no fusion power Traveller

[infojunky]

OTOH, in 2300AD this same non widespread fusion power makes its use more limited. Lasers are 1-2 Mw in power, not the 250 Mw ones in Traveller, and the total ship's PP output uses to be in the range of few Mw (10 Mw it's quite a lot in 2300AD), not in the Gw (or even Tw) that Traveller uses to have.

That was close to the point I was making.

I suspect that some form of Solid-state stand plant would be a common sight in remote outposts. I also think that a similar plant would be part of a lot of ship's power systems providing a core base level of power, with Fuel Cells and MHD turbines providing peak power. But Strongly suspect that arrangement wouldn't be used on interface craft.

 

[mike wightman]

And T5700...

 

[Condottiere]

There appears to be no advanced fission reactor.

Maybe Thorium?

Fusion is just great cost benefit.

 

[Straybow]

I demonstrated somewhere that the energy level per dT of H2 is almost exactly equal to the D-D fusion yield of the natural deuterium fraction. Quite a coincidence.



Really, a decent gas core fission reactor would do just as well, and all that H2 is just there to make plasma for the jump field.

 

[mike wightman]

The jump field requires no plasma

Going back to the OP:

What would a setting without fusion power look like? No sustained, useful /economically viable fusion reactions outside stars.

How far into the future do you postulate this setting? A few decades, a few centuries (T2300, the Expanse), a few millennia (the 3I OTU)?

In this variant universe where fusion power plants can never be made to work or can only exist as huge facilities then how you handwave FTL travel may or may not resemble the CT jump drive, the T2300 stutterwarp, a hyperdrive, a warp drive, a stargate network, pretty much whatever you want.

Fission power plants will be developed to greater efficiencies than we have today and thus should be able to power the FTL system of choice, if not you are stuck with STL methods of slowly building your interstellar empire, with travel times between systems likely measured in decades rather than days.

 

[tjoneslo]

Another option might be Anti-matter power. While most TL progressions assume it's a very advanced technology, a lack of workable fusion power may push engineering efforts into making anti-matter power system more attractive.

Anti-matter is mostly a power storage system. You need to create the anti-matter from your large scale power plant. The most space-opera version is a large solar array on the surface of Mercury.

For use, you could use anti-matter as a kicker for the gas fission plant or a way to make what would normally be a insufficient fusion plant work. Or simply a pure anti-matter reaction to get energy.