Kilted To Kick Cancer
I love how fast sci-fi fans and gamers become jaded about technology.
I have a term that's new to me from Roberta X, "Teakettle Drive".
(I will now butcher the explanation)
A fusion thermal drive is basically a fusion source making heat and spraying it down with reaction mass, the reaction mass expands and that makes thrusties.
Roberta calls it a teakettle drive, like they are merely heating the water to boiling and spraying live steam out the nozzles.
Like I said, jaded.
That water will be heated to plasma temperatures and will likely not remain water but broken fragments of water molecules. It will probably be a little radioactive as well.
Milk with your tea? Sugar?
The scope of technology gets strange in space when you demand things happen faster than in a Hohmann transfer orbit. Heating water, with fusion, hot enough to make plasma for thrust = teakettle.
This is not the first time this has hit me.
I had absorbed the tech from Traveller pretty well. I was accustomed to 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 g drives. I had a tentative grasp of orbital mechanics and gravity wells.
Then I saw Star Trek VI. There's a scene where the Enterprise-A is ripping towards a planet for the final showdown. Tearing STRAIGHT DOWN THE WELL! Apparently in Star Trek, hundreds or thousands of g's are everyday.
I got over it and had to deal with its opposite recently. The space setting I've created from scratch has a "fast" ship that can pull 0.13g fully fueled with a peak acceleration of about 0.45g as the fuel is running out. Delta-V matters more in a harder science world than in Traveller or Star Trek. I am still struck by things taking days instead of minutes because of the differences in the real-space drives. Traveller caused me to expect much shorter normal space travel times.
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"Apparently in Star Trek, hundreds or thousands of g's are everyday."
ReplyDeleteYup. They tend to accelerate from 0 to significant fractions of c in just a few seconds on a regular basis. "Full impulse" is generally accepted as being 0.5c.* If we're generous and allow 15s from rest to full impulse, that's 9,993,082 m/s^2, or a bit over 1 million g's of acceleration.
Yet strangely enough, when the inertial dampeners fail (which happens rather frequently) they're never squished into a thin red paste on the back wall by the sudden massive acceleration.
Not that Star Trek has ever been very good about realistic physics, of course.
* The fact that it's a measure of velocity rather than acceleration is just silly, IMO. But in reality, "full impulse" is most accurately defined as "speed of plot".