Orbital refineries

[Scarecrow]

I was reading the Travellers comic strip from White Dwarf the other day and at one point they stop off at a gas giant to refuel. However, instead of the Osprey II skimming the giant's atmosphere, they stop at an orbital refinery and "gas station" to refuel. It's a gag, of course, but it makes perfect sense. Systems would surely have facilites around their local giant offering refined fuel. It'd be a massive income for the local system. Has such a thing been covered anywhere in canon?

Crow

 

[kafka47]

Well, in the first folio adventure for Megatraveller - Assignment: Vigilante, it mentions about ships that dive into Gas Giants for fuel. Presumably, bringing the fuel back to the mainworld for its energy needs and some of course could be sold to commercial fuelling depots. However, most ships in Traveller are equipped with fuel scoops IMTU, so why pay for something you can get for free. (yes, it is unrefined...and precious few of the ships IMTU, save military & scout have filters)...but that is what gives the jump drive the kick.

I seem to recall a T20 reference somewhere...but cannot place it.

Secondly, in quasi-canon, there is Swycaffer's novel (Become the hunted) that deals with an alleged terrorist who will hijack a fuel liner and crash it into a major city if his demands are not met.

 

[Scarecrow]

I guess if you don't have fuel scoops and/or streamlining it helps. Also a refinery's fuel processors are likely to be more thorough and cleaner than the 'nice-try' processors on board a starship. Also, aren't fuel scoops for frontier refuelling? Sure you can dip in and help yourself but why go to the effort and risk wear and tear on your ship in the atmosphere of a gas giant when for just a few creds, you can let someone else do it instead.

Crow

 

[Pickles]

Originally posted by Scarecrow:
Has such a thing been covered anywhere in canon?

The Travellers are canon.

Good point, though. I can't imagine any advanced and probably very bureaucratic government in the imperium not controlling access to their gas giant.

 

[mbrinkhues]

Kafka: The "Wildcatters" with their "Roughneck" fuel harvesters (TL6, Combustion Engine P-Plant, High Performance Rocket with about 1.5g accel) gather "complex hydrocarbons" from the gas giant. It uses lift-support from a hydrogen ballonet and then hunts for "propane rain" and takes on 650kl of the stuff. Funny beasts

 

[mike wightman]

Wasn't there a Traveller adventure on an orbital refinery in an old White Dwarf...

 

[Pickles]

With a tentacly native life form in the maintenance crawlspaces ...

 

[Liam Devlin]

Orbital Facilities, and their construction came out in JTAS long ago.
Requirements:

Worlds with C-class ports or better

Tech Level 8+

with populations of 5+
could build them, iirc.

Refineries, factories, food & medicine production, etc..whatever you wish to fill them with.

 

[Liam Devlin]

Originally posted by Michael Brinkhues:
Kafka: The "Wildcatters" with their "Roughneck" fuel harvesters (TL6, Combustion Engine P-Plant, High Performance Rocket with about 1.5g accel) gather "complex hydrocarbons" from the gas giant. It uses lift-support from a hydrogen ballonet and then hunts for "propane rain" and takes on 650kl of the stuff. Funny beasts

MT/ Hard Times , and The MT adventure Arrival Vengeance also mention these pre-gravitic spacecraft.

Built at TL7, they could be sustained with TL5 technology. Primarily the post Black War era market for them were worlds that had lost their orbital and system facilities, iirc.

 

[Klaus]

Surely the OTU is big enough for anything to happen somewhere.

And orbiting fuel stations are cool.

The thing that gets me about gas-diving (which is also cool) is the time it takes to get from the gas giant to the main world (on either leg, and assuming the ship wants to visit the spaceport). Surely on a commercial vessel (and given the trading rules) this time is worth far, far more than the price of fuel at the port.

There is also the rather magical nature of fuel scoops, which seem to have no mass or volume, and seem to be involved (or not, please advise) with the rather intriguing way the j-drive can crack water for H2 right before doing whatever it does with it but not do it to the fuel mid-flight (as it would constitute filtering).

Slightly off-topic, but wouldn't it be preferable to keep your fuel as water when in the tanks, with no need for cryogenics and no risk of serious explosion if there's a fuel leak into the crew compartment, and where volume rather than mass is the key limiter?

