> Realistically, fusion could make a bit of hydrogen last quite a while.
> Since it's been my impression from Classic that power plant fuel got
used up by manuvering,
> this means that m-drives are add-ons to the power plant and what
would be a fuel efficient process
> gets used to provide raw plasma for thrust or super-science gravity
generators on mutated steroids.
Yes, Traveller fusion plants are terribly inefficient as written and
remained so
for compatibility's sake.
Best case in Megatraveller is TL 15 fusion at 0.016% fuel energy
available as power.
Traveller: The New Era (TNE) is a little better at 4.3%.
Lower tech levels are far worse.
The fuel can't be used as a rocket; you can't get the canonical
multi-G-hour thrust with either
the standard or relativistic rocket equation even with the Megatraveller
fuel rate.
Traveller m-drives must convert the fuel directly to energy, per E=mc^2,
which is used to generate
momentum and kinetic energy to push the ship along. Call them impulse
drives ;-)
(As a bonus, the near-c rock problem goes away if you invoke
conservation of energy and say hydrogen is the only fuel for m-drives -
you can't carry enough fuel to push a payload to high fractions of c,
but several percent of c is still bad enough and reachable).
Whatever the process is allows the multi-terawatt waste heat to be
radiated without a big explosion.
I think a reasonable handwave is neutrino radiation, or some other
weakly interacting particle.
Which has the bonus effect of enabling directional stealth and giving
ships a reason to carry neutrino detectors.
My particular handwave is that the first gen M-Drives are repulsor drives that accelerate the plasma to do the thing (or if close enough to a planet or sun, work without the plasma). When Jumpspace comes around, the field of interdimensional physics upgrades them to a very small, exceedingly weak, jump bubble just behind the drive that constantly moves forward. The physics breakthrough also allows very efficient heat sinks that can also break conservation of energy because pulp physics and interdimensional weirdness. If their limiter breaks, the ship freezes; if it seizes up, the ship over heats. If you fill it up and keep going, it erupts in an explosion of heat and random matter equal to 150% or more of original input energy. Fill it up and let it sit for a while, and you can get stable exotic matter, some of which is impossible to create using normal physics.
Pulp science is my favorite science - does it make sense in our universe? No. Does it make sense in theirs? Mostly.
> So I would feel confident saying that space stations (and other
things that need power
> and not m-drives - and probably throw jump drives in there too?) use
in a year what an equal
> power plant on a ship would use in two weeks.
Depends on which rule set you use, and how efficient a bare fusion plant is:
Megatrav power plant with the numbers above is 3066x worse than 50%
efficiency.
TNE power plant is 11.6x worse than 50% efficiency.
Space stations need station-keeping propulsion, so they will have very
small m-drives; 1 G-hour is a delta-v of 36km/sec, which is huge
compared to the 45m/sec/year required to keep geosynchronous satellites
in position (for example).
If we say that magic radiators are an integral part of the m-drive, they
are still attractive for planet-based power stations; you could have
them on a giant barge type arrangement which would make them proof
against seismic events, for example.
Depends on what the handwave is for them. I'll have to think about that, other than using gravity control to make a mini sun smaller than your head.