• Welcome to the new COTI server. We've moved the Citizens to a new server. Please let us know in the COTI Website issue forum if you find any problems.
  • We, the systems administration staff, apologize for this unexpected outage of the boards. We have resolved the root cause of the problem and there should be no further disruptions.

Quarks for power

Savar

SOC-12
there is a SciFi series starting with the book Into the Looking Glass by John Ringo that talks about free quarks being more powerful then AntiMatter for energy release. I was trying to think of what TL that would be in Travellers 20 or higher ?
 
No real parallel, and TL in Traveller was never really well-defined above 15. I interpret TL15 to be "This is the best we have now", TL16 is "We can do this in theory, but it's real hinky in practice", TL17 is "We can see theory for this in the distance", and anything higher is Clarkian, i.e., indistinguishable from Magic.

If this is the series with Travis Taylor, Doc is pretty good on the science, so I'd rate it as no lower than 17.
 
It is the same series, waiting for the next book.

I know that Antimatter was listed as 17 in t20 but with that view point antimatter might be better at TL16 ?
 
AM, Quarks & Tech Levels

Well, as far as I can tell AM (anti-matter, not to be confused with AM2 of Sten fame :)) is being studied, manufactured and even stored these days on good old Terra. Now truth is we, iIrc, don't have a lot of AM, but CERN or possibly Fermi Lab have or had some AM in storage and that was back when I was a kid. (I can still see the scientist looking over his shoulder and spouting off the number of anti-hydrogen particles they had in storage, it had a six at the beginning, I think it was 6K, close to seven.) Still not enough around to power much, and mostly still used for study.

However, extrapolating from that figure in a few TL, say TL-A+ we should be ready to begin using it as a power source, possibly.

Now since we know that by (OTU) TL-F subatomic particles are used for both communications and warfare. Quarks, which again we can liberate right now, to be used as power source, well, that sounds to me like high teens, for experimental for sure, and possibly even prototype power plants, and even those might require large colliders or some such to either liberate or trap the quarks.

Of course I am not a scientist, I merely play one now and again on the net. YMMV. :)

Hope that helps,
Laterness,
Magnus.
 
AM power is TL17 (MT Ref's Manual, design sequences. T20 Design sequences, too.)

(Values for drives of 14kL+)

TL Description Power Out (MW/kL)
11 Fusion 6
12 Fusion 6
13 Fusion 9
14 Fusion 9
15 Fusion 18
16 Fusion 21
17 Antimatter 500.00
18 Antimatter 1000.00
19 Antimatter 2500.00
20 Antimatter 15000.00
21 Antimatter 50000.00
 
Free quarks would require an incredible amount of handwavium for containment... quark confinement is to the Standard Model of particle physics about what Relativity is to Cosmology.
 
Antimatter is sort of on the line between 16 and 17, given MY interpretation above. It's closer than "We can see the theory in the distance", but it's not quite at the "We can do it in theory but it's hinky in practice" level yet. For now, I'd still call antimatter TL17, and note that our current knowledge of it is essentially at the "We've checked the math, and haven't found any errors yet" level. We can't make it in any sort of useful-for-more-than-research quantities, and we don't have the ability to contain it if we could.
 
Back
Top