What Fusion Power means to the Project

[tsofian]

The original designers incorporated fusion power so teams would not need to chase fuel all the time. As with a lot of decisions they made there are a number of unintended consequences that cascade from this

First, you can use fusion to power your tunnel boring machines an they become the fabulous subterrenes that UFO/Secret Underground Base folks talk about. There are US Patent documents concerning these machines from the early 1970s so it is quite possible the Project had them nearly as soon as they got fusion.
It can also provide long lasting power to bases. Bases are going to need large power generators, so fusion is ideal. Having what basically amounts to unlimited energy
If this Lockheed reactor is used as the base for the big units at the bases there is little you can’t throw raw energy at.
The prototype was planned to be a 100-megawatt deuterium and tritium reactor measuring 7 by 10 feet (2.1 by 3.0 m) that could fit on the back of a large truck and would be about one tenth the size of current reactor prototypes. 100 megawatts is enough to provide power for 80,000 people.[2][14] A series of prototypes were constructed to approach this goal.
TX Reactor[edit]
Parameters:
• 7 m diameter × 18 m long, 1 m thick blankets
• 320 MW gross
• 40 MW heating power, 2.3 s
• n = 5×1020 m−3
• β = 1 (field = 2.3 T)
• V = 16.3 m3, 51 MJ total energy
• Ti = 9.6 keV
• Te = 12.6 keV

Water can be distilled or cleaned with reverse osmosis. Non-recyclable trash can be incinerated. Any hazardous chemicals except radiological and heavy metals can be ionized into simple elements. I’d assume each base would have redundant fusion plants


How much would a bolt hole need?

Here is my guess. Each Freeze tube needs 2 kW of power to maintain its temperature. Warming would need a much higher peak load so let’s say the standard 8 person hole could cruise on 30 kW and would peak at 100 kW during wake up.
A mention was made of using Radioactive decay heat in the form of RTGs for powering bolt holes. The only really good isotope for this is Pu 238. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioi...tric_generator
Given the energy densities of this material it would require over 100 kilograms of this material per bolt hole for peak energy demand. Batteries could help with this, but even at “cruise” power demand 2,000 bolt holes require far more Pu238 than has ever been manufactured (Pu239 is far more common).
This fusion plant isn’t too much bigger than a vehicle one.

[dragoon500ly]

Couple of questions...

What is the projected life-span of the two units? Would they require periodic refueling are would they be good for, say a 200 year life span?

[mmartin798]

Originally Posted by tsofian

The original designers incorporated fusion power so teams would not need to chase fuel all the time. As with a lot of decisions they made there are a number of unintended consequences that cascade from this

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TX Reactor[edit]
Parameters:
• 7 m diameter × 18 m long, 1 m thick blankets
• 320 MW gross
• 40 MW heating power, 2.3 s
• n = 5×1020 m−3
• β = 1 (field = 2.3 T)
• V = 16.3 m3, 51 MJ total energy
• Ti = 9.6 keV
• Te = 12.6 keV

.
.
.

How much would a bolt hole need?

Here is my guess. Each Freeze tube needs 2 kW of power to maintain its temperature. Warming would need a much higher peak load so let’s say the standard 8 person hole could cruise on 30 kW and would peak at 100 kW during wake up.

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.
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This fusion plant isn’t too much bigger than a vehicle one.

Just a question to clarify something for me. When you say "This fusion plant isn’t too much bigger than a vehicle one," what are you referring to? The T4B experiments resulted in the TX being physically as large as it is, large enough to park 6 V-150s inside, to (theoretically) produce 320MW. The output of a "standard" size vehicle reactor has to be around 150KW. Your bolt hole calculations make that reactor needing to output only about 150KW to be safe, so is the output the size you are refering to?

[tsofian]

The bolt hole plant needs to produce about the same energy as a vehicle power plant, not the same size as the big plants for the bases

[mmartin798]

With the 4e timeline and potential for other vehicles, we may have to reevaluate what is a "standard" vehicle reactor. I am of a mind that they created a standard size for classes of vehicles to maximize the economy of scale in manufacturing.

In 3e, you could easily standardize on a 150KW for V-150's and smaller, 500KW for small aircraft like Bell 206 and OV-10, and a 3MW for larger aircraft like C-130 and CH-47 as well as smaller ships. This would supply power in the same range as their conventional counterparts.

But if we look at more modern versions of the Commando vehicles(1) and HEMTT that could be used in 4e, they are pushing upwards of 300-350KW power plants even with the diesel-electric hybrid HEMTT A3. We could still use the same standard sizes from 3e if we assume these newer vehicles use two reactors, much like a Project C-130 would have to house four 3MW reactors to match the conventional power. But this begs the question, can you fit in two reactors? There is clearly a minimum size and I assume that the physical size does not grow linearly with output, but rather is some kind of logarithmic increase in size. So in my world, a 300KW reactor would not be twice as large as a 150KW reactor.

So what is a "standard" vehicle reactor?
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(1) The Commando Select, which comes in configurations similar to the V-150, is slightly larger and is part of the reason I assume the power plant is larger. The Commando Select is 6.63m long, 2.74m wide and 3.02m tall and has a higher ground clearance at 0.66m. It has a higher max road speed of 100km/h and a larger turning radius of 10.65m. Handles the same 60% grade and has a slightly less vertical obstacle of 0.56m.

[cosmicfish]

One of the reasons I always used GURPS to actually play the game was because there is a Vehicles supplement that lets you design from the ground up. I built an entire fleet of compatible vehicles, very convenient and well balanced.

[tsofian]

The full size fusion plants are 100 mW for 200 tons. So 2 tons to the mW. The WW2 era Packard Merlin produced 1400 hp and weighed 1600 pounds dry. Between oil and antifreeze and other fluids, not to mention gasoline I can see a "Standard" fusion power pack running 500 horsepower or around 400 kW running at 2 tons or so.

If there is too much power in a particular vehicle it can be used to run other devices and such.

This is a very rough guess, based on far too little research