Quote:
Originally Posted by malloyd
I think the core problem here is early Traveller authors didn't have a good feel for energy content of fuel. Ship designs are probably based on the kinds of tankage you might see in an oil powered naval warship, and a lot of stuff seems to assume that hydrogen fusion produces power levels not too dissimilar to combustion - hence the fuel requirements of power plants, the ability of unique ships to make jumps with solar power, and here the ability to burn all this stuff and store the energy in "capacitors" somehow without this technology obsoleting all other power plants, or letting you crack planets. This stuff probably *can't* be made to make sense, if you are going to preserve it's canon status you just have to take it at face value, and not try to work through the implications or logical alternative approaches.
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That is my assumption. They knew fusion was more energy-intense per kilogram than combustion, but thought it was 100 or 1000 times better, when it is actually more like 1,000,000 times better.
As I recently posted, IMTU most jump fuels is really protection from hyperspace, there are no jump capacitors, and drop tanks are much more expensive, require a ship with an overly large jump drive, and have to be retained throughout jump. But that clearly breaks with canon.