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Old 02-15-2020, 10:27 AM   #1
thrash
 
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Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: traveller
Default Nerfing fuel purifiers

I am looking for a reasonable justification for restricting fuel purification plants to ground installations and making them impractical for PC-scale starships, in order to promote a return to an "old school" Traveller relationship with unrefined fuel.

In the original (1977) and revised (1981) three books of classic Traveller, the use of unrefined fuel was both a hindrance and a necessity. Refined fuel was available only at class A or B starports; unrefined fuel could be obtained at class C or D starports, by gas-giant skimming, or (1981) from oceans and lakes. (Note that the water was "used as unrefined fuel" (p. 6), rather than processed somehow.)

Using unrefined fuel, however, resulted in the chance of drive malfunctions or misjumps. This imposed a distinct "terrain" on the star map: voyages had to be planned around the availability of fuel sources, and visiting a better quality starport for refined fuel was a definite plus.

Book 5 (1979) introduced the fuel purification plant (p. 32), which processes unrefined into refined fuel on shipboard. These were cheap but bulky, with most of the cost in lost revenue space. (Paradoxically from a game design standpoint, this put the greatest burden on the small, PC-scale ships that needed it the most for the low-quality ports they serve.) The 1980 edition (p. 27) reduced the minimum installation to 3 dtons and Cr30,000 at TL15, well worth the cost for even the smallest starships. This removed virtually all restrictions due to lack of refined fuel and pushed most fuel-related considerations (even gas giant skimming) into the background.

If "refined fuel" is simply pure liquid hydrogen, and "unrefined fuel" is hydrogen-containing material with other contaminants (helium from gas giant atmospheres, oxygen from water, etc.), it's hard to see why this wouldn't be possible. All ships capable of gas-giant skimming must be able to compress and liquefy gaseous hydrogen (albeit perhaps inefficiently, with lots of wastage to carry away residual heat); this could remove most of the helium at the same time. The 1981 quote about using water directly as unrefined fuel implies that the process of "burning" jump fuel can separate oxygen from hydrogen in stream and dump the former. Separating hydrogen from oxygen by electrolysis of water (as, presumably, happens in a fuel purification plant) is energy intensive but simple.

So, what then? My thought was to instead define "refined fuel" as pure protium -- hydrogen without any deuterium present. Naturally occurring hydrogen is ~0.03% deuterium by mass. Removing this fraction (usually to capture the deuterium for nuclear power applications) is more complex than separating hydrogen from other elements, since the chemical and physical properties are very similar. My research suggests that these processes don't scale down as readily as electrolysis.

My questions to the hive mind are:
(1) Does this approach make sense, or is there a scalable method of refining light hydrogen I've missed because it would be uneconomic without (say) fusion power?
(2) Is there a different approach that would solve the original problem?
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