You know, I just thought of something...Water is a good fuel source because it's
cheap(read: free), stable, and easy to handle 'cos it's just plain liquid at
room tempreature...but there's something wrong with that:
Who sez your fuel tanks are kept at room temperature?
What kind of idiot would waste all kinds of life support and power by putting
pressurization and heating coils into a starship's fuel dump??? Once that
stuff gets purified to H2, one short circuit could(assuming your engineer
rolled a '2' :-) blow the whole ship to Kingdom Come! H2 is flammable at
STP, ani't it?
Now of course, you could just stay on the water's surface until your purifiers
take care of everything, but what if you get run off? If your fuel bays AREN'T
pressurize and heated, then once you get out of the atmosphere and into the
(I think) ~4 deg. K of Space(tm), all that unpurified water will freeze,
shattering your tanks! And don't forget, you're probably still running from
whatever shooed you off the water to begin with! What a lousy day!
Yeah, ammonia, methane, and LH2 have to kept at ungodly low temperatures to
be stable, but in space...no one can hear you melt...:-)
DISCLAIMER: Please note that all of the above was stated by a totally
chem-ignorant Computer Science major...so if I screwed up in
my assumptions, in the words of Bart Simpson, "Don't kill me Homer."
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|"And all this science, I don't understand.
[email removed](Legion) | It's just my job, five days a week."
| -Bernie Taupin
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