Hello fellow Travellers,
here is one comments on TML messages I read in the last TML nightly V57#8.
1. Kerry Harrison [email removed] wrote:
> 5. Most of the ships in the book do -not- list the total amount of
> fuel they take.
...stuff deleted
Well the fuel volume is listed under "notes" together with the fuel
purification ability. In some designs the fuel is called "reaction mass".
It is given cubic meters. I checked the G-hours mentioned of the ship
against the mentioned fuel mass, and got 12.5 kliters per G-hour and
100 tons of ship displacement, a slight difference to your calculation.
I had some trouble looking through the Starship Operating Procedures.
In Step 12, "Travel from Orbit" only streamlined ships are allowed to
land on planet surfaces. After checking the Starships, I found out that
the Subsidized Liner and the Yacht are USL but have Contra-Grav-Lifters.
Contra Grav Lifters are used to lift the ship against the gravity of a
world, so why should ships include Contra Grav, when they are not intended
to land on worlds (the illustration of the Yacht shows the ship flying in
an athmosphere). Realising this, I recommend an addition to step 12 of
the Startship Operating Procedure:
The deorbiting of an unstreamlined Starship is done in two steps. First
the ship decelerate as usual for the landing of a streamlined ship. But
after the time noted in the "Traval Time To Orbit Table", the ship has
only decelerated to suborbital speed (about 1000 km/h), and has reached
the edge of the atmosphere. It takes no G-hours of fuel, but at least
an additional hour to reach the surface of the world to land.
This additional rules only holds, if the destination planet has an
atmosphere. If not so, use the standard rules.
The starting sequence of an unstreamlined ship from an atmosphere world,
should include a one hours ascend to the edge of the atmosphere and then
the usual acceleration to orbital speed.
Any comments on this suggestion are strictly encouraged!
Juergen
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Juergen Kirsch
Institut fuer Informatik, Universitaet Bonn
Germany
[email removed]