Last week, DataPacRat replied to me: > > VXii9, cold gas thruster. > > I do have my UT books, though; how do VXii's stats compare to UT's > hand thrusters?
Hello DataPacRat, I've been away from my books for an extended weekend. Sorry. As a very rough approximation, 1 lb. of hydrogen gives 1 lb. of thrust for 67 seconds. That would give a human in a space suit roughly 3.3 m/s delta-V. The UT38 thruster does 27 m/s. > Someone jotted down some notes on the system, from the same source I'm > taking it, at http://interzone.com/~cheung/Page.dir/pg.mars3.html , > under 'Ecosystem'. The main components are 6 litres (.2 cf) of > water-algae slurry, and a super-critical water oxidizer (SCWO), which > takes the user's waste, cooks it at 480 Celsius and 3500 PSI, and > turns it into harmless feedstock for the algae. So one of the main > limits on the size of this life-support system is how small such an > SCWO can be built at TL9... and whether such a device is larger or > smaller than the 'molecular recycling technology' described for TL11 > life-support. Calling it 3 cf, plus half a cf for miscellaneous bits, > seems plausible - though so would calling it 1 cf. On the other hand, I haven't seen such a system in operation yet. For instance, how easy will it be to extract oxygen and food from that slurry in zero gravity? How will the feedstock mix with the algae? Could things clump? Industrial chemistry is different from test tube experiments, and you don't have an entire process just because each single step would work. Regards, Onno _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
