Quote:
Originally Posted by Anthony
Um... no, it wasn't. Early rules had things like rules for using your drive exhaust as a weapon(it counted as a plasma/fusion type weapon and was hilariously broken), the fuel consumption rules in Beltstrike (exhaust velocity somewhere around 10c IIRC), and the solar powered jump drives in the Annic Nova.
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Hence that the fuel wasn't just for fusion. Aside from calling the manoeuvre drives 'fusion drives' in that rules in HG 1980, the early rules are very vague. Power for housekeeping and the 'manoeuvre drives' is provided by a 'power plant', which takes in 'fuel' (ideally hydrogen, but which could just be water) to do this. FTL travel is done using a 'Jump Drive', which also just consumes 'fuel'. How these devices use the fuel to produce power or jumps is not explained (wisely, IMO).
There's a mention of fuel being consumed for manoeuvres in Book 2 (1977), which is gone from the 1981 version (and never mentioned in HG) in favour of the simple 'N tons of fuel per month'.
Later additions started more strictly defining things, which is where we get such dubious things as fairly small fusion reactors consuming tons of hydrogen every month, with the text allowing people to interpret that as using all of it for fusion reactions.