Accumulators: A concept for GURPS Spaceships

[starslayer]

I agree with your basic concept; however.

Energy storage capacity and discharge rate are pretty much inversely proportional. Capacitors discharge quickly (but can't store a lot) and batteries store a lot (but can't discharge quickly).

A superconducting loop is a capacitor, not a battery.

With that said power cells which start appearing at TL9+ seem to have solved this issue, having discharge rates fast enough for rapid fire lasers and energy capacity in excess of any modern battery while only being trivially heavier.

Massive storage of power and rapid discharge at the rate required for energy weapons, etc, will be at such high levels of power that you will be generating as much if not more detectable gauss energy and radio emissions, so I would dispose any notes about it being more stealthy to use the power reserve.

[YankeeGamer]

I was trying to keep it simple, without needing to distinguish between types of storage. (Call it ultra-tech equipment.)

Using the Accumulators to fire won't be stealthy, but they have no emissions until the gun is fired, keeping the emissions low until that first blast from a spinal gun. Reactors will radiate when idling, as long as something is reacting--they don't really have an "instant on" function.

They're still useful for a hyperdrive that needs a massive jolt to enter hyperspace, or ships that don't usually need lots of power, but when they need it they need it NOW, or need LOTS for a few minutes.

I'm sure that cloaking will be much more effective if there's no reactor running, too.

[starslayer]

Originally Posted by YankeeGamer

I was trying to keep it simple, without needing to distinguish between types of storage. (Call it ultra-tech equipment.)

Using the Accumulators to fire won't be stealthy, but they have no emissions until the gun is fired, keeping the emissions low until that first blast from a spinal gun. Reactors will radiate when idling, as long as something is reacting--they don't really have an "instant on" function.

They're still useful for a hyperdrive that needs a massive jolt to enter hyperspace, or ships that don't usually need lots of power, but when they need it they need it NOW, or need LOTS for a few minutes.

I'm sure that cloaking will be much more effective if there's no reactor running, too.

If the reactor can be turned on and off at will (which is not the case for any current atomic reactor), then it will have no problem turning down to enter 'stealth mode' and only providing the bare requirements for life-support and the cloaking device while reducing its emissions to near-nil in the process (unless the stealth system is particularly hungry, but then you go back to the stored energy releasing so much gauss and EM that its a beacon in and of itself)

[YankeeGamer]

Originally Posted by starslayer

If the reactor can be turned on and off at will (which is not the case for any current atomic reactor), then it will have no problem turning down to enter 'stealth mode' and only providing the bare requirements for life-support and the cloaking device while reducing its emissions to near-nil in the process (unless the stealth system is particularly hungry, but then you go back to the stored energy releasing so much gauss and EM that its a beacon in and of itself)

I'm assuming that a reactor takes time to power up, so Instant On is very valuable.

[gruundehn]

From my experience as an electronics tech, capacitors can hold a charge only for a small time as they will "bleed" their charge off continually. Also, find yourself a decent basic electronics principles book and notice just how big a capacitor has to be to hold a decent charge. I do not think "Doc" Smith ever mentioned just how big his spaceships were but unless the Lensmen found a way to modify the laws of physics as we presently understand them, the Dauntless would be close to the size of our Moon and most of the interior space would be capacitors in order to power effective weapons.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by gruundehn

. I do not think "Doc" Smith ever mentioned just how big his spaceships were but unless the Lensmen found a way to modify the laws of physics as we presently understand them, the Dauntless would be close to the size of our Moon and most of the interior space would be capacitors in order to power effective weapons.

Doc did indeed modify the laws of physics as we understand them. That was one of the things that made him a Master of Superscience!

The one time specific real world power numbers were mentioned was early in Triplanetary and the power cell of a blaster pistol was exploding and releasing all the many kw/hours it held. It was much more energy than even a Gurps 3e superscience power cell.

No specific numbers on ship size but the Dauntless was on the order of hundreds of yards long. It's weapons were not powered by accumulators but rather by directly tapping into cosmic energy.

There were accumulators in Spacehounds of IPC but superscience was rife in that book too.

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

Doc did indeed modify the laws of physics as we understand them. That was one of the things that made him a Master of Superscience!

The one time specific real world power numbers were mentioned was early in Triplanetary and the power cell of a blaster pistol was exploding and releasing all the many kw/hours it held. It was much more energy than even a Gurps 3e superscience power cell.

No specific numbers on ship size but the Dauntless was on the order of hundreds of yards long. It's weapons were not powered by accumulators but rather by directly tapping into cosmic energy.

It also carried total-conversion reactors, and in this case Smith gave hard numbers. Each mass converter could turn 400 lbs. per hour into useful energy, which means each converter had an output of 4.5 petawatts. When the cosmic energy collectors were running, that was amplified by a factor of 100,000 to 1, so the minimum energy potential of the Dauntless was 454 million terawatts. That's over 2600 times the energy the Earth intercepts from the Sun.

Interestingly, unlike some writers, Smith was not completely unaware of the implications of this kind of power. The Patrol and the Boskonians could and did volatize entire planets, reshape star systems, etc. OTOH, the effects on daily life were limited, and there are some interesting questions about how this kind of power was controlled absent computers and related tech.

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by gruundehn

From my experience as an electronics tech, capacitors can hold a charge only for a small time as they will "bleed" their charge off continually. Also, find yourself a decent basic electronics principles book and notice just how big a capacitor has to be to hold a decent charge. I do not think "Doc" Smith ever mentioned just how big his spaceships were but unless the Lensmen found a way to modify the laws of physics as we presently understand them, the Dauntless would be close to the size of our Moon and most of the interior space would be capacitors in order to power effective weapons.

By the time of the Dauntless, Civilization's technology and physics were both well past our level. Think Vingian singularity level, though without computers.

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2

By the time of the Dauntless, Civilization's technology and physics were both well past our level. Think Vingian singularity level, though without computers.

The Vingean singularity, specifically, is exponential growth of self-modifying code. How does that work without computers?

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by starslayer

If the reactor can be turned on and off at will (which is not the case for any current atomic reactor), then it will have no problem turning down to enter 'stealth mode' and only providing the bare requirements for life-support and the cloaking device while reducing its emissions to near-nil in the process (unless the stealth system is particularly hungry, but then you go back to the stored energy releasing so much gauss and EM that its a beacon in and of itself)

Even if the reactor is just ticking over, it's still likely spitting out either neutrinos or anti-neutrinos.