The new Starship Operator's Manual is here!

No, what I am saying you are ignoring basic physics and not even handwaving it. You can not move waste heat from the ship at 290K into a plasma at 200,000K, it is a physical impossibility and there is no space magic technology that could be used to explain how you are breaking thermodynamics.

To cool the plasma waste requires more coolant than all the liquid hydrogen power plant fuel you are carrying. If you are venting the hot waste plasma to space then you still have the problem of removing the waste heat in the ship - you can not move waste heat from cold to hot.

There are two ways to remove waste heat -
1 - radiate it (my proposal is to radiate it into the gravitics field that is coupled via space magic to an external field that interacts with the gravitics field - backgound gravitational waves, gravity wells etc. - this requires no additional magic items

There is only one canonical reference to a radiator fin in CT.

2 - heat something up inside the ship - a heat sink. Trouble is the only heat sink you have is the liquid hydrogen that you can't use as a heat sink for long before the hydrogen evaporates, pressure builds up, and your ship explodes.. There is the possibility of adding a gravitc heat sink (in MT high TL coldberth used gravitics to freeze the occupant) but that requires adding a system that has never appeared in any version to date.

Gravitics - technologies that interact via the gravitcs field coupling with an external gravitational field, including the universal .gravitational wave background. These technologies include artificial gravity plates, acceleration compensators, grav modules, lifters, and the maneuver drive. The coupling allows ships to radiate energy as gravitational waves and so has the additional use as a heat sink.
 
Last edited:
No, what I am saying you are ignoring basic physics and not even handwaving it. You can not move waste heat from the ship at 290K into a plasma at 200,000K, it is a physical impossibility and there is no space magic technology that could be used to explain how you are breaking thermodynamics.

To cool the plasma waste requires more coolant than all the liquid hydrogen power plant fuel you are carrying. If you are venting the hot waste plasma to space then you still have the problem of removing the waste heat in the ship - you can not move waste heat from cold to hot.

There are two ways to remove waste heat -
1 - radiate it (my proposal is to radiate it into the gravitics field that is coupled via space magic to an external field that interacts with the gravitics field - backgound gravitational waves, gravity wells etc. - this requires no additional magic items

There is only one canonical reference to a radiator fin in CT.

2 - heat something up inside the ship - a heat sink. Trouble is the only heat sink you have is the liquid hydrogen that you can't use as a heat sink for long before the hydrogen evaporates, pressure builds up, and your ship explodes.. There is the possibility of adding a gravitc heat sink (in MT high TL coldberth used gravitics to freeze the occupant) but that requires adding a system that has never appeared in any version to date.

Gravitics - technologies that interact via the gravitcs field coupling with an external gravitational field, including the universal .gravitational wave background. These technologies include artificial gravity plates, acceleration compensators, grav modules, lifters, and the maneuver drive. The coupling allows ships to radiate energy as gravitational waves and so has the additional use as a heat sink.
Why not just transfer excess heat directly into a different form of energy with 100% efficiency? Say from thermal to electrical? I know that that is basically impossible today, but theorical physics has already described the process, We just have no idea how to actually do it yet. What We can do today is change thermal energy to electrical energy at an efficiency of about 35%. It seems reasonable to Me that with greater scientific understanding and great technical knowhow, 100% Energy Conversion Efficiency is a very real possibility with Traveller technology.
 
Thermal energy to electrical is doable, it is called thermoelectric generation. It is not very efficient and never can be. IR photons lack the energy to knock about electrons very much.
We are not discussing thermal energy, we are discussing waste heat. Waste heat and thermal energy are different things. 100% efficiency? Nope.
 
No, what I am saying you are ignoring basic physics and not even handwaving it. You can not move waste heat from the ship at 290K into a plasma at 200,000K, it is a physical impossibility
Any time you are presented with a non-trivial working system and believe the description you have been given is a physical impossibility, you can usually assume that you have misunderstood part of the explanation. Just bluntly and repeatedly declaring that it is impossible never helps. Instead, point out how you think it works and the contradiction therein, then ask where you have misunderstood. If it truly is impossible, the presenter will have overlooked the contradiction, or something equivalent.

In this case, you are thinking of just transferring heat from a colder object to a hotter object with no other steps involved. That is not what is happening.

Change the plasma's pressure and volume, and you can change its temperature. Drop it to under 290K (or whatever the ship's temperature is), which may turn it from a plasma to a gas. Transfer heat in. If you then return to the former pressure and volume (becoming a plasma once more), the coolant would be at over 200,000K; this may or may not be done before releasing the coolant to space. This is similar in principle to, if much greater in scale than, modern refrigerators - so, literally, saying you can't do this even in principle is saying that refrigerators don't work.

Trouble is the only heat sink you have is the liquid hydrogen that you can't use as a heat sink for long before the hydrogen evaporates, pressure builds up, and your ship explodes.
SOM speaks of using helium (made via fusion from hydrogen), but otherwise this is the method, releasing the helium before it would rupture containment. The helium (hydrogen) does thus effectively evaporate over time: this is represented by the rate of fuel usage by the power plant.

Perhaps you may think this usage rate is impossibly small for the volume of waste heat removed. That, I confess to handwaving as "the magical efficiency of high technology", but we had to take High Guard's numbers as canon and work from there. If that is your quibble, I must defer to authors who went well before we did. I can offer a partial explanation, though: gravitic containment undoubtedly increases the maximum pressure (and thus temperature) that can be contained in a given volume, increasing how efficient this process can be, but there's still a finite limit.
 
Thermal energy to electrical is doable, it is called thermoelectric generation. It is not very efficient and never can be. IR photons lack the energy to knock about electrons very much.
We are not discussing thermal energy, we are discussing waste heat. Waste heat and thermal energy are different things. 100% efficiency? Nope.
We are also not discussing how things would change if you have advanced control of the system at the quantum level. Maybe it can't impart much to an electron, but to an even smaller particle, perhaps. We have no idea currently how many particles smaller than an electron even exist, so there is no way that anyone on here can tell Me how particles that We haven't even discovered or theorized of yet, may or may not behave. We do not yet have the understanding to know if that is even possible or not, so for game purposes, We just havewave it and assume that it is not only possible, but actually being used in starships throughout Charted Space... lol.
 
Sorry I'm a bit late to this party, but I didn't read through the book until I got my physical copy a few weeks ago.
I love this book! Lots of personality in the writing, lots my favorite bits from the DGP version carried over, and Sgt. Floofy.
I think you all did a great job in putting together a lot of the lore of the last 50 years into something that hangs together pretty well.

I loved the walkthroughs, but I got a bit confused that the last few seemed to have keys for illustrations that aren't there. Like the "Mission Support" section shows entries for "Animal only" ("frozen meat" is one example) and "Suleiman Only" ("fabricator cabinet") but the only illustration in the section is of the low berths for the Empress Marava. Were there other illustrations that were originally intended to be included?

All in all, a great book that I very much enjoyed reading and that gave me a few ideas to spring on my players.
 
Back
Top