Ahh ... HUNGER GAMES meets TWILIGHT (in SPACE) ... Appeal to a new generation of Travellers!
Vent-Rant MegaTraveller what I hate about it.
- Thread starter Murph
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Spinward Flow
SOC-14 5K
Ahh ... HUNGER GAMES meets TWILIGHT (in SPACE) ... Appeal to a new generation of Travellers!
ALWAYS bring a shotgun ...
Condottiere
SOC-14 5K
I think we invented that.
The concept is interesting, but the implementation is more complicated than just attaining the fuel and temperature and pressure.
The general idea is that in a "standard" fusion reaction you fuse a deuteron (H2) and a triton (H3) and produce He4 and a high energy neutron (n0) which you have to deal with via shielding, and you still need to convert the heat to electricity via some system (Steam turbine, thermocouple, etc).
A Light Helium Reactor requires higher temperature, but fuses a deuteron (H2) and a helion (He3) and produce He4 and a high energy proton (1H+1) which not only can easily be dealt with via electromagnetic fields, but can actually be used to be bent into a circular stream through the center of which you run your power cabling to induce a current directly without the neutron radiation problem. Sounds great.
But the problem is that in your reaction plasma, any and all reactions that can take place at a given energy will take place. So not only will you be reacting deuterons and helions, you will also be reacting deuterons with other deuterons, producing either tritons and protons or helions and neutrons, or deuterons will react with some of the tritons produced above, and produce alpha-helium-4 and neutrons. So the reacting plasma will still be producing some neutrons as part of its reaction cross section. The future design engineers will need to come up with a design that can isolate the reactants in order to be truly aneutronic.
I like the muon reaction as well, but you need a muon source (think damper-induced reverse-weak/beta muon genesis) , and you need to preserve the lifetime of the muon, and you need to solve the problem of muons binding to reaction products (or produce muons rapidly enough to supply the reactants over and above those removed by binding with reaction products).
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Spinward Flow
SOC-14 5K
More of the latter..."Vampire Fleets and Uber-Viruses" or "Hard Science and Pocket Empires"?
That was my Venus campaign...
No problem, you simply create a muonium alloy via mumble mumble process that then is used as the source for the muon injector accelerator, relativistic speeds for lifetime management, and damper tech for the advanced requirements of miniaturized sustained fusion over the short term pulse required for jump.
Really, I would have expected your first year jump netbooks to have gone over this.
One must be mindful of the unexpected properties of such an Ultimate Metal
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Use of the "destroy the Universe, and everyone will like the results" did not work out so well. If that was what they wanted to do, keep TNE and later disasters as a separate line item, and move the OTU out further, Trojan Reach, Vanguard Reach, Far Frontiers, Reavers Deep, Dark Nebula, or move over to the Hiver/K'kree side of the Empire.
