Fuel scooping like a Boss
- Thread starter Achilles Maelstrom
- Start date
Most likely you're scooping Hydrogen isotopes, specifically H-2 (Deuterium) and H-3 (Tritium) that's being kicked out from the degradation of helium from a star's primary reactor (moreso Tritium than Deuterium, which is far more common). Odds are your scoop is a large series of magnetic fields that direct the isotopes into magnetic holding chamber/bottles. H-2 and H-3 are the primary components of a relatively stable "hot" fusion reaction. One fusion reaction as such generates 14.6 MeV according to wikipedia, and this is a significantly measurable amount of energy, being .014 eV (electronvolts, which are equivalent to 1.6×10^−19 Joules, and a joule is the amount of energy required to apply one newton of force for 1 meter. A newton being the force required to accelerate 1 kilo at 1 meter per second squared).
In other words, it takes a *lot* of fuel fusing to generate enough energy to move your ship at all. The amount of energy generated when rapidly converting a couple tons of fuel to energy required for a wormhole jump is terrifying.
Now this doesn't quite mesh with the fuel tank system that we see in Elite. Handwavium aside, I guess you could say that you when you take a chunk of fuel out of reserves and move it to the active tank, you run a DT fusion and result in helium, which you then use as impulse fuel from your thrusters.
Now the significant part of relying on a D/T fusion reaction is that you find Tritium in all kinds of interesting places... like in theory in large gas giants (Originally when ED referenced fuel scoops I imagined skimming gas giants and not stars). If by 3300 we find a way to make H-2 and H-3 isotopes out of pure hydrogen in a meaningful way then fuel scooping becomes even easier.
As for fuel qualities, obviously the purer your sources of H-2 and H-3 the cleaner your reaction will be. Or if we have multiple reaction fusion drives that can handle different types of fuel you can have all kinds of elements fusing and resulting in different power outputs and different end results of fuel biproducts.
Is that psudeo-sciency enough for you?
Edit: It occurs to me that the traditional D/T reaction creates radioactivity. If you're looking for a cleaner reaction helium-3 is a better isotope to fuse with hydrogen, although the temperature for such a reaction is higher. Helium-3 is relatively available in gas giants and stars as well, so perhaps a helium-3 fusion reaction is what we're rocking in Elite.
At any rate, the fuel scoop is still using high charges of magnetic fields to collect the elements and isotopes with the correct charge and corral them into holding tanks. I still like my idea of using the byproduct of fusion to create thruster fuel for traditional impulse/Newtonian sub light maneuvers.
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The scooping rates depend on the size of the star as well as your scoop, I suppose.
Your comment = fail. Sorry.