What if Jump Drives used antimatter?

[Tom Kalbfus]

Suppose someone in the Traveller setting invented an Antimatter Jump Drive? What should the range be on that? How much antimatter would be required for each 1 parsec of jump? Antimatter I believe is tech level 17. What would an antimatter Jump drive be like?

 

[PsiTraveller]

Well TL 20 has the antimatter power plant, it produces 100 power points per ton of Power plant. You would only need a small engine to power your Jump Drive. Jump Drives max out on the tech chart at TL 18 and Jump 9.

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

Well TL 20 has the antimatter power plant, it produces 100 power points per ton of Power plant. You would only need a small engine to power your Jump Drive. Jump Drives max out on the tech chart at TL 18 and Jump 9.

Well it appears they changed the tech level scale.

this is the one I've got, its derived from the original Traveller Classic handbook, I've moved Artificial Intelligence down to Tech Level 15. The T20 book lists it at TL 17. the Worlds Classic Handbook does the same. Why was antimatter raised to TL 20? I don't really think antimatter is any great deal, it is just very hard to make, but our scientists know how to make it. I compressed those things into 16 tech levels the first 0 through 15 correspond to digits in the hexadecimal number system, and figure anything that goes beyond that ought to be beyond common tech levels tech level 16, in reality, I think antimatter spaceships will come sooner than 8 tech levels beyond us. it would be hard to build a self-contained starship without antimatter, that doesn't take centuries to reach its destination. In the Traveller setting, I think antimatter would eliminate the need to skim gas giants for fuel, or perhaps more advanced starships would skim those gas giants and run the hydrogen through its fusion power plant, using the power generated to create antimatter fuel for its next interstellar journey.

Hydrogen would come in through the intakes, helium would be expelled through the exhaust, and the antimatter power plant would be creating and storing antimatter while it does this. Probably 200 atoms of hydrogen would need to be fused to create every single anti-proton, probably more realistic inefficiencies would entail 500 to 1000 hydrogen atoms being fused to create every antiproton, the rest being rejected as heat or radiation so basically a ton of hydrogen creates a kilogram of antimatter, however reacting a kg of antimatter with a kilogram of matter would release as much energy as the complete fusion of 200 kilograms of hydrogen into helium. if this gives you a guide of how much matter and antimatter you would need for each jump. Lets say you have a 100 ton scout courier, which needs 10 tons of hydrogen to make each 1 parsec jump, now it would need 50 kilograms of antihydrogen and 50 kilograms of hydrogen, this would extend the range of a Jump-2 Scout/Courier powered by Antimatter to 200 parsecs by using 10 tons of antimatter and 10 tons of hydrogen. A Jump 100 to 600 would allow for a Galactic Empire to exist, you would be able to travel to the Galactic core in 60 jumps of 500 parsecs this would take 1.15 years, add in 60 days of gas giant skimming, and that is 1.34 years of travel, lets make it 1.5 years as a nice conservative estimate. Even with this technology a Galactic Empire could just barely hold itself together, it would take 3 years for the Empire to react to something occurring on its periphery. This is not exactly Star Wars. To something at the edge of the galaxy, it would be more like a 6-10 year response time. Though local administrative parts can react more swiftly.

 

[Condottiere]

As an energy source, it's part of the Traveller canon, assuming you locate a functioning artifact power plant, or develop the industrial base to make one.

Creating a jump drive that uses as basis anti-matter to punch a hole in the spacetime of reality, would require a re-examination of jumpspace physics.

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

As an energy source, it's part of the Traveller canon, assuming you locate a functioning artifact power plant, or develop the industrial base to make one.

Creating a jump drive that uses as basis anti-matter to punch a hole in the spacetime of reality, would require a re-examination of jumpspace physics.

