On 04Jun2020 0908, xxxxxx@gmail.com wrote:
>
> Now other things I think make sense:
>
> 1. Failures would occur at two places - the initial shock/damage of
> freezing and the struggle to revive (plus attention needs paid to
> damage to the unit and its effects)
> 2. Failures going in might be detectable during freezing and a backout
> or some mitigation steps might be possible (not sure what, but worth
> pondering)
> 3. Failures on exit might be detectable and you might have two options
> - stop the partial defrost and freeze again until you get to a better
> situation (better doc and facility) or go ahead with thaw
That sounds likely to be worse than finishing the thaw. They've now just
had a bad thaw and an emergency freeze on top of each other.

> 9. Durations in the literature I've seen have been weeks but
> stretchable to up to 30 months (vs. a decade) so some sense has to
> exist that will allow the story-interesting long term freezing that we
> know from extant fiction and there's perhaps no good reason to make
> energy demand high.... it may just be a very efficient chest freezer
> (in a sense) and ongoing energy use might be quite minimal. (And
> battery tech at high TLs should be amazing).

TNE's text assumed that they were good for decades at least. Also that
they were safe enough that bored nobles might use them to 'skip ahead'.
Such people would be assuming that they'd have proper attendants upon
thawing, of course.

I've always assumed that if the environment the berth is in is cold
enough they would draw almost no power (perhaps even none, though
without power the user wouldn't be thawable), so a ship in a distant
stellar orbit could power right down and passengers and crew in low
berths could last for decades until either it's found or a timer goes
off, restarts everything and thaws everyone out.

> (Is there a 'Rich Time Traveller' company? If I was on a developing
> world, had a massive liquid wealth, and could pop 20 years forward
> after making diverse investments in secure types of financial
> instruments, that might be a great way to grow wealth for the uber
> rich....)
Low berths were being used in MT as a way of skipping past the war. This
suggests to me that the idea that said war could actually destroy
nobles' fortunes was not something a lot of them really comprehended.
Apparently 1000+ years of the Third Imperium made it eternal to a good
chunk of its population.

--
Rupert Boleyn <xxxxxx@gmail.com>