Where's the Helium?

[Hans Rancke-Madsen]

Originally Posted by combatmedic

True, it may be better to just pay more up front and get second hand contragrav lifters.

There could be maintenance issues. A contragravity lifter is no good if it's broken.

And, of course, there the Rule of Cool factor. Helium balloons on TL5 worlds are (IMO) cooler than second hand contragravity lifters. (Unless I have a plot involving imported CG lifters).

That raises a question: I have a TL4 world that I'd like to furnish with a limited number of dirigible airship passenger routes. I know the method for extracting helium from natural gas using low-temperature gas liquefaction wasn't developed until around WWI, but is it a process that could be employed at TL4 if you possess the requisite knowledge?



Hans

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by Hans Rancke-Madsen

There could be maintenance issues. A contragravity lifter is no good if it's broken.

There are certainly maintenance issues with airships. They're no good when they leak.

That raises a question: I have a TL4 world that I'd like to furnish with a limited number of dirigible airship passenger routes.

They're expensive, and damned slow. Also, how are you going to propel them? Aero engines or even diesels are TTL 5 and GTL 6.

I know the method for extracting helium from natural gas using low-temperature gas liquefaction wasn't developed until around WWI, but is it a process that could be employed at TL4 if you possess the requisite knowledge?

TTL 4 yes. GTL 4 I doubt very much.

[Hans Rancke-Madsen]

Sorry, I forgot I was on the GT board where GTL would be the default assumption. I was talking about TTL 4, not GTL 4.

Originally Posted by Brett

They're expensive, and damned slow. Also, how are you going to propel them? Aero engines or even diesels are TTL 5 and GTL 6.

I suppose I would either have to make the world advanced in propulasion technology or employ imported TTL5 engines. Being only one level above the local technology, such engines would be easier to maintain with local resources. But imported engines would still cancel out much of the point about using local production capabilities.


Hans

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by Hans Rancke-Madsen

I suppose I would either have to make the world advanced in propulasion technology or employ imported TTL5 engines. Being only one level above the local technology, such engines would be easier to maintain with local resources. But imported engines would still cancel out much of the point about using local production capabilities.

You might have an issue with aluminium and magnesium for the framing of a dirigible, too. Though perhaps you could use bamboo.

Using an FTL spaceship with antigravity drives to export aero engines from a planet with WWII tech to one with US Civil War tech, for use in Zeppelins, is cute economics. But my guess is that contragrav will dominate even on low-tech worlds, for the same sort of reason that trucks prevail, motorbike are cheaper than horses, and mobile phones outcompete landline phones and walkie-talkies.

[combatmedic]

Originally Posted by Brett

You might have an issue with aluminium and magnesium for the framing of a dirigible, too. Though perhaps you could use bamboo.

Using an FTL spaceship with antigravity drives to export aero engines from a planet with WWII tech to one with US Civil War tech, for use in Zeppelins, is cute economics. But my guess is that contragrav will dominate even on low-tech worlds, for the same sort of reason that trucks prevail, motorbike are cheaper than horses, and mobile phones outcompete landline phones and walkie-talkies.

Right, makes sense.

NOT ABOUT HELIUM:

Poor, lower TL worlds may provide wealthier high TL worlds with a market for second hand goods and obselete but serviceble models; the last stop on the way to being junked or recycled.

What do you think?

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by combatmedic

True, it may be better to just pay more up front and get second hand contragrav lifters.

Or if you really want helium, a second hand modified fuel skimming cutter you can use to "mine" your own gas giants.

Maybe ships visiting low TL worlds fill balloons with the stuff and hands those out to the primitive local kids...

If they're going to hand out balloons, just fill them with the boiloff from your LHyd tanks. Traveller civilizations have so much cheap hydrogen extraction infrastructure lying around (even pretty crummy ports seem to be able to make thousands of tons of the stuff pretty much on demand), that I can't really see anybody who cares about cost using helium as a lifting gas anyway.

[Anaraxes]

In this context, it's interesting the real-world Earthly helium production is also just a side effect -- of natural gas mining, in our case. Thanks to a geological oddity, until recently the gas was almost all (90%) from the US as well. The cost of helium is really all handling -- separating it from the natural gas, packaging, marketing, shipping. And even the natural gas, while it certainly has significant economic value, is still so cheap that when it occurs in conjunction with oil, the oil rigs often just burn it off rather than capture it for market.

This seems like a close analogy with the situation in the OP. Sure, there's a lot of helium out there. And it's even obtained along with something you'd going after anyway. However, it doesn't follow that it then gets put into widespread use, even though it's really cheap.

GG mining always seemed like something done in situ to me. Either your miner floats in the atmosphere, or it's in low orbit. Either way, in a world with reactionless, fuel-free thrusters, it's easy enough to dump the waste helium back into the GG. Those terribly poor low-tech worlds aren't paying you enough to do anything with it. (All "waste" products, from a certain point of view, are just resources that aren't worth doing anything with.) If you're in orbit, you might not want trace helium screwing up your vacuum, so you might well drop the stuff back into atmo rather than vent it outside. Or not.