That is what higher tech levels generally do. An actual jump drive would require a reexamination of our own physics. I tend to think higher tech levels should be able to travel farther distances quicker. Antimatter is one possible route, without it, higher tech levels are stuck with the hydrogen powered jump drive and its fuel requirements. Antimatter in its early stages can't be created onboard the spacecraft, can only be bought at high tech level class A starports, you can't refuel locally at any system that doesn't have that, as a bonus you can travel a lot further with an antimatter jump drive than if you are forced to rely on standard hydrogen fed jump drives, all antimatter does is allow you to travel within system quicker and further for longer, but you are still stuck with those fuel requirements for making a jump. Since your ship gobbles up so much fuel, and you have to get hydrogen anyway, you might as well have a hydrogen fusion reactor to power your ship with, that sort of stunts the higher tech levels doesn't it! Losely what tech level would the Star Wars Galaxy be at considering what would be required to travel from one end of the galaxy to another within hours! It seems trans galactic travel in Star Wars takes as much time as a transcontinental travel in a jet plane does today. Traveling from the core to the rim takes about as much time as traveling from the United States to Australia.

 

[phavoc]

For MGT, under the current rules, it wouldn't work. Hydrogen is required to produce the pocket universe.

It would work under previous versions, or in T5.

 

[fusor]

Why ask the question if you're just going to write walls of text with your own answer that you've decided anyway? Again, if you're going to do this sort of thing then it's better on a blog, not on a discussion board.

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

Why ask the question if you're just going to write walls of text with your own answer that you've decided anyway? Again, if you're going to do this sort of thing then it's better on a blog, not on a discussion board.

Oo creative content, bad bad bad! Lets not be creative, lets only be supercritical of others and knock down other people's contributions, because we don't want anything original. You want a lot of emptiness here and silence. You want to come here and find nothing new or interesting, because that's the way you like it! I guess you want to come here to make sure nothing new is posted, and if there is anything new here, you zero in on it and blast it as spam. For you spam is anything you don't want to read or which you don't want anyone else to read. If you don't like it, you don't want anyone else to see it either!

 

[alex_greene]

Why ask the question if you're just going to write walls of text with your own answer that you've decided anyway? Again, if you're going to do this sort of thing then it's better on a blog, not on a discussion board.

It's called discussion for a reason. Someone proposes an idea; everybody chews the fat. Some people come away from it inspired, others do not. But at least it's an idea, and it keeps people thinking.

What is not discussion is aggressive snapping along the lines of "this belongs elsewhere - take it away!"

No, we will not take this discussion away. Yes, this discussion belongs here. If someone here does not like it, they should exercise the option of going away instead.

 

[Reynard]

Star Trek has the warp drive alternative Traveller drive. It creates a warp field that doesn't need a hydrogen bubble(?) and can run as long as there's fuel in the tank. Star Trek uses A/M power plants and Traveller has those as alternatives so ships could warp for very long periods. Star Wars actually is somewhat similar to Traveller's jump space as both enter an alternate universe that compresses distance except Star Wars has far fewer constraints as they can travel there as long as they need and in a lot less time plus no hydrogen bubble. That puts Star Wars on the Way Up There tech level for Mongoose and earlier editions. I consider Star Wars travel more science magiky when things are extremely handwaved for story. HOWEVER, Marc Miller's T5 has the answer with The Many Levels of Jump Technology allowing great expanses of distance at the price of much higher tech levels staring at TL 17 up to TL 34. The Leap drive is Transgalactic which sound close to what Star War ships do so we're talking TL 22. Still, these need a hydrogen Realspace field whether as a bubble or a form fitting grid. And you can bet these Fantastic Drives are all using anti-matter power plants.

Remember that the drive doesn't produce power, it uses outsourced power to create the energy field. It's an emitter. All you need is the A/M power plant and a powerful alternative warp engine in Your Traveller Universe. No hydrogen a all. No need to rewrite jump or warp engines as energy producers.

 

[fusor]

No, we will not take this discussion away. Yes, this discussion belongs here. If someone here does not like it, they should exercise the option of going away instead.

Fine. Let's see how the board looks in a few weeks when he's spammed it with all his crap again. I think at one point I counted no less than 11 threads on the first page started by him and that pretty much only had comments by him on them as well as only he was adding anything to them (usually some fantasy "what if" thing that he'd come up with with every single implication that he could possibly think of for it). He clearly is just using this board as an outlet for his "creativity"/verbal diarrhea, and it should be obvious to anyone that this would be the perfect reason for putting it all on a blog instead. Also I can't help but notice that he steals a lot of images from other sites without credit (most of his BSG stuff is from elsewhere), when he could just link to it instead.

