*** I am forwarding this for J.S. Higginbotham ****
In TML message number 2320, it was stated that the MT rules for fuel usage in
fission plants were out to lunch. I have to agree.
>From my Naval Nuke School days, I acquired a good feel for fuel usage in a
naval nuclear reactor. The suggested conversion of hours-years in the table
is the one we use when we do fission plants. It is a convenient conversion,
but NOT especially accurate. Modern naval nuclear plants are CONSIDERABLY
more efficient than that. Probably hour-two years would be more accurate.
As to the difficulty implied be the fact that that would make a fission plant
considerably superior to a fusion plant, ALAS! MT fusion plants are a mong
the most mind-boggling INEFFICIENT power plants i have ever heard of.
According to my calculations, a MT fusion plant (TL 15) is about 0.014 PERCENT
efficient at getting usable energy from fusion.Slightly ridiculous, eh?
A possible explanation for the above inefficiency is that a VERY large
fraction of the fuel used in a fusion plant is used to cool the plant, and is
then dumped overboard. This would imply that planetside plants should be
perhaps 1000 times as efficient (or perhaps 2-3000) as shipboard plants.
Unfortunately, this does not explain why fusion plants are preferred to
fission plants in the Imperium. I prefer to believe that there are rather
obscure environmental protection statutes involved (read: wierd local
prejudices). Alternatively, the fact that fission plants are REALLY heavy,
and cannot produce any reasonable amount of agility might be considered.
still another possibility, all them guys may have forgotten fission in the
last 3000+ years. whichever.
JS Higginbotham
(reality checker & rules analyst
(read: kibitzer))