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Count me in.

Good luck, Mike

I tested them earlier, before I reported the issue, and they didn't work for me. I keep having to look up words in my online dictionary to get the spelling right.

Thanks, Sol.

Either I'm having a senior moment (quite possible) or the site used to have spellchecking in certain places but no longer does. Unfortunately, I can't remember which fields those were.

Has anyone else encountered this?

I discovered an interesting bug related to inline reviews. I received an inline review from someone with no inline comments (he already reviewed the chapter before the crash), but with a closing comment. I received the site's email informing me of the new review, but the only way to access it is by clicking the link in the email. The review does not show up in the Inline Reviews tab, nor at the bottom of the chapter where other reviews are listed, and there's no indication on the home page that I have a new review. Once I delete the email, I won't be able to access it anymore. The site should probably cough up a warning message that there are no inline comments, and it definitely should be visible like any other review.

Thanks
Dirk

That's where filbert flanges and grapple grommets come in.

I suppose I should have actuallly read the article. I totally forgot about the warp reactor. Duh.
https://www.quora.com/The-Starship-Ente … y-possible

Crystalline structure sounds good, but it also sounds too much like dilithium crystals. I don't actually plan to explain anything about atreidite's properties other than to say it can store and release energy as needed. Since I plan (hope?) to move the atreidite out of the stardrive and use it to store and release extra energy for whatever purpose a ship requires, I may no longer need rapid release of energy (tbd). It simply serves to augment the energy provided by the powertron during peak periods of demand such as when a ship goes into battle and needs full shields and fully powered novas and supernovas. The only quirk is that I still need a stardrive to require a delay between jumps for it to work as needed for story purposes. Perhaps it does need to be charged, although at this point, I prefer to use the atreidite as a way to store/release energy to augment available energy for whatever purpose the ship needs extra power. So, either the stardrive needs to be recharged or it needs to cool down between jumps, probably the former.

Based on the descriptions of real powertrons (the name is used for several different products, including backup generator), I'll rename mine to avoid confusion.

Hypercapacitor?

I meant cold fusion or something similar. Regular fusion requires too high a temperature. However, the most important property for my (quasi?)fusion generators is that they produce enough heat that, when coolant runs out (e.g., leaks from a damaged vessel such as a starfighter), the temperature rises sufficiently to cook the human in a starfighter.

I'm going to have to brush up on cold fusion and LENR. LENR drive doesn't make sense, though, since it needs to be a power generator, not a drive. The power generator in small ships/vehicles has to power every system in the ship/vehicle.

Having a power source that powers a powertron adds unnecessary complexity. My powertron is the power generator that probably does not involve fusion, otherwise I could simply call it a fusion reactor. Not sure of the principle behind powertrons, but I don't really care (for now). Whatever it is, it's gotta be big enough to be a useful target on warships for story purposes, and when it blows, it implodes, then explodes, taking the rest of the ship with it. Keep in mind that in two thousand years we'll probably have invented something that goes beyond fusion reactors. Or, maybe it's an advanced fusion reactor. TBD.

Thanks for the feedback.

Since I needed a scarce resource in my story that eventually leads to war over New Bethlehem, I added the mineral atreidite, which functions like a hyperbattery, a type of battery that can release an enormous amount of energy in milliseconds, which is required to power jumps using a stardrive. The quantity of energy and the speed with which it needs to be released rules out simply using a vessel's powertron directly to power a stardrive. The atreidite gets energized from the powertron over a period of many minutes to hours. This has the advantage that military fleets can't simply jump as far as they want in zero time using just a powertron. They usually need multiple jumps, which eventually drains the atreidite's charge, requiring time to recharge. And atreidite can only be recharged so often, which requires the Republic and Imperium to constantly search for more.

Thing is, I had intended to use two kinds of power generators in my ships and flying vehicles. I figured huge ships should have a different power generator than starfighters and Leonardo's taxi, which use fusion. For one thing, the big ships are supposed to implode-explode when a powertron is ruptured in battle. I had therefore envisioned powertrons to be big enough to power warships and big enough to make them an important target in warship-on-warship fighting. The power source in small vehicles can't be that dangerous since the cab gets damaged a lot in Leonardo's chapter, both from enemy fire and his crazy driving. Remember suicidio mode?   There are other examples besides the taxi.

A further wrinkle is that interstellar drones have stardrives, meaning they need something powerful enough to charge their atreidite. If I were to say that a fusion generator could charge atreidite, then all spaceships could presumably be fitted with a stardrive since all ships have either a fusion generator or a powertron. I don't want that, though, since I definitely need ships that don't have a stardrive and, therefore, can't jump.

This is making my head spin. One possibility is that anything interstellar has to have a powertron, anything else can use fusion. But if powertrons are small enough to be used by drones, then what prevents warships from using a similary small powertron to power their own stardrives? And the smaller it is, the easier it is to bury deep inside a warship, as far away as possible from the surface of a ship, where it might rupture from enemy fire. Obviously, I don't want to bury it deep within ships since most of my warship battles rely on the powertron to be breachable (or to at least serve as a target).

Another option is to use fusion OR a powertron to charge a stardrive, but if you want to do interstellar jumps with large ships, then you need bigger stardrives than are needed by interstellar drones. The bigger the stardrive, the more atreidite it needs, and the more power it takes to charge the atreidite. So fusion to charge small stardrives and powertron to charge big ones. Obviously big ships also need much more power just to operate.

And, in order to explain why all spaceships don't have stardrives is that atreidite is scarce. So there are small, intrasystem ships with no stardrives (starfighters, shuttles, etc.) and interstellar ships (ranging from drones up to dreadnoughts) with stardrives powered either by fusion (for the small stuff) or by a powertron (for the big ships).

In case you haven't noticed, that's a lot of complexity, which I hate.

Another approach is to continue use atreidite to store power but incorporate the atreidite directly into the vessel's power generation system, rather than just using it inside the stardrive. So, at all times, ships that need a lot of power very quickly, regardless of the purpose (stardrives, heavy cannons, shields, etc.), store some of their power in their atreidite batteries, using them as a reserve power source for when there is an excess demand for power. Non-interstellar ships still won't have atreidite because it's scarce, so they have no reserve power source to handle spikes in power needs such as required to power a stardrive. They simply have to make do with whatever their power generator can put out, and they may have to divert power from one system to another at times (e.g., from weapons to shields, etc.).

I'm going to try using the latter approach. Fortunately, most of the details are within one Galactipedia article. I just have to look at the battles again to be sure nothing breaks.

Wee. What fun. Not.

LonelyWolf, updating the text of an existing chapter has never cost points (use the blue edit "link" on the posting (chapter) view above the existing chapter's text, not the white edit button). If you delete the chapter and post a replacement (i.e., with the same chapter number), then it'll cost points. In the latter case it will also put the chapter back at the top of the home page, and reviewers can review it again for points. But, deleting an existing chapter will also delete any reviews attached to it.

If you have any follow-up questions, let's move the discussion to a new thread, so we don't derail this one. Or, feel free to send me a connection request and we can message outside the forum.

Regards,
Dirk

Thanks, Sol.

Before the offtopic discussions get too large, could I ask folks to break out a different thread? The purpose of this thread is outlined in the first post. Sol has to be able to go through these posts and actually find real requests, which is why I hope to keep this and the Minor Enhancement threads on track.

Thanks
Dirk