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Author Topic: what's in the supply box?  (Read 1221 times)

Deshara

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what's in the supply box?
« on: July 29, 2021, 11:19:08 PM »

so I had a thought here that goes roughly,

Quote
There is another complication: AM fuel is only consumed in hyperspace but obviously a drive bubble is present during normal space travel, where unfortunate asteroid impacts happen.
It make sense that AM fuel is consumed in HS as you’re literally traveling FTL (judging from unit ly being a standard unit IRL) but not in normal space (judging from common sense it takes only minutes for light from sun to reach earth).

you don't actually know that the ships aren't using their antimatter drives in normal space. Consider; when you scrap a ship you get some fuel out of the system that had been left in the pipes. But, if you order a ship constructed from your industry, and you pick the ship up from where it was made, with a fleet with 0 fuel in store, then scrap the ship, you still get fuel from it despite it having never gone into hyperspace or been in a fleet with fuel. Why? Because they use antimatter fuel for sublight travel as well, so part of the manufacturing process is priming the engine with antimatter fuel just to get it to fly out of the drydocks.
They just don't use enough that you ever run out of that initial 1 fuel that they prime the engine with before they take the stickers off the windows. If traveling 1 lightyear takes 1 fuel capsule, how long do you have to fly your ship in sublight to have used 1 fuel capsule? The answer is, far longer than your character's lifespan. And if you do enter hyperspace, that 1 fuel capsule that you've used less than 1% of flying around in sublight gets used first then replaced as the engine's priming capsule by the last capsule used.

that's my headcanon anyway. The way I look at it, the Domain developed such extremely fuel efficient engines that they effectively run forever unless you use them to do something stupid like fly between stars. Interesting thing to note here is that, if this is the case, that means that back during the Domain era, since people were using the stargates instead of hyperspace, you could use a ship without ever needing to refuel it. The gas in the tank when you buy it will last longer than your body will. Your grandkid's grandkids will still be using that 1 unit of fuel. Your entire bloodline could spent their entire waking lives running that ship in sublight and probably they'd invent a new kind of fuel & stop producing antimatter hundreds or thousands of years later before than 1 unit of fuel is used up. But then the gates get shut off, and 1 unit of fuel won't even get a kite from system to system...

edit: actually now that I think about it, that would mean that, barring hyperspace flight, antimatter isn't a fuel for space flight but is a catalyst for it, since it's required for the reaction but isn't (effectively) used up by it at all. That would mean that the actual fuel fuel of subspace flight is inside of the supply commodity your fleet uses. I wonder what that would be

So...

Spoiler
whats in the supplies?
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Quote from: Deshara
I cant be blamed for what I said 5 minutes ago. I was a different person back then