Ships fuel at gas giants for convenience. Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, and it's common in a lot of compounds. Odds are good that, wherever you are, there is a source of enough hydrogen to power your civilization for millennia right there -- an ocean, a methane-rich atmosphere, hydrocarbon deposits, etc. The energy cost of mining/piping and refining such resources is dwarfed by the energy yield when you fuse the recovered hydrogen.You really, truly can't have the Traveller "feel" without ludicrous amounts of energy being readily available. And ludicrous amounts of cheap energy would have consequences we don't see in Traveller canon. It's a discontinuity we just need to live with (if we adhere to canon, of course).On Mon, Mar 28, 2016 at 11:03 AM, Michael McKinney <archangel620@gmail.com> wrote:Well from what I understand of Traveller fuel requirements, yes energy is abundant, but cheap in regards to time and vulnerability is not accurate. Ships that use such engines routinely are fueling up at gas giants, and gas giants are a fighting/conflict point between powers in Traveller because they are the vital oil fields of space.So a high-energy setting is still vulnerable to fuel shutoffs and exploitation abuses by those who control gas giants because the market does not control the production, in many cases the setting is more Feudalistic rather than Capitalistic. From reading and talking with various folks on the basis of Traveller-lore, an assumption that cheap makes scarcity non-existent is inaccurate. The fuel is cheap because it's unlimited in quantity, but not in location. Those who have access to it have unlimited travelling potential per se, but we aren't in a friendly "I share my gas giant" kind of setting, are we?Therefore scarcity still exists, just not in the form that resources will deplete over time.On Mon, Mar 28, 2016 at 1:55 PM, Kelly St. Clair <xxxxxx@efn.org> wrote:*Common, convenient space travel* implies/requires "cheap, abundant energy". Which is why, among other things, we're still mostly stuck at the bottom of our gravity well, and ship's boats make great WMDs.
A low-energy TU is one where most people don't do much Travelling. Conversely, a high-energy, high-traffic one is one where the genie is already well and truly out of the bottle.
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