On Thu, Feb 11, 2016 at 4:16 PM, Bruce  Johnson
<xxxxxx@pharmacy.arizona.edu> wrote:
>

> lets be real generous and say that Traveller Jump Drive fusion plants are only 1% efficient, and 99% of that H2 is used as ‘coolant’ (which STILL doesn’t make sense; since water would be much more efficient, but fine, lets use H2), that means when the J-drive of a scout courier is fusing 100 dt of H2, it is generating 980 kg (h2 is REALLY light! one liter of liquid H2 weighs just 70 g) x .63 10^12, or just over 6.17 x10^14 of energy; or roughly equivalent to a 120KT nuclear weapon.
>
> Then storing it, however briefly, in jump capacitors.
>
> (Imagine what would happen if one was to do it in port, then short out the caps in a blaze of glory).
>
> And that’s the MINIMUM sized ship for jumping.
>
> Using H2 as a shield is SO much more sensible, imo.
>

T5 explicitly rules out the H2 Shield idea.

Says that running the power plant in Jump Charge mode takes it to
several orders of magnitude lower efficency, and lots of LH2 are
vented for cooling.