[Say, it isn't that bad!]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

I looked at your design late last night and it's actually almost as good as you could get at your SM. It has PF 750 or 7.5 against cosmic rays. It'd be better though if you swapped the fusion reactor and the habitat. persons in Core habitats or Control rooms get double protection. I think you'd be at PF 1800 or 18 v. cosmic rays.

Thanks. I had that thought while drifting off, as it has a number of systems that provide radiation protection.

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

The radiation rules are tricky but if all the time was spent in ships this well protected you could go about 3 and 1/2 years without rolling for radiation sickness. You could double that by taking Antirad (the version in Bio-tech) which would give PF 2 (not divided by cosmic rays) to add on.

Since Solar War I is between Earth-Mars and (mostly) the Inner Belt, and since its role is to *defend Earth and Mars, rather than to attack, the crew is unlikely to spend nearly that much time exposed to dangerous levels of radiation.

According to the quick spreadsheet I wrote for reaction drive travel, it's 21 days from Earth to Mars, and 89 days from Earth to Ceres/the Inner Belt, spending 38 mps on acceleration and deceleration.

If it spends only 19 mps (edit: on acceleration or deceleration; 38 mps total for the round-trip), it can make a round trip to and from Earth and Mars at 53 days, or a round trip to and from Earth and Ceres at 190 days. That makes it less than optimal on attack, since 190 days is plenty of time to concentrate defensive force.

* It needs a refuelling station at the end, or to only spend 19 mps on acceleration and deceleration, total. This could be fixed with a robofactory of some sort...

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

After you do start rollling, if you have HT people half of them get sick and 2% of them get very sick and in a couple of years some of them die from cancer (technically the Terninally Ill disad).

A setting with mature TL9 Bio-tech can cure cancer and reset the radiation count but both are quite expensive and require hospital facilities (this is in the Gene Therapy section of Bio-tech).

TL10 brings you abetter version of Antirad and portable cancer and radiation cures for half the TL9 price. The big thing though is the ability to genetically engineer parahumans who have Regeneration(Radiation Only) 4pts. With that Ad you cna ignore thwe cosmic radiation stuff. You still can't go into Jupiter's inner radiation belt but you might be able to colonize Ganymede and Callisto.

So I'd make your setting TL10 in Bio-tech (at least) and your Belters and peopel further out be parahumans with space adaptations.

Another possibility is that Belter ships and stations are rather large, which is an idea I was thinking about already - after all, they don't have to lift material out of any (significant) gravity well.

Although most of the Earth-Mars Alliance ships would be built in space, the Belters just have a lot more space rocks to play with.