Quote:
Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl
While the default assumption in Space is that FTL drives do not require fuel beyond energy from power plants
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Where do you see this assumption? Page 41, "Fuel Consumption," under "Designing a Stardrive," is all about drives that require fuel. There is no whiff of deviating from a fuelless default. And the discussions of FTL speed and range focus on fuel.
I've run
Tales of the Solar Patrol games, in which ships' electron drives are reactionless engines that run off of "Tesla coils" that draw power from the luminiferous ether, so no refueling is needed. Interestingly, there's a section that describes how the first ship to land on Ceres had to convert the Tesla coils from a ship to power the colony until the atomic generators could be used. I emailed Lizard about this — why would you need to use atomic fission if you've got a Tesla coil? He responded that he hadn't noticed this seeming contradiction when writing it.
My eventual justification was that Tesla coils burn themselves out quickly unless very carefully maintained, and they burn themselves out faster the bigger they are. A ship's engineer in the source literature is usually pretty obsessive about his engines, while a colony wouldn't want to hang the lives of so many people on the attention span of a rock-bound mechanic. So while atomic fission doesn't provide as much power as a Tesla coil, it provides steadier power for a much longer term and for much less manpower.
And this solution gives the setting a reason to continue to care about mining and transporting fissionable materials. Nobody would take on the extremely difficult job of mining Mercury for uranium if nobody needed uranium.
So the ships don't need fuel, but the planet- or asteroid-based populations do.