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BattleTech Game Systems => Aerospace Combat => Topic started by: wundergoat on 22 July 2019, 00:08:05

Title: Safe superjump?
Post by: wundergoat on 22 July 2019, 00:08:05
So, we know the WoB was able to boost jumpship range by using a LF battery to jam a second charge through the jumpdrive to strengthen the jump bubble.  This had the side effect of frying the drive.  There may have been a prototype that was more limited but was safer and still had tremendous jump range.

What if instead of jamming the charge through one core you used two separate compact cores to generate a stronger field?  Using multiple cores to enhance a jump bubble isn't unprecedented.  The Ryan Cartel used fleets of coordinated jumpships extend the jump bubble around massive chunks of ice.  IIRC the ice would be plenty mangled so that technique didn't work for other applications, but I've always thought this was due to the uncertainty and loss of precision between the jumpships.  If you had two cores in one ship, conceivably run by the same drive controller, could you take out that uncertainty and have the cores enhance each other?
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Weirdo on 22 July 2019, 08:32:28
Two cores on one ship automatically results in a shredded ship and dead crew.

Having a drive core(even pieces of a dead one) anywhere near another core that is trying to jump is a catastrophic event.
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: wundergoat on 22 July 2019, 10:00:11
Of course two jump cores interfere with one another, but what is the mechanism and can that be overcome?  In the standard example of interference you have one jump drive extending its jump bubble through its core and a second nearby core interferes with this, warping the bubble and causing bad things to happen.  Presumably this is why the ice moved by ice ships gets mulched. 

However, in that example you have two separate, independent cores.  Even if you could coordinate the two, knowing their precise location and orientation to one another would not be a trivial challenge.

In a dual core ship, you could control the variables much more easily even to the point of taking into account the particular impurities in each core.  If you can precisely control the variables, you could potentially calibrate the two cores to eliminate interference and instead resonate and create a stronger jump field.

Of course, not many factions in the fiction understand K-F mechanics well enough to mess with the precision required here, to say nothing of the resources needed.
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Weirdo on 22 July 2019, 10:03:59
It's the mere presence of the material the second core is made from that causes the jump to fail messily. Coordinating the two cores means that instead of everyone dying, you have a lot of calculations, absolute precision, followed by everyone dying.

It's kinda like having two people next to a nuclear bomb when it goes off, one being a layman and the other actually helped build the bomb. When you push the button, both are equally dead.
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Daryk on 22 July 2019, 17:40:59
This is the kind of question that in universe would require decades and trillions of C-Bills to answer...
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Liam's Ghost on 22 July 2019, 18:38:21
It might be worth noting that something like a safe superjump has been conducted at least once, but it was accidental and completely random.

The jumpship that founded the Alfirk colony in the deep periphery managed to misjump around seven hundred light years in a single jump back in the 22nd century, and was still in a state where it could be repaired by a rather small, low tech colony centuries later to make a voyage back to the inner sphere (it ran into an Explorer Corps ship on the way, and comstar apparently hushed the whole thing up).

It seems a more profitable endeavor to try to figure out how stuff like that happens and how to reproduce it safely and reliably.

The problem, I think, is that there are so many variables to take into account, and they grow exponentially the further you grow. The star league actually did make enough progress to produce a prototype drive with a slightly extended range, but it was a bit unstable.

And there is a tremendous amount of strategic value in having ships that could go anywhere in one jump. Enough that I imagine the Star League put ungodly amounts of money and resources into figuring it out. But they didn't really. So the only people who might have a chance of solving it will probably have to build on the Star League's research, as well as the Word of Blake's, and maybe spend enough to bankrupt a nation on top of that. Or find some lost, misjumped ship that somehow still retains the last puzzle piece somewhere in its databanks.

Actually sounds like an interesting adventure, now that I say it.
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Daryk on 22 July 2019, 18:49:49
Of course it sounds interesting... you said it! (Which means we might eventually see a Tribble or FanFic in that vein...)  :thumbsup:
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: skiltao on 22 July 2019, 19:32:54
What if instead of jamming the charge through one core you used two separate compact cores to generate a stronger field? 

It's hard to say how the imaginary physics would work, because KF fields are even more imaginary than the rest of BattleTech's physics, but I suspect that the second drive would merely (merely! if one can call it that) contribute to the KF field in the same way the Ryan Cartel's do; which is to say, it might allow you to move a greater mass of ship relative to however much the KF drives weigh.

I doubt it would increase the distance of the jump.
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Talen5000 on 22 July 2019, 19:34:06
It's the mere presence of the material the second core is made from that causes the jump to fail messily. Coordinating the two cores means that instead of everyone dying, you have a lot of calculations, absolute precision, followed by everyone dying.

It's kinda like having two people next to a nuclear bomb when it goes off, one being a layman and the other actually helped build the bomb. When you push the button, both are equally dead.

As an aside, the TAS Trailblazer One used a triple core arrangement though no further information is available, other than it was a WarShip class vessel that appears to have carried a HPG.

It is the only reference to a multicore ship in the entirety of BT history....although one can assume a plethora of attempts to actually make it work.
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Weirdo on 22 July 2019, 19:35:50
Source on that ship? I can't place it from memory.
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Talen5000 on 22 July 2019, 19:39:20
Source on that ship? I can't place it from memory.

1630, original Star League SB.

I would presume it is apocryphal/retconned/ignored at this stage, but I thought it worth mentioning.
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Daryk on 22 July 2019, 19:51:50
I just went through the Terran Alliance section of that book and didn't see mention of that ship... got a page reference?
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Talen5000 on 22 July 2019, 20:26:46
I just went through the Terran Alliance section of that book and didn't see mention of that ship... got a page reference?

Its the sidebar on p60
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Daryk on 23 July 2019, 03:29:59
Ah, thanks!  I'm pretty sure Trailblazer One was a Star League ship, not a Terran Alliance one... that's what was throwing me.
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Ursus Maior on 23 July 2019, 07:18:09
It says, Trail Blazer it was on a 35 year mission. The article is from the 27th century, so it's certainly not a Terran Alliance ship, but maybe a Hegemony ship.
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Weirdo on 23 July 2019, 08:23:19
Yeah, I'd treat that as apocryphal. As things stand right now, multiple cores in close proximity during a jump automatically means Very Bad Things.
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: The_Caveman on 23 July 2019, 09:45:04
"Triple core" might just mean "one core formed out of three rods". There's next to nothing given in canon sources about the actual design constraints of K-F cores (nor should there be).
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: grimlock1 on 23 July 2019, 11:44:55
It's hard to say how the imaginary physics would work, because KF fields are even more imaginary than the rest of BattleTech's physics, but I suspect that the second drive would merely (merely! if one can call it that) contribute to the KF field in the same way the Ryan Cartel's do; which is to say, it might allow you to move a greater mass of ship relative to however much the KF drives weigh.

I doubt it would increase the distance of the jump.

When in doubt, blame resonance.
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Daryk on 23 July 2019, 16:14:45
+1 for the physics reference!  And as a reward: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbOjxPCfaFk
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: glitterboy2098 on 23 July 2019, 20:13:47
It's hard to say how the imaginary physics would work, because KF fields are even more imaginary than the rest of BattleTech's physics, but I suspect that the second drive would merely (merely! if one can call it that) contribute to the KF field in the same way the Ryan Cartel's do; which is to say, it might allow you to move a greater mass of ship relative to however much the KF drives weigh.

I doubt it would increase the distance of the jump.
except it has been established that the Ryan cartel method does nothing of the sort. they just are taking advantage of the fact that you don't have to deliver comets used for water in one piece and using the normal destructive process on items caught in a jump field but not linked to the drive itself to rip chunks free from the comets when they jump.
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Talen5000 on 24 July 2019, 18:36:16
except it has been established that the Ryan cartel method does nothing of the sort. they just are taking advantage of the fact that you don't have to deliver comets used for water in one piece and using the normal destructive process on items caught in a jump field but not linked to the drive itself to rip chunks free from the comets when they jump.

Against which is that KF drives are mass limited, not volume and the total mass limit of a core circa 3100 is about 7 million tons.

The Ryan Iceships used 16 JumpShip working together to jump icebergs massing up to several billion tons and did so by coordinating the links and controllers.

The inference here is not only were the KF fields expanded to surround the asteroidal iceberg, but that the "harmonization" effect of linking the fields created a reinforcement effect that  greatly expanded the mass the total field could carry.

Since it seems likely an Iceship was smaller than a Monolith or Star Lord, those sixteen JumpShips probably reinforced the field by several orders of magnitude.

Although probably simpler to accept the role of the IceShip was a:overstated and b: normally relegated to new colonies which lacked the infrastructure to purify huge amounts of water cheaply and terraforming efforts.

As in....the Ryan Cartel didn't "jump" bergs at all but harnessed specially created jumpships that could "dock" with suitable bergs and boost them in system. Because the Ryan Cartel as stated doesn't really make sense.

Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: skiltao on 24 July 2019, 19:15:38
except it has been established that the Ryan cartel method does nothing of the sort. they just are taking advantage of the fact that you don't have to deliver comets used for water in one piece and using the normal destructive process on items caught in a jump field but not linked to the drive itself to rip chunks free from the comets when they jump.

The "standard destructive process" is exactly the same process that allows the jumpship to be jumped safely and intact. The difference is that the portion of the field encompassing the ship is shaped and controlled, while the portion reaching (weakly) out two kilometers away is not.

The Ryan Cartel would cut icebergs 2km across and then surround it with ships, using overlapping fields to cover that enclosed space the way Talen described. Strategic Operations adds the idea that the iceberg often fractures, but it's still intact enough for tugs to maneuver. The enclosed iceberg arrives essentially complete - it is not merely "chunks ripped free."

The reasons the iceberg might shatter have to do with problems mapping the desired mass and coordination between the participating cores. They would not apply to the innards of a ship purposely built with multiple cores.

Although probably simpler to accept the role of the IceShip was a:overstated and b: normally relegated to new colonies which lacked the infrastructure to purify huge amounts of water cheaply and terraforming efforts.
<snip>
the Ryan Cartel as stated doesn't really make sense.

Simpler than what?

Overlapping KF fields allows for greater field strength and control over the desired distances. It's a sufficiently esoteric body of knowledge (inside the already esoteric field of KF science) that its use has not recovered as quickly as other aspects of jumpship/warship construction and operation. What doesn't make sense?
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: cray on 27 July 2019, 16:08:37
Although probably simpler to accept the role of the IceShip was a:overstated and b: normally relegated to new colonies which lacked the infrastructure to purify huge amounts of water cheaply and terraforming efforts.

Those billions of tons weren't "huge." Humans have voracious appetites for water, especially once they industrialize and have factories, bathrooms, and power plants to feed. So, as you said, iceships are unlikely to be able to support any sizable colony.
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Talen5000 on 27 July 2019, 17:10:18
Those billions of tons weren't "huge." Humans have voracious appetites for water, especially once they industrialize and have factories, bathrooms, and power plants to feed. So, as you said, iceships are unlikely to be able to support any sizable colony.

Huge refers to the amount of water a colony needs and, as far as I can see, there is no water shortage as such that would justify an Ice Cartel as written. If a world lacks enough water to support a colony then either it would not be colonised, or the colony would obtain ice from the local sphere. The capability of merging jumpfields to jump Icebergs seems unnecessarily complex and expensive and justifiable only in the rare situations when large amounts of water needed to be transported in system.

The situation is that the iceships were added simply to create a "tone" for the universe, but it is a setup that appears to have no basis in fact, no basis in in game logic, and appears to contradict later explanations for how kf jump fields work.
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: skiltao on 27 July 2019, 18:45:48
A basic tenet of the BattleTech setting is that water isn't available in economic speeds and quantities at every star system humanity wants to inhabit or exploit. Are you arguing that worlds won't vary in how economical it is to exploit them, and that new technologies won't move some worlds from uneconomical to economical? ???

The basic operation of a KF field - dragging matter through a KF jump - is exactly the same in both standard jumps and in the overlapping fields of a Ryan fleet. How do their facts and game logic seem different to you?

appears to contradict later explanations for how kf jump fields work.

The cores of a Ryan fleet aren't close enough to damage each other. What seems to be the conflict?
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Hellraiser on 29 July 2019, 18:18:18
Wasn't there a quote somewhere early on where KF jumps used to be less than 30LY.

I swear I read that somewhere.  That early jumps were only capable of like 10LY.

The 30LY figure is only the current max of a "safe" jump.

We also have 2 examples of 40 & 50 LY prototype drives in use with the Manassas & IU? drives that didn't burn out the core but had some other issues IIRC.

So I'd say the "Super-Jump" is a matter of "When" do we advance the KF tech to a new milestone achievement.

Like coming up with an IS produced Clan ERLL,  they just need to refine the 40/50 LY tech to get it working safely.
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Ursus Maior on 30 July 2019, 14:18:40
Wasn't there a quote somewhere early on where KF jumps used to be less than 30LY.

I swear I read that somewhere.  That early jumps were only capable of like 10LY.

The 30LY figure is only the current max of a "safe" jump.

We also have 2 examples of 40 & 50 LY prototype drives in use with the Manassas & IU? drives that didn't burn out the core but had some other issues IIRC.

So I'd say the "Super-Jump" is a matter of "When" do we advance the KF tech to a new milestone achievement.

Like coming up with an IS produced Clan ERLL,  they just need to refine the 40/50 LY tech to get it working safely.
That's true, you might be thinking of Interstellar Operations and ships like Aquilla class primitive JumpShip. However, JumpShip technology has stagnated in the BTU for centuries. Since the Age of War, the boundaries of K-F technology have not been pushed further out, the exception being HPG devices. No information has been given, as far as I know, on early HPG transmitters and the developments regarding their distances.

My theory would be that early HPGs started at a 30 ly range, since anything under 30 ly would yield no benefit to developing courier JumpShips. The question remains though, where HPG theory forked off from K-F-drive theory.

It's interesting to see, though, that in the BTU K-F-drives and HPG transmitters become more efficient at some point, i. e. they can be build much smaller, but they not more effective, meaning their range maxima stay constant. That seems rather odd, since usually being able to build something smaller means one has mastered its power, too. By analogy, that would be like microchip processors being build on ever smaller circuit boards, but not being able to build computers that can do more calculations per microsecond. These technological boundaries do exist for certain spans of time, yes, but usually they are solved within a couple of years and can temporarily be circumvented by adding processor cores and enhancing clocking speed.

For K-F technology, no such circumvention seems to exist, not even during the heydays of the Star League. That suggests a rather hard limit, probably due to the nature of hyperspace. Unless one finds a new way to look at the problem, which is WoB scientists might have done.
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Daryk on 30 July 2019, 15:46:34
The tech improvement in KF drives was efficiency.  The fact that "modern" JumpShips are 95% KF drive tells you they are as cheap as can be, and drop collars double down on that math.  Each collar is worth 100,000 tons for the mere cost of 1,000 for the JumpShip.
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: idea weenie on 31 July 2019, 19:54:32
My theory would be that early HPGs started at a 30 ly range, since anything under 30 ly would yield no benefit to developing courier JumpShips. The question remains though, where HPG theory forked off from K-F-drive theory.

I could see a use for an HPG that only had 10-15 ly range - it can send data from itself to several of the worlds within range (sequentially), instead of only one world like a courier Jumpship.

Courier Jumpships allow transmitting lots of data to a single location (plus passing it on to other Jumpships in-system).

