Re: Freighter thoughts

At 10:51 PM -0400 4/17/04, <apter@bellsouth.net> wrote:
>my son had the following thoughts about FTL freighters:
>
>A freighter with a jump drive must use 10% of 
>its mass for drive and an aditional 5% of its 
>mass is for a thrust one drive. Plus to make it 
>worse 10% of your mass must be hull. This means 
>that a freighter can at best only devote 75% of 
>its total mass to cargo. Now this seems like a 
>huge ammount but when compared to the 90 or so 
>percent a modern oil tanker or bulk frighter 
>gets it

It'd depend on the type of freighter. There are 
freighters that are designed for fast transit 
with fast hulls and lots of engine plant. Those 
are usually ships that transport perishable cargo 
or cargo with some kind of rush to it. Some 
container ships fall into this category.

Bulk freighters are much higher on the scale of 
cargo to weight of ship with regards to power 
plants.

The nice thing about space craft however is that 
you're not having as much wear and tear on the 
ship. No salt water to rot out the ship in 20 
years.

-- 
--
Ryan Gill	       rmgill@SPAMmindspring.com
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'60 Daimler Ferret '42 Daimler Dingo '42 Humber MkIV (1/3)
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