The screaming-through-the-atmosphere sort of fuel scooping has its own issues with the fuel refining. The on-board refineries didn't operate fast enough to keep up with the collection rate (as I recall). But they also didn't mention that you were losing 10% of your fuel volume to waste helium. The impurities that get removed aren't significant enough to call for a second pass (for 99% pure; three for 99.9%). Nor were ships with fuel processors designed with 10% extra fuel volume -- though on the deck plans, that was acceptable error in the fuel tankage areas.

On a great many planets, helium could be recovered the same was it is on Earth. No need to go to space for it.

So, I agree that helium is readily available and cheap. But I'm not convinced it's so much so, and that it has so many applications untapped in the real world due to cost, that the abundance will change the face of society. It's the sort of point of usually shows up as an amusing note to make one planet distinctive amongst the library data. "Hyperion is a sizeable moon of the only gas giant in the system, and the site of all the fuel refining. Thanks to the dense atmosphere, inhabitants use the excess helium to employ many lighter-than-air cargo craft." That kind of thing, rather than "the sector economy depends on mass redistribution of helium which is vital to the transportation networks of a hundred planets".

And not to gloss over the "untapped applications" bit -- even if you have unlimited quantities of helium for free, what's it really good for? There's only so many things you can do with a noble gas.

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by combatmedic

Right, makes sense.

NOT ABOUT HELIUM:

Poor, lower TL worlds may provide wealthier high TL worlds with a market for second hand goods and obselete but serviceble models; the last stop on the way to being junked or recycled.

What do you think?

Yes, I think that's likely, especially as (I seem to recall) interstellar shipping in Traveller isn't all that expensive.

Back before the economic reforms of the Hawke-Keating government in the mid-Eighties, Australia had one of the oldest car fleets in the world. The reason was that we had enormous tariffs on all imported cars, which meant consumers were as reluctant to replace a car as if they were Cuban, whereas our roads weren't so bad as to beat cars to bits as happens in most countries in Africa. At that time there was a thriving industry in importing second-hand and rebuilt car motors from Japan to put into elderly cars in Australia.

Another interesting phenomenon that you'll see on mid-tech worlds is like your example with the aero engines. Even if that particular example is undone by the superior performance of contra-grav, the phenomenon of a TL ~5 planet exporting motors &c to a TL ~4 planet in TL 11 spaceships, those being cheaper, easier to build a truck around, and easier to maintain at TL4 than the TL11 high-tech. (There will be some complicated stuff going on with real exchange rates, and that will make shipping costs more significant than they appear, but Traveller has to have trade to work so poor folk have to be able to afford shipping for the setting to work.

Then you are likely to see an exaggerated form of the phenomenon in which computers are made of chips from South Korea, Japan, the USA, and Germany, displays from Taiwan, and injection-moulded cases from Thailand. No real device of any complexity is going to have a single tech level: it's going to have critical components of very high tech in a heterogeneous matrix of other components made at tech levels appropriate to their sophistication, all the way down to raw materials from an underpopulated and low-tech dump where rare-earths ores are cheap. (Though, with the terribly low planetary populations in Traveller you expect most raw materials to be as cheap as dirt.)

[ak_aramis]

Originally Posted by Brett

Yes, I think that's likely, especially as (I seem to recall) interstellar shipping in Traveller isn't all that expensive.

Given that the Traveller Cr is roughly $3.8... and it costs roughly $1500 to ship a 3Td, 24 metric ton loaded mass, 21 ton cargo mass, 1TEU container between Virginia and Shanghai... that's roughly Cr130 per Td, or Cr19 per metric ton to ship half a world. The Op cost can be as low as $950/TEU.

The Traveller cargo rate (assuming J1, CT OTU pricing, not GURPS $) is Cr1000 per parsec (with an op cost of between 650 and 1040 per ton per parsec, depending upon Bk2 vs Bk 5, size of ship, and fuel costs), or roughly Cr100 per metric ton. (The 10 metric tons per Td is based in TNE, just to be intellectually honest.) At least 5 times the cost.

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by ak_aramis

Given that the Traveller Cr is roughly $3.8... and it costs roughly $1500 to ship a 3Td, 24 metric ton loaded mass, 21 ton cargo mass, 1TEU container between Virginia and Shanghai... that's roughly Cr130 per Td, or Cr19 per metric ton to ship half a world. The Op cost can be as low as $950/TEU.

The Traveller cargo rate (assuming J1, CT OTU pricing, not GURPS $) is Cr1000 per parsec (with an op cost of between 650 and 1040 per ton per parsec, depending upon Bk2 vs Bk 5, size of ship, and fuel costs), or roughly Cr100 per metric ton. (The 10 metric tons per Td is based in TNE, just to be intellectually honest.) At least 5 times the cost.

Yeah, but that's cheap compared with air freight, for example. It's comparable with shipping before containerisation and giant bulk freighters took over. People on low-tech worlds are likely to be able to ship a widget from another world to the starport cheaper than they can bring it a lousy 2,000 km from the downport to their home.

On the other hand, real exchange rate effects are going to sting people earning their livings at TTL 4 and paying freight at TTL11.