An entry with a Bang! - A BT roundrobin III

On the use of sails, what we know from the sourcebooks:

1) it is explicitly stated as being implemented in order to save fuel
2) charging the drive from the reactor is explicitly stated to require multiple tons of fuel expended.

What we do not know is WHY charging the drive from the reactor requires such a high fuel expenditure, and without evidence to the contrary we must assume that there is a good reason for it.

Obviously it is the Jumpship captains sticking it to Big Hydrogen.

After check rules and number of webpage there is one common element when come to charge a jump drive.

“An alternative to the Jump Sail is to recharge the drive with the ship's power plant, but the delicate machinery of the K-F drive does not tolerate such treatment well.”

Some points

1. Now the fluff call the jump core a coil most of the time (we could be look at a Tesla coil ;7), and any one with a background with electrical system will know that they can hold a charge for some time so the “recharge time” may also have “discharge time” as well.

2. There also the point the write of the rules may have a background with cars and were thinking of car ignition coils when write the rules.

3. The also the point that the coils used in RW gauss guns (and other fast discharge/charge coils) get hot spots when charging/discharging that can cause damage to the coils.

So it could be a case that the K-F drive is a just hanger queen, this should not stop cutting the charge time down CEarth computers would give greater control but you may need to build the control system into the jump core like the LF Battery.

Has anyone seen the trailers for the new Steel Battalion game?

If nothing else, I'm pretty sure someone on C-Earth will try building one of those mecha as a Hobby.

Im pretty sure that if nothing else all GDI jumpships should be able to charge their core in only 5 days versus 175 hours (7.3 days). And that any homebuilt jumpships should have the jumpsail as an 'optional accessory'. Since its pretty much completely unnecessary and is just a needless expense, a tonnage waster, and a source of money lost to maintenance. Sure it saves on hydrogen, but it only saves a couple kilos of it, and hydrogen is literally the most abundant element in the universe. Hell, cutting back the number of days from 7.3 to 5 that you have to keep the station keeping drive active saves you 22.3 tons of hydrogen. Compared to the meager consumption of a few kilograms to charge from the reactor... assuming 10kg consumption you will literally save 2,200+ times as much fuel per jump as you lose from charging by a reactor.

The wasted fuel and money from the operation of a jumpsail instead of the onboard reactor is astounding.

Oh, and does anyone remember how much a jumpsail masses at? i can't remember.

The sarna.net entry on jump sails indicates that: "A Jump Sail is a huge, totally black solar collector deployed by JumpShips. The sails are used to recharge the Kearny-Fuchida Drive on a JumpShip, which enables the JumpShip to traverse interstellar space in 30 light-year "jumps"."

Perhaps the term "solar collector" means that, rather than absorbing solar radiation, the sail collects some form of esoteric solar particle that acts as a catalyst for the operation of a K-F drive. If so, then charging the drive with these particles directly from the ship's reactor may be horribly inefficient, thus explaining the reliance on sails.

Also, didn't someone mention earlier in the thread that you can use a ship's engines to speed up sail charging? Given that spaceship engines in the BattleTech universe seem to be absurdly (and potentially impossibly) powerful, this lends credence to the possibility that the engines are pumping out some really weird energy/particles. Perhaps this is the same type of energy/particle as produced by a star.

No its canon that their is no exotic particles or energy. Everything is run off of electricity. Which makes solar sails a dump idea.

And we also really need a BT roundrobin IV. This page has gone on waaayyy too long. Its impossible to find anything at all in it.

In which case, the smaller your jump core is, the faster it will safely cool down to the point that you can jump again.

Just put the Dolphin Piece in the story.

Does that obnoxious congratulations banner come up every time you post to the story thread or just the first? I've heard of The Observer, but who are Kier and Cool Guy?

How much effort goes into configuring a neuro-helmet for a person to use a 'new' mech?

Please include a link to any sources you cite.

For instance:

Because of the frequent use of fusion engines to "quick charge" the KF drive, it is sometimes not understood that fusion engines can recharge the KF drive safely. However, fusion engines can offer a safe charge if they take more than 176 hours to do so.

Your quote is incompatible with the observed properties of jumpdrives and even if your quote is taken as gospel what you describe is a hardware problem. The delicate machinery does not like it. There is no reason to assume that any amount of computing would allow more current to be put through a machine that is not physically designed to take it and, even if it did, there is no reason to assume that C-Earth would have an advantage. C-Earth has an advantage in sheer, blazing, serial processing and miniaturization, BT is a match or better for total processing power and far more advanced in fuzzy logic and parallel computing. Since the checks can be made by humans it is far more likely that they have to do with the sort of operations that favor BT computers rather than raw serial computation. The fact that no one in the entire history of BT has done this strongly implies that C-Earth is going to be even less able to.

