Methane vs LH2:
Chris, the reason that you can store more hydrogen in liquid methane thathan in liquid hydrogen is simple: the volume per molecule isn't that much
different, even if there are five [one C and four H] vs. two [two H] atoms in
the molecule. Since there are twice as many Hydrogen atoms in a methane
molecule than in a hydrogen molecule [diatomic, only way it's stable in nature]
then you get twice as much hydrogen, though it weighs a whole lot more.
I don't feel like going into gas and liquid theory enough to justify
the above, just remember that most of everything is empty space anyway :-) and
the ping pong balls bounce about like tennis balls do.
Re: mass-independent drives
Interesting analysis. This whole things points out a couple of
things some friends of mine and I have known and dealt with for a long time:
Traveller isn't science. A lot of it is pseudoscience that looks real
good. and
If you bend things a little you can still make sense. For instance,
at the beginning, things like hull armour weren't a factor, and so starships
tended very strongly to have a closely similar density. When high guard came
out, they didn't want to deal with mass, so they continued that assumption.
Presumeably the 'armour really takes up volume' assumption helped to
counteract that, but i haven't done an analysis of it myself...
Then, with Megatrav, suddenly we have a problem. Our starships now
are like everything else and _weigh_ something. Oops, wow, our drives didn't
used to take this into account. Two choices for the designers now: either to
cheat on reality [really just realizing that there's been an innacuracy in the
rules] and keep the drives consistent; or they could revamp them totally and
risk having starships that had been made earlier not work in the new system.
They chose to assume that ships really were still close to the same density,
continuing a known reality gap, but that way we can still make ships like we
used to...
All you have to do to correct this is to follow allong in the
assumption that the rule is valid under...have a ship within [relatively]
reasonable densities. As long as you don't armour it to hell and back, it'll
work fine. If you demand reality anyway, kluge a rule yourself and ignore
the new Fighting Ships and you might as well write Marc Miller a nasty letter
about it too :-)
[oh, final comment about ship densities... FINALLY we have starships that
weigh more then they displace in water. :-) old ships just couldn't sink, so
using them as submarines was a bit difficult :-)]
- -george
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George William Herbert JOAT For Hire: Anything, Anywhere: My Price
UCB Naval Architecture undergrad: Engineering with a Bouyant Attitude :-)
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