Just about any system is going to have gigantic quantities of ice in sufficiently distant bodies. Hydrogen and the elements with which it easily forms ices (carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen for methane, ammonia, and water respectively) are very abundant in the universe. You might have to go to Kuiper or Oort distances from the star to find it, of course.

Worlds in volatile-poor inner systems are likely to be backwaters (pardon the pun) due to the difficulties of both life support and ship fueling. If a volatile-poor inner system is very valuable for some reason (strategic or economic), a long(ish) term strategy would be to push distant icy bodies into orbits closer to the inner system for more convenient resource retrieval. Traveller tech is easily up to this task; the only real limit is how much stress the body will take before breaking up (or before your drive just burrows into the surface), which limits how much acceleration you can apply to the task. But even a steady 0.01g will let you reshape orbits radically over periods of a few decades.

On Mon, Oct 17, 2016 at 11:23 PM, (via tml list) <xxxxxx@simplelists.com> wrote:

This email was sent from shadowgard.com which does not allow forwarding of emails via email lists. Therefore the sender's email address (xxxxxx@shadowgard.com) has been replaced with a dummy one. The original message follows:

On 16 Oct 2016 at 18:17, Christopher Sean Hilton wrote:

> I'm thinking about sources of hydrogen in a system because I'm seeing
> a few extended system that have neither gas giants nor ice/fluid
> worlds.
>
> Firstly, I say fluid because I assume that someone with a fusion plant
> has enough energy at there disposal to electrically or otherwise
> seperate hydrogen from any Carbon-Hydrogen or Nitrogen-Hydrogen
> compound without too much work. My first question is: "Is this a good
> assumption?"
>
> Secondly, as I look at extended systems, I find that there are many
> that feature neither fluid nor "ice" nor gas giants. In such a system
> I would figure that the only source of hydrogen would be the Oort
> Cloud. In Sol Terra, this region starts at about 11 light-days
> (wikipedia) from the Sol. Is this beyond the endurance range of a ship
> that hasn't got enough fuel to jump?
>
> I would figure that this would seriously depress trade within such a
> system. At least it would make such a system dependent on a fleet of
> fuel tankers which regularly run from the mainworld to the oort cloud
> and back. Am I barking up the wrong tree here?

Asteroid belts inside the "ice line" may still have carbonaceous
chondrites. They've got heavier hydrocarbons and other organics.
They'd get processed for the carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen, all of
which are needed for life support systems.

Ones *outside* the ice line will have icy bodies as well as the other
assortment of asteroid types.

and, there will be comets and the like that pass thru the inner
system. In a system like you are talking about, they'd probably have
ships drop a processing module on tyhem as soon as they are spotted
and process them for hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon and anything else you
can't get from "rocky" bodies.

So you probably don't have to go all the way out to the Oort cloud.

The "ice line" in our system is a bit oinside Jupiter's orbit.

Mind you, if there aren't GGs and there aren't worlds with apprciable
fluid percentages, they system must have formed from, a nebula that
was poor in volatiles, so expect all the things I've mentioned to be
a lot rarer than in a normal system. But they should still be around
to some extent.

--
Leonard Erickson (aka shadow)
shadow at shadowgard dot com

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