Quigg--
That's an excellent question, and the answer is, No, and Yes, and Sort of.
And when you say "fuel" I assume you mean LHyd.
1. No. The idea of 14m3 displacement tons of hydrogen was just so embedded
in everything in Traveller that it was difficult to ever get away from, so
I don't think we ever got there, unless there's a table in FF&S. What you
say is logical, however. See also, "sort of."
2. Yes, in the sense that TNE was very focused on the idea chemical
storage of energy rather than always just firing up the fusion drive,
burning a few displacement tons of LHyd, and pumping the energy through
the power bus to the laser. Since Traveller had so much embedded thought
about shipboard weapons being electrically powered, this only went so far,
but you will see that chemical energy storage is in there in TNE, for
example the Zho laser tank from Striker II. This is another case that the
BSG reboot definitely reminded me of TNE, in that their space-weapon pulse
guns used physical cartridges and weren't just plugged into the power
grid. So, while we did not think specifically about compacting LHyd down
to its less-volume consumptive metallic state, we did think quite a bit
about off-loading power draw from the ship's grid to chemical power
cartridges. Kinda similar, but not identical.
3. Sort of. And this is perhaps the most important of the three. There was
an inherent problem in starship design that went all the way back to Book
2, which is that starships were designed on the basis of volume, not mass.
That was fine for j-drives, but not m-drives. I think, in order to deal
with the cognitive dissonance of this, Frank developed this article of
faith that, "All starships will float if you put them in water," the
reasoning being they had so much LHyd tankage. And I always had to say,
"no, they won't. You can easily build a ship, ESPECIALLY an SDB or
battle-rider, that will sink like a lead pellet." However, attempting to
back-door in mass-based maneuver ratings onto a system that was inherently
volume-based just led to infinitely recursive starship designs, which
would have been awful. So we came up with a half-way fix which said after
you're done, calculate the density. If it's above X, you have to base
maneuver rating on mass (and then the design becomes infinitely
recursive), if it's not, you're home free and you're done. AS PART OF THAT
ENTIRE CONCEPT, making the LHyd tankage denser would have undermined the
sort of uneasy truce we had worked out with our design system, and would
have sent us screaming from the room. So we were not really inclined to go
that way, for the exact reason that we had spent a lot of mental anguish
on the relationship of mass to volume.
Make sense?
Dave
> Has anyone looked into storing fuel via metallic storage? Figured TL15
couldn 't be too far out of scope. Was it part of or considered as
Canon?
>
> It always stuck in my craw that such large volumes of space had to be
dedicated to raw/inefficient/vulnerable fuel storage.
>
> Sure, ship design would be changed radically, but I always wanted to
build
> a Super Star Destroyer like "dreadnought".
>
> Cheers,
> Quigg
>
> Sent from my iPhone