On 06/21/2020 5:32 PM xxxxxx@gmail.com wrote:

Not suggesting my suggestion would suit you, but you are still stuck with these conundrums the basic rules leave:

1) How does your regular fusion plant manage to (in a near instant time period) convert 10-60% of ship volume of fuel into energy for the jump? The normal burn rate of said fusion plant on an ongoing bases to power the M-drives is miniscule. And we have YET to build any sort of reasonable fission plant with much in the way of high output AND load following. You get one or the other for the most part. That's why most nuclear vessels have other subsidiary power sources (batteries, generators, diesel systems, etc) and they also, as of now, do not have high-draw energy weapons or jump drives....

Note: We in Ontario have been looking at high output nuclear for a long time as a major part of our power infrastructure. The reason we still have coal fired plants (in addition to inertia, climate-change denial and a bunch of other corruption indicators) is that coal fired plants have very fast hourly ramp-up/ramp-down rates compared to nuclear. Nuclear cannot track the rise and fall of peak demand in a day which can be +150% of baseload. That's where the more 'agile' (in the sense of load following) coal fired plants fill a key gap.

Until we can invent nuclear that can load follow quickly (while not being someone's small, low power pet project in a lab or in an paper), there's no way we'll be able to just use fusion like that.

We've tried using wind power, but the problem with it is that it is plentiful but unpredictable. Something like over 40% of generated wind power that the province paid for was never delivered *because we did not need it*. This is what happens when you have power generated that you don't need and if baseload (night) and baseload (day) can vary by +150% of night baseload, existing nuclear technologies can't handle that.

This is why the jump drive should have an entirely different mechanism of operation which is less 'fusion reaction' and more 'magical poof' which will provide the huge whack of power. A normal fusion plant likely will never be able to run at both a low level and high level effectively or safely nor will it be able to transition in moments (as space combat would require). (If we ever evolve much of a useful fusion power infrastructure which still seems quite distant).

So, your main plant really has a choice of: Run at a power level that provides sensors, comms, ship's internal power, and manouver drive and with margin to power some sizable capacitors that can be kept active all the time in case weapons or screens need to be brought hot in less than several hours (the normal case) - in this case, J-drive is not powered but it either uses a 'magic poof' (and not the normal plant) or it has to spend a LONG time to power up the caps for a jump - hours and hours.

OR

Run at a very high level of power that can output enough to feed all active systems including J-Drive at once.... but then what do you do with all that excess power? The reality is you'd blow caps or have to use some very counter-to-stealth radiation techniques to constantly expend that high energy output.

THIS is why you need two types of plants and I think just boiling one into the Jump drive unit itself makes sense to me, as does having a specific jump drive fuel tankage that costs a bit more that can support the 'magic poof'. If you don't, it is really hard to see how a fusion plant can load follow fast enough to accommodate the vast and very, very fast conversion of that much fuel (energy) which then get fed to the J-drive.

Just plain easier. 

2) The drop tanks would need to be built to connect to the jump drive and allow the same kind of 'magic poof' for exterior fuel tankage. You couldn't possibly pump the volume of fuel that would be required fast enough into internal tanks. (On a Gazelle, you might, on a Tigress, no way.)

If you don't have 'magic poof' but imagine this happening in the regular fusion plant...you are basically saying your plant usually uses X fuel assuming a particular thrust rate from M-drives and with normal systems up but combat systems not up, and then suddenly it can, in a very short period of time, dump orders of magnitude higher of fuel for jump into power... yet we don't use that to power weapons or screens, etc. (If we did, you can bet many military ships would have a certain amount of 'surge fuel' in its tanks to quickly convert when under heavy fire... but that's not what we see in standard designs, though it would happen if the tech was available and not stupidly expensive).

--- long and short: I can't see a fusion reactor being able to satisfy the use cases of non-combat power demands, combat demands with fast ramp-uip, and the absolutely insane high speed conversion of a sizable volume of jump fuel to power (which requires a much higher ramp-up capability). You can't do it with current fission and I don't think you can with fusion either, though it may be better.

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I don't see an easy way to find the answer in CT as to the exact rate of consumption in the short or instant time period jump systems operate vs. the normal (non combat) ongoing power use from M-drive, sensors, commo, etc.

I suspect the rates of consumption for jump is orders of magnitude larger than the regular plant so I am convinced, until I see math to convince me otherwise, that a jump just needs to be in a totally different power plant type/design. If that's true, it might as well be packaged into the 'jump units'.

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Lanthanum Grid: Is part of the hull. Is used to tear spacetime and form the jump bubble and is energized causing the jump interface (the tear in spacetime and the bubble around you). It may be adjustable or maybe you just form it 5m off the hull to allow space walks... whatever. The bubble will follow the shape of the hull which is to say of the grid in the hull so if the grid is damaged, the bubble's shape will be odd and jumpspace conditions could intrude into areas with significant battle damage as one can expect the field will not protect those areas.

Why do zuchaii crystals have to be rare? (rare is also a relative term, not a universal hard number of units of an item).

Because if they aren't rare, they will be cheap. You can't have expensive things that are plentiful because the glut on the market will cheapen them. Market forces say plentiful is cheap, rare is expensive. (again, relative to other goods in the universe)

You could still have 5 million active jump-able ships in the 3I and zuchaii crystals can still be rare compared to quartz crystals, Li-Ion batteries, etc.