Small transmission to multiple locations quickly?  HPG
Lots of data and willing to accept delays? Courier Jumpship

Both would have their use


But I would like to see a slow improvement in KF capability.  Maybe a 1 ly improvement in jump range per 10 years of research, starting only after the WoB research into their superdrive gets loose?  So if it got loose in 3090, that means in 3160 the range is 37 light-years.  Not game-breaking yet, but some worlds that were just over 30 light-years apart are rejoicing at only needing 1 jump to reach each other, instead of 2.  Other worlds that belong to different Houses are annoyed because they just wound up on the front lines.
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Ursus Maior on 01 August 2019, 08:35:26
The problem with JumpShips as couriers is that even primitive JumpShips take up space and time in the very few JumpShip yards each state has. And considerung the time frames of the BTU, 1 ly increase per 10 yrs would actually be a lot. For the Star League alone that would be a 21 ly increase. And for the post-Helm era that would be another 10 ly roughly, leaving out several years for the jihad and its anticipated loss of research time.
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: The_Caveman on 01 August 2019, 08:39:49
Might be 30 LY is close to the physical limit for a germanium core. Some property that is intrinsic to germanium at an atomic level, such that technology can't do much to get around it (like how we'll never change the density of iron, we're just stuck with what nature gave us).

You can hypothetically build more advanced cores with longer ranges but they need materials more exotic than germanium. Maybe some rare lanthanide, or heaven help you if it's astatine. Or non-baryonic matter. No one has built such a core because assembling enough of the raw materials in one place would have bankrupted the Star League.
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Kovax on 01 August 2019, 11:14:37
Research normally does not happen smoothly over time.  Increasing jump range by some set amount over time would be blatantly artificial, as opposed to having 2 or 3 events at random intervals which make small or modest increases, or one major improvement.

For instance, rather than 1 LY per decade, have an event which boosts range by 2LY, then 20-30 years later, a second discovery adds another 3 LYs.  50 years pass before the next improvement, adding a mere 1 LY in range.  The older Jumpships won't necessarily be able to use all of the improvements, so some will only be adaptable to the 3 LY increase, but not the 1 or the 2.  That complicates matters, because now some ships jump 30 LY, some 33, and some 36.

As an alternative, a single new discovery in the field might add 5-10 LY to the range, but only new ships built more than a year or two past that date would have the cores properly shaped for it.  Ships already under construction most likely wouldn't be scrapped and rebuilt.
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Col Toda on 22 August 2019, 18:34:43
The Lucretia was a jump ship that could jump 120 Light years at a time with a small chance of damage to the KF system . Writen in Conspiracys of the Jihad I think . The faction kept such a tight security lid on it that when the ship and associated labs on it was lost so was the tech . If it was done once it can be done again .
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: The_Caveman on 23 August 2019, 00:11:56
The Lucretia was a jump ship that could jump 120 Light years at a time with a small chance of damage to the KF system . Writen in Conspiracys of the Jihad I think . The faction kept such a tight security lid on it that when the ship and associated labs on it was lost so was the tech . If it was done once it can be done again .

Assuming the story was true. Canon rumor is a thing.
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Retry on 23 August 2019, 11:57:10
I found this note on the Lucretia in the Sarna wiki.

Although the main source on the Lucretia is the Jihad Conspiracies: Interstellar Players 2 sourcebook, the information pertaining to this vessel is presented as fact, largely found in the Gamemaster/Behind the Scenes sections, and not as a mere canon rumor.
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Talen5000 on 23 August 2019, 13:07:15
I found this note on the Lucretia in the Sarna wiki.

Although the main source on the Lucretia is the Jihad Conspiracies: Interstellar Players 2 sourcebook, the information pertaining to this vessel is presented as fact, largely found in the Gamemaster/Behind the Scenes sections, and not as a mere canon rumor.

Which, given the nature of the book, is not saying much. That "facts" section also speaks of wild rumours and theories and apparentlies.

Given what we know of HPG and KF tech, then the likeliest story is that the Lucretia...if it existed...was a normal Jumpship or an SL prototype that IU found

Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Sir Chaos on 31 August 2019, 11:35:40
Would it theoretically be possible to put multiple LF batteries on a jumpship?

The ability to do 4 jumps of 30 LY each should be even more useful than that to do 1 jump of 120 LY.
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: dgorsman on 31 August 2019, 14:10:13
That's kind of the idea with a DropShip mounted battery system.  Jump, switch over to the next battery ship, and jump again.  Pick up a pre-charged battery ship and drop off the expended one.  Kind of an enhanced command circuit,  without the extra JumpShips.

There would be a delay of a day or so between jumps in this case, not necessarily from switching but to avoid stress on the jump core and cooling system.  Doing multiple sequential jumps (even with an LF system) risks damage.
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Sir Chaos on 31 August 2019, 15:46:35
That's kind of the idea with a DropShip mounted battery system.  Jump, switch over to the next battery ship, and jump again.  Pick up a pre-charged battery ship and drop off the expended one.  Kind of an enhanced command circuit,  without the extra JumpShips.

There would be a delay of a day or so between jumps in this case, not necessarily from switching but to avoid stress on the jump core and cooling system.  Doing multiple sequential jumps (even with an LF system) risks damage.

You´d still need charged dropships waiting in each system; that´s an improvement over a command circuit, but not by all that much - for example it would not help you pass through an enemy system.
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Liam's Ghost on 31 August 2019, 16:23:36
The mass of an LF battery is based on the mass of the jumpship. If you could mount them on dropships to function as an external battery, you'd still need a whole bunch of different ships with different batteries to accommodate the wide variety of jumpships out there, and hope you've got enough of the right type of ships in place where you need them to get any benefit.

Would it theoretically be possible to put multiple LF batteries on a jumpship?

It's never been explained why, but canonically you can't put more than one LF battery on a jumpship.
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: dgorsman on 31 August 2019, 17:16:08
For the battery ship, I would suggest that the weight would be standardized, or maybe a small/heavy paradigm, to get away from the percentage factor.

And yes, it doesn't help that much for travelling through hostile territory if you intend to pick up extras along the way.  But consider a Star Lord with three transports, and three battery ships.  That's potentially 4 jumps in as many days.

Not *quite* the same as a super jump which gets you there in a single jump, bypassing everything.  And not the same as an integral LF drive which can pull off a second jump seconds after the first.
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Ogra_Chief on 01 September 2019, 00:04:59
For the battery ship, I would suggest that the weight would be standardized, or maybe a small/heavy paradigm, to get away from the percentage factor.

And yes, it doesn't help that much for travelling through hostile territory if you intend to pick up extras along the way.  But consider a Star Lord with three transports, and three battery ships.  That's potentially 4 jumps in as many days.

Not *quite* the same as a super jump which gets you there in a single jump, bypassing everything.  And not the same as an integral LF drive which can pull off a second jump seconds after the first.

This may be a dumb question, but presumably the 'battery dropship' would need to charge and recharge. So, would the recharging be done via its' own solar sail or recharge station? Or, by other means?

Also, wouldn't the carrying of a battery ship limit the systems use to emergency personnel transport rather than cargo? Similar to a locomotive carrying extra coal cars, rather than simply refilling coal at the next major yard. Seems impractical from a logistics standpoint.

Or, am I off...
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: dgorsman on 01 September 2019, 10:55:04
Hadn't gotten around to that part yet.  Given the circumstances, using recharge stations would seem the best.  Including a sail would be interesting, but I'm not sure about space.  And they're not exactly intended for independent operation.  Maybe allowing them to charge off a JumpShip's reactor, same as an integral LF battery, perhaps.

If all collars are used for battery ships then yes, there isn't room for DropShips carrying anything else.  Certainly an option for some command circuits.  In the previous example of the Star Lord JumpShip, there's a mix of each for extended operations - sometimes you just need to get there in a hurry, and screw the inconvenience.  Another option for operating in more friendly space is to keep one collar reserved for exchanging with a charged one after each jump.
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Daryk on 01 September 2019, 11:06:36
Being that the "Energy Storage Batteries" that Space Stations use for this exact purpose (TacOps, pages 406-407) weigh 100,000 tons, I can't see how you can justify installing them on DropShips.
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: dgorsman on 01 September 2019, 11:43:57
Uhmmm, what?   ???

You can't mount them on JumpShips for jump drive use at all.  And even then, it wouldn't improve recharge times for subsequent jumps.  Not the system I'm referring to.
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: idea weenie on 01 September 2019, 13:02:31
For the Li-F battery Dropships, you might go with just using them on giant Dropships, and accept that 25,000 tons of your cargo space is going to be taken up by the battery so it can handle any size FTL ship.  You then have to factor in the the KF cost multiplier for a KF core for a 2.5 megaton Compact Core vessel now being applied with the Dropship cost multiplier.  You might just throw your hands up and decide 5,000 tons is all you need, so it can fit any size Jumpship, and the smaller Warships (1/5 the mass/cost, plus 20,000 tons smaller).  They can be recharged by a Recharge station, or by a Jumpship's solar sail if it is in-system longer than it needs to recharge its own KF core.

Advantage: The cargo can get to its destination much faster
Disadvantage: Expensive!


For the Energy Storage batteries normally mounted on Space Stations, you might go with making half-size batteries that are 50,000 tons each, and needing 2 Dropships to recharge a KF core in deep space.  The Dropships are charged at a Recharge station, saving fuel costs.  Mounting them on a Compact Core Warship takes up at least 4* the mass of a Li-F Battery, but does not have any KF cost multipliers.

Advantage: Much cheaper, and they can recharge the Jumpship simply by parking near the solar sail, or connecting a long extension cord to the ship's power grid.  No need for actually docking the Dropship, meaning they don't take up a Docking Collar
Disadvantage: Need 2 of them per Jumpship, and it takes ~150 hours (the recharge rate for using a Recharge station).  On a Warship it takes up far more room than a Li-F Battery, reducing tonnage available for armor, weapons, sensors, fuel, supplies, etc.
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: monbvol on 01 September 2019, 13:04:22
The mass of an LF battery is based on the mass of the jumpship. If you could mount them on dropships to function as an external battery, you'd still need a whole bunch of different ships with different batteries to accommodate the wide variety of jumpships out there, and hope you've got enough of the right type of ships in place where you need them to get any benefit.

It's never been explained why, but canonically you can't put more than one LF battery on a jumpship.

Well there is a potential practical limitation of mass to explain that for actual jumpships.
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Talen5000 on 01 September 2019, 14:18:53
Being that the "Energy Storage Batteries" that Space Stations use for this exact purpose (TacOps, pages 406-407) weigh 100,000 tons, I can't see how you can justify installing them on DropShips.

Because 100,000 Tons is vastly vastly vastly too much mass to devote to batteries which shouldn't exist.
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Daryk on 01 September 2019, 14:46:31
Then perhaps this discussion should make its way down to Fan Rules...
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: idea weenie on 02 September 2019, 04:19:22
Because 100,000 Tons is vastly vastly vastly too much mass to devote to batteries which shouldn't exist.

I figured that the Energy Storage Batteries also contained coolant, allowing the KF core to be charged faster since it is being actively cooled not just by its own coolant grid, but also the coolant contained in the tonnage allocated to the Energy Batteries.

So to me the full 100,000 tons contains:
Coolant storage
Coolant equipment (to bring the stored temperature down low enough)
A steady cooling system so you don't get thermal shock in the KF core from incoming coolant not being the right temperature (it'd be annoying if the incoming coolant caused the helium to vaporize)
A giant extension cord to connect to the receiving ship
Oh, and batteries
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Talen5000 on 02 September 2019, 06:00:05
I figured that the Energy Storage Batteries also contained coolant, allowing the KF core to be charged faster since it is being actively cooled not just by its own coolant grid, but also the coolant contained in the tonnage allocated to the Energy Batteries.

The energy needed to spark a jump is about 130 MWh

A modern 3MW diesel generator masses about 70 tons plus fuel. All it has to do is shine a light on the sail or send a small amount of current through a cable.

Even allowing for mounting, bracing, specialist transmission gear etc....100,000 Tons? There is very little reason JumpShips don't carry these generators themselves.

You just don't get a lot of solar power at a Jumppoint
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Daryk on 02 September 2019, 06:10:03
That's all?  I would have figured at least a few TJ, not less than half of one.
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Talen5000 on 02 September 2019, 08:27:03
That's all?  I would have figured at least a few TJ, not less than half of one.

One week of Solar output at a standard Jump point....we know the energy out of the sun and the distances involved. Even if you magnify everything by a couple of orders of magnitude to account for 100% conversion and any vagaries in conversion or mistakes, 100,000 Tons for an energy battery is dubious. Space would have been a better constraint of this sort (not much of one for a station but still better), but the end result is that FASA wanted the solar sail look and that limits the amount of energy a jump requires to the amount that sail can capture. Even if you think up some esoteric reason why you can't spark a jump from an onboard generator - all you need to do is tie that generator to a few lightbulbs and point them at the sail.

You want a few TJ to open a jump point? You can't use a solar sail collecting solar energy for a week. Three or four months, maybe...but not a week

But - FASAfiziks
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Daryk on 02 September 2019, 08:29:49
What sail diameter did you assume?
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Talen5000 on 02 September 2019, 11:53:57
What sail diameter did you assume?

1 kilometre, without the cutout
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Daryk on 02 September 2019, 12:18:28
Going with a 2km sail would definitely get you in the TJ range without too much trouble.
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Col Toda on 02 September 2019, 18:46:38
All the improved  jump tech works on both the engines the LF batteries  . Given a choice I would rather have a normal 30 LY jumpship with an LF battery  to have  the  jump back out ASAP option .

A normal jump ship w/o an LF battery and a super jump ship that does 120 LY by consuming  the energy of reengineered LF battery  still loses the as fast as possible  option  .
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Talen5000 on 02 September 2019, 19:59:02
Going with a 2km sail would definitely get you in the TJ range without too much trouble.

The original jumpsails were 50km in size...just much less efficient.

But there is little point in moving to a larger sail as the way BT drives operate, you can't charge a core faster than is already done. A larger sail adds mass, but not much else....you could charge from further away from the star being the only advantage.  Even the McKennas is only 1500m or so.

None of which really changes the point. Which is that the amount of power necessary to spark a jump is very low. Low enough that over a week, simple diesel generators could produce enough power, several times over. You could even argue a trickle feed from the ships existing reactor systems would provide enough power.

Of course, this means sails aren't necessary, but there are certain advantages. And it means energy batteries in stations are largely a waste, especially with the rules that neuter quick charging.
 
 
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Daryk on 02 September 2019, 20:00:34
The amount of hydrogen "burned" to charge a drive would give a wildly different number.
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Liam's Ghost on 02 September 2019, 20:52:25
The amount of hydrogen "burned" to charge a drive would give a wildly different number.

Indeed. The real problem isn't that energy storage batteries are too big or diesel generators should be able to charge a jump drive easily, it's that the whole thing doesn't make sense.

Focusing on just one part of the nonsense doesn't fix the problem because of all the other nonsense. A solar sail of this size at this distance may only realistically be getting this much power, but you still need to burn multiple burn days worth of reaction mass to charge the drive without it. Energy storage batteries are a hundred thousand tons and can only store power which has to be trickle charged across, while the largest possible lithium fusion battery is twenty five thousand tons and can power the core directly, but for some reason you can only have one. Also reaction mass is magic.

