Howdoo All!
Yet another questionette for you all. I notice that Thruster Plates
do not require fuel (directly) to operate - they just burn up power plant
fuel when they draw their operating power. Since they don't themselves
burn any fuel like HEPlaR does, then does this mean that the concept of
G-Hours goes out of the proverbial window for Thruster Plates?
I did a bit of calculating, and found that at TL 12, Fusion Power
plants use 0.15 kl of fuel per year (actually, I wonder if this is the
fuel consumption per kl of power plant, and not for the plant as a whole).
If say, the Thrusters required 187.5 MW of power to run, then this means
that they require (187.5 / 0.15 =) 28.125 kl of LHyd fuel to operate for
one whole YEAR!! So, effectively, one G-hour of fuel in this case works out
to be 0.00107 kl of fuel per hour of continuous operation. This seems to
indicate that you don't need to carry around much fuel to use your
thruster plates, and if the fuel tankage is large enough, you'd only need
to refuel your maneuver drive once per year at most!! Thus, you have an
effectively infinite number of G-hours of fuel.
Does this make sense to people, or am I barking up the wrong tree
completely here?! If I am right, then what does this do to the G-Hour
concept, which seems to be rather important in Space Travel as it stands in
TNE and FF&S?
Opinions, comments etc on a postcard please....
PS. Further to my previous (LONG!!!) post (Stars and Planets...), I forgot
to mention a rather good book called 'What If The Moon Didn't Exist?', by
Neil. F. Comins (published by Harper-Collins, price $20). This book is
excellent for any prospective planet-builders out there, as it goes through
lots of 'What If' questions about the Earths that might have been.
Specifically, it tells you what life would be like if: the moon didn't exist
(natch), the moon was closer to the Earth, the Sun was more massive, the
Earth was tilted at 90 degrees, the Earth was smaller, a star went Supernova
near the Solar System, a Star passes through the Solar System, a black hole
passed through the Earth (?!), and if the ozone layer didn't exist (very
topical!!). So, if you want to know what the environment would be on planets
that you build that don't have any moons, or orbit bigger stars, or any of
the above, this is the book for you. Its very 'reader-friendly', and doesn't
throw any equations or anything like that at you. Its basically a VERY good
book.
Also, you could do no worse that have a look through 'Astronomy'
magazine. Every now and then, somebody writes an article that exercises the
imagination (a lot of the things in the aforementioned book appeared in this
magazine first). Also, there is the occasional article about stars and the
different type thereof (James B. Kaler writes some good articles on this
subject, and has published a rather good book called 'Stars and their
Spectra' which is good but assumes some previous astronomical knowledge. He's
also written a book called 'Stars' which is the same sort of thing, but much
simpler. Both books are very good if you want more info on Stellar
Evolution).
I hope that's helped anyone who's interested in some background
reading, or just plain interested in astronomy.
TTFN, Constantine