High Efficiency Batteries for Jump

[baithammer]

Interesting handwavium, preposterous but interesting.

Explain antimatter powered drives...

The initial jump creates a singularity, ie a fold in space in a very concentrated form.

The hydrogen is pumped into the singularity and draws the ship into the expanding bubble.

Once the ship passes into the singularity the bubble begins to collapse and the singularity expands in the direction of the desired jump.

As for antimatter, that's a power plant not a drive system in mgt 2ed.

Antimatter plant is probably using high energy collisions of hydrogen to generate / collect the anti-hydrogen and recirculating the hydrogen in the collision to mix with the anti-hydrogen to generate energy. ( Hence the need to have hydrogen stock for the plant.)

This would require both science and tech to find a way to lower the requirements for input energy, collection and colliding the final product. ( Hence TL20)

 

[Sigtrygg]

Antimatter powered jump drives do not need hydrogen 'fuel' to jump - so explain how they form the jump bubble filled with hydrogen?

 

[baithammer]

Which don't exist in mgt 2ed and I have a feeling your drawing on T5 which has a number of optional components that are mashed into the rest of ship building section.

 

[PsiTraveller]

Maybe I am missing something but the Express Boat (High pg 108) has 40 points of battery power for the Jump drive. The fuel is used for the bubble, but the burst of energy for the drive comes from a battery. The power plant is TL 8 and gives only 20 points of power, enough for basic systems. No extra power for M Drives, it has none.

Batteries can make a lot of sense for a ship. For higher Jump ships the extra energy needed for a Jump can require several more tons of Power Plant. Most of the time this extra power is not needed. A few tons of battery space can negate that need. This reduces the basic fuel needed for a ship and the number of engineers needed.

A lot will depend on how often you need the extra power. This is likely going to be Jump capacity dependent. A J4 ship needs 40% of tonnage in energy terms. If a ship has extra power plant capacity because of weapon needs or a high M Drive capability then batteries may not be needed. For a stripped down ship a single ton of batteries can save millions on construction cost.

and to slightly highjack the thread, batteries are excellent for smaller ships that want to pack in some extra lasers into the turrets. A single battery will add an hour of fight time to a battle, which is as long as most battles seem to take in the smaller scale skirishes I've played.

 

[paltrysum]

Based on the RAW, it would only require a single round to recharge the batteries using available power:

They can be recharged in any round by excess Power not being used by other systems. These Power points may then be used in any subsequent round as if they were being produced by the power plant; simply add any amount of Power stored within the batteries (they need not be completely drained) to the Power the ship has available that round.

So in the case of the X-boat, there is no excess power to recharge them. Presumably the recharge is provided by the tender at the X-boat's next stop. It seems like this might be a great technology to use for very predictable routes, such as a free trader plying a main. If you're simply going from one planet's 100-diameter limit to another, employing your maneuver drive to work your way in and back out for trade purposes, why invest in extra power? Gotta play around with this some more.

A little experiment:

Based on the Garu-class far trader (the TL-11 far trader used in "Lords of Thunder," the MegaTraveller Journal #4 far trader), we can realize some pretty significant savings by employing budget drives and adding high-efficiency batteries:

• Budget maneuver drive, energy inefficient. Cost savings MCr1.
• Budget jump drive, energy inefficient. Cost savings MCr5.625.
• Reduced power plant to 75Mw (standard is 90). Cost and space savings MCr1 and 2 tons.
• High efficiency batteries added. Cost is only MCr0.1 taking 1 ton of space for 40Mw of power.

Total savings: MCr7.525

The ship uses the high-efficiency batteries to power the jump drive which requires 52Mw. It has a normal-sized fuel tank, so the power from the power plant and batteries can combine to initiate a jump. The power plant uses 40Mw for basic ship systems and life support, leaving 35Mw for the jump drive, a shortfall of 17Mw. The extra power is drawn from the batteries, leaving 23Mw of Power in the batteries after the ship comes out of jump. The ship's power plant does not have enough Power to run the weapons, but given a fully functional power plant running basic ship systems, maneuver drive, and sensors (total: 67Mw), leaving 8Mw for the weapons (a 5Mw shortfall), the batteries can power the weapons for four rounds of combat if only partially charged after a jump. This can be rectified by not adding a budget maneuver drive, but it could be argued that a ship class like this one has no business being involved in five or more rounds of combat anyway.

 

[PsiTraveller]

Well you can throttle back power, so even the 20 power points produced by the exress boat could be cut back to say 15 used. The doors may no longer open and the communicators may stop working.
You could then put 5 points a turn into the battery. This would fill the battery in under an hour.

The description of the ship says it is recharged during refuelling. This would mean the tender connects a power cable and charges up the batttery, but really it would be pretty simple to slowly charge the battery during jump for example. Cut power down from 20 to 19 and take 4 hours to recharge the battery. Do it during sleep shift and nobody notices anything at all.

