On Wed, Feb 22, 2012 at 3:18 AM, Onno Meyer <[email protected]> wrote: > 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.
No worries, and I hope you enjoyed your Mardi Gras. :) > 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. That's a pretty significant difference; do either of those numbers come closer than the other to passing a reality check? >> 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. I think we're about at the level of just picking some numbers and going with it, similar to saying that a Farnsworth-Bussard fusor can be built with a particular output or not. On a related note, due to some typically offbeat conversation, one new item has been suggested being installed - something resembling an emergency rescue-bubble, but since the character doesn't actually expect to ever need to use it, and since said character has a somewhat quirky sense of humor, having it placed inside the 'taur-prosthetic's belly area, to be the subject of a number of jokes and perhaps a quick short story. Thank you for your time, -- DataPacRat lu .iacu'i ma krinu lo du'u .ei mi krici la'e di'u li'u traji lo ka vajni fo lo preti _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
