more imune against radiation exposure.
Mert
Anyway, thinking the Traveller way could allow to use special superdense materials, designed for gamma interaction and thus weakening of high energy radiation intensity.
So, a material 20 times as dense as lead might be quite efficient here.
OTOH you might use fiberoptical and hardwired components to be a bit more imune against radiation exposure.
Mert
TO divert EMF/EMR (also known as non-visible light waves), you need either gravity (very ineffective) or shielding.
Photons are apparently immune to magnetic fields. Or, they are as far as our ability to detect has shown. So no, you can NOT use magnetics to shield.
Magnetics will shield against alpha and beta radiations (which are atomic nucleii stripped of their electrons), but since photons carry no electro-magnetic charge, they are immune to magnetic shielding.
But Gamma is just a form of radio/light wavicle. (Really, it's just REALLY high-frequency X-Rays.)
You could, however, put a large shield to hide behind, and then stutterwarp away; gamma is directional.
The design is finished and posted: please have a look at http://www.geocities.com/canada2300vj/doorstop.htm
The final design came out to just over half a million livres. The Anatomy of a Missile article suggested drastic cuts in the listed price, mass and volume of one-time use components, but to reflect the need of reliability and for some extra shielding, the cuts were a lot less than stated in that article. Mass and volume were halved, not quartered, and price was cut to 50%, not 5% for the drive.
And for some fun with GRBs in your campaign, check out
http://www.geocities.com/canada2300vj/seeds.htm.
The final design came out to just over half a million livres. The Anatomy of a Missile article suggested drastic cuts in the listed price, mass and volume of one-time use components, but to reflect the need of reliability and for some extra shielding, the cuts were a lot less than stated in that article. Mass and volume were halved, not quartered, and price was cut to 50%, not 5% for the drive.
And for some fun with GRBs in your campaign, check out
http://www.geocities.com/canada2300vj/seeds.htm.
Seems I was wrong about the magnetic shield and Gamma rays. I stand corrected (no matter how hard I looked for some data to back me up... 
).
Looks good, however using an optical lock on the home star will, of course, provide a position which is a month (or year, or whatever, depending on distance) out of date. The positional fix will get better as you move closer, and the transmitted light, and hence position, becomes more recent, but It might pay to add in a little for a simple navigation computer to do some simple orbital mechanics and re-align the return course off a projected position.
G.
).Looks good, however using an optical lock on the home star will, of course, provide a position which is a month (or year, or whatever, depending on distance) out of date. The positional fix will get better as you move closer, and the transmitted light, and hence position, becomes more recent, but It might pay to add in a little for a simple navigation computer to do some simple orbital mechanics and re-align the return course off a projected position.
G.
Thanks - I was thinking of something like that, but I don't know if it's worth while. If I start have it 'navigating', someone will insist that it needs a few cubic meters of 'navigation workstation' - and quite frankly, I doubt the extra travel time would be more than a minute or two. It's not an elegant solution, but it should get the drone to the target system.
