Dark Hydrogen
- Thread starter phavoc
- Start date
"This ‘dark hydrogen’ formed at temperatures of around 3,800˚F and just over 1.1 million times the pressure on Earth’s surface, conditions which would be found below towards the core of gas giants such as Jupiter."
So unless the ships are incredibly tough and going ridiculously deep inside the gas giant for some reason (more than half of the gas giant's radius, when refuelling would usually only occurs in the uppermost few kilometres of an atmosphere)... it won't affect gas giant refuelling at all. Still interesting though.
So unless the ships are incredibly tough and going ridiculously deep inside the gas giant for some reason (more than half of the gas giant's radius, when refuelling would usually only occurs in the uppermost few kilometres of an atmosphere)... it won't affect gas giant refuelling at all. Still interesting though.
ShawnDriscoll
Cosmic Mongoose
Thanks for this. Lots of game session encounter ideas.phavoc said:
fusor said:
I agree. Most refueling would normally take place (at least according to all the previous documents I've read on Traveller gas giant refueling) would take place in the upper atmosphere, where the pressure is around 1 to 1.5 atmospheres.
But we do know that SDB's and other nasty critters like to lurk far deeper in the gas giants atmosphere. So there's that. Or else the PC's ship is being chased, or has a drive failure or many other interesting ways they have to run silent, run deep, so to speak. The article talks about the dark hydrogen being formed on down below, and then working it's way up. One game explanation that may be plausible is dark hydrogen "icebergs", where they are drifting towards the upper atmosphere and falling apart, but much like icebergs they can drift pretty far from where they were calved from an ice shelf.
Question is, would sensors detect it, or be confused by it? For my refueling scenarios I've always postulated pockets of hydrogen that are richer or more dense than others, thus they would provide more fuel faster than 'regular' atmosphere. It would be easy enough for a crew to think they've hit the jackpot and can refuel in one single pass and then it turns out that rich pocket of hydrogen is kinda solid, too. Oops...
Condottiere
Emperor Mongoose
I don't think you can boost performance, but perhaps the fuel is in a more compressed form.
NOLATrav
Emperor Mongoose
Cool article, thanks for the link.
For quite a while now I've allowed ships to dive deeper into gas giant atmospheres if they like, by spending more time and increasing pilot task difficulty in exchange for significantly reduced fuel processing times. Failure of the pilot task increases time required further or may result in an external hit depending on the roll.
More fun, more flavor and pretty hand-wavy but now I have a little (theoretical) real-science justification :wink:
For quite a while now I've allowed ships to dive deeper into gas giant atmospheres if they like, by spending more time and increasing pilot task difficulty in exchange for significantly reduced fuel processing times. Failure of the pilot task increases time required further or may result in an external hit depending on the roll.
More fun, more flavor and pretty hand-wavy but now I have a little (theoretical) real-science justification :wink:
There's no need to go so deep (thousands of km) into a gas giant for anything, period. Ships won't be able to withstand the pressure and temperature there anyway.
Fuel is readily available at the cloudtops.
"hiding"? there's millions of cubic kilometres of cloudtop level gas giant to "hide" in. No need to go deeper.
Dark Hydrogen an interesting curiosity that has no effect on anyone's games whatsoever.
Fuel is readily available at the cloudtops.
"hiding"? there's millions of cubic kilometres of cloudtop level gas giant to "hide" in. No need to go deeper.
Dark Hydrogen an interesting curiosity that has no effect on anyone's games whatsoever.
FallingPhoenix
Mongoose
fusor said:
What if someone's playing a "Hollywood SF" version of Traveller? Are they wrong to do so?
FallingPhoenix said:
"Here's something real that's just been discovered, can we fit it into a scifi setting?"
"You can't unless your ships can withstand extreme pressures and have some reason to go down so deep"
"OK, we'll totally ignore whatever you say and do what we want then because it doesn't suit us!"
That's how every goddamn thread involving science or realism goes on this board, and it's really tiresome. if you want to play "hollywood SF" then you're not going to give a damn what's realistic or not anyway.
FallingPhoenix
Mongoose
fusor said:
Everyone does this to some extent in SF. Jump drives (or FTL in general), reactionless drives, meson weapons, plasma weapons, stealth in space, "bumpy forehead" aliens, earth going into space at all, etc, etc.
Just because my ignorances are different doesn't mean I don't still appreciate your input.
