Reaching waaay back:
You don't need more than that, since if the trip would take longer than a week, you might as well jump. Go ahead and jump. (Youtube, and you're welcome)
And since you don't need more than that, just handwave the situations where the math would dictate that you would actually need more -- and then hide the actual fuel use by ruling that you write off the whole tankful every trip.
Worst case total trip time -- covered by the handwave -- is then two weeks (gas giant to gas giant), no power plant fuel burn during jump ('77). HG'79 says there's a power plant and it runs at full power during jump, so worst case trip time then becomes three weeks. Now, add in the normal-space runs from the mainworld to the gas giant on each end -- partially nerfing the handwave -- and you're up to four weeks. Works for HG, well enough that that it stays unchanged in HG'80.
Backport the 4 weeks to LBB2'81 and there you go. What was once 1 week of full power operation for the maneuver drive alone, had now become 4 weeks of power for the entire ship. Of course, the fuel requirement was still based on the original '77 rules that didn't scale fuel use by ship tonnage, but it looked like they'd fixed it because suddenly it did four times as much with the fuel as it did in the first edition.
Except that in '77, they were using a ludicrously unrealistic "flat rate per G-turn" fuel burn rate that explicitly did not scale up by hull size. That 5KTd'er was literally using the same fuel consumption as a 50Td small craft of the same acceleration. A poorly-thought-out rule (bigger vessels are more fuel efficient) that turned into magic at the high end, though at the low-to-middle range of Adv-Class Ships it wasn't quite as implausible. It's probably worth noting that the fuel use rates from LBB2 and LBB5 match at 1KTd, while also noting that all of the ships in LBB2 are less than 1Ktd (and even Kinunir is only 1250Td).A 5000 ton starship using the same fuel consumption (scaled up) as a 50 ton small craft would need 100 times as much fuel, or 100 kg fuel per minute = 1 ton per turn. With a power plant fuel allotment of 10 tons it would be able to accelerate at 1 G for 10 turns. It certainly would not have any "at least 288 accelerations" worth of reaction mass.
And it is effectively unlimited. At small craft burn rates (10kg/G-turn), 10Pn gives you a week of continuous full-power acceleration.Not exactly 288, at least 288, meaning more than 287. It does not say 288 turns and you're out of luck. There might be a limit, but it's not exact.
The rest of the book sticks with "effectively unlimited".
You don't need more than that, since if the trip would take longer than a week, you might as well jump. Go ahead and jump. (Youtube, and you're welcome)
And since you don't need more than that, just handwave the situations where the math would dictate that you would actually need more -- and then hide the actual fuel use by ruling that you write off the whole tankful every trip.
Worst case total trip time -- covered by the handwave -- is then two weeks (gas giant to gas giant), no power plant fuel burn during jump ('77). HG'79 says there's a power plant and it runs at full power during jump, so worst case trip time then becomes three weeks. Now, add in the normal-space runs from the mainworld to the gas giant on each end -- partially nerfing the handwave -- and you're up to four weeks. Works for HG, well enough that that it stays unchanged in HG'80.
Backport the 4 weeks to LBB2'81 and there you go. What was once 1 week of full power operation for the maneuver drive alone, had now become 4 weeks of power for the entire ship. Of course, the fuel requirement was still based on the original '77 rules that didn't scale fuel use by ship tonnage, but it looked like they'd fixed it because suddenly it did four times as much with the fuel as it did in the first edition.
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