None of it fits together well, because it was all bolted together over a couple decades by people who didn't really think too hard about it, on top of prior work by people who thought even less about it. The whole space thing is a mess.
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: monbvol on 02 September 2019, 21:26:59
Indeed. The real problem isn't that energy storage batteries are too big or diesel generators should be able to charge a jump drive easily, it's that the whole thing doesn't make sense.

Focusing on just one part of the nonsense doesn't fix the problem because of all the other nonsense. A solar sail of this size at this distance may only realistically be getting this much power, but you still need to burn multiple burn days worth of reaction mass to charge the drive without it. Energy storage batteries are a hundred thousand tons and can only store power which has to be trickle charged across, while the largest possible lithium fusion battery is twenty five thousand tons and can power the core directly, but for some reason you can only have one. Also reaction mass is magic.

None of it fits together well, because it was all bolted together over a couple decades by people who didn't really think too hard about it, on top of prior work by people who thought even less about it. The whole space thing is a mess.

*nod*

I don't want to give these people too much crap because engineering/scientific inconsistency/implausibility even back when this was being slapped together wasn't anything new but yeah it is all too obvious that by in large they just threw numbers at things and then multiple attempts to actually put that into rules came later and they all eventually failed to deliver an enjoyable portion of the game.
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Daryk on 03 September 2019, 18:18:47
Sadly true, both of you...  :-\
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Talen5000 on 04 September 2019, 06:32:51
*nod*

I don't want to give these people too much crap because engineering/scientific inconsistency/implausibility even back when this was being slapped together wasn't anything new but yeah it is all too obvious that by in large they just threw numbers at things and then multiple attempts to actually put that into rules came later and they all eventually failed to deliver an enjoyable portion of the game.

No  - it's enjoyable.

It may not make much sense, but that doesn't mean it isn't enjoyable.

As I said, FASA obviously wanted the sail motif. There is nothing wrong with that....it's a fairly unique style. And they obviously liked the BattleRider/Battletender concept of Traveller. And the various authors have done a marvellous job stitching things together. That some of it doesn't "quite" match reality is a pity, but it fits in universe and the game is fun. Just don't think too much about the parts that don't make sense and accept them for what they are.
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: monbvol on 04 September 2019, 10:02:06
I'll admit I should have said "enjoyable to a large enough portion of the fan base to see widespread acceptance and support" as I can't argue there are die hards that enjoy it as is but how often threads show up where people are complaining about all things space and how poorly executed a lot of it really is I'm going to stand by my assessment that all things space are in desperate need of redoing top to bottom.
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: skiltao on 04 September 2019, 14:11:19
I think AeroTech has so little traction because of issues with accessibility and grokkability of the rules, and how big and fiddly any ship's weapon blocks are. Not because of how jump drive charging works.

Gameplay choices (like armor and fuel mass) aside, I find the original 1988 DropShips and JumpShips to be surprisingly rigorous. The quick-charging section does contradict itself, though; can only wonder what might've been lost or mangled in editing.

Rolling back to DS&JS construction would resolve TR:2750's mass bloating, solves several questions about KF mass limits which result from how BattleSpace weighs KF drives, and might obviate the discrepancy between Lithium-Fusion batteries and station batteries.
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Talen5000 on 04 September 2019, 17:23:05
I think AeroTech has so little traction because of issues with accessibility and grokkability of the rules, and how big and fiddly any ship's weapon blocks are. Not because of how jump drive charging works.

The only way to get rid of those would be to completely redo the rules -not likely.

For example....you could slash the mass of the KF drive and engine by a factor of ten, BUT increase fuel mass AND armour by a factor of 1000.

Now, running costs are a major issue and while the ships have huge amounts of armour, it is heavy.

That way you could also embrace a simple AP vs AV system for combat. Your weapon has a certain AP value which is compared to the targets Armour value and if it passes, then the ship takes an amount of internal damage depending on the where it hit, type of weapon, damage value and margin of success. In effect, you try to crit the ship to death because mile long ships just don't blow up.

However, rewriting AT rules is VERY unlikely to ever happen any time soon. Not with SO on the reprint list.

Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: skiltao on 04 September 2019, 18:39:40
Fixing accessibility and grokkability would involve more than a simple reprint, I agree.

It wouldn't surprise me if trying to implement higher fuel and armor fractions is how TR:2750 got its mass bloat in the first place.

As this thread is about increasing jump distance and handling multiple KF charges, I won't comment on weapons too much except to say that there's multiple ways to make the stat blocks less huge, most of which don't require a complete rewrite of the rules and some of which may change hardly any rules at all.
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Liam's Ghost on 04 September 2019, 19:19:53
As this thread is about increasing jump distance and handling multiple KF charges, I won't comment on weapons too much except to say that there's multiple ways to make the stat blocks less huge, most of which don't require a complete rewrite of the rules and some of which may change hardly any rules at all.

Battleforce Space, or Battleface among the cultured.
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: m79 on 04 September 2019, 21:45:58
Getting back to the original topic...

Given the existence of an FTL ship weighing barely 6100 tons, the possibility that the Hegemony developed something much more advanced and toyed about with them (i.e. Lucretia) and perhaps developed a much longer range capacity.  It might also have encouraged the reported 'no more than one KF drive within X km' rule to discourage the other powers from trying the same experiments.
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Thunderbolt on 04 September 2019, 23:04:54
It's interesting to see, though, that in the BTU K-F-drives and HPG transmitters become more efficient at some point, i. e. they can be build much smaller, but they not more effective, meaning their range maxima stay constant. That seems rather odd, since usually being able to build something smaller means one has mastered its power, too. By analogy, that would be like microchip processors being build on ever smaller circuit boards, but not being able to build computers that can do more calculations per microsecond. These technological boundaries do exist for certain spans of time, yes, but usually they are solved within a couple of years and can temporarily be circumvented by adding processor cores and enhancing clocking speed.

For K-F technology, no such circumvention seems to exist, not even during the heydays of the Star League. That suggests a rather hard limit, probably due to the nature of hyperspace. Unless one finds a new way to look at the problem, which is WoB scientists might have done.
would that imply that the only improvements were in materials and manufacturing, not design and architecture?  Like they're just miniaturizing the existing blue prints without "daring" to alter any of the "arcane" circuitry?
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Thunderbolt on 04 September 2019, 23:09:03
In a dual core ship, you could control the variables much more easily even to the point of taking into account the particular impurities in each core.  If you can precisely control the variables, you could potentially calibrate the two cores to eliminate interference and instead resonate and create a stronger jump field.

Of course, not many factions in the fiction understand K-F mechanics well enough to mess with the precision required here, to say nothing of the resources needed.
well, everyone so far is right if you (could according to canon) just define your two tightly integrated compact cores as a single full size doubly powerful supercore

Vaguely like upgrading from one 200XL engine to one 400XL engine not 2x200XLs
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Thunderbolt on 04 September 2019, 23:26:19
Indeed. The real problem isn't that energy storage batteries are too big or diesel generators should be able to charge a jump drive easily, it's that the whole thing doesn't make sense.

Focusing on just one part of the nonsense doesn't fix the problem because of all the other nonsense. A solar sail of this size at this distance may only realistically be getting this much power, but you still need to burn multiple burn days worth of reaction mass to charge the drive without it. Energy storage batteries are a hundred thousand tons and can only store power which has to be trickle charged across, while the largest possible lithium fusion battery is twenty five thousand tons and can power the core directly, but for some reason you can only have one. Also reaction mass is magic.

None of it fits together well, because it was all bolted together over a couple decades by people who didn't really think too hard about it, on top of prior work by people who thought even less about it. The whole space thing is a mess.
well I tried to point out in another thread, that the canon rules are actually surprisingly realistic, if you interpret the rules such that what you are actually doing is just topping off the charge stored in the drive, due to practical losses to all of your EM, neutrino, and gravity wave emissions at either end of the jump transit

The vast majority of energy required to "eject" matter, from the fabric of space time into hyperspace, you actually recover on the other end, when all that mass "drops back into" the fabric of space time

Only some of it "spills" out as losses

If so, your KF drive (in the fabric of space time) is never less than 99% charged and you're just cycling from 99%-100% jump 99%-100% jump...

[gimme a sec 😅 ]
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Retry on 04 September 2019, 23:59:26
No  - it's enjoyable.

It may not make much sense, but that doesn't mean it isn't enjoyable.

As I said, FASA obviously wanted the sail motif. There is nothing wrong with that....it's a fairly unique style. And they obviously liked the BattleRider/Battletender concept of Traveller. And the various authors have done a marvellous job stitching things together. That some of it doesn't "quite" match reality is a pity, but it fits in universe and the game is fun. Just don't think too much about the parts that don't make sense and accept them for what they are.
I've felt the Aerospace portion was the weakest.  It felt weird going from the ground-based game with somewhat loose realism for both gameplay reasons and practical concerns (like range brackets being under a kilometer), to space where they pretend to be much harder sci-fi on newtonian-style physics but which breaks down when you start considering digging deeper into stuff like reaction mass.  I think I would have preferred soft sci-fi space physics over the half-and-half solution.

Aero Design isn't particularly interesting either IMO.  Fighters especially feel the same, they're functionally just weapon platforms with some armor slathered on top.  They fly the same, even in atmosphere, despite if the fighter is a flying wing, a delta wing, foward- or backward- swept.  Which for hard sci-fi is realistic, granted, but not immersive or interesting whatsoever.

Other units feel far better in the design aspect, such as Battlemechs (unsuprisingly).  Even within the same weight and engine class you can make many, many different and useful designs with different niches that are a bit more than "platform for Weapon A".
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Thunderbolt on 05 September 2019, 00:05:06
Because 100,000 Tons is vastly vastly vastly too much mass to devote to batteries which shouldn't exist.
those rules make total sense, if the actual energy required to boost matter clear out of the fabric of space time is absolutely enormous, requiring those kinds of tonnages

The 130MWhr figure is only the residual topping off required after the jump to make up for practical losses to heat, Neutrino EM and gravitational radiation

Your 100Ktons does not store merely 130MWhr... That is just the icing of the gravy of the hint of a whiff residual on top of the actual raw energies involved

(https://www.epectec.com/images/battery-comparison-energy-density.jpg)

You can easily imagine 1MJ/kg with 21st century battery technology

 x100Kton = e14J

= 30,000 MWhr

KF drives might take years if not decades to construct just from charging in the factory
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Thunderbolt on 05 September 2019, 07:24:40
Regarding reaction mass, think if you read tons per burn day as Kton per burn day the numbers check out well enough
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Talen5000 on 05 September 2019, 08:22:29
those rules make total sense, if the actual energy required to boost matter clear out of the fabric of space time is absolutely enormous, requiring those kinds of tonnages

The 130MWhr figure is only the residual topping off required after the jump to make up for practical losses to heat, Neutrino EM and gravitational radiation

In which case, there is no need for a solar sail whatsoever and the charging mechanic as descrbed is a lie.

That isn't the case. Sails gather the energy to spark the jump, the core stores it, and uses that energy during the jump process.

However, the energy gathered by the sail, even over the course of a week, is relatively minuscule but even if you multiplied it by ten to account for mistakes or magical super efficiencies or whatever, a sail can be replaced by a modern compact diesel generator.  Call it three or four to allow for resiliency and you've just replaced the entire sail assembly, and the randomness of star type for a reliable power source with minimal running costs and a fixed recharge period.

Call it a fuel cell and your fuel is standard reaction mass or water so you can't even blame running costs for the sail.

This is simply an inherent contradiction that must be accepted, just like DropShips and fasanomics.
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Thunderbolt on 05 September 2019, 10:04:17
In which case, there is no need for a solar sail whatsoever and the charging mechanic as descrbed is a lie.

That isn't the case. Sails gather the energy to spark the jump, the core stores it, and uses that energy during the jump process.

However, the energy gathered by the sail, even over the course of a week, is relatively minuscule but even if you multiplied it by ten to account for mistakes or magical super efficiencies or whatever, a sail can be replaced by a modern compact diesel generator.  Call it three or four to allow for resiliency and you've just replaced the entire sail assembly, and the randomness of star type for a reliable power source with minimal running costs and a fixed recharge period.

Call it a fuel cell and your fuel is standard reaction mass or water so you can't even blame running costs for the sail.

This is simply an inherent contradiction that must be accepted, just like DropShips and fasanomics.
Well, how about economics? To generate the energy acquired by a jump sale for free. Over the course of a week or 10 days could require as much as a ton of hydrogen.  That's 50 tons of year. 50 tons more hydrogen you have to have shift all the way out to some remote jump point. You have to pay some drop ship to deliver it to you. Then you'd have to pay them for their time whilst their crews hooked you up and transferred the fuel over. You probably have to pay your own cruise overtime also. For an EVA. On the jump ship end of the transaction. Moreover, time is money and you'd have to pay every other drop ship hooked up to your hull for their time, waiting around for your fuel transfer.

Or you could just enjoy free energy from the local star. Save everyone time and money and make your merchant line. Or Quartermaster reputation better.

Back in the good ol days of the Starleague everyone probably used recharging stations or worst case. Recharging tugs whilst the station was down for some freak accident. But after the attrition of the succession wars. Jumpships have fallen all the way back to a frontier near Periphery Pirate Bandit mentality. Where theyre required to use? What were originally installed as backup emergency energy generation systems?

So the jump sale is an economical. Emergency fall back system, which has been pressed into service because of? The. Demands of the era.
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Talen5000 on 05 September 2019, 17:59:31
Well, how about economics? To generate the energy acquired by a jump sale for free.

Sure...it's free. It's also replacing a readily created fossil fuel or water, makes you reliant on the star type whereas a diesel engine or fuel cell would guarantee a fixed  minimum time recharge and when you get down to it, you already have a massive power plant in the form of the ships engines.

The Jump Sail system just does not work. The reason given is that it is economical, and that it replaced a large heavy and bulky generator system that halved the range and as far as that goes, it makes sense.

The trouble is the amount of energy generated by a sail is too small for the sail to be anything other than an emergency system. The sail system even takes up more mass than a generator and would be more complex to operate.

And if you need fuel, you just siphon a couple of tons off the DropShips you carry.

ts a contradiction, a paradox that you need to accept for the setting to work.
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Thunderbolt on 05 September 2019, 19:06:54
And if you need fuel, you just siphon a couple of tons off the DropShips you carry.

ts a contradiction, a paradox that you need to accept for the setting to work.
not for free, and not instantaneously, and time is money

How much H would you really need?  Quick calculation...

 f dm/dt c2 = 100MW
 f = 0.008 for optimal fusion efficiency

dm/dt ~ e-5

1 kg per day

Say 10kg per week including non ideal operating conditions
Half ton per year
Twice as much if you're using deuterium

Is an extra ton per year alot for a JS?
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Daryk on 05 September 2019, 19:07:54
If only the rules were that consistent...
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Syzyx on 05 September 2019, 19:48:34
I don't know if this fits in this thread, but this discussion sparked the idea.

Why do we assume the jump drive works on electricity?
Could the sail be collecting something else that isn't efficient to convert from electrical power?
Similarly, could the Li-F batteries be storing that 'other' energy whilst the station system is using the inefficient but cheaper method to bank it?

Probably questions to make cray roll his eyes but I thought I'd throw it out there and learn.
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Liam's Ghost on 05 September 2019, 20:08:40
Just to make things worse, Mechwarrior 2nd Edition actually put a hard number on how much power was needed to make a jump.

