Warp Drive ships with Antimatter power plants.

[Allensh]

Ok, I was chugging along on building a 300-ton ship with warp drive and antimatter power plant when I encountered the following:

1. Warp Drives consume fuel double to that used by the power plant. (does this mean it simply doubles what the power plant uses, or that it consumes Px2 and the power plant also consumes P).

2. Antimatter power plants do not have to allocate tonnage for fuel, they simply are "refueled" every month.

Thus...if I am reading this correctly...a warp drive on a ship with an antimatter power plant actually consumes no fuel? If you had a 300-ton ship with an H Warp Drive you're doing 5 parsecs a week and only needing to refuel every 20 parsecs?

Or...does it now mean your plant will need to refuel every two weeks rather than every month?

Allen

 

[LotusBlossom]

Yeah I came upon this problem too:

In the end I figured this:

Since Warp drive uses fuel at double rate, then the power plant will need to be refuelled twice as often. So, every 2 weeks.

What ya think?

 

[LotusBlossom]

The other funny thing about it was,since antimatter fuel needs no tonnage allocated to it, could spare fuel be carried somehow elsewhere on the ship. If so,if you had the money for its initial purchase, you could zip about for years..for decades perhaps

 

[Allensh]

The other funny thing about it was,since antimatter fuel needs no tonnage allocated to it, could spare fuel be carried somehow elsewhere on the ship. If so,if you had the money for its initial purchase, you could zip about for years..for decades perhaps

I would suspect that containment might be an issue, unless you had "magnetic bottles" to keep the antimatter in...in which case it would not surprise me at all for large exploration or merchant vessels to carry refueling supplies onboard.

Allen

 

[simonh]

I think it's right that antimatter power plants should ignore fuel space requirements, but not fuel costs. Antimatter fuel should take up negligible space, but be incredibly expensive.

The easiest way to do this would be to calculate the normal fuel consumption rate of the power plant and then calculate the cost of the antimatter fuel based on that. Fuel usage is normaly calculated based on 2weeks endurance, so let's say the AM fuel cost is 0.1MCr per ton of normal fuel usage per 2 weeks. A power plant that requires 30 dTons of fuel for a 2 week duration costs 3 MCr to fuel up with anti-matter for those 2 weeks. If you want to load it up with 20 weeks worth of fuel go right ahead, it takes up no space but will set you back 30 MCr.

For your warp Drive, it will not increase the fuel space requirement on such a ship, but double the fuel costs for a given endurance.

Simon Hibbs

 

[rje]

I always thought that the antimatter "power plant" more or less was mostly a container of antimatter... basically the fuel is part of the plant. In other words, fuel is not "zero" volume, but rather integral with the unit. ??

 

[simonh]

I always thought that the antimatter "power plant" more or less was mostly a container of antimatter... basically the fuel is part of the plant. In other words, fuel is not "zero" volume, but rather integral with the unit. ??

It'll also require a reaction chamber in which to annihilate the anti-matter in a controlled way, and a power conversion system to somehow convert the resultant high energy photons into electricity. I'd also want an emergency ejection system to jetison the anti-matter in case of a problem.

You will need a containment vessel for the anti-matter, but anti matter is so energy dense that I'd expect scale effects work strongly in your favour and certainly by the time you have anti-matter power technology, containment system capable of storing a significant amount of AM should be fairly compact.

Simon Hibbs

 

[Twi'lekk_Den-keeper]

Antimatter is an incredibly source of energy, and 20dtons of it could easily get you about the stars with ease for years- the problem being it's about the rarest substance in the universe. in our T8 planet, it comes at 300 billion dollars per milligram http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimatter#Cost
So, try and scale that price throught the TL's...

 

[simonh]

Antimatter is an incredibly source of energy, and 20dtons of it could easily get you about the stars with ease for years

20 dtons of it would handily get you round the observable universe untill the end of time.

- the problem being it's about the rarest substance in the universe. in our T8 planet, it comes at 300 billion dollars per milligram

I don't think you can do a streight-line extrapolation over time on something like that. Preusmably nobody would develop the technology for antimatter powered systems if they didn't have an economicaly viable supply of anti-matter.

Simon Hibbs

 

[EDG]

Antimatter is an incredibly source of energy

For each gram of antimatter that is annihilated, you get 9e13 Joules of energy, which is 90 trillion joules! You just need 1.67 billion proton-antiproton collisions (which is a really tiny amount - 5.5e-18 kg worth!) to generate one joule of energy.

 

[rje]

Short answer: it's reasonable to assume that the antimatter in an antimatter pod is insignificant compared to the size of the unit, but the cost of the rest of the unit may be insignificant compared to the cost of the antimatter itself.

 

[Jame Rowe]

yer tryinna make Star Trek there aincha!

 

[Allensh]

yer tryinna make Star Trek there aincha!

Why not?Actually, not yet...but it would be cool if I could

Allen