Weinbaum atomic engines

[ffutures]

Re. space travel in the Weinbaum RPG, I'm going with nuclear engines that give about 0.01-0.02g acceleration in sustained flight, which are the best fit for the travel times mentioned in the stories.

Now obviously this isn't going to be much use for takeoffs and landings, and I can either go with auxilliary engines that have higher power output but can't be run for a sustained time, or with an "emergency / takeoff / landing" setting on the main engines, like using the afterburners on a jet. A lot more power, but it burns through fuel extremely fast, say 200 times as much fuel for 100 times as much thrust. E.g. to get 2g for 10 minutes uses as much fuel as .02g for 2000 minutes, about 33 hours. And 33 hours at 0.02g will take you a LOT further than 10 minutes at 2g.

Does this sound reasonable for game purposes?

Later: To clarify this, my best guess for travel times is a few weeks for Earth-Mars and Earth-Venus, with Saturn to Neptune and beyond just on the edge of the possible. In The Red Peri they imply that Saturn-Pluto (about a billion miles) can be done in three months or possibly less, but they don't give exact times.

Assuming that it'll take three months for the 1 billion mile trip under normal circumstances, that's about 0.01g cruising acceleration /deceleration. Plugging in a range of values gives 1 billion mile trip times of:

0.01g = 93.7 days
0.015g = 76.5
0.02g = 66.3
0.025g = 59.3
0.03g = 54.1

And Earth-Mars times at conjunction of:

0.01g = 20.2 days
0.015g = 16.5
0.02g = 14.3
0.025g = 12.8
0.03g = 11.7

I think I'm going to go with 0.01g for the earlier ships in e.g. A Martian Odyssey, 0.02g to 0.03g for later ships.

Comments

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

Maybe, but I probably won't speculate on that much; given the lack of computers etc. it might take a long time to advance the technology much.

Yeah ... if such a technology did come to pass it would probably be some special crystal inherently channeling the magnetic fields, much like the crystals in the flame-guns can store and discharge immense energies (perhaps through some nuclear process), rather than the way we'd do it (through actively controlling the force fields at electronic/photonic speeds).

As I'm sure you've noticed, there is a potential source of all sorts of weird wonders -- the prehuman civilization or civilizations that attained interplanetary travel. Tweerl's folk, and the Loonies, and maybe more.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Definitely - I've got the Slinkers (which appear to be the same species as the Martian rats) pegged as the Big Bad responsible for wiping out earlier civilizations. Somewhat like the little Moties, perhaps?

I don't want to do too much with prehistoric Tech - Traveller and other games mined this one to death, they'd find another bit of Ancient tech whenever it suited the plot, and it got to be really annoying.

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

Definitely - I've got the Slinkers (which appear to be the same species as the Martian rats) pegged as the Big Bad responsible for wiping out earlier civilizations. Somewhat like the little Moties, perhaps?

Hmm ... you're right, to the point that I wonder if Niven & Pournelle were inspired to this by Weinbaum?

Continuing the Motie Watchmaker analogy, what if the Slinkers were either a tool (or caste) of something worse, or they metastasize into something worse when they reach some critical level of technology or population density?

I don't want to do too much with prehistoric Tech - Traveller and other games mined this one to death, they'd find another bit of Ancient tech whenever it suited the plot, and it got to be really annoying.

True. Though it is in the pulp tradition :)

The key is, I think, to not let it overshadow the story of the "present-day" human civilization.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

I'm actually writing a sidebar on Martians tonight (there will be a lot more later in the book), which says that they are believed to have used chemical rockets - Weinbaum says that they have plantlike features, so it doesn't seem impossible that they took years rather than months per flight, spending most of the time rooted.