1,000,000 kilowatt hours or 1 megawatt hour.

(this is not a conversion error on my part. That's what the text actually says).

The original Pathfinder generated this power using a huge tank of seawater to produce deuterium to feed the onboard fusion plant, which took three to four weeks to charge the core. The jump sail was supposed to be a superior alternative that saved mass, made recharging faster, and increased jump range (by freeing up mass for a larger core).

Obviously, a lot of this has gone away, but you can still see some of the bones of it in modern rules, particularly the way primitive jump drives get heavier as they gain range, and the way you have to burn exorbitant amounts of your fuel to charge your jump drive.

But yeah, the inconsistencies run deep.


EDIT: The information related in Mechwarrior 2nd edition was actually copied verbatim from Mechwarrior 1st edition. I think it may very well be the oldest description of how a jumpship actually works. 

Another EDIT and tangent: this old entry also indicates why recharge stations were a big deal. The old fluff indicates they could recharge a jumpship in eighteen hours rather than the week it took for the solar sail or the fusion plant. At the time, it does not appear that quick charging the drive (with the additional risk of damage) had been invented yet. The charging time was simply the limit of the power output of the fusion plant or solar sail.

I think the first account of quick charging a drive was in the warrior trilogy, which created the idea that you could charge a drive faster, but you might break something (which makes sense when you're talking about the energy output of a fusion reactor needing weeks to match a relative small solar sail fighting against the inverse square law. Once that notion was codified as rules, the poor energy storage batteries got shafted by association, since they too had to avoid burning out the drive by charging too fast.

I may research later where the idea that you had to burn reaction mass to quick charge came from. If it's a relic of the old seawater tank on the pathfinder or if it was a later addition to make not using a jump sail less attractive. I don't think that rule actually appears in battlespace.
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Thunderbolt on 05 September 2019, 21:14:06
Just to make things worse, Mechwarrior 2nd Edition actually put a hard number on how much power was needed to make a jump.

1,000,000 kilowatt hours or 1 megawatt hour.

(this is not a conversion error on my part. That's what the text actually says).

The original Pathfinder generated this power using a huge tank of seawater to produce deuterium to feed the onboard fusion plant, which took three to four weeks to charge the core. The jump sail was supposed to be a superior alternative that saved mass, made recharging faster, and increased jump range (by freeing up mass for a larger core).

Obviously, a lot of this has gone away, but you can still see some of the bones of it in modern rules, particularly the way primitive jump drives get heavier as they gain range, and the way you have to burn exorbitant amounts of your fuel to charge your jump drive.

But yeah, the inconsistencies run deep.


EDIT: The information related in Mechwarrior 2nd edition was actually copied verbatim from Mechwarrior 1st edition. I think it may very well be the oldest description of how a jumpship actually works. 

Another EDIT and tangent: this old entry also indicates why recharge stations were a big deal. The old fluff indicates they could recharge a jumpship in eighteen hours rather than the week it took for the solar sail or the fusion plant. At the time, it does not appear that quick charging the drive (with the additional risk of damage) had been invented yet. The charging time was simply the limit of the power output of the fusion plant or solar sail.

I think the first account of quick charging a drive was in the warrior trilogy, which created the idea that you could charge a drive faster, but you might break something (which makes sense when you're talking about the energy output of a fusion reactor needing weeks to match a relative small solar sail fighting against the inverse square law. Once that notion was codified as rules, the poor energy storage batteries got shafted by association, since they too had to avoid burning out the drive by charging too fast.

I may research later where the idea that you had to burn reaction mass to quick charge came from. If it's a relic of the old seawater tank on the pathfinder or if it was a later addition to make not using a jump sail less attractive. I don't think that rule actually appears in battlespace.
well, a very large sail at say the minimum safe JP distance might harvest most of one million KW = 1 GW

That's almost what the original text reads

Of course you would need more like 1GW week or more of total power x time = energy

= 100-1000 TJ

~ 100 M KWhr
= 100 K MWhr
= 100 GWhr

So yeah I think these figures are ballpark accurate

Think that is the equivalent rest mass energy of 1-10g of matter

---

The largest sail size mentioned, 50km, would increase collected power >1000x

Such sail sizes of 10-50km would also show up on AT2 map boards as hex clusters 1-5 hexes across

Such super sails might also double as station keeping drives via radiation pressure? Plus stellar wind?

2-for-1, harvest energy all without thrusting??
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Thunderbolt on 05 September 2019, 21:47:19
Regarding alternate uses or purposes of the solar sail, what about harnessing stellar wind like an actual veritable sail?

(http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2009/06/sw_dials.gif?resize=310%2C170)

Solar wind ranges from 0.1-100 nPa = 0.1-100 mN per square km

Whereas solar radiation pressure is more like 1-3 N per square km = 1000-3000 mN per square km

Guess maybe much of the time radiation pressure is greater than particle wind pressure?
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Daryk on 06 September 2019, 03:47:47
There was a "quick charge" table in the original Dropships & Jumpships book from 1988.
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Talen5000 on 06 September 2019, 08:16:46
Is an extra ton per year alot for a JS?

No. Its not quite a rounding error but even a Scout carries 45t of fuel.

Station based charging made a degree of sense when it allowed the jumpship to safely charge in hours instead of a week...

But even then, 100kTon  energy storage batteries don't out benefit a diesel engine connected to a spotlight.
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Thunderbolt on 06 September 2019, 10:58:31
No. Its not quite a rounding error but even a Scout carries 45t of fuel.

Station based charging made a degree of sense when it allowed the jumpship to safely charge in hours instead of a week...

But even then, 100kTon  energy storage batteries don't out benefit a diesel engine connected to a spotlight.
well, +1 ton/year drains a Scout in 45 years and they and other JS have had to survive almost 10x that long, on a "SL frontier" style budget without charging stations, by the 32nd century. The only ones to survive have learned to economize every corner and pinch every penny

And aren't those 100kton storage batteries essentially LF batteries?  That's why they can quick charge jump hyper drives?  KF drives are very sensitive to charging particulars 
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: skiltao on 06 September 2019, 17:52:04
As things currently stand, station batteries work like regular quick-charging but a little faster and safer. They don't work like Lithium-Fusion batteries.

Could the sail be collecting something else that isn't efficient to convert from electrical power?

Maybe (and I've proposed something similar in the past), but if there's a practical/play issue with how things work, it's more useful to suss that issue out first before deciding what fluff excuses may be needed.

Battleforce Space, or Battleface among the cultured.

:)

Another EDIT and tangent: this old entry also indicates why recharge stations were a big deal. The old fluff indicates they could recharge a jumpship in eighteen hours rather than the week it took for the solar sail or the fusion plant.

Ahhh, I should've remembered that. I must be off my game.

Quote
I may research later where the idea that you had to burn reaction mass to quick charge came from.

Pretty sure it first appeared in AeroTech 2. I assume it was added to make quick-charging less attractive, but don't remember if Hartford ever said so.
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Thunderbolt on 07 September 2019, 00:05:45
Please permit just one tangent, from visualizations of multi body bound systems, looks like a JS in a binary, trinary or multi star system...

In which all the members are firmly gravitationally bound...

Could jump, not only "through" the star the JS was hovering over, from zenith to opposite nadir JP...

But could also jump "past" your star "through" other bound stars in the same system, in the same field of view as your star, to JPs on the opposite far sides of those stars as well...

Because the "gravity wells" of mutually bound objects connect, such that the gravitational potential between the objects is lower than around the outsides of the system...

And if you are high up on those outermost slopes of the system potential well, you can jump "over the low ridge" between objects, to the far side outer slopes of the system potential well

However, you might not be able to jump "through the low ridge" to JPs on the near sides of the other stars

Physically, if you were in a multi star system, you could look at your star, and know you could jump "through" (hyperspatially "over" it) it to JPs on the far side...

and you could look at other bound stars, in the same general direction as your star, over the limbs of the same, and know you could jump "through" ("over") them to JPs on their far sides opposite your present position...

But you might not be able to jump to a JP on their near sides closest to you, or to any JPs of stars in the opposite direction, away from your star, because the fabric of space time "ridges up in between" and blocks HS LOS:

(https://i.postimg.cc/Z9hfRPc8/binary-system-jumps.jpg) (https://postimg.cc/Z9hfRPc8)

Safe jumping  :)
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: idea weenie on 07 September 2019, 12:02:34
well, +1 ton/year drains a Scout in 45 years and they and other JS have had to survive almost 10x that long, on a "SL frontier" style budget without charging stations, by the 32nd century. The only ones to survive have learned to economize every corner and pinch every penny

The Scout Jumpship likely asks for a top-up of fuel from any Dropships that want to jump.

And aren't those 100kton storage batteries essentially LF batteries?  That's why they can quick charge jump hyper drives?  KF drives are very sensitive to charging particulars

A Li-F battery and a Energy Storage Battery are two different things.

The Li-F battery is linked directly into the KF core, and allows the vessel to make a second jump almost immediately.  It affects the KF core cost multiplier, and masses 1% of the mounting ship's mass.

An Energy Storage Battery is put on Space Stations and used to recharge a Jumpship or Warship the slow way.  It can charge faster if it is attached to the Jumpship Warship, but you still have to charge the KF core slowly with it, unless you are wanting to take risks with frying the core.  It does not affect the KF cost multiplier, and masses 100,000 tons, no matter the size core it is supposed to recharge.
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Thunderbolt on 07 September 2019, 12:36:14
The Scout Jumpship likely asks for a top-up of fuel from any Dropships that want to jump.

A Li-F battery and a Energy Storage Battery are two different things.

The Li-F battery is linked directly into the KF core, and allows the vessel to make a second jump almost immediately.  It affects the KF core cost multiplier, and masses 1% of the mounting ship's mass.

An Energy Storage Battery is put on Space Stations and used to recharge a Jumpship or Warship the slow way.  It can charge faster if it is attached to the Jumpship Warship, but you still have to charge the KF core slowly with it, unless you are wanting to take risks with frying the core.  It does not affect the KF cost multiplier, and masses 100,000 tons, no matter the size core it is supposed to recharge.
So, some of that 100Kton is infrastructure, in the form of not only of power generation & charge storage, but also docking collars, connecting booms, cabling, crew stations & quarters, etc. ?
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Daryk on 07 September 2019, 12:44:34
And power conditioning hardware... don't forget that.
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Thunderbolt on 07 September 2019, 13:06:16
And power conditioning hardware... don't forget that.
yes, KF drives are very particular, they don't run on regular wall AC

and, they can charge multiple ships at once ??
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Daryk on 07 September 2019, 13:09:37
The stations can... not so sure about individual "batteries"...
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Thunderbolt on 07 September 2019, 13:21:14
The stations can... not so sure about individual "batteries"...
Guess the Olympus has 8x batteries for 8x JS...
(https://cfw.sarna.net/wiki/images/thumb/0/0d/Olympos.png/320px-l2s4hqh6xwi2mlljy64thjl4wkewc6x.png?timestamp=20100529221144)
still the 100kton includes a JS-sized docking cradle, power tether & reel, microwave transmitter array... power storage, conditioning, transfer equipment... personnel stations, locker-rooms & quarters etc.

and it certainly sounds like a "nice round (average) number", probably quite accurate for the Olympus which is the mainstay of still-surviving recharge station capacity, but there may have been other recharge stations with other tonnages of the same general order of magnitude
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Daryk on 07 September 2019, 13:33:25
Guess the Olympus has 8x batteries for 8x JS...
*snip*
Yes, indeed, at least according to the original DropShips & JumpShips book.  It paid 800,000 tons for 8 batteries...

EDIT: Damned keyboard shortcuts... cut me off before I could post...
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Thunderbolt on 07 September 2019, 21:51:20
And each of those 8x batteries was designed to service such a high volume of SL-era HS traffic that at least the dry docks had months-to-years long waiting lists (tho' guess that includes DS & JS)

The general impression given is that just about as soon as one JS / WS undocked, another would already be waiting to start recharging

So Olympus 100kton battery "recharging dock/port/gate installations" could service everything the SL had in service or on the drawing boards, up to 2.5-3Mton WS designs (?)

And might require a primary and at least a secondary if not second full sized battery, so as not to keep customers waiting, and be able to service a near continuous stream of often-super-massive SL-era HS vessel traffic

2x 3Mton LF batteries = 60kton ???

Looks like the vast majority of the station mass was comprised of the charging docks... the Olympus was basically built around those, from the picture each of those was much more than merely 1x battery, but more of an entire "pressurized charging dock module" which plausibly could be swapped in and out individually (say) as one entire monolithic unit

adds up

space stations in their own rights, so to speak
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Thunderbolt on 07 September 2019, 21:54:12
Being that the "Energy Storage Batteries" that Space Stations use for this exact purpose (TacOps, pages 406-407) weigh 100,000 tons, I can't see how you can justify installing them on DropShips.
well, maybe, as above, those ESB unit modules (from the Olympus ?) were self-contained stations-in-their-own-rights, and could almost already be detachable independent JS/WS dockable "battery tugs" ? Maybe the ultimate SL plan ?
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Thunderbolt on 07 September 2019, 21:57:41
I don't know if this fits in this thread, but this discussion sparked the idea.

Why do we assume the jump drive works on electricity?
Could the sail be collecting something else that isn't efficient to convert from electrical power?
Similarly, could the Li-F batteries be storing that 'other' energy whilst the station system is using the inefficient but cheaper method to bank it?

Probably questions to make cray roll his eyes but I thought I'd throw it out there and learn.
just a quick thought

JS could hypothetically "reef" their J sails, angling them so as to "tack" laterally and drift around the JP, out of the way of other craft

perhaps one part of their purpose was to actually be light-sails, for radially-outward station keeping thrust vs. gravity, as well as lateral "sliding around out there" around the JP "jump harbor" ???
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Daryk on 07 September 2019, 23:21:52
I think it was Cray who told me the sails actually hang below JumpShips, and the station keeping drives thrust the ship away from the star.  Both gravity and solar wind pressure are miniscule at that distance.
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: The_Caveman on 08 September 2019, 00:54:50
Zenith/Nadir points would be the worst imaginable place to try and catch the stellar wind anyway. The strongest stellar winds are emitted at mid-latitudes and the poles are fairly weak.

