Batteries...

Once long long ago, while I was doing battery tradeoffs
for a UC Berkeley/NASA study on Mars Spacesuits,
I got bored and checked the numbers for the Traveller
batteries against what we had around today for real.
It turns out that we're just about right, and that
the projection for TL9 is about in line with what
is reasonable to guess will be usable by 2010.
Even more impressive is that the TL10 and 11 entries
are _also_ on line with that theoretically will be
state of the art in 2030 and 2050 8-) (Note that as
an engineer, I don't put much faith in more than 10
year development prediction, but it's nice to know
that the traveller stuff agrees with presumed reasonable
values...).

The only thing that's high is cost.
The given costs are roughly in line with space-rated
battery costs.
One could presume that less tough (and less tested...)
batteries for ground vehicles are possible and
cheaper.
Radio shack, for instance sells TL7.5 NiCad batteries
for about 65% of Traveller figures, and you could
probably halve that for bulk purchases at wholesale.

- -george william herbert
[email removed]       [email removed]