I checked GEnie yesterday to see what the Internet rates are. GEnie is
currently charging $0.30/5000bytes of information flow, either incoming
or outgoing. So, getting the TML on GEnie is probalby going to cost
about $45/month. So, watch those inclusions, folks. Colin Roald
presumably left half of the Higginbotham's message below his response
by accident, but it is now costing any of our GEnie friends money to
read...
On the subject of fusion, I am no expert. However, I once ran through
the calculations during our discussions. At least on Earth, deuterium
is about .015 percent of all hydrogen. If you figure a fuel flow rate
of 3 liters of hydrogen per hour (see MT Ref's Manual for choice of
number), and had a 100% efficient d-d fusion reaction with no other
reactions, you could derive a maximum of 5MW from that reactor (compared
to the 6MW that can be gotten from a 14kl+ TL9-12 fusion reactor using
3 liters of hydrogen per hour per kl). Ergo, you either have deuterium
enrichment, or protium reactions. It doesn't take a terribly efficient
protium reaction (when added to d-d with a higher efficiency level) to
get the sort of power output we are told we get from a fusion plant in
MegaTraveller.
Rob Dean
(shouldn't be doing this--I've got to be up at 4:30 tomorrow to make my
flight...)