The transit drives of JumpShips are actually strong enough to punt them into stellar orbit at the distance of a proximity point, anyway. Would only take a couple of hours at 0.1 g. And the orbital period would be measurable in decades, so for the few weeks they're hanging around waiting on a DropShip to dock, the position change would be negligible.
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Thunderbolt on 08 September 2019, 01:38:42
I think it was Cray who told me the sails actually hang below JumpShips, and the station keeping drives thrust the ship away from the star.  Both gravity and solar wind pressure are miniscule at that distance.
yes, station keeping drives would need to thrust away from the star, and yes the sails are more realistically positioned opposite the drives, off the bow of the vessel, gravity would dominate radiation pressure for the entire vessel, but the sail itself would plausibly be billowed out away from the star ?

something like the following configuration would imply that radiation pressure on sail > gravitational weight of entire vessel, i.e. the entire craft was essentially a light-sail ship:

(http://www.camospecs.com/images/schemes/19_medusans.jpg)

for the Sun, the ratio of Radiation pressure to gravity (= Lsun / 4 pi G c Msun )is always around 1.5g / m2 at all radii (assuming ideal reflection harvesting 2x each photon's momentum)

If a JS is actually absorbing much of that light, that would plausibly be more like 1 ton / km2

A 100km x 100km sail could support ~10Kton, 1000km x 1000km could support 1Mton

A Scout would require a 250-300km sail (~30 AT2 hexes)
A Monolith a 900km sail (~100 AT2 hexes)
WS would be 1000-1500km (~150 AT2 hexes)

It does happen that this is exactly what you get, if you read DS&JS "m" as "km", much as "tons per burn day" might hypothetically be read "Ktons per burn day" to immediately resolve the physics

would also boost power harvesting (from 100s MW ~ 1e8 W) to 10s-100s TW (1e13-14 W)

10s-100s TW x 10 days (~1e6 s) = 1e19-20 J

so happens if you retcon "m" to "km" you simultaneously make many things more realistic

might also be rather easy to deploy sails, they might unfurl like a parachute in the stellar radiation & wind ???
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Daryk on 08 September 2019, 01:45:45
From what I remember, Cray had said the weight of the sail would make it droop toward the star.  The solar pressure just isn't enough.
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Thunderbolt on 08 September 2019, 02:20:01
Well, Isaac Arthur says we can already conceive of solar sails, designed to reflect powerful GW/m2 lasers, at 1000t per 100km x 100km = 0.1t / km2

JS sails only need to reflect a miniscule fraction of such power densities, at most of order 1 KW / m2

So even if they were 1/10th as massive, they'd only be 0.01t / km2 = 10kg / km2 = 0.01 g/m2 << 1 g/m2

even a super-heavy duty laser reflector sail is only 0.1 g/m2 and would still billow away from the sun

A 500kton Monolith, with a 700km x 700km sail, would have to devote only about 5kton to the sail (at a seemingly reasonable 0.01t / km2), which is about what the stats suggest ?  A Scout's 300km sail would be about 1kton

Such sails could harvest enormous power, lift the vessels against stellar gravity, allow the vessels to "reef" and "tack" their ways around the JP jump harbors... and the depicted nose-down configuration would guard the sail against stellar winds, much like the NASA proposal to park a magnet at the L1 point to create a bow shock around Mars and protect its atmosphere:

(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/37/Magnetic_shield_on_L1_orbit_around_Mars.png/220px-Magnetic_shield_on_L1_orbit_around_Mars.png)
(http://cfw.sarna.net/wiki/images/thumb/2/27/Jump_Sail.jpg/300px-76yh57kil6sh5tg5vm76vdgub5enywb.jpg?timestamp=20121003171430)

and if 21st century engineers can imagine 100km sails, 24th century engineers could plausibly have produced 1000km sails
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Thunderbolt on 08 September 2019, 06:56:56
I love BT b/c it makes me think  :D

(https://i.postimg.cc/0zN0tVqb/jump-sails.png) (https://postimg.cc/0zN0tVqb)

You actually can carry out the calculation, given the Mass-Luminosity relation of stars, one can compute their Mass-to-Light (Light-to-Mass) ratios and so determine the area density (mass per area) which is just neutrally "radiatively photonically photo-buoyant" with "radiative photo-lift to weight" ratio equal to one:

(L/c) / (4 pi G M*) = 1 = outward radiation pressure over inward gravitational weight

Virtually all IS worlds orbit Suns of <2 Msol.  If JS jump sails are some sort of super-armored, 100 micron thick, 10 tons per square km material (capable of reflecting GW-TW/m2 power density lasers), then all jump sails throughout the IS are heavier than they are reflective in all IS star systems, and they would all & always droop down towards the central star (unless the JS let itself freefall towards the star)

Conversely, if all JS sails are some sort of gossamer super-thread, 100 nm thick, 10 kg per square km material, then all jump sails throughout the IS are always more reflective than they are heavy, and all would always billow away from the central star

For intermediate area densities, sails would billow away from the brighter stars, and droop down towards the dimmer stars

The original JS&DS era artwork seems to imply that they are the super-thin gossamer super-fabric variety, such that they all & always billow away from all IS stars.

Maybe WS would favor thicker and more rugged sails, capable of reflecting extremely high power-densities ???
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Daryk on 08 September 2019, 07:00:06
That's really a question for Cray... he's the one who wrote all that stuff for the game.
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Weirdo on 08 September 2019, 10:17:03
Real-world math is irrelevant. We explicitly know that charging JumpShips maintain position by pointing their station-keeping drives at the star, and that the sail's weight is greater than the outward pressure, so it must dangle below/behind the ship.
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Thunderbolt on 08 September 2019, 10:21:53
Real-world math is irrelevant. We explicitly know that charging JumpShips maintain position by pointing their station-keeping drives at the star, and that the sail's weight is greater than the outward pressure, so it must dangle below/behind the ship.
That's carved in ferrocrete ?

The convex surface of the jump sail faces towards the star ?
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Weirdo on 08 September 2019, 10:25:52
Yes, per StratOps.
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Daryk on 08 September 2019, 11:27:17
As written by Cray, no less.
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: skiltao on 08 September 2019, 15:02:59
Yes, per StratOps.

So when you said "Real-world math is irrelevant," what you really meant was that someone else had also done the real-world math and they came to a different result. ;D
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Weirdo on 08 September 2019, 19:59:30
What I meant was that StratOps said so, and rulebooks trump real-world. I haven't done the math myself so do not know for certain if it is based on actual math. Rulebook said so, therefore it is.
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Thunderbolt on 08 September 2019, 20:56:47
If jump sails have an area density of 10 tons / km2 or greater, then yes they are heavier than they are reflective and would sag starward

Isn't that what the stats indicate?  How much does a 1km2 sail mass?

Only means that they are extremely thick, rugged, durable, more like a star shield than a sail, they would deploy more like solar panels than parachutes, if they sag starward have to have some means of lateral support or they would just bunch up like the parachute of a paratrooper who is hanging upside down in a tree
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: R.Tempest on 08 September 2019, 20:59:01
 Have to agree with Thunderbolt - love BattleTech because it makes me think.
That being said, maybe the Jumpsail/KF drive likes only a specific radiation wavelength? This is contained in the solar wind at the jump points (and throughout the star system) and is absorbed at the usual listed rates. However a recharge station can broadcast at precisely this frequency, allowing for faster recharge times.
 It might also account for the different recharge times at different star types.
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: skiltao on 08 September 2019, 20:59:55
What I meant was that StratOps said so, and rulebooks trump real-world. I haven't done the math myself so do not know for certain if it is based on actual math. Rulebook said so, therefore it is.

If Thunderbolt is sitting at a game table that you're refereeing, sure; but otherwise, that's not your call. The discussion seems to be more in the vein of just shootin' the breeze anyways, or maybe doing research for some fanfic, so "rules trump thinking" doesn't apply.

I haven't done the math for myself either, so I won't guarantee the figures are right; but I do recall that author discussing the math and considering it relevant in the years leading to StratOps.
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Thunderbolt on 08 September 2019, 21:15:45
Super quick comment. Hypothetically. Every Battletech player ever has always been completely right. Hypothetically if jumpships have sales maybe they also have anchors. Maybe jumpships have both a lightweight parachute like sail. As well as a Super Heavy Starshield, which hangs down below the boat?

Some of the pictures some of the time have depicted the sale. And other pictures have depicted the Starshield.  Perhaps by Reefing and tacking and adjusting both the. Parachute like sale and anchor like Starshield. Jump ship captains are able to maneuver around jump harbors and so on.
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Thunderbolt on 09 September 2019, 05:48:31
(https://i.postimg.cc/YvRs4kFH/jumpship.jpg) (https://postimg.cc/YvRs4kFH)
(https://i.postimg.cc/sMZzBBMj/jumpship-storm.jpg) (https://postimg.cc/sMZzBBMj)

Quick concept art of a jump ship with both a
The Stern Mounted "Star Anchor" Receives strong stellar flux, and could incorporate solar panels. To harvest starlight?  So accounting for all those rules which attribute solar stellar. Power harvesting to the Stern mounted. Starward "starshade"?

Meanwhile, your primary Stellar power harvesting Would be accomplished by the bow mounted Jump ship sail?

---

Quick origami question for everyone how exactly do you fold up a jump anchor or jump sail???
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Talen5000 on 14 September 2019, 11:25:22
Have to agree with Thunderbolt - love BattleTech because it makes me think.
That being said, maybe the Jumpsail/KF drive likes only a specific radiation wavelength? This is contained in the solar wind at the jump points (and throughout the star system) and is absorbed at the usual listed rates. However a recharge station can broadcast at precisely this frequency, allowing for faster recharge times.
 It might also account for the different recharge times at different star types.


I don't see that working. A big reason why sails shrunk over time is that they now drink in a much wider variety of EM radiation to use as "fuel".

If you want to explain things then you can't rely on just the 100% canon information. You need to extrapolate and bring in mew concepts that work within the existing rules, or at least, as much as possible.

For example, my own "headcanon" runs like this...

We all know the basics of the jump system...it is described in books.

It uses Germanium. More specifically, it is the rarest isotope...Germanium 76...which is of value. Why? Because it is radioactive.

More...because it so Germanium, it is transparent to IR light.

2....a jump process requires the core to hold about 130MWh of power. That's a fair amount, but nothing a diesel generator cannot produce in a couple of days. Heck, it should be possible to simply trickle feed the core from the existing power systems.

Why use a sail? Several reasons.

Early jumpsuits used a power plant. It was heavy enough that it reduced the jump radius by more than half.  Why would such a generator be so heavy? Because it isn't the amount of energy that is important....it is the density (for lack of a better word). The drive doesn't care where the power comes from....but what it does need is enough power to spark the jump. What the core and storage system does is allow the system to carry enough power so that it can be dumped into the system in a nanosecond.

That 130 or 200 or whatever MWh then becomes equivalent to an energy output of 130 PetaWatts or more. Only for a fraction of a second, but it is long enough to initiate the jump process. You could posit more power is required but that this may be drawn directly from KSpace itself.

3...The act of jumping creates a KF field around the core. The more power pumped into the field, the longer it can be stabilised for a jump, and the longer it is stabilised, the further it can be jumped. But, the more power pumped into the field then the more unstable the field becomes...a spring too tightly wound...and the more vulnerable it becomes to outside interference. A misjump happens when the field twisting becomes so severe it causes the field to break.

4...The outside "interference" is represented by our old friend in the BTU...Heat. Just as 76Ge is transparent to IR radiation, making it a necessity for jump drives, heat inside the jump core can interfere with the jump field. Thermal Poisoning of the Core is to be avoided. This is why Quick charging uses so much reaction mass....it isn't being burned. It is being flushed through the core to keep it cold and then any that can't be cooled quickly enough is thrown over the side. It is dumped. Any JumpShip seen with a bloom of reaction mass around it is dumping the fuel too hot to use in the core or even keep. But quick charging, regardless of source, still entails the risk of thermal toxicity, the risk of creating heat nodes within the core that will warp and twist a KF field.

This need to avoid the thermal contamination of the core is also why more advanced superconductors aren't used...the liquid helium is necessary to keep the germanium cold enough for the jump process, so it simply saves mass by doing a double duty as coolant and battery.

5...One other factor to consider is that the creation of a KF field leaves a charge upon the core. Jumping with this charge is dangerous as it interferes with the KF field. It is almost akin to jumping with a second core, not quite as destructive but still risky. Discharging the charge is dangerous and can damage the ship, a bit like static electricity and it effectively grounds the field into the KF core, equalizing the KF potential.  Most jumpships prefer to let the charge dissipate naturally over the course of a week unless absolutely necessary.

The LF battery system includes mechanisms to help dissipate the charge but still only doubles the discharge rate.

So....the sail replaces a heavy generator because the sail includes mechanics to boost the energy density to a point the jump can be sparked. This process doubled the range by removing the generator system but it didn't speed up the jump process because discharging the KF Potential of the vessel....shall we call it shimmer heat?...takes about a week due to safety.  The sail system was built and designed with this limit in mind. However, moving to the sail also introduced the problems of thermal toxicity within the core and did little to negate the issues of field twisting.

Now...this expands upon the existing info, but adds concepts and systems that aren't fully canon.  But it mostly works, even if it adds s couple of minor issues.

But within canon itself, the jump process, quick charging, core construction, etc have a number of built in paradoxes that simply need to be accepted. Would tbe concept that the drive requires only a special frequency if EM light work? Maybe, but then you are drawing in even less power, and contradicting other information.









Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Thunderbolt on 14 September 2019, 12:39:46
a jump process requires the core to hold about 130MWh of power. That's a fair amount, but nothing a diesel generator cannot produce in a couple of days. Heck, it should be possible to simply trickle feed the core from the existing power systems.

Why use a sail?
Well, canon stipulates 150MWh or so is required to replenish the drive

Not sure it specifically defines that as the total power requirement of the jump, or merely the losses from the previous jump which must be replenished to "top off" the charge in the core

The sail, given its mass per density, is extremely thick & sturdy, more of a "Jump Shield" than a light gossamer thin "sail" like is usually discussed -- more of a Nuclear Pulse Propulsion pusher-plate when compared to commonly conceived "sails"

The "Jump Shield" hangs below the JS and not only harvests power but could (by all rights) protect the priceless JS & KF drive from frequent stellar flares, storms, radiation

So the "Jump Shield" is plausibly the best way to squeeze everything from stellar radiation shielding to power generation into a single light but rugged multipurpose component

76Ge is transparent to IR radiation, making it a necessity for jump drives, heat inside the jump core can interfere with the jump field. Thermal Poisoning of the Core is to be avoided...But quick charging, regardless of source, still entails the risk of thermal toxicity, the risk of creating heat nodes within the core that will warp and twist a KF field...the liquid helium is necessary to keep the germanium cold enough for the jump process, so it simply saves mass by doing a double duty as coolant and battery.
Supercooled certainly suggests some sort of delicate quantum entangled state something-something which has a high degree of plausible-sounding-ness

Use of heavy Germanium semi-metal instead of lighter Silicon (or Carbon) also supports the notion of trying to minimize random thermal motions for some exquisitely controlled quantum state something-something

use of quasi-stable Ge76, as the heaviest essentially stable isotope, would further reduce thermal motion -- if there's any mention of Selenium 76 anywhere, into which Ge76 decays, such would corroborate your speculations
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Talen5000 on 14 September 2019, 16:49:39
Well, canon stipulates 150MWh or so is required to replenish the drive

Which still means 150MWh are used to jump.

However, the supposition that the sail simply tops up tbe charge is destroyed by the simple fact a JumpShip cannot jump without charging.

Quote
The sail, given its mass per density, is extremely thick & sturdy

The mass of a Volgas Jumpsail is 420 Tons, assuming that is all sail and includes none of the mass for the rest of the sail system. Its diameter is 1270m, and its area is approximately 1.3 million square meters, less space for the cut out, estimated at a generous 200m diameter, for a total estimated area of 1.27 million square meters.

That suggests approximately 331g per metre squared.

That does not imply a thick material, but I suppose it could be foamed.


 But I am aware of nothing in the canon which suggests a Jump sail is thick and sturdy. Quite the opposite...the sails are fragile and thin.