I stand by my opinion though, and if anyone bothered to have a look at his past "contributions" they'll come to the same conclusions. All he does is produce walls of text and use pictures from elsewhere, he never listens to anything that anyone says, and he vomits it all out and then moves on to another topic where he does the same thing, and it's not really that relevant to Traveller or MGT.

 

[alex_greene]

No, we will not take this discussion away. Yes, this discussion belongs here. If someone here does not like it, they should exercise the option of going away instead.

Fine. Let's see how the board looks in a few weeks when he's spammed it with all his crap again. I think at one point I counted no less than 11 threads on the first page started by him and that pretty much only had comments by him on them as well as only he was adding anything to them (usually some fantasy "what if" thing that he'd come up with with every single implication that he could possibly think of for it). He clearly is just using this board as an outlet for his "creativity"/verbal diarrhea, and it should be obvious to anyone that this would be the perfect reason for putting it all on a blog instead. Also I can't help but notice that he steals a lot of images from other sites without credit (most of his BSG stuff is from elsewhere), when he could just link to it instead.

I stand by my opinion though, and if anyone bothered to have a look at his past "contributions" they'll come to the same conclusions. All he does is produce walls of text and use pictures from elsewhere, he never listens to anything that anyone says, and he vomits it all out and then moves on to another topic where he does the same thing, and it's not really that relevant to Traveller or MGT.

The OP is contributing to the board. He's taking pains to make the topics science fiction. He's doing his best to do conversions into Traveller stats. He's making them germane.

And to everyone's astonishment, the topics aren't about warfare and destruction.

I would commend such enthusiasm, and wish we had more creativity like that.

 

[fusor]

I would commend such enthusiasm, and wish we had more creativity like that.

Creativity? You mean where he just posts reams of stuff from other settings and websites (without credit) and sticks some Traveller stats on them? Right, yeah, that's really great. He's doing that with the BSG stuff and he's done that with other material before.

And also have you not noticed that on this thread he's not really asking us "What if Jump Drives used antimatter" but he's really just telling us what he think would happen if Jump Drives used antimatter?

 

[Sigtrygg]

So start a discussion.
Tell him how you would handle an antimatter powered jump drive.

These boards are a lot richer for Tom's contributions over the years. I may not agree with him on most stuff, but it is always thought provoking and that is why it is useful.

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

I would commend such enthusiasm, and wish we had more creativity like that.

Creativity? You mean where he just posts reams of stuff from other settings and websites (without credit) and sticks some Traveller stats on them? Right, yeah, that's really great. He's doing that with the BSG stuff and he's done that with other material before.

And also have you not noticed that on this thread he's not really asking us "What if Jump Drives used antimatter" but he's really just telling us what he think would happen if Jump Drives used antimatter?

Don't worry, they'll get a percentage of what I earn off of them. I earn nothing, because I'm not selling anything! Most science fiction is not original. I thought the Cyrranus System was a fantastic system they cooked up to explain twelve garden worlds in one system. One thing this allows for is the PCs to travel from world to world in small craft, they can fly their fighters, their ship's boats, their launches, Pinnaces and shuttles from world to world without having to pay for a full fledged starship. The System has a lot of history, lots of buried and not so buried treasure, probably a lot of greedy people fighting over it as well. One can do a space age version of "Treasure Island" here! It probably works best if it is at the edge of settled space, the planets are barely inhabited, lots of wild animals roaming around. The Cylons really did try to fix things after nuking these places, there was few episodes showing some centurians planting trees, for example.

 

[alex_greene]

I would commend such enthusiasm, and wish we had more creativity like that.

Creativity? You mean where he just posts reams of stuff from other settings and websites (without credit) and sticks some Traveller stats on them? Right, yeah, that's really great. He's doing that with the BSG stuff and he's done that with other material before.