 

[AnotherDilbert]

Based on the Garu-class far trader (the TL-11 far trader used in "Lords of Thunder," the MegaTraveller Journal #4 far trader), we can realize some pretty significant savings by employing budget drives and adding high-efficiency batteries:

• Budget maneuver drive, energy inefficient. Cost savings MCr1.
• Budget jump drive, energy inefficient. Cost savings MCr5.625.
• Reduced power plant to 75Mw (standard is 90). Cost and space savings MCr1 and 2 tons.
• High efficiency batteries added. Cost is only MCr0.1 taking 1 ton of space for 40Mw of power.

Yes, this should work without any problem.

I consider this more or less the standard for budget-constrained designs.

 

[Condottiere]

There are two different aspects to the operation, the power required by the jump drive, and then how the jump drive processes that power, that used to energize the lanthanum grid.

One difference that is relevant would be that it's a spontaneous burst of power, whereas it used to be implied that the power plant continuously fed electricity to the grid.

The other point that I would like to repeat, is that the use of stored energy has been discussed before the Mongosian revisions, and the answer was that the power plant overclocks to provide that energy to the jump drive.

Of course, once you get to see parts of the sausage with precise energy needs for each component or operation, deconstruction is possible.

Of course, it's clearly stated you can't use solar panelling to power a jump drive.

 

[PsiTraveller]

Well the battery on the express boat indicates the power need is a one shot. You fire the jump drive and that is it. It has to be that way for the express boat since there is not enough power to run the Jump drive.

As for the Garu class ship, I have questions.
You have 7 tons of TL 8 power plant. My Highguard shows that produces 10 Power per ton for 70 points of power. You are showing 75. Where is the other 5 coming from?

A ship can get extra power from basic systems, so the battery could be recharged during Jump. The Core book page 144 has the soup dispensers being shut down. Basic systems can be run on half power. This would free up 10 points on the Express Boat, enough to charge the battery back up in 4 turns.

Your ship could charge the battery back up in 2 turns with 35 extra points to spend.

 

[paltrysum]

There are two different aspects to the operation, the power required by the jump drive, and then how the jump drive processes that power, that used to energize the lanthanum grid.

No lanthanum grids in MgT2.

 

[paltrysum]

As for the Garu class ship, I have questions.
You have 7 tons of TL 8 power plant. My Highguard shows that produces 10 Power per ton for 70 points of power. You are showing 75. Where is the other 5 coming from?

It should be 70. The 75 is a typo.

 

[Condottiere]

Ten energy points per hundred tonnes is minimum requirement to run basic systems, twenty is the norm that merchant ships have built in.

 

[paltrysum]

Resurrecting this old thread. I'd forgotten that _High Guard's_ Express Boat design uses batteries for jump. So in MgT2, it's canonical!

 

[Sigtrygg]

Why does it have 41 tons of fuel as well?

 

[paltrysum]

You have to expend the L-Hyd to create the jump bubble.

 

[Sigtrygg]

You don't need a hydrogen filled jump bubble - see collector powered ships which are now MgT 3I canon thanks to Great Rift.

 

[Reynard]

I notice the Express Boat in High Guard has High Efficiency batteries with the same power as needed for a jump plus hydrogen fuel for a single J4.

"The jump drive is powered by the battery,
which is recharged during the normal
refuelling operations."

So there you have the x-boat being recharged at the tender while prepped for the next flight. Why the fuel? Emergency supply if something goes very wrong and needs to jump again? This also seems to contradict the bubble concept if you can run a jump from battery power.

I like the idea that ships could make jumps on batteries (and collectors) assuming a grid system again rather than a bubble. T5 actually lists starports that have the capacity to produce and store energy from collectors. The limitation is you're really dependent on a recharging station which is going to need a lot of resources as well as hydrogen to produce the energy or a ship needs more power production facilities to self energize over time. The x-boat system is an ideal example as well as commercial freighters or even subsidized ships that have dedicated ports specifically for such vessels on regular routes. This is less useful for ships that go where they want.

 

[AnotherDilbert]

Why does it have 41 tons of fuel as well?

40 Dt for the jump.
_1 Dt for the power plant.
41 Dt in total.

You have always needed both power and fuel to initiate jump, see HG'80.

 

[Sigtrygg]

So why does it need the batteries?

And you do not need fuel and power to jump, it may be true for the HG80 paradigm but not the OTU or other Traveller rule sets:

see Annic Nova
antimatter powered jump drives
collector powered jump drives

 

[AnotherDilbert]

So why does it need the batteries?

For some reason you need to generate enough energy for the jump in a limited time, the batteries allows you to generate the energy a little at a time and then shunt it to the jump drive in a short pulse.