Quote
use of quasi-stable Ge76, as the heaviest essentially stable isotope, would further reduce thermal motion -- if there's any mention of Selenium 76 anywhere, into which Ge76 decays, such would corroborate your speculations

There isn't...I thought with Cray involved, he might have had the same ideas I did but I'd assume any 76Se would either be scavenged during maintenance or occurs at such a low level that its presence doesn't significantly affect field creation during the drives working life. An accumulation of 76Se could pose a minor, albeit growing risk, to the use of old cores but given the half life of 76Ge, probably wouldn't ever be anything more than a trace. That's not to say it couldn't cause issues, especially if a structurally pure core is needed for a jump, one where any contaminant can be problematic, but at that scale, scavenging would likely be unwarranted, with the core simply ground down for recycling and the parts purified


However, my speculations, though an extrapolation of tbe information provided in game should still be considered headcanon, especially as several new concepts...thermal toxicity, 76Ge, heat nodes, field twisting, shimmer heat. etc...are added to explain the known jump systems and the idea of blooming, that a ship uses reaction mass for cooling and then jettisons it to avoid heat contamination because cores aren't built for quick charging is simply a possible explanation for the in game rules.

I mentioned this merely to indicate that deriving a passable system from the known information is possible, but not...repeat NOT (IMO)...without introducing new concepts.

It still leaves the jump requiring very little power, and quick charging as somewhat paradoxical

Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Liam's Ghost on 14 September 2019, 17:19:47
The only canon number I've seen specified was 1 gigawatt hour.
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Talen5000 on 14 September 2019, 19:45:30
The only canon number I've seen specified was 1 gigawatt hour.

We know the distance to the jump point, we know the energy output from the sun at that distance and we know the area of the jumpsail and how long it takes to charge the core.

However, even if we accepted that bump to 1 GWh...and why not? FASAFiziks...we are talking about using a couple of more generators to charge the core, which will still likely be cheaper and more compact than the sail, or keeping one generator and just letting it run for longer.

1GWh over a 168 hour week is just about a 6MW engine....or two 3MW generators. Spending 150 Tons on two diesel generators and ten tons of fuel to replace a 500 Ton sail sounds like a neat investment.

Granted, its a fictional universe but even then, it doesn't truly work.

If you to keep a degree of realism...yes, I know - the "R" word...then additional concepts must be added or expanded upon.

Hence the head canon above.

Cores can't be charged quicker because heat spikes damage them.
The generators that can provide enough power to spark a jump are so heavy and large they halve the range
Ships require one week between jumps because thats how long it takes "shimmer heat" to discharge...shimmer heat being a quick n easy term for the "static charge" a ship gains after a jump.

And in this headcanon, these effects do real damage which is why ship captains try to avoid them

But as I said, some of this is simple extrapolation of the existing info. But some of the rest are new concepts. I think. I don't recall them cropping up anywhere else

But...getting back to the original topic.

Could this be used to explain a superjump.

Kinda...in this system, the LF battery would be used to feed power into the KF field to prevent it twisting. What you'd be doing would either be

1...pumping power into the field to stabilise it and prevent it twisting and tearing the ship apart
2...using the system to generate a second KF field overlaid upon the first, reinforcing it, maybe adding a concept of drag or mass.
3...using the system to generate  a second KF field, but instead of creating an overlay, you'd be creating an inverse field that mirrors the original, shoring it up and countering the twist effect by applying the reverse twist and thus stabilising the field.

Option 1 would be the Manassass.
Either option 2 or 3 could explain the WoB drive.

Of course, the Holy Grail here would be to get two fields generated at the same time so that any imperfections due to the time delay between initiations would be minimised. Options 2 and 3 would both be equivalent to operating two cores in close proximity to each other, possibly explaining the damage the drives suffer.

One could also posit a feedback loop which destroys the core.

Within the canon BTU, however, a safe superjump may not be advisable. It may be possible but it would also disrupt the story. Constraints are a necessary part of storytelling and world creating and game balance and any different transit technology would need its own set of pros and cons.

The existing universe would accept a safe superjump system...IF it were properly balanced in some way. The WoB version destroyed the drive....which is too strong a drawback, though it does work well to keep the standard drive as king.

A working superjump system would need some strong drawbacks...probably not automatic destruction of the core, but something.
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Liam's Ghost on 14 September 2019, 19:54:07
I'm not, strictly speaking, disagreeing with any of your assessments, just pointing out what the only actual hard number on power requirements given (back in 1986 and probably long forgotten by the writers) was.
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Talen5000 on 14 September 2019, 20:17:29
I'm not, strictly speaking, disagreeing with any of your assessments, just pointing out what the only actual hard number on power requirements given (back in 1986 and probably long forgotten by the writers) was.

Yeah...and I'm not really dismissing it. We could argue that it is due to quantum fluctuations in the core, or that it is an old figure referring to older, less efficient core systems.

My point is that it doesn't matter...the amount of energy output by a sun is great but finite and at a jump point,  the amount of power that can be generated, even over a week, is limited.

Limited to the point that sails don't make economic sense. You shouldn't even need generators....a trickle charge from the fusion plant should charge the core nicely, and give you a nice fixed recharge time independent of star type.

None of that matters though because FASA wanted BattleRiders and they wanted sails.

And there is nothing wrong with that....except in reality, it doesn't work. It doesn't even really work using BTU rules.

Hence, the quip that it is a paradox we need to accept.

Unless or until CGL publish or expand the canon to provide alternate explanations. I've tried to do that here, to show it is possible (unless I overlooked something)....but I think the important thing here is that this IS a paradox we can accept.  It is not weird enough or poor enough to break the fourth wall or shatter the suspension of disbelief. The basic rules of jump travel are fairly consistent.


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The fusion plant was capable of generating approximately 1,000,000 kilowatt hours(a megawatt hour) of energy, sufficient for one jump. It also imposed a mass constraint that seriously restricted the range of jump to 16 to 18 light years jump- and-return for a medium-size vessel. Finally, the time required to recharge the drive core was prohibitive(three to four weeks or more)

P150, MW2 and it refers specifically to the TAS Pathfinder.

Later cores are arguably more efficient and so would require just 130MWh.

We can probably ignore the comment that seems to equate a GWh to a single Megawatt hour. They likely meant Gigawatt
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Thunderbolt on 14 September 2019, 22:23:49
Which still means 150MWh are used to jump.

However, the supposition that the sail simply tops up tbe charge is destroyed by the simple fact a JumpShip cannot jump without charging.
cannot jump without a sufficient charge, yes

your departure & emergence signatures deposit significant energy into EM, gravity & neutrino & particle emissions IIRC

you have to replenish that energy to get back up over the bar required for HS transit

But where does canon say that the KF-drive emerges from HS completely 100% empty ?


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The mass of a Volgas Jumpsail is 420 Tons, assuming that is all sail and includes none of the mass for the rest of the sail system. Its diameter is 1270m, and its area is approximately 1.3 million square meters, less space for the cut out, estimated at a generous 200m diameter, for a total estimated area of 1.27 million square meters.

That suggests approximately 331g per metre squared.

That does not imply a thick material, but I suppose it could be foamed.
The rugged sails under consideration for Project Breakthrough Starshot, which would have to be able to withstand and reflect enormous laser focused power densities, mass around 1000 tons per 100km x 100km = 10,000 km2, at approximately 1 micron thick IIRC

That's a density of 1e3 x 1e3 x 1e3 / (1e4 * 1e3 * 1e3) = 0.1g / m2

So "Jump Shields" are several thousand times more rugged still


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But I am aware of nothing in the canon which suggests a Jump sail is thick and sturdy. Quite the opposite...the sails are fragile and thin.
whenever they appear on an AT2 map, yes

not designed to deflect GR rounds

but very hardy vs. starlight, stellar wind & flares & storms etc.


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There isn't...I thought with Cray involved, he might have had the same ideas I did but I'd assume any 76Se would either be scavenged during maintenance or occurs at such a low level that its presence doesn't significantly affect field creation during the drives working life. An accumulation of 76Se could pose a minor, albeit growing risk, to the use of old cores but given the half life of 76Ge, probably wouldn't ever be anything more than a trace. That's not to say it couldn't cause issues, especially if a structurally pure core is needed for a jump, one where any contaminant can be problematic, but at that scale, scavenging would likely be unwarranted, with the core simply ground down for recycling and the parts purified
sounds like excellent material for scenario background and/or the fiction
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Talen5000 on 15 September 2019, 04:48:17
you have to replenish that energy to get back up over the bar required for HS transit

But where does canon say that the KF-drive emerges from HS completely 100% empty ?

None of which, even were it true, makes any difference. You still need to generate that 130MWh of energy somehow.


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The rugged sails under consideration for Project Breakthrough Starshot, which would have to be able to withstand and reflect enormous laser focused power densities, mass around 1000 tons per 100km x 100km = 10,000 km2, at approximately 1 micron thick IIRC

Project Breakthrough Starshot is a proposed project to launch a fleet of nanocraft each weighing a few grams. The sails of these craft will ne measured in metres...not km.


Meanwhile, BT jumpsails are described as sub-mm thick, as "foil", with a risk of tearing when deployed or retracted. This goes all the way back to the early days of BT with the use of sail rigger robots, or the use of ship rotation to help control deployment.

The most recent descriptions would probably be SO. I don't know where the concept that they are rugged came from.
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Thunderbolt on 15 September 2019, 07:22:17
Project Breakthrough Starshot is a proposed project to launch a fleet of nanocraft each weighing a few grams. The sails of these craft will ne measured in metres...not km.

Meanwhile, BT jumpsails are described as sub-mm thick, as "foil", with a risk of tearing when deployed or retracted. This goes all the way back to the early days of BT with the use of sail rigger robots, or the use of ship rotation to help control deployment.

The most recent descriptions would probably be SO. I don't know where the concept that they are rugged came from.
oops, true, hard to understand futurist Isaac Arthur in the background on 2x playback speed  :D

RL sails are 5-6g / m2 implying they are about 2 microns thick

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_sail#Sail_parameters

That translates to... 5-6 tons / km2

BTU Volgas jump sail is 331 tons / km2 about 60x more rugged

About 120 microns = 5 layers of heavy duty aluminum foil

Please just take a step back and think about this -- solar light sails are light & thin so as to be pushed away from the Sun, whereas BTU jump sails sag down towards stars... er go thick & heavy & rugged

maybe how they've survived for all these centuries  :)

offer that jump "sails" are really more of a "jump shield" protecting JS from violent stellar weather patterns  ???





PS: as imaged above, canon rules "push" the proximity points of low-mass M-class Red Dwarves "out" farther away from said stars than you'd expect.  That's reflected in longer recharge times for such stars.  One plausible justification in support of canon on this is that Red Dwarves are known to be flare stars, having frequent severe stellar flares, mass ejections, storms, etc

Think that's because the entire bulk of M-class stars are convective, meaning convection cells extend from the fusing core all the way to the surface, carrying material straight from the central fusion furnace all the way to the surface... where it blasts outward ferociously

Plausibly unsafe to drop down deeper into the gravity wells of such unpredictable host stars... such that the minimum safe distance limit is increased over the trend of better behaved, higher massed stars

just a quick thought in support of canon science

DS&JS II could include rules for (say) "deep charging" closer to M-class stars, at the risk of daily saving throws vs. stellar ejections aimed at the JS... and which would each have some chance of damaging the "jump shield / sail" and/or JS itself ???
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Thunderbolt on 15 September 2019, 07:55:10
"Flamm's paraboloid" quantifies the curvature, imputed into the "fabric" of space-time, by stars.  It defines the "hyper-spatial elevation" of the "fabric" of space-time, as a function of distance from stars -- the fully general relativistic version of the classical "gravity well".

The paraboloids from two neighboring stars have to merge & mesh together at their mutual L1 point (gravitational pulls towards both stars cancel out), which is on average about 2 light-years from stars (4 lyr between stars on average), so knowing the star's mass and that distance, you can estimate a ballpark figure for the difference in "hyper-elevation" between the surface of the star and that L1 point in interstellar space between:

(https://i.postimg.cc/0zcPJGsd/hyper-elevation.png) (https://postimg.cc/0zcPJGsd)

Generally, the "hyper-depths" of the gravity wells imputed into the "fabric" of space-time are around 10-30 M km for M/K/G/F class stars (respectively).  Similarly, the "hyper-elevation change" from star surface to standard Jump Point / Proximity Point is around 10-100 K km = 0.01-0.1 M km for the JP / PP of M/K/G/F class stars at 1-10AU (respectively)

just in support of canon rules, trying to help visualize the "fabric" of space-time "stage" on which all of the BTU events occur, obviously the usual space-time "mesh" images (like the one above) exaggerate the "vertical" contrast by a factor of a thousand to a million (!) (actual million to one grade is like one basketball hoop across the continental US)

PS: same calculation for Milky Way & Andromeda galaxies gives a "hyper-elevation change" of ~700 lyr from one galaxy to the halfway point in betwen
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Thunderbolt on 15 September 2019, 08:03:33
One more thing for backstory support of canon rules, the fact that the central cutout of jump-sails is not enormous plausibly implies that station keeping drive exhaust is "charge neutralized" before being ejected from the thrusters

otherwise, wouldn't the freshly fused He ions rapidly disperse and fan out over most of the inner surface of the jump sail ?

the fact that the exhaust plume remains collimated over reasonably long distances may imply the jet is charge neutral  ???
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Talen5000 on 15 September 2019, 09:29:15
Please just take a step back and think about this -- solar light sails are light & thin so as to be pushed away from the Sun, whereas BTU jump sails sag down towards stars... er go thick & heavy & rugged

They "sag down" because they aren't intended to move the craft, and are pulled down by the suns gravity, exacerbated by tbe station keeping thrust of the jumpsuit.

The lore also describes them as foil thin and easily torn.

As for the Volga...the mass of the Jump Sail is 420 Tons. That would, I presume, include the mass of the entire sail assembly and not just the Jump Sail. Even if we say that this represents the entire mass for the sail, that doesn't alter the canon that the sails are foil thin and easily damaged.

It just means the sail is heavier, and designed for collecting power rather than movement

Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Thunderbolt on 15 September 2019, 10:03:19
They "sag down" because they aren't intended to move the craft, and are pulled down by the suns gravity, exacerbated by tbe station keeping thrust of the jumpsuit.

The lore also describes them as foil thin and easily torn.

As for the Volga...the mass of the Jump Sail is 420 Tons. That would, I presume, include the mass of the entire sail assembly and not just the Jump Sail. Even if we say that this represents the entire mass for the sail, that doesn't alter the canon that the sails are foil thin and easily damaged.

It just means the sail is heavier, and designed for collecting power rather than movement
Yes, they have the area mass density (kg / m2) of 5 layers of heavy duty aluminum foil, foil is the most appropriate stock "off the shelf" comparison to make

Physically, they have to be heavy & dense in order to not be blown outwards by radiation pressure & stellar wind "ram pressure"

If they were as light as a solar sail (5-6 tons / km2) or the "starwisp" mesh design (0.1 tons / km2) they would be blown outwards like a parachute deployment and billow up above the JS.  Takes 333 tons / km2 to droop down starwards into radiation & stellar winds

The Sun has persistent "coronal holes (https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/phenomena/coronal-holes)" over the poles, with open magnetic field lines extending out to infinity, along which the solar wind is especially fast (~800 km/s), twice as fast as from the equator:

(https://media.springernature.com/lw785/springer-static/image/art:10.1007%2Flrsp-2015-5/MediaObjects/41116_2015_5_Fig40.jpg)

Clearly, at solar maximums, "streamers" can jet out from the sun at high (even polar) latitudes... straight towards jump proximity points

Plausibly, space weather is important for BTU space travel  ???  Having a "jump shield" between you and the star your charging over might well be mandatory  :o

(https://db4sgowjqfwig.cloudfront.net/campaigns/26212/assets/539796/Invader_at_Anchor.jpg?1451080882)
(http://www.sarna.net/wiki/images/thumb/9/97/Security.jpg/200px-Security.jpg)
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Talen5000 on 15 September 2019, 11:10:38
Physically, they have to be heavy & dense in order to not be blown outwards by radiation pressure & stellar wind "ram pressure"

The jumpsuit would be accelerating in the opposite direction. It is gravity that is pulling them down, solar wind not being strong enough.
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Plausibly, space weather is important for BTU space travel  ???  Having a "jump shield" between you and the star your charging over might well be mandatory  :o

If it were, such shields would be necessary WarShips, for DropShips, for ASFs and wouldn't have a hole cut into them.

Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Thunderbolt on 15 September 2019, 19:10:03
The jumpsuit would be accelerating in the opposite direction. It is gravity that is pulling them down, solar wind not being strong enough.
If it were, such shields would be necessary WarShips, for DropShips, for ASFs and wouldn't have a hole cut into them.
true

Both radiation pressure and gravity decrease with the square of the distance from the star, so the ratio is constant

For the sun, the threshold is:

L/4pi c GM = 0.7 g/m2 = 0.7 ton / km2

IDK why Wikipedia has solar sail almost 10x denser ???

Anyway you interpretation is plausible,  :omean "jump sail assembly".  However, the mass of support structures probably scales with the sail mass.  Masts and hoists wouldn't be overbuilt, massing 419t for a 1t sail, yes?

So, order of magnitude,

you're saying that the sail isn't 100% of the listen mass
I'm suggesting it is more than 1%
That gives us 10% ballpark, say 10-50%

If we agreed that the actual sail was only a third of the total listed mass 33%

That would be 140t total, 100t per square km

16x thicker than the 2 micron thick Wikipedia sails, about 33 microns thick, a third thicker than heavy duty aluminum foil at 25 microns

So you are canon are correct, it's comparable to aluminum foil
I'm not wrong, it is extra heavy duty aluminum foil

Enough to shield the jump ship from space weather to which it is perpetually exposed  :o

Unlike DS and ASF which receive regular repairs

So still offer that the canon implies that the sail doubles as an extra heavy duty shield against stellar storms, winds, flares etc
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Talen5000 on 15 September 2019, 20:14:13
So still offer that the canon implies that the sail doubles as an extra heavy duty shield against stellar storms, winds, flares etc

Leaving aside that stuff like stellar storms don't exist and that space craft need to be radiation shielded anyway, with or without a "shield", the sail has s great big hole in it right in line between the ship and the star....there is no protection. More, a WarShip maneuvering to orbit would have its nose generally pointed towards the star, have no protection and still be in just as much need...none.

A deployed sail would do nothing to protect a Jumpship from "space weather" nor is there any indication it is needed or designed for that role. It is too thin and too uni directional to protect from micro meteorites. It is debilitatibg during actual combat.

The only reason the sail seems to exist is the only obe given in canon...to charge the core in a manner that suited JWs vision of the game.
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Thunderbolt on 16 September 2019, 00:15:26
Leaving aside that stuff like stellar storms don't exist and that space craft need to be radiation shielded anyway, with or without a "shield", the sail has s great big hole in it right in line between the ship and the star....there is no protection. More, a WarShip maneuvering to orbit would have its nose generally pointed towards the star, have no protection and still be in just as much need...none.

A deployed sail would do nothing to protect a Jumpship from "space weather" nor is there any indication it is needed or designed for that role. It is too thin and too uni directional to protect from micro meteorites. It is debilitatibg during actual combat.

The only reason the sail seems to exist is the only obe given in canon...to charge the core in a manner that suited JWs vision of the game.
The central cut out is hardly bigger than the thruster nozzle?

Which you could use to "fight fire with fire" and blast exhaust into severe coronal mass ejections?

Moreover the thruster nozzle can handle your fusion exhaust, hotter than the cores of most stars, much less cool outer layers (photosphere) discharged into stellar winds over the poles

Hundreds of millions to billions of degrees versus one million or so

Your thruster nozzle already is armored versus stellar weather patterns

Moreover still, the sail is so thick it could be a lamellar of multiple purposed layers? Lower outer dark photo absorbent collector layer over say a capacitive layer that could be charged to millions of volts to electro statically repel wind ions, over a conductive layer which could generate high currents for magnetic shielding

Obviously speculation but in support of canon, which is justifiable

Just view the pictures, canon clearly positions the sail between the dangerous star and precious JS... Doesn't that immediately suggest if not outright imply a shielding function?  Where such protection would be plausibly required?
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Talen5000 on 16 September 2019, 04:23:17
The central cut out is hardly bigger than the thruster nozzle?
Quote

It can be bigger  and some sails aren't circular.
The point is the pathway for any "stellar storm" has a clear passage right into the ship. The sail also only acts from one orientation so a maneuvering ship...fighter...DropShip included...has no protection at all.



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Your thruster nozzle already is armored versus stellar weather patterns

Lets say that is true....you've just said a sail isn't needed for a shield. Because the engine is "armoured" against it.







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Just view the pictures, canon clearly positions the sail between the dangerous star and precious JS... Doesn't that immediately suggest if not outright imply a shielding function?  Where such protection would be plausibly required?

No...it doesn't. It implies a sail used for anything other than a shield because most pictures also show the cutout.

The sail is nothing but a charging device.


And the simplest fix for the power charging issues would be to simply increase its size. A sail with the original (canonical) 50km diameter would generate about 1500 times as much power...about 200 GWh...at which point onboard diesel generators wouldn't be that desirable.

Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Thunderbolt on 16 September 2019, 07:02:47
Lets say that is true....you've just said a sail isn't needed for a shield. Because the engine is "armoured" against it.



No...it doesn't. It implies a sail used for anything other than a shield because most pictures also show the cutout.

The sail is nothing but a charging device.


And the simplest fix for the power charging issues would be to simply increase its size. A sail with the original (canonical) 50km diameter would generate about 1500 times as much power...about 200 GWh...at which point onboard diesel generators wouldn't be that desirable.
again DS and ASF don't live in deep space round the clock far from repair facilities

And they would be protected by the JS when berthed

The sail deflects all but a narrow stream of wind plasma from scouring all sides and surfaces

Shape of sail doesn't matter the hole is always small and round unless canon explicitly says otherwise somewhere I'm not aware of

Which wouldn't make sense if it's just a solar panel anyway why lose the real estate?

50km sounds cool but would drop the density from 100s of tons per square km... To only 100s of kg...

That is right around the threshold between heavier than reflective to more reflective than massive

Ie such sails would billow away from stars like a parachute deploying

So evidently canon was revised to make the sails thick and dense so as to hang down below the ship in a shield reminiscent way

Don't know why the writers would re revise their decisions but it's their call, solar observatory satellites have sun shields and JS spend centuries of operational life in fast polar stellar winds and weather patterns...

Makes sense to me I always wondered what kept JS safe from storms

Multipurpose with redundancy on a minimal mass budget seems plausible, but if you insist BT can't be physically plausible i guess it won't be
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Weirdo on 16 September 2019, 09:24:09
I always wondered what kept JS safe from storms

Armor. It's a known fact that spacecraft armor has nearly magical properties when it comes to stopping radiation.
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Talen5000 on 16 September 2019, 13:45:24
again DS and ASF don't live in deep space round the clock far from repair facilities

Neither do JumpShips. Those Olympus class recharge stations have docking berths precisely for maintenance

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The sail deflects all but a narrow stream of wind plasma from scouring all sides and surfaces

Said narrow stream, if it exists, being aimed directly at the ship itself. And the sail doesn't "protect" the ship when it is in transit. Why is the nose unworthy of protection by the sail? And if not the nose, why not sides? And if not the sidse, why the sail to protect those side?

This supposition that the sail acts as a shield is without any foundation whatsoever. There is not even canon inferenece that this is the case and that Jumpships can move and point directly at the star, head directly into this solar wind that you are positing is so damaging, is a clear sign that your supposition is wrong. That the sail cannot perform the task you suggest because there is a great big hole cut out of it is also an indictaion that your premise here is wrong.

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Shape of sail doesn't matter the hole is always small and round unless canon explicitly says otherwise somewhere I'm not aware of

You are trying now to push the idea that the sail somehow protects the sides of the vessel....even though the shapes of some sails woudl leave those sides dangerously expose tot he forces you are trying to suggest occur. The hole has to be larger than the engine exhaust stream AND large enough to account for any maneuevering or thrust or dispersion that will occur.

But it wouldn't matter if it was tiny....it is still a breach in the sail that allows through the "stellar storm" it is supposed to protect against, and the necessary placement of said breach means said storm will be focussed directly on the jump ship. If you try and posiut that the engiens are shielded against the storm, great...but you also admit that the ship doesn't need a jump sail for shielding because the crafts inherent armour is already good enough to deal with a direct hit from this "stellar storm".


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Which wouldn't make sense if it's just a solar panel anyway why lose the real estate?

Because a 50km  - that probably would mass more than sugegsted in the books - would generate enough power over the course of a week to render portable diesel generators as ineffecient in comparsion. You'd be at the point of requiring a full size power station.

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Makes sense to me I always wondered what kept JS safe from storms

The magnetic field they generate that is designed to deflect charged particles, ions and even small micrometeorites.
Another reason a flimsy shield isn't needed.
Not to mention armour. And the outerskin of the JumpShip. It's probably safe to assume that the electronics are also hardened.

Not to mention that a jump point is quite some distance away from a star.

Look - it's an interesting theory, but there appears to be no rationale behind it, no canon inference, no reason for such a purpose to the sail. The sail coudl very well provide a shadow that might provide some "protection", but such protection is ultimately unneeded, unnecessary and plays absolutely no reol in the JumpSails design, placement or reason to exist.

As things stand, the JumpSail provides too little power for it to be "realistic" or desireable in the BT universe.
The solutions would appear to be to tweak existing KF phsyics to alter the bottleneck - in my headcanon, to emphasise the shimmer heat into something more dangerous so the ship has to hang around for a week anyway so it may as well double the jump range by switchinto the sail system anyway - or to address the issue by upping the power requirements to something truly massive and then simply scaling the JumpSail up as well, to something 10km across, or 25km or 50km or even 100km. The upside is that it keeps most things the same, the downside is that it alters the visuals to the point the JumpShip becoems near invisible if you use a JumpSail that is big enough to be viable.

Or probably a mix of both. The idea that the charge has a stronger impact on jumps than existing canon suggests, and can be dangerous, is an example of a cosntraint on technology and one that appears fairly reasonable and doens't necessarily preclude the idea of a more pwpoer battery charge being required, with a suitably increased sail radius.

But the idea that the sail does double duty as a shield? It is interesting, but it invites more questions than it answers, and creates further holes when answers to those are attempted. Ships that can withstand PPC fire are not going to be bothered by the solar wind.



Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Thunderbolt on 16 September 2019, 19:10:24
Neither do JumpShips. Those Olympus class recharge stations have docking berths precisely for maintenance
and are rare? Stats are only for survivors of centuries

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Said narrow stream, if it exists, being aimed directly at the ship itself. And the sail doesn't "protect" the ship when it is in transit. Why is the nose unworthy of protection by the sail? And if not the nose, why not sides? And if not the sidse, why the sail to protect those side?
When the sail is furled to the masts, it forms a shield all the way around the stern far wider than the hull and most berthed DS, please view the artwork i shared

The folding ratio is approximately 10-100:1, sail folds from about 1000m across to more like 100m-300m

So 33 microns becomes 3-33mm

One gust of stellar wind wouldn't cripple a JS, but those things live out there, they're essentially mobile permanent space habitats, and they have to be prepared for coronal mass ejections which might only come up their way once a week or month... But thousands of times per century

And usually the DS are safely away or have stayed away

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This supposition that the sail acts as a shield is without any foundation whatsoever. There is not even canon inferenece that this is the case and that Jumpships can move and point directly at the star, head directly into this solar wind that you are positing is so damaging, is a clear sign that your supposition is wrong. That the sail cannot perform the task you suggest because there is a great big hole cut out of it is also an indictaion that your premise here is wrong.
the clear canon reference is visual, the sail is deployed like a wind break below the vessel

Think you're describing WS, when do JS drive towards stars? The issue is not initial maneuvering around the jump harbor for the first few minutes after arrival, but protection from prolonged exposure especially to severe storms

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You are trying now to push the idea that the sail somehow protects the sides of the vessel....even though the shapes of some sails woudl leave those sides dangerously expose tot he forces you are trying to suggest occur. The hole has to be larger than the engine exhaust stream AND large enough to account for any maneuvering or thrust or dispersion that will occur.
the most canon DS&JS artwork is consistent

If the exhaust is electrically neutralized by ejecting electrons with ions, dispersion could be minimized

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But it wouldn't matter if it was tiny....it is still a breach in the sail that allows through the "stellar storm" it is supposed to protect against, and the necessary placement of said breach means said storm will be focussed directly on the jump ship. If you try and posiut that the engiens are shielded against the storm, great...but you also admit that the ship doesn't need a jump sail for shielding because the crafts inherent armour is already good enough to deal with a direct hit from this "stellar storm".
any wind plasma which did make it through would head up the tail pipe, and the thruster nozzle can handle temperatures up to a thousand times higher


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Because a 50km  - that probably would mass more than sugegsted in the books - would generate enough power over the course of a week to render portable diesel generators as ineffecient in comparsion. You'd be at the point of requiring a full size power station.
first you don't actually mean a hydrocarbon combustion process, yes? Nobody has or will ever put sooty oxygen breathing engines on spacecraft?

The question is why not always use the fusion drive? Why not just carry more hydrogen?

How thin could you make a sail? The only obvious limit is at least one or a few atoms thick, 1-2nm would be a thousand times thinner, only 3-6kg per square km, a 50km sail might mass a dozen tons

But it would be a sail blown about by the starlight and wind

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The magnetic field they generate that is designed to deflect charged particles, ions and even small micrometeorites.
From the hull?  Are you agreeing that the unfurled deployed sail a few km away generates its own field?

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Another reason a flimsy shield isn't needed.
Not to mention armour. And the outerskin of the JumpShip. It's probably safe to assume that the electronics are also hardened.
Stellar winds and storms are not naval PPCs

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Not to mention that a jump point is quite some distance away from a star.
For the same reason?

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Look - it's an interesting theory, but there appears to be no rationale behind it, no canon inference, no reason for such a purpose to the sail. The sail coudl very well provide a shadow that might provide some "protection", but such protection is ultimately unneeded, unnecessary and plays absolutely no reol in the JumpSails design, placement or reason to exist.
common sense impression of the canon artwork

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As things stand, the JumpSail provides too little power for it to be "realistic" or desireable in the BT universe.
I suggested also it was originally a backup which has been pressed into service for wont of Olympuses

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The solutions would appear to be to tweak existing KF phsyics to alter the bottleneck - in my headcanon, to emphasise the shimmer heat into something more dangerous so the ship has to hang around for a week anyway so it may as well double the jump range by switchinto the sail system anyway - or to address the issue by upping the power requirements to something truly massive and then simply scaling the JumpSail up as well, to something 10km across, or 25km or 50km or even 100km. The upside is that it keeps most things the same, the downside is that it alters the visuals to the point the JumpShip becoems near invisible if you use a JumpSail that is big enough to be viable.

