On 24 Mar 2017 at 1:13, James Davies wrote:

> The key issue is power.  With no main engines you have no main power.
>  With no power you have no utilities.  With no utilities you can't
> start the engines to generate power.
>
> Ships have an emergency generator, with some critical systems powered
> from the emergency board. This usually means that some parts of the
> critical startup systems are powered, but not all. So, if you have
> several pumps you might find that only one is powered from the
> emergency board and if you need one of these pumps to start up then
> you need to know which pump is on the emergency board and go and turn
> that one on locally.

I'm reminded of some things I read shortly after the big East Coast
blackout in 1968(?).

One of the big problems was that when when plant went offline, the
tielines to other plants would start trying to supply power for
everything the first plant had been poweroing. This quickly
overloaded the plant at the other end of the tieline and so it went
offline.

Can you say "cascading failures"?

One small facility stayed up because the engineer on watch took one
look at the overload readings for the tieline and (very much contrary
to standing orders) hit the breakers to disconnect the tieline. so
*his* plant stayed up. and was later able to give a jump start to the
plant(s) on the other end of the tieline.

Yes, just like on a ship, power plants for cities and factories need
power to start up.

One ConEd plant in NYC was on the waterfront (easier to get coal
deliveries). They got a jump from a docked ship that still had
internal power running.

In Boston, MIT got called to see if *their* plant was online (they
have one for trainging engineers on, duh!). It wasn't but the guy
said "let me get back to you.

Apparently they raided all the various labs for any sort of "large"
battery they could find and used *them* to supply startup power.

Definitely "thinking outside the box.

This has applications to both the proposed scenario and others a GM
may want to throw at PCs.

For example, something went wrong at a small colony/outpost. and the
PCs get asked to supply power to restat the local power. Or they need
power to restat the ship's systems.

Oh yeah, I remember a discussion from *long* ago on the list.

Planned colonies will likely have centralized power.

But outlying installations and other places in the middle of nowhere
will have their own power. Farms, mining claims isolated "cabins"
belonging to trappers, prospectors, etfc.

They'll have a wide choice. solar (requires battery banks, but
Traveller has *really* good batteries), wind (also requires
batteries), hydro (doesn't *need* batteries, but they're a good idea
anyway), geothermal, nuclear (RTGs), etc.

The RTGs are a fun one. Say you are using an isotope with a 40 year
half-life. So if the unit (basically a big "block" with power
connections, that you stick in a concrete vault) produces 10 kW when
manufactured, 40 years later it'd only be producing 5 kW.

And nuclear damper tech means they can be "turned off" when not in
use, extending the lifetime. So they'd be *really* practical for a
lot of places.

Anyway, as the isolated places get more crowded (trading post growing
into village, a farm attracting other farmers, etc) folks would still
be putting in their own power for a long time.

So they'd likely grow a "shared" power network. sort of a co-op
sharing the load. Eventually they might get a "neighborhood" power
plant, but still mostly be a co-op sharing "excess" power between
them.

Makes for interesting setups.

--
Leonard Erickson (aka shadow)
shadow at shadowgard dot com