Subject: re: antimatter jump drives
[email removed] writes:
[At TL 17 (or beyond, perhaps), why is there no antimatter powered
jump drive?] TL 17 is when antimatter power plants first appear. You can
certainly design a TL 17+ starship with antimatter instead of fusion plants,
(p 64 of Ref's Manual)
[If I'm missing something] You're missing something.
[Reading the Traveller rules and supplements leads me to believe
that starship jump drives are powered directly by large capacitor banks]
No. The "jump drive" (which is not of course a "drive"--it is not an engine)
is simply a very large fusion plant which uses up its fuel very quickly
because the jump uses a lot of energy which must be supplied in a very short
amount of time with no power fluctuations. (which is why you risk mis-jump if
you use unrefined fuel on a ship not equipped to use it)
The energy is shunted through these crystals (name escapes me) which puts the
energy into a grid which is around the hull of the starship. That grid is
more properly what is responsible for jump, but since you only see it when
the ship enters or leaves jump space its easier for the spacers to just point
to the fusion plant and say "thats the jump drive" to the tourists, even though
everybody with a little experience knows thats not what it is.
I got that from Digest Group's Starship Operator's Manual which explains
(probably for the first time) the rational for the various technologies
in Traveler.
[energy absorbed by black globe screens,] - nope. You can't use this energy.
It goes into the crystals and must be discharged before you want to jump. If
the crystals absorbs the total amount of energy they are able to you must turn
off the black globe or the energy which it absorbs will go elsewhere rather
than into the jump capacitors (ie. you FRY!!) This has struck me as a strange
method of getting rid of the energy from the black globe, but then again it is
an experimental weapon and the naval engineers had to put all that energy
*somewhere*.
Fred Schiff ([email removed])