Re: Starship design revamping

[email removed] writes:

>I suggest that you recheck your figures. You have that starship traveling at
>5.0e8 meters/second. But lightspeed is only 3e8 m/s!! And at 1 g, ignoring
>relativistic effects, it'll take nearly a year to reach lightspeed.

Dropped a decimal -- should be 5.08e7... thanks for catching that. That
means the drive will only be 13,000,000% efficient. Oh well.

>The figures *I* mentioned came from the original 3 books. And there was
>nothing in there about the drive being reactionless. That's an *assumption*
>that was made by so many people that it became official.

from my post:
>The problem is that the MT manuver drives are not rockets!

I was referring to Megatraveller. Check the Ref's Manual p.56:

"This new, artificially generated force pushes against a vessel's
`thrust plates' themselves, which make true reactionless thrusters
a reality for starship-sized vessels."

Not until MT was the power consumption of the manuver drive given
(High Guard had power plant energy point figures, but that was in
addition to powering the drives.)  There was never anything in the
old set that said the manuver drives were rockets, either. Everyone
I ever discussed it with assumed they were rockets, as did I, since
that was the obvious explanation for the high fuel consumption.  I don't
know what Marc Miller and co. intended them to be at that time. Metlay?
My guess is that they were intended to be reactionless all along, otherwise
why switch?

Bertil Jonell writes:

>A suggestion, why not correct both things and with the same amount? If both
>energy production and energy consumption is increased, lets say, 1000 times
>(volume etc left untouched) the net change would be zero (Aside from a
>net gain in space available, because the volume of the part of the power-
>plant thats dedicated to supply the non-drive components is reduced by a
>factor 1000.

This would cause BIG problems for warship design, since the limiting factor
for many designs is power for weapons, and this would make it 1000 times
easier to get.....  It would probably work better to reduce the fuel needed
for the power plant, while keeping the output the same.

					W. Dow Rieder
				alias Capt. Kagariilian Grant

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