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The two Size A engines on the Assault Scout appear to pull 4g for two days just by devouring one10cm diameter sphere of U238 apiece.
That's a total of 20kg of Uranium.
That's not much.
And it's JUST Uranium consumed from what I can fathom from the rules.
That description conforms to the fission fragment drive from Vehicles Expansion 1.
But those drives are not lightweight at all.
The engines in Star Frontiers are as realistic as the Epstien drives from The Expanse.
And The Expanse has fusion...
Got the numbers I need... Just need a specific impulse of about 847 million that uses just under 41kg of water as reaction mass for 42.46 hours of operation.
ReplyDeleteI think I will do better changing the "atomic" engines to some kind of hot-reactionless drive.
I do understand good SF writers simply describing their STL and FTL drives as fusion drives and "Drive Plates" or such. H B Pipers Space Vikings and more modern space opera writers come to mind.
ReplyDeleteNo fuss, no muss, get on with the storyline unless a drive plate failure will drive the plot.
In an RPG the need for some "realism" in paying for your spacecraft operations it's useful, but seldom do I hear of Gamemasters actually keeping track of how many rounds of ammo or lifecycle of the FGMP's disposable emitters in a game. Working with various military weapons systems over the decades I know what Mean time between failure means.
Players study weapons stats. Gamemasters study logistics.
DeleteThis all started from me realizing that Star Frontiers didn't have any gravity manipulation or fusion power.
That got me to wondering how close to real it is.
Not very close it turns out.
I've forced the players to keep track of shots fired by keeping track for them. I know what MTBF is too! And if they didn't do the maintenance, I was waiting.
Did you know a wrist seal is a wear item? Lefty does. Now.
At what tech level does regeneration show up? Asking as Heinlein's Friday had it.
DeleteA couple of AP's from that series makes a fearsome NPC enemy.
There's some miracle healing stuff that starts showing up at TL9. Regeneration would be a world detail at whatever TL the GM selected and the player would be able to select it as an advantage.
DeleteBio-Tech lists it as a TL10/11 thing for slow regeneration and 11/12 for fast regeneration. The stuff going on in Bio-Tech tends to be things I don't include in my games. It presents easy solutions to problems on the order of cell phones working in a horror movie. With some of the player groups I've had, this means a lack of challenges and boredom.
When I've dabbled with Transhuman Space, this kind of advanced genetic manipulation comes up and I'm not really comfortable with it yet. It probably wouldn't take too much work to get there, but I keep hopping around on side trips like finding out that the atomic drive in Star Frontiers is better than the best TL10 reactionless drive with a fusion plant. Two things that Star Frontiers doesn't have.