 

[RandyT0001]

Originally posted by Klaus:
Slightly off-topic, but wouldn't it be preferable to keep your fuel as water when in the tanks, with no need for cryogenics and no risk of serious explosion if there's a fuel leak into the crew compartment, and where volume rather than mass is the key limiter?

Might be better to keep your hydrogen in hydrocarbons like petroleum, especially the longer chains that make up tar. You need some fuel, you heat up the tar to liquifiy it, add a catalyst to break the chains down some, pipe it into the purifier and out comes the hydrogen. Slightly more risk than water but a much higher concentration of hydrogen.

 

[Klaus]

I do like the idea of topping up your tanks at your local gas station.

Water's a bit more conveniently scattered about than petrol though.

It's a shame none of the ship design concepts can bear close scrutiny.

 

[RandyT0001]

Klaus, Jupiter is made up of about 2% methane. I suspect that there, typically, is more methane, a single carbon atom and four hydrogen atoms in a hydrocarbon, in gas giants than water. Jupiter is about 90% free hydrogen in it's upper atmosphere. If you skimmed it and wanted to store it as water where do you get the oxygen from? Methane can be combined into long string hydrocarbons with the right catalysts and energy, and you should have enough energy on a fusion power orbital refinery.

A one million dton orbital refinery could have about 800,000-900,000 dtons of fuel to sell. Maybe it's just better to store it as liquid hydrogen.

 

[Malenfant]

Well, you can compress hydrogen to liquid form (or maybe even solid or solid metallic form if you can get the pressures/temps high enough) too. Wouldn't you be able to get a bigger 'hydrogen density' that way than by mucking around with methane or hydrocarbons (which are also rather messy to deal with)?

 

[RandyT0001]

Now, Malenfant, you know that Solar Shell and/or System Exxon is going to do whatever it takes to maintain their monopoly on fuel.

I assuming that the Imperium can't get the pressures/temps combination high enough to get solid/metallic hydrogen in a readily storable state. Marc and company probably didn't know about solid/metallic H2 when Traveller was first designed back in the '70's and it seems Traveller has maintained that limit throughout. But yes solid/metallic H2 would be best if possible.

 

[parmasson]

Orbital refineries would be the logical choice for toll booths as well. Want to skim? Pay a toll. The squadron of SDBs with a network of satellites watching for the telltale signs of illegal skimmers. Makes an adventure out of refueling. Perfect chance for those Legal, Bribery and Admin skills to do their thing.

 

[Ran Targas]

^ As large as gas giants are, it would be pretty difficult to charge tolls to skim them. Unless the toll keepers had 360x360 sensor coverage of the entire planet and the ability to police it, it would be relatively easy to avoid detection or prosecution.

But all of this doesn't apply to law abiding citizens, like most of our fellow players

 

[Pickles]

I don't know, a few spy satellites in very high orbit (or on a few of the moons) could keep a pretty close eye on approaching ships. After all, there's not much to hide behind in space. And there is no shortage of moonlets for SDB bases.

It might be possible to evade interception by patrols, but they'd probably know you were doing it. Then we're into falsifying transponder signals to avoid prosecution in the future.

 

[KrisComet]

heheh Traveller is a game, a lot of what marc and his team put into the original game was their house rules and problem solving to make the game playable... keep in mind, it is designed for a group to hang out together and have fun, now if you group has really strong science types, then you could accept the rules as they are or tweak them to make them more realistic...

I'm always willing to see modified rules, I myself introduced a complex personal combat system in my MTU. It lets ppl feel the combat around them... (doh' off target)

Simply, I can think of many reasons why ppl would use the orbital refineries over diving in, they care about their ship. Scotty from the Enterprise would kick ur arse if u poured crap into his ship. (i know different propellants and energy sources).

Case in point, I drive a V8 mustang, if I pull up to a gas station and it doesn't have premium, even at today's prices, I'll go to the next station.

Liam's post makes sense, off course there would be worlds who would want to control their systems resources but, they have to be equipped to do it.

I like this thread,.... good on the donator.

kris

 

[Pickles]

Heh, true, Starflash, that is of course the best reason for buying from the refinery. Anyway, it can't be fun flying a semi-streamlined brick through the upper atmosphere of a gas giant.

Originally posted by Scarecrow:
I was reading the Travellers comic strip from White Dwarf the other day ...

Were you reading the originals, or the full-colour online version?