TL21 "Crude Energy Sink"

[robject]

Referee's Companion; the tech chart has a "Crude Energy Sink" at TL21.

Is there any other reference to this technology in the entire Traveller corpus? Can anyone shed some light on the subject, please?

 

[inexorabletash]

The thing which pops into my head is the energy sink needed for teleportation, mentioned in Adventure 12: Secret of the Ancients page 38, as a hackaround for the conservation of energy problems with teleporting.

"In circumvention, another method is required - it can be handled through the use of an energy sink." "An energy sink is a large mass to which excess energy can be sent, or from which energy can be taken to make up a lack. Several hundred tons is sufficient, but the more mass available, the better."

Grandfather's pocket universes use spare planets as energy sinks.

I'd imagine that a TL21 "crude energy sink" is something like a mountain-sized mass in a portable hole, which serves as the energy sink for devices like the Oynssork (personal shield/disintegrator AM5).

 

[TheEngineer]

So, just a kind of battery

 

[atpollard]

Originally posted by TheEngineer:
So, just a kind of battery

But a really powerful battery.

 

[TheEngineer]

Maybe a good thing for my energy sucking Sony digicam....

 

[atpollard]

I said it was a really powerful battery ...
... not an ALL POWERFUL battery!

Nothing can feed the energy maw of a Sony digicam.

 

[robject]

Ah, thank you Joshua. I should have checked out Adventure 12.

So, it's a massive storage bank, in this case embedded in a pocket universe.

The method for transferring energy to and from this sink is, presumably, portal technology. Although, jump capacitors could be considered very small energy sinks, couldn't they?

 

[Whipsnade]

Originally posted by TheEngineer:
So, just a kind of battery

Eng,

Not exactly. You can 'shunt' energy to and from the mass, but the storage angle isn't exactly efficient. (Although efficiency isn't a real issue if the mass is huge.)

Much of A:12's teleportation background follows Larry Niven's ideas from a series of short stories he wrote in the 1970s. (These were not part of his future history with the Kzin etc. although some of the teleporation ideas crossed in that work.) The stories included one about a project to save a STL mission to Alpha Centauri. Another was about 'flash riots' and a club of professional thieves who looted during them.

In one of the stories Niven describes a huge mass of something, clad in a polymer, and floating in Lake Michigan. That mass is the energy sink for the teleportation network in North America. It generally just sits there, constantly heating and cooling by a few fractions of a degree 24/7/365, but a character in the short story is lucky enough to see it 'lurch' when a huge 'payload' is teleported somewhere into space.

You can shunt oodles of megawatts to the sink but it doesn't mean you can 'withdraw' exactly what you 'deposited' or even anything close to exactly what you 'deposited'. It's in this way that the device acts as a sink and not a battery. It's a matter of degree and not kind, if you get my meaning.


Have fun,
Bill

 

[TheEngineer]

Hi Bill !

Guess I don't rreally get it...(its pretty early in the morning).
What do you mean with "storage angle" ?

Regards,

TE

 

[Whipsnade]

Originally posted by TheEngineer:
What do you mean with "storage angle" ?

TE,

I mean that you don't get back precisely what you put in. (We also need to remember that Robject was asking about a 'crude' energy sink and not the near-perfect magical ones the Ancients presumably had/have.)

The 'crude' energy sink is straight from CT's SotA and it is an explicit part of the teleportation system(s) described there. Because SotA used many of Larry Niven's teleportation ideas I described the teleportation system energy sink in Niven's short stories. So, what did that sink do in the stories? Well, teleportation has to worry about the differences in momentum and potential energy between entry and exits points.

A planet is a spinning globe. If you move closer to both poles and your momentum changes; obejcts at the equator are moving much faster than objects on either pole. If you don't find a way to balance momentum between your entry and exit points, you're going to either slam into the back of the teleport booth or be ejected from it at a high speed. Niven's big Mass o' Whatever floating in Lake Michigan acts as a momentum 'sink'. When teleporting closer to a pole, you shunt your 'extra' momentum to it. When teleporting closer to the equator, you 'borrow' the momentum you need from it.

Altitude is also a problem. The 'higher' you are in a gravity field, the more potential energy you have. If you teleport 'down' in altitude, you'll need to shed that potential energy or you'll heat up. Conversely, if you teleport 'up', you'll need to gain energy from some source or you'll cool down. In this case, Niven's big Mass o' Whatever floating in Lake Michigan acts as a thermal 'sink'. You borrow or shunt away the energy in question.

Now, we need to ask how efficient this sink is. Because its 'crude', I feel safe in saying it is not very efficient at all.

Take a regular electrical battery. When you charge it, you must put more energy into it then you will later be able to draw from it. Some of the energy is lost in various ways. You also lose energy when you draw energy from a battery too; look at how your laptop heats up as you use it. Some of the 'electricity' in the battery doesn't come back out as ‘electricity’; it comes back as 'heat' instead.

The crude energy sink mentioned in SotA should have similar limitations. You can shunt various types of energy to it, but you’re not going to get back exactly what you put into it or in the same form that you put it in either.


Have fun,
Bill

 

[robject]

Excellent analysis Bill. Thank you.