RE: Steam Powered Starships?

Y'know, Tom, you may have something here - H2O is a lot more common than

LH2 - and I always wondered how many extreme-cold-casualties were 
'acceptable' in Traveller.  'Sir, we've got a fuel leak, and Ensign 
Johnson's shattered.'  Maybe a jump engine is heat-powered - just keep 
pumping live steam by it, or maybe thru a turbine for rotational energy?
 I 
can see the gun stations quickly filling up with 'empties' from the
lasers 
- we'd need big chain hoists for the rounds going from magazine to
weapon. 
 I assume everybody is in vacc suits in combat situations - we're not as

calm about decompression as the Star Trek types.  H2O as reaction
mass/etc. 
 would make those Jovians really important - Europa-types and rings may
be 
mostly water ice.  But I really do like the Orion+Steam concept - 
especially with those shuttles strapped on the sides.  Saw 'Armageddon' 
today - no spoilers, don't worry, but I was envisioning the climactic 
battle between the Humans & Snouts the entire time.  I also need to
write 
up some kinetic bombardment rules for FT/DS2...

Noah
BTW - US Procurement would be more interested if it was high-tech, and a

Bad Idea...

-----Original Message-----
From:	tom.anderson@altavista.net [SMTP:tom.anderson@altavista.net]
Sent:	Monday, July 20, 1998 04:45 PM
To:	FTGZG-L@bolton.ac.uk
Subject:	RE: Steam Powered Starships?

 ---- Noah wrote:
>	Well, I'd want electricity for life support,

some of the life support - pumping air and fluids - could be done with 
steam-powered pumps.

> jump engines

ah, but who says jump engines run off electricity? i have always
pictured 
them as doing something a bit more exotic. not that i'm suggesting
they're 
steam powered.

> navigation systems, running lights,

granted, you will need auxiliary generators to power a multitude of 
critical electrical widgets.

however, who says computers in the future will be electronic? optical 
computers will still need electricity to power the lasers, but
mechanical 
computers could be driven by steam pressure. don't laugh -
nanotechnology 
is essentially mechanics, and there a
re designs for a turbine built from benzene rings ...

> interior cooling (more of a problem than heating -
> ask the MIR crew),

cooling can be done with a mechanism as in a fridge - pumping a suitable

heat-transfer medium; this is done elctrically in fridges, but could be 
done by stream turbine.

> water reclamation & reprocessing,

if you have a steam engine, you tend to carry quite a bit of water
around 
with you, thus reducing the need to reclaim so much of it (admittedly, 
reaction-mass water might not be of drinking quality, so procesing would
be 
needed).

> those multi-megajoule
> particle beams we all know and love, etc.

again, are these necessarily electric? what about ds2-style DFFGs, which

(IIRC) use self-contained rounds, or lasers based on disposable chemical

lasing cells, a bit like excimers. the cells might be semidisposable -
load 
them, fire them, collect the empt
ies and return to an arms plant for recharging (perhaps the recharging 
process needs complex chemical processes not feasible on starships).

> When you take damage on a ship
> with lots of electrics, you'll have shorts and hot wires occasionally.
>  With steam, you've got 300+ degree-Centigrade atmospheres of pressure
-
> even if a compartment is not open to space, this guarantees
casualties.

unless your crew are in vacc suits, which is a fairly sensible
precaution 
in deep-space combat: if you anticipate hull breaches, then you will
need 
vacc suits anyway. plus, you get cool damage effects ("sir! we have
twelve 
hull breaches, eighteen pipe fra
ctures and steam on all decks!").

>  Yuck.  And if you're running a 100 million degree-Kelvin fusion
plant,
> most other safety problems will pale by comparison.

i remember reading that one of the reasons why (currently anticipated) 
fusion plants are so safe is that the density of the plasma is so low
that 
it has a tiny thermal mass, so when it hits the reactor wall, it cools
down 
to ambient temperature and the wa
ll hardly changes temperature at all. not *quite* sure about that,
though.

> Not to say that they
> wouldn't be concerned, but other stuff (liquid hydrogen, and I think a
> carbon-diamond-type ultrafine dust) is apparently much better reaction
> mass.

gah! don't you believe it. ignore those other r-masses: buy Anderson's 
Patent hydrogen oxide reaction mass! :-) (although that smiley is
somewhat 
redundant)

seriously, though, those are both going to be a lot more expensive and 
harder to work with. i don;t think LH2 is going to be better at all, 
although i can believe carbon might be (so we will need coalers after
all - 
but for reaction mass, not fuel! :-).

> The manuver drive in 'Footfall' was an Orion-type nuclear pulse drive
-

yeah, yeah, i know how an orion works! i was flying those things when i
was 
in short trousers (i had a simulator for an orion-type starship on an
old 
mac though it always used to lock up when you hit 2/3 lightspeed - this
may 
have been relativity or just
bad code ...)!

>  The attidtude drives were steam vents - there were large ice/water
tanks 
> in the ship, and heat from the thrust plate was collected and used to 
heat
> the water to provide thrust to change attitude.

that's what i meant by maneuver drive - sorry, i wasn't clear there;
think 
star trek - "ahead, maneuevering thrusters only, mr sulu"

all in all, even if steam-powered ships are decidely low-tech and a Bad 
Idea (nobody tell the US procurement people! :-), they have a certain 
appeal lost to backgrounds with neat and tidy ST:TNG-style neat-o-matic 
technology.

> still waiting for 'Footfall' to be made into a movie - sort of 
'Armageddon'
> plus wierd alien invaders.

aren't we all!

Tom