And also have you not noticed that on this thread he's not really asking us "What if Jump Drives used antimatter" but he's really just telling us what he think would happen if Jump Drives used antimatter?

That's the thing about these boards: if you don't care to see what anybody in particular is posting, you have two main options, neither of which actually hurt the other poster or you.

One, you can unsubscribe - or, in fact, not click on the posts and comment at all. Commenting on any given post, adding to the thread, automatically subscribes you to that thread, which means emails will keep popping up until you go up to the top left corner and unsubscribe.

Two, see the Options underneath, which has "Disable BBCode, Disable smilies" etc? See if the box marked "Notify me when a reply is posted" is ticked, and untick it.

Problem solved, no harm done, the poster gets his platform and you get yours for whatever you are posting. Everybody gets along.

I really cannot see how and where this becomes a problem for anybody here.

 

[fusor]

Don't worry, they'll get a percentage of what I earn off of them. I earn nothing, because I'm not selling anything! Most science fiction is not original.

That's not how it works - the point is that you should give credit where other people have done the work. Otherwise how do we know how much of your Cyrannus thread is actually your material versus stuff you just stole from elsewhere? Certainly you didn't make the big "Twelve Colonies of Kobol" map and map of Caprica in your last post there (and those are other peoples' copyrighted material - do you have their permission to repost it elsewhere, without credit no less?). Did you actually make the UWPs or the Orbit Charts yourself? You also copy/pasted all the UWP explanations wholesale from a Traveller book in your first post on that thread, which is also unnecessary since we know how Traveller works here.

e.g. the Caprica map is from http://sixu.deviantart.com/art/Caprica-Continents-Map-II-132716294 . Are you SixU? Did you get their permission to repost their work?
The Twelve Colonies map is from the creators of the show, shown off at: http://io9.gizmodo.com/5742034/a-detailed-map-of-battlestar-galacticas-twelve-colonies

 

[fusor]

Problem solved, no harm done, the poster gets his platform and you get yours for whatever you are posting. Everybody gets along.

Discussion boards aren't and shouldn't be anyone's "platform" or soapbox - that's exactly what blogs are for.

Again, what is the problem with him posting this material on a blog? He can still link to it from here if here wants to point people to it for discussion purposes.

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

Problem solved, no harm done, the poster gets his platform and you get yours for whatever you are posting. Everybody gets along.

Discussion boards aren't and shouldn't be anyone's "platform" or soapbox - that's exactly what blogs are for.

Again, what is the problem with him posting this material on a blog? He can still link to it from here if here wants to point people to it for discussion purposes.

What good is a soapbox if no ones around to hear it. Not people come to this site not knowing what they'll find here, I don't think people will go looking for my personal website to see what I have to say, instead they come here, and you want them to find nothing interesting? Maybe you what them to find two people arguing about some trivial point in the rules and so forth, is that what you'd hope to find here?

Who reads blogs? Why would I want to go to a blog and just get someone's one way communication? I like discussing things, with a blog its one way. I got a word file that I put these things into, if I think its relevant, I sometimes post some of it here, then people can talk about it. As for blogs, I don't have a web site, and I am not interested in making a website. I have an idea that I think might be shared, I share it, if you don't like it, you don't have to read it, I am not sending e-mail directly to you.

 

[fusor]

Who reads blogs? Why would I want to go to a blog and just get someone's one way communication? I like discussing things, with a blog its one way. I got a word file that I put these things into, if I think its relevant, I sometimes post some of it here, then people can talk about it. As for blogs, I don't have a web site, and I am not interested in making a website. I have an idea that I think might be shared, I share it, if you don't like it, you don't have to read it, I am not sending e-mail directly to you.

People who are actually interested in what the writer says will read their blog. And it's not one way communication - people can and do comment and discuss things on blogs too.

You're using this board exactly as if you were posting your stuff to a blog anyway (and many of your threads don't have comments from other people either, since they're just information dumps). Sure, you have to work to drive people to your blog rather than have the captive audience here, but if you actually post stuff that is interesting to people on your blog then they should come anyway.