In a recent message Scott Kellogg quoted my aircraft carrier design as a
justification for building a couple of fission powered spacecraft. While
I am flattered that people remember what I write, I need to point out that
that was a "quick fix" ruling, intended to make a particular class of vehicles
fit my conception of TL8 reality a little closer. Before I started doing
cost/benefit analyses using those fuel consumption figures to decide whether
a starship should have a fission plant, I'd want to be a little more sure of my
numbers. (As soon as I get around to it, I'll get the fuel volume and refueling
rate for a nearby commercial nuclear powerplant from a friend of mine who works
there, and see what that works out to in kl/hour per megawatt of power output.
I also want to comment on the current nuclear damper controversy raging as a
result of Scott's post. While I will not comment on the rationalization of
dampers in the game, I think there is a problem with using your damper to
increase the prodcution of your power plant. I'm originally a chemical engineer
by training, and that was a while ago, BUT, I suspect that if you intended a
fission (or any other steam generating) plant to be a certain size, that is,
have a certain heat flux and boil a certain amount of water, operate at a fixed
pressure, etc...you could not easily "overload" it to prodcue more power. This
means that if you really wanted to do that, you would need to have the plant
sized for the largest power output that you intended to squeeze out of it, and
run it at a lower efficeincy the rest of the time. In game terms, you could
"burn your fuel faster" in a nuclear power plant, and thus carry less fuel for
a given power output (with correspondingly lower endurance). I'm not sure I
see the advantage of this.
Now, I said I wasn't going to comment on damper rationalization, but if you
really focussed a beam on a nuclear pile that caused extra neutrons to be shed
(which is *not* the same as normal radioactive decay for uranium...which decays
by alpha emission, I think) and more fissions to take place, the temeprature
in the pile would rise until it would eventually melt down...unless you shoved
the damper rods in to slow the reaction, which wouldn't help your power output.
Anyway, an innovative idea, but I don't think it will work.
PS Fission power vs. Fission warheads: about 4% U235 vs. 95+% U235 if memory
serves me correctly. You wouldn't have to completely destroy the U235 to
render a fission warhead unusable...just get it below 90(??)%. (I don't
know the real crtitical limits, and if I did they'd be classified.)