On Mon, Mar 28, 2016 at 02:03:47PM -0400, Michael McKinney 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.

We're mostly talking about fusion power, not jump fuel.  Fusion plants
in Traveller provide energy costing less than a tenth of a cent per
kilowatt-hour, on demand, on site, from a rugged power plant that
doesn't take much maintenance.

Even that shouldn't be cheap enough to support space travel on the
level that Traveller displays.  Getting a 100-tonne craft to Mars in a
couple of days like in Traveller should require at least 10^17 J of
energy, but the magic space dust drives allow it to be done for about
a thousandth of that.

Even regarding jump fuel, hydrogen is nearly everywhere.

> 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.

Not really.  They're just one of the options that isn't dependent on
any infrastructure being in place.

Some other options:
  Cold worlds
  Icy moons
  Terrestrial bodies of water
  Cometary bodies
  Some asteroids
  Methane or other hydrocarbon deposits or lakes

Conflict over gas giants as refuelling points is a quirk of the
setting that doesn't really have much basis in anything.

> The fuel is cheap because it's unlimited in quantity, but not in
> location.

In our solar system, there are probably only two planets where
water/ice -- and therefore hydrogen -- is not abundant, and both of
those are because they're ridiculously hot.  There are also at least
hundreds (but more probably tens of thousands) other locations to get
the stuff in large quantities within distances comparable to the gas
giants.

- Tim