Or probably a mix of both. The idea that the charge has a stronger impact on jumps than existing canon suggests, and can be dangerous, is an example of a cosntraint on technology and one that appears fairly reasonable and doens't necessarily preclude the idea of a more pwpoer battery charge being required, with a suitably increased sail radius.

But the idea that the sail does double duty as a shield? It is interesting, but it invites more questions than it answers, and creates further holes when answers to those are attempted. Ships that can withstand PPC fire are not going to be bothered by the solar wind.
stellar winds aren't that strong but effects gradually accumulate.?
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Daryk on 16 September 2019, 19:14:21
*snip*
When the sail is furled to the masts, it forms a shield all the way around the stern far wider than the hull and most berthed DS, please view the artwork i shared
*snip*
For your head canon, sure.  For mine, sails stow in spools with axes parallel to the jump core.  It's the most efficient use of space.
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Talen5000 on 16 September 2019, 19:39:22
and are rare? Stats are only for survivors of centuries

Do you really think JumpShips don't get maintained? Olympus class statiosn are simply the sites mentioned.

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When the sail is furled to the masts

Masts?


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it forms a shield all the way around the stern far wider than the hull and most berthed DS, please view the artwork i shared

Irrelevant. Show me the shield that protects a ship when it is driving into the sun. Show me how the ships deals with that great huge hole cut into it. Tell me why the armour and hardening we know JumpShips have aren't sufficient. Point me out even one sentence that even implies that this shield idea might be true.

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One gust of stellar wind wouldn't cripple a JS, but those things live out there, they're essentially mobile permanent space habitats, and they have to be prepared for coronal mass ejections which might only come up their way once a week or month... But thousands of times per century

The JumpShips are at the jump point. you are talking about a discharge that is about 100 times weaker than that hitting  Earth hitting an armoured vessel that already uses a strong magnetic field defence to deflect charged particles and micrometeorites.

Why does it need a unidirection shield with a hole in it?

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Think you're describing WS, when do JS drive towards stars?

Whenever they want to. JumpShips manuever all the time. They only need to point their engines at the sun when they are charging the sail. But even discounting JumpShip maneuvering, WarShips use the same systems.

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The issue is not initial maneuvering around the jump harbor for the first few minutes after arrival, but protection from prolonged exposure especially to severe storms

Again - the ships are already armoured and protected. Why is this shield idea necessary?

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If the exhaust is electrically neutralized by ejecting electrons with ions, dispersion could be minimized

Which is a gamble and a risk that noone is going to take especially since it is not necessary that it be taken. And that is if the exhaust is electrically neutralised and again, no evidence. You are positing a solution to a problem which doesn't exist. Even IF stellar storms were the problem you suggest, the ship already has the defences necessary and these defences provide full coverage from all angles, and not just part of the rear view.

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any wind plasma which did make it through would head up the tail pipe, and the thruster nozzle can handle temperatures up to a thousand times higher

And ship armour is capable of handling PPC fire, meteor strikes, missiles and ballistic weapon impacts, all of which would hit with magnitudes more energy. And again, if any "wind plasma" did make it through, and headed up the tailpipe, why is the sail necessary?

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first you don't actually mean a hydrocarbon combustion process, yes? Nobody has or will ever put sooty oxygen breathing engines on spacecraft?

Considering that oxygen can be replenished easily by breaking down water, why not? But there are other types of generator available.

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But it would be a sail blown about by the starlight and wind

You mean, like the canon JumpSail?

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From the hull?  Are you agreeing that the unfurled deployed sail a few km away generates its own field?

No - part of a JumpShips defence system is that it is surrounded by a magnetic field which is used to deflect charged particles and micrometorites. The sail has nothing to do with it.

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Stellar winds and storms are not naval PPCs

No - they're far weaker. Far, far, far weaker.

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common sense impression of the canon artwork

Artwork which depicts a solar sail in use for charging. You are trying to extrapolate that it has an additional function - that of protecting the rear...and just the rear...of the vessel because for some reason, only the armour surrounding the engine is vulnerable to damage from charged particles.

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I suggested also it was originally a backup which has been pressed into service for wont of Olympuses

Sails predate the fall of the Star league by quite a bit.

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stellar winds aren't that strong but effects gradually accumulate.?

No. You are now positing an erosion effect and if the JumpShips had no armour, and the Jump Points were a lot closer to the stars and if the charged particles were actually grains of sand it might work. But if these issues or stellar storms were probelmatic, the ships would simply jump an AU or two further out.

The Sail as Shield idea doesn't work - there are already defences against charged particles, bu even if there weren't, the sail would be a poor defence. The cheap defence would be distance while the simple defence would be "lets weld a couple more plates of steel to the hull". It just doesn't work within the BTU
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Thunderbolt on 16 September 2019, 22:26:38
Do you really think JumpShips don't get maintained? Olympus class statiosn are simply the sites mentioned.

Irrelevant. Show me the shield that protects a ship when it is driving into the sun. Show me how the ships deals with that great huge hole cut into it. Tell me why the armour and hardening we know JumpShips have aren't sufficient. Point me out even one sentence that even implies that this shield idea might be true.

The JumpShips are at the jump point. you are talking about a discharge that is about 100 times weaker than that hitting  Earth hitting an armoured vessel that already uses a strong magnetic field defence to deflect charged particles and micrometeorites.

Why does it need a unidirection shield with a hole in it?

Whenever they want to. JumpShips manuever all the time. They only need to point their engines at the sun when they are charging the sail. But even discounting JumpShip maneuvering, WarShips use the same systems.

Again - the ships are already armoured and protected. Why is this shield idea necessary?

Which is a gamble and a risk that noone is going to take especially since it is not necessary that it be taken. And that is if the exhaust is electrically neutralised and again, no evidence. You are positing a solution to a problem which doesn't exist. Even IF stellar storms were the problem you suggest, the ship already has the defences necessary and these defences provide full coverage from all angles, and not just part of the rear view.

And ship armour is capable of handling PPC fire, meteor strikes, missiles and ballistic weapon impacts, all of which would hit with magnitudes more energy. And again, if any "wind plasma" did make it through, and headed up the tailpipe, why is the sail necessary?

Considering that oxygen can be replenished easily by breaking down water, why not? But there are other types of generator available.

You mean, like the canon JumpSail?

No - part of a JumpShips defence system is that it is surrounded by a magnetic field which is used to deflect charged particles and micrometorites. The sail has nothing to do with it.

No - they're far weaker. Far, far, far weaker.

Artwork which depicts a solar sail in use for charging. You are trying to extrapolate that it has an additional function - that of protecting the rear...and just the rear...of the vessel because for some reason, only the armour surrounding the engine is vulnerable to damage from charged particles.

Sails predate the fall of the Star league by quite a bit.

No. You are now positing an erosion effect and if the JumpShips had no armour, and the Jump Points were a lot closer to the stars and if the charged particles were actually grains of sand it might work. But if these issues or stellar storms were probelmatic, the ships would simply jump an AU or two further out.

The Sail as Shield idea doesn't work - there are already defences against charged particles, bu even if there weren't, the sail would be a poor defence. The cheap defence would be distance while the simple defence would be "lets weld a couple more plates of steel to the hull". It just doesn't work within the BTU
Olympus stations are rare

Mast seems like an appropriate name for the struts to which the sail is attached

A canon picture is worth a thousand canon words, the sail is deployed like a shield... Which would protect not only the JS but all docking operations at it

Why would JS ever nose dive stars??  Maybe they emerge from HS that way but would surely quickly right themselves

The thruster nozzle is surely the most radiation hardened structure not the least

The central cut out doesn't have to be huge

If hull armor really was stopping particle radiation then wouldn't it be taking ever if very gradually accumulating damage? What do KeV level ions and electrons do on impact?

If the ship deflector field stops them, some would be trapped in radiation belts around the hull which could affect docking ops

A large shield sail with narrow central opening could deflect all stellar weather systems safely around it, clearing out a safe haven for its DS space traffic

Again you could fire thrusters against severe blasts such that your exhaust would plow into the onrushing plasma cloud and disperse it around your craft before it even reached you

But of course this isn't carved in ferrocrete until it's printed which isn't up to me sounds like you're more of one of the writers than me anyway
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Talen5000 on 16 September 2019, 22:39:58
Olympus stations are rare

And not the only maintenance platform. Bringing some degree of realism here, what shipyards and stations provide is nothing more than a place to stand. An Olympus is an ideal place to perform maintenance, but it isn't the only one and a properly trainned crew wouldn't need it as all they'd be doing outside the ship would be a visual inspection for meteorite impacts.

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A canon picture is worth a thousand canon words, the sail is deployed like a shield... Which would protect not only the JS but all docking operations at it

Deployed like a shield does not mean it is a shield.

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Why would JS ever nose dive stars??

To get form one point of the system to another. Because some of them do use their transit drives to accelerate and create gravity.

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The thruster nozzle is surely the most radiation hardened structure not the least

And therefore in no need of shielding.

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The central cut out doesn't have to be huge

It's got to be large enough to accommodate the exhaust from engines that may be as wide as the ship, plus room for dispersion, plus a safety margin. and it isn't the smallest cutout you need to explain foir this concept...but the largest.

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If hull armor really was stopping particle radiation then wouldn't it be taking ever if very gradually accumulating damage? What do KeV level ions and electrons do on impact?

You have abandoned warships whose armour is till good after centuries so - no. And again...yet another indicator that the shield doesn't  exist. Abandoned ships are no worse the wear.

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If the ship deflector field stops them, some would be trapped in radiation belts around the hull which could affect docking ops

Not how things work.

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A large shield sail with narrow central opening could deflect all stellar weather systems safely around it, clearing out a safe haven for its DS space traffic

No. It couldn't.

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Again you could fire thrusters against severe blasts such that your exhaust would plow into the onrushing plasma cloud and disperse it around your craft before it even reached you

No - you can't.
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Thunderbolt on 16 September 2019, 22:40:39
https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/nuclear-engineering/22-55j-principles-of-radiation-interactions-fall-2004/lecture-notes/alph_proto_of_let.pdf

Linear energy transfer of stellar wind protons of 1-10KeV would be far in excess of MeV protons, which are already 10 KeV per micrometer

So a 30+ micron sail would be adamantite vs stellar winds which would not penetrate even the first micron even without EM shielding

I guess you could say the same about hull armor but I don't think you want to let wind scour your vessel

Suggesting that the sail also incorporates EM field generation to deflect plasma all the way around the craft

Suspect it is possible plausible but I guess you guys make the call
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Thunderbolt on 16 September 2019, 22:44:04
And not the only maintenance platform. Bringing some degree of realism here, what shipyards and stations provide is nothing more than a place to stand. An Olympus is an ideal place to perform maintenance, but it isn't the only one and a properly trainned crew wouldn't need it as all they'd be doing outside the ship would be a visual inspection for meteorite impacts.

Deployed like a shield does not mean it is a shield.

To get form one point of the system to another. Because some of them do use their transit drives to accelerate and create gravity.

And therefore in no need of shielding.

It's got to be large enough to accommodate the exhaust from engines that may be as wide as the ship, plus room for dispersion, plus a safety margin. and it isn't the smallest cutout you need to explain foir this concept...but the largest.

You have abandoned warships whose armour is till good after centuries so - no. And again...yet another indicator that the shield doesn't  exist. Abandoned ships are no worse the wear.

Not how things work.

No - you can't.
You're the expert?

Ever tried?  Simulated??  Share your results???

EVA crews would appreciate a plasma free safe haven for their maintenance...
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Weirdo on 16 September 2019, 23:37:57
First off:
++mod notice++
You're both stepping back and calming down. Now. This isn't a request.

Secondly:
Why hasn't either of you made a post in Ask the Writers yet that contains a single sentence: "Are jump sails in any way meant to operate as stellar shielding?"? Seems like the easiest way to settle this.
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: VhenRa on 02 October 2019, 12:37:50
An Energy Storage Battery is put on Space Stations and used to recharge a Jumpship or Warship the slow way.  It can charge faster if it is attached to the Jumpship Warship, but you still have to charge the KF core slowly with it, unless you are wanting to take risks with frying the core.  It does not affect the KF cost multiplier, and masses 100,000 tons, no matter the size core it is supposed to recharge.

It also generates a new charge for a jumpship every 100 hours, without any usage of fuel, without any sail...
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Weirdo on 02 October 2019, 12:42:09
Source on that free power statement?
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Daryk on 02 October 2019, 21:19:42
I'm pretty sure recharge stations have their own sails.  It's still "free" power, but a sail is involved.
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Retry on 02 October 2019, 21:51:58
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Introduced: 2131 (Terran Alliance)
The key element of recharge stations, these large power generation, storage and distribution systems (generically referred to as energy storage batteries, though they usually include power plants) enable Kearny-Fuchida drive vessels to recharge relatively quickly and safely, without the headache of deploying their huge (and delicate) solar sails. They are particularly useful at small, dim stars where K-F drive recharge times can stretch to ten days or more, and even more useful for vessels with lithium-fusion batteries; energy storage batteries can vastly reduce the travel time needed for JumpShips in a hurry.

...

Energy Storage Batteries are an alternative to conventional K-F drive recharge sources (including JumpShip solar sails and fusion engines), but can charge a vessel’s K-F drive either through its jump sail (typically via a diff use microwave beam) or by a direct connection (requiring the vessel to dock with the recharging station).
When an Energy Storage Battery’s power is delivered via the vessel’s solar sail, normal quick charging rules are followed, the rules of which are found in Strategic Operations.
 If the vessel instead uses a direct connection to the charging station, the Energy Storage Battery applies a –2 modifier to rolls made on the QuickCharge Table (to a minimum of 2), allowing for relatively safe quick-charges.
Energy Storage Batteries include massive power plants that can recharge their storage systems about as fast as they can be safely discharged into a JumpShip. An Energy Storage Battery can thus prepare a new charge for a JumpShip in 100 hours (which can occur concurrently while recharging a K-F drive). Full rules on constructing space stations are covered in Strategic Operations.
That's from tac ops.  So "Energy Storage Batteries" evidently include power generation as well as actual storage, so you may technically be able to get away with a recharge station that doesn't have a solar sail.  At least I don't see anything that specifically states that sails are mandatory on such stations.
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Daryk on 02 October 2019, 21:58:11
I agree they're not mandatory, but the power plants do require fuel, so sails are still the best way to get "free" power.
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Retry on 02 October 2019, 22:02:27
I agree they're not mandatory, but the power plants do require fuel, so sails are still the best way to get "free" power.
I agree.  You're certainly not getting something from nothing.
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: Korzon77 on 16 October 2019, 16:26:30
On the question of superjumps, beyond anything else, I doubt they'll ever be introduced in a useful way, because the existence of a system that breaks the 30LY limit, especially by a significant amount, changes the setting assumptions far more than such minor additions as say, giving someone 100 Mckennas, or LAM's that have no drawbacks.

It's just too big a chance for the system to support without putting out a metric ton of supplemental materials.
Title: Re: Safe superjump?
Post by: RifleMech on 31 October 2019, 05:53:46
I don't know. You'd need to increase jumpship production to make use of them beyond strategic raids.