C-Earth has cannon technological advantages in serial processing, miniaturization, and optics. The only thing remotely applicable is computing, and since the problems involved are clearly capable of being handled by a human they must not involve the sort of footrash serial processing that C-Earth has an advantage in.

Save yourself some time, you will not find a cannon piece of evidence that explains the jumpdrive's workings without needing a fannon interpretation that could cut either way because there isn't one because even the line developers themselves don't know how it works because all they are concerned with is what it does. You can't sell the interpretation that cuts C-Earth's way because every one ever presented completely shreds the entire BT universe and the plausibility of the scenario. You can take the same tack and just say "this is what C-Earth will invent, this is what it does" and sell it on only its positive effects on the narrative without bothering to justify it mechanically exactly as the original authors did with FTL itself, except that there are no positive effects on the narrative to handing C-Earth another gift from heaven completly divorced from any merit or worthyness on their part.

Stop, for the love of god just stop trying to find a way for C-Earth to glance at the most complicated piece of machinery ever invented, based on physics they do not understand and are inherently incompatible with the ones they do, and, with trivial effort, improve it several times over what a millennium of galaxy spanning history and their own future selves were able to do.

Unless the culture who's drive technology achieves fuel efficiencies that are physically impossible aren't simply wasting fuel for the hell of it. Once again, every wonky piece of physics in the BT universe revolves around protium fusion, from the black box to the mech gyro inertia sink to the jumpdrive, perhaps there's more to the fusion reaction in the case than simply generating electricity.

5 days is reasonable, and already done in cannon. It would take a bit of authorial fiat to get around the 100,000 ton minimum size of charge station batteries but that is relatively minuscule and with those cannon batteries and preprocessing equipment on board every jump could be the same 5 day charge time as a hard link to a charge station.

Of course, no one likes this, because there's no reason for C-Earth to be the ones to develop it first and many why they would not be. The vastly greater energy densities of BT storage for one, the incredible experience with the technologies for another, the access many working examples for a third, the boom in research over OTL for a fourth, and the existence of a Secret Shipyard Research facility for a fifth.

If getting faster charge times in is so very vital there is an easy way to do it that will not strain anything and has been set up for months, but it won't happen because it doesn't give everyone's favorite protagonists another notch on the Mary Sue meter.

Yes yes yes! Good man.

No, it's cannon that the nature of the charge stored in the core is electrical. That does not mean that it is not shaped by wonky physics that can only be achieved through protium fusion reactions. Again, the line developers have been deliberately vague, the only way to reach a conclusion is the make a speculative interpretation that could go either way. There being more to the fusion reactions used than simply generating electricity is more plausible than the idea that the same people who can push a hundred thousand tons halfway across a solar system in a week with a few kilos of hydrogen and pull enough power off of their reactors for the ridiculously energy dense naval weaponry of BT could not achieve a reasonable efficiency in this single specific example standing in contradiction of all others.

Ryss we all try to work out this problem on this thread, if you can not help then just go way all you done to date is said the RAW is god and we not change them.

There is no problem. You are declaring the jump times a problem to be fixed instead of a defining feature of the setting based upon self-contained handwaving designed to produce the scenario desired by the original writers, but that is only your decision. It is absurd that an ICE engine weigh a dozen times current earth equivalents because we know the rules that they should be working under and can work out what they should be capable of. This is not the case for the jumpships, which by admission of the authors, do not follow existing physics. You do not know the rules they work under in universe, you can only have a personal opinion, so stop pretending that you are going to find some conclusions are inevitable and incontrovertible.

Since there is only a problem in your own head based upon your own assumptions and your own speculation to suit your own desires it's hardly surprising that I am not helping.

You're going to have to expand your acronym, I don't remember calling anything god.

Kier is the owner of the server and the forum, Cool Guy and Observer are Mods/Admins.

Leaving for a lodge convention (sigh), so I'll just point out something, then return Sunday night.

(Most of) the people of the Inner Sphere appear to have come from Rock Ridge. Yeah. Y'know, from the movie Blazing Saddles?

And

After all, we've done it ourselves. The Inca, having the wheel and never using it. The Romans, an engineering people, yet they never industrialized. China - so MANY inventions, yet happy to not only stay with the status quo, at times they actively hunted down and killed innovators in the name of keeping the status quo... status quo. Egypt, where avoiding social change was actually elevated to a state religion.

So many cases of rampant head-up-assery in history.

We - you and I - just happen to be in a brief moment in history where people are enjoying change instead of being terrified of it.

Whereas Battletech is set in a reality where people seem to be exhausted after centuries of war, and fear all change, even benevolent change.

Well, gotta get up at 4am. See you Sunday night. Sooner if the hotel has WiFi.

Ed.

And people do realize that we're moving out of this thread (#III) and into the new one (#IV) right?