| From: | shadowrn@*********.com (Robert Fanning) |
|---|---|
| Subject: | More rigger 3 nitpicking |
| Date: | Sun Jul 8 12:05:03 2001 |
by 0.01 km/kg = 500km travel
Pg 193: Suborbitals F-B China Clipper and Ilyushin IL-159 has 80,000kg fuel
by 0.01 km/kg = 800km travel
Seeing you can't get tickets for less than 4000km (I think), that means a
lot of mid air refueling stops. I would love to see that if they are
travelling at Mach 10 or so (unless I was watching from onboard).
Either that should be 0.1 km/kg, or that is the fuel they use to get out of
the atmosphere and coast in very low earth orbit, representing the
"manuevering fuel" - They have only 250 or 400km for the launch and re-entry
to move around.
The drop tanks used for the Suborbitals to get them to low earth orbit are
also not listed.
Also, I would like more details in the rules on orbital habits, especially
at the Lagrange points.
Do they use a linear accelerator to launch ores from lunar mining and
refined products from surface factories?
Is Mars Colonized? Certainly adding some of the nastier greenhouse gases
would get the temperature at the equator up to the 15 C range.
Use of orbital reflective mirrors should also help a Mars Colony. Using
them in reverse on Venus should get the temperature down, along with
introducing primordial volcanic bacteria in the atmosphere over the poles.
A few comets aimed to break up in decaying orbits should provide sufficient
water to provide shallow seas - water would be essential in cooling the
planet down.
I assume there is not the government funding for such large projects, but
even now, we could build long baseline orbital telescopes (using an array of
smaller telescopes) to see continent or smaller sized details on distant
star systems. Even if they don't have the money to build probes to get
there, we can certainly decide what star systems are suitable for future
colonization - the rights on those worlds would be worth trading.
Also, could Jim suits be adapted for vacuum conditions or for nuclear
reactors?
In anycase if I was a magician, even if I didn't have an ally spirit or
magical focuses to worry about on a suborbital or semi-ballistic, I would be
taking the High Speed Jets thank you very much.
If it takes 40 minutes to cross the Atlantic, but 4 hours each way in
customs, loading, unloading, catching a cab to and from the airport, etc; I
can easily afford to have a 2 hour flight instead.
The price of suborbitals and semiballistics (along with a lot of other
vehicles are out of the character's range), so I don't understand why they
have 2 different versions of each.
Now supposing I was to go down to a scuttled Russian nuclear submarine and
salvage the ICBMs, why couldn't I build my own sub-orbital as a player? It
would be a small cramped cabin, with no ammenities, but surely you can hold
it for 40 minutes? I don't need to carry 156 passengers, probably no more
than 5. I can understand it might be a one way trip, with refueling
problems (plus a heap of alarmed fighter jets converging on the location),
but it might be just the ticket for getting out of a country in a hurry (or
into it), especially out of the soviet union.
