Hi Bruce Johnson,

 

Marc Miller's article in JTAS 24 did not cover how the refined liquid hydrogen was used. From CT LBB 2 1977 my take was that the jump drive's fusion power plant used the fuel. When CT LBB 5 1979, CT LBB 5 1980, CT LBB 2 1977/1981 and the JTAS 24 article in 1985 came out I have no clue why the jump fuel has to be refined since the maneuver drive does not care as long as the power plant provides the power.

 

There was a web site that someone had up that discussed the jump drive and had some sort of animation showing the jump fuel being deployed around the ship making a jump. Unfortunately, my saved link returned a page/site not found message the last time I tried to review the material there.

 

My guess is dumping that amount of energy would cause a nice big detonation at the least and I would really like to be some place else. Of course with my normal luck my Traveller character would be the one to try the maneuver. ;-)

---

From: "Bruce Johnson" <xxxxxx@Pharmacy.Arizona.EDU>
To: "TML" <xxxxxx@simplelists.com>
Sent: Thursday, February 11, 2016 1:16:00 PM
Subject: Jump Fuel (was Re: [TML] Instant city)

> On Feb 11, 2016, at 1:13 PM, tmr0195@comcast.net wrote:
>
>  
> Pulling all the material from 1979 to 1985 together my idea is now that the jump drive is not a specialized fusion power plant, but I have no clue other than the guts have capacitors, coils, and other stuff not described.
>  
> Of course my idea is probably out to lunch, but it is my best shot to date.
>  

All of this is strong support for the ‘jump fuel is used to create a protective bubble of H2 around the ship in J-Space’ rather than ‘We fuse enough hydrogen for 77 exa-jigga-google-watts’ model of the ‘it’s all burned’ school of jump drive theory.

A bit of back of the envelope calc:

Note that 1 kg of H2 fused into He results in ~63 x10^12 joules of energy. (converting H2 to He results in a loss of mass of ~0.7%, so via E=mc^2 we get 63x10^12 joules. see https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080223194641AAT5acE )

lets be real generous and say that Traveller Jump Drive fusion plants are only 1% efficient, and 99% of that H2 is used as ‘coolant’ (which STILL doesn’t make sense; since water would be much more efficient, but fine, lets use H2), that means when the J-drive of a scout courier is fusing 100 dt of H2, it is generating 980 kg (h2 is REALLY light! one liter of liquid H2 weighs just 70 g) x .63 10^12, or just over 6.17 x10^14 of energy; or roughly equivalent to a 120KT nuclear weapon.

Then storing it, however briefly, in jump capacitors.

(Imagine what would happen if one was to do it in port, then short out the caps in a blaze of glory).

And that’s the MINIMUM sized ship for jumping.

Using H2 as a shield is SO much more sensible, imo.

--
Bruce Johnson
University of Arizona
College of Pharmacy
Information Technology Group

Institutions do not have opinions, merely customs

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