Thread: Metallic Hydrogen storage?

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

With reaction drives always going to need large volumes of space
for reaction mass, if nothing else. IIRC CT power plants were
much more hungry so not as big of a disparity IIRC

---
from my T989

Scott Quigg wrote:


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

Yup, Heplar makes sense, maybe I'm thinking in MT/CT terms, but thought jump fuel volume was biggest culprit?

Sent from my iPhone

On Jun 27, 2012, at 12:41, "" <> wrote:

>
>
> With reaction drives always going to need large volumes of space for reaction mass, if nothing else. IIRC CT power plants were much more hungry so not as big of a disparity IIRC
>
>
> ---
> from my T989
>
>
> Scott Quigg wrote:
>
>
> 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
>
>

You could also store in metallic (using gravitic compression) then allow to return to reaction volume to be used as propellant?

Mass should be the same, just volume would be greatly reduced.

Sent from my iPhone

On Jun 27, 2012, at 12:41, "" <> wrote:

>
>
> With reaction drives always going to need large volumes of space for reaction mass, if nothing else. IIRC CT power plants were much more hungry so not as big of a disparity IIRC
>
>
> ---
> from my T989
>
>
> Scott Quigg wrote:
>
>
> 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
>
>

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

Right on, makes great sense. Figured some base rules/assumptions had to be in place.

I was thinking of sheer forces and other fun effects some years ago with meters of BSD plating and massive volumes of LHyd as the source background to a series of missions. Corrupt contractor, scandal/cover ups, etc.

Thanks again for jumping back into the fray. Great fun going through this pent-up excitement.

Just wish i had other tne players here, north of atlanta!

Sent from my iPhone

On Jun 27, 2012, at 12:59, wrote:

> 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
>
>

Quigg--

Good, I'm always glad when I make sense.

I like your idea, though, and as a possible way to tinker with it, you
could just assume, MHyd (Metallic storage of Hydrogen fuel) is possible at
say, TL 16 or 17. I pick those numbers because the existing FF&S systems
should take you up that high on the other starship systems that you would
match up with the MHyd ship. Or any other TL that still is low enough so
that the other ship systems have FF&S values you can use.

I would then be inclined to say, "Fuel Purification plants at that tech
level include the ability to compress LHyd to MHyd and back again", or
maybe double the size/power draw to be conservative.

Then you'd have to have rules for the MHyd tankage to keep it in its
metallic state. I don't know the density of MHyd compared to LHyd, but you
could work that out, and that would show you the tank size. Then you'd
have to work out the overhead required to keep the MHyd "tamped down" as a
percentage add-on to the tank size for magnetic, cooling stuff, plus the
power draw. Logically that would be similar in a lot of ways to the fusion
drive itself, as they are both compressing hydrogen, although the tankage
is doing so without allowing fusion to begin, which is probably the real
tricky part.

Finally, might want to allow some kind of staging tanking to bring a
quantity of Hyd back up to LHyd preparatory to using it as reaction mass.
Probably based on some number of G-turns at the ready, but also related to
how quickly your fuel purifiers need to expand/contract that mass. On the
other hand, it would also be logical to say, if we can store it in a
compressed state that is similar to the compressed state in which it will
be "burned" in the fusion drive, at this TL we don't have to mess with
reconverting it to LHyd, but can just inject it into the HEPlaR as is.
Probably want to think about that.

Then, and here is the sticky part, and will be intimately related to the
decisions made above, you'd get into the infinitely recursive part of
high-density starships, where you have to keep calculating and
recalculating ship's mass to get G performance. And finding out that
you've used way too much surface area on your exhaust and your passive
radiators for all of the power you've reinvested in.

Potentially an interesting thought experiment, though. But maybe once you
go to all this trouble you'd realize, "screw it, we've already got
matter/antimatter at this point, which is easier to work with."

Do the Star Wars ships claim to store hydrogen fuel in its metallic state?
If so, that seems quite a waste, as the one constant in SW ship designs is
that they are needlessly, showily big, with nothing really to take up all
that space. Not very many guns or fighters or troops or AT-ATs on board,
just lots and lots of long hallways leading off to nowhere (kind of like
the Seaview, now that I think of it). Might was well have big LHyd tanks
to fill out your deckplans.

Just some brain flatulence.

Dave

> Right on, makes great sense. Figured some base rules/assumptions had to
> be in place.
>
> I was thinking of sheer forces and other fun effects some years ago with
> meters of BSD plating and massive volumes of LHyd as the source background
> to a series of missions. Corrupt contractor, scandal/cover ups, etc.
>
> Thanks again for jumping back into the fray. Great fun going through this
> pent-up excitement.
>
> Just wish i had other tne players here, north of atlanta!
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>
> On Jun 27, 2012, at 12:59, wrote:
>