Tenacious-Techhunter
Mongoose
FallingPhoenix said:
Only if they think that their playstyle overrules the need for rules necessary for Hard Science Fiction play, or that Traveller was Hard Science Fiction to begin with. How people play is their choice, but the history of Traveller Canon and the need for a game system to be built around all applicable playstyles are just plain indisputable facts. People who prefer to pretend facts don’t exist deserve what they get.
FallingPhoenix
Mongoose
Tenacious-Techhunter said:
The problem being that if you ask 10 people "What is 'Hard SF'?, you'll get 11 different answers.
And we need to make sure that we don't think that our playstyle overrules the need for people to be able to play "soft SF" without anyone telling them they're "laughable".
Tenacious-Techhunter
Mongoose
Ignoring the pressure issues for a moment, that Fusor is entirely correct about, the additional travel time to get through the thick, soupy atmosphere may well outweigh any time saved from refining fuel. At which point, no one would bother.
Tenacious-Techhunter
Mongoose
FallingPhoenix said:
Only from the 10 people who don’t know what it means.
FallingPhoenix said:
No, people who play Soft Science Fiction just need to accept that it is laughable. They need to stop assuming that it is fact just because they love it. They need to accept the unintended consequences their “Soft” alterations to a universe produce, so they can then correct for them, rather than ignore them. People who play Soft Science Fiction think they have a license to handwave anything the moment it becomes inconvenient, leaving no room for actionable consistency players may then rely upon to be creative. At least, that’s how it goes on this forum, anyway...
FallingPhoenix
Mongoose
Tenacious-Techhunter said:
Is space combat not being instantly deadly for both sides Hard SF or Soft SF? Is humanity ever even leaving earth "hard" or "soft"? Until every question like this has a definitive, unequivocal answer, it doesn't seem that "Hard" SF can ever be unequivocally defined.
Tenacious-Techhunter said:
I played Star Wars RPG for years without ever once assuming it was fact. There was tons of actionable consistency and tons of creativity all of those years and I don't remember very often thinking through very many unintended consequences.
I also play Traveller. I've not yet tried to work through many unintended consequences of a reactionless drive (like everyone in space has an instant WMD) and I still have a great time.
Sometimes I even play with stealth in space and just ignore the fact that I'm violating at least one of the laws of thermodynamics...
Tenacious-Techhunter
Mongoose
FallingPhoenix said:
The answer to that question doesn’t define something as one or the other; it depends on the described technologies involved. What’s more important is whether you can trace the function of the weapons and the armor to genuine scientific principles. It’s the the extent that you can apply scientific scrutiny to it, and get realistic answers, that makes something Hard Sci Fi or not, not the direct effect on gameplay that matters.
The moment you start handwaving “pure weapons-grade bolognium” into a hypothetical technology, that technology stops being Hard Sci Fi.
Tenacious-Techhunter
Mongoose
FallingPhoenix said:
Right. You accepted Star Wars was laughable. Traveller is a different story. It started out as Hard Sci Fi, and was gradually polluted over the years with nonsense. Canonists like that nonsense, and that’s fine, but the minute they think their nonsense deserves supremacy over the Hard Sci Fi version when it comes to rules inclusion, they’ve crossed an unacceptable line.
FallingPhoenix
Mongoose
Tenacious-Techhunter said:
Ah. That makes sense. I understand a lot better where you're coming from. Thanks!
This of course pinpoints the challenge of a game trying to bill itself as a generic SF RPG. It seems to me to be difficult, at the very least, to satisfy all play styles and universe types. GURPS is the one I know that seems to come close (although I admit, I've only read the books and haven't actually played using the system), but at the expense of complexity. Mongoose Traveller seems to be trying very hard to avoid complexity, which can make it difficult to meet up with reality in many respects, as space travel in reality (from the point of view of us common planet-bound folk) is inherently complex.
Tenacious-Techhunter
Mongoose
It’s easier than you think to do both. You start with Hard, and then you soften it up. So you get the realistic base, and then you diverge from there. But, by going nonsense-first, that approach becomes impossible, because realism requires precision, and nonsense does not. The two models never mesh, because no one ever decided which things to neglect deliberately; they just neglect a bunch of stuff, and figuring out how to unneglect it becomes impossible, since decisions were never broken up along physical lines.
Start with physics, and have your rules model that. Then figure out what to neglect for the “canonist” playstyle. And everyone’s happy.
Start with physics, and have your rules model that. Then figure out what to neglect for the “canonist” playstyle. And everyone’s happy.
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