Refined Fuel?

[Condottiere]

Raw materials would head for the industrial zone(s).

Passengers, if any, the local starport.

Finished goods, warehouses.

I kinda doubt the local authorities encourage point to point deliveries.

 

[Geir]

Assuming m-drives - so you don't have to worry about using propellant to escape a gravity well, then the best source of hydrogen is going to be the closest available. Think about it from a fuel delivery point-of-view:
The bulk of the costs in running and crewing a tanker are going to be monthly costs (wages, maintenance, probably mortgage), but revenue is going to be (most likely, unless there's some market distorting subsidy happening) based on tons of fuel delivered. So the more round trips you can make in a month, the greater the amount of money you make.

A fuel mining operation could alter the total operational costs: easier to scoop hydrogen out of an atmosphere or electrolyze it out of an ocean than cracking it out of dirty snowballs or worse, icy rock balls, but if you run a fuel truck, that's not the main concern.

 

[Vormaerin]

Clearly. If sucking hydrogen out of the earth's atmosphere and ejecting it into space by the thousands of tons a day as L-Hydrogen jump fuel isn't a problem for the Earth's ability to produce hydrogen (honestly, I don't know if it would be), then you'd want to produce the fuel on Earth.

 

[Shadowblayde99]

Ships have fuel tanks that have enough storage for 1 jump. If you don't have collapsible tanks and assuming you are skimming hydrogen from a gas giant, you get 40 tonnes of unrefined fuel (for a far trader). But that fills up your tanks. So where do you put the refined fuel as you're refining it?In other words, how do you separate unrefined fuel from refined fuel if all you're tanks are full?

It would seem that you'd need to have the collapsible tanks filled with the unrefined fuel which is then refined and transferred to your normal fuel tanks. And then you could fill up the collapsible fuel tanks again.

If all the refined fuel is used to make the jump bubble or power the drive, you could then refine the fuel that was in the collapsible fuel tanks while in jump space.

Does that make logical sense?

 

[Iracundus]

Ships have fuel tanks that have enough storage for 1 jump. If you don't have collapsible tanks and assuming you are skimming hydrogen from a gas giant, you get 40 tonnes of unrefined fuel (for a far trader). But that fills up your tanks. So where do you put the refined fuel as you're refining it?In other words, how do you separate unrefined fuel from refined fuel if all you're tanks are full?

It would seem that you'd need to have the collapsible tanks filled with the unrefined fuel which is then refined and transferred to your normal fuel tanks. And then you could fill up the collapsible fuel tanks again.

If all the refined fuel is used to make the jump bubble or power the drive, you could then refine the fuel that was in the collapsible fuel tanks while in jump space.

Does that make logical sense?

Error about Fuel skimming

Greetings All, Newbie GM here, but 40s years playing. I need to clarify a technical question about Fuel Skimming? High Guard p37 states 1T of Fuel Processor will turn unrefined fuel (brought or skimmed) into 20T of refined fuel in a 24 hour period. Mathematics: A ship can do approximately 250...

forum.mongoosepublishing.com

"The Starship Operator's Manual/Guide which is currently being written does address this; tanks are segmented due to the necessity of slosh baffles, and it goes a step further to prevent excessive fuel loss due to ruptures and other reasons. As a consequence, they're essentially made up of 1 dTon "cells" and the purifier can do its thing with each one individually."

 

[Condottiere]

Though, in theory, inertial compensation field would mitigate that, until it doesn't.