DrTemp

Old Man can't be that old if he really feels that. Any future spacedrive viable for a "space opera" or a military SF setting like "Alien Wars" will probably be a fusion rocket- if one manages to do a controlled fusion of two protons, that's the cleanest and safest way for high specific impulse, AFAIK. High thrust might be a problem, but some super-duper-light materials for building the reactor could solve that. Which is, at least, not entirely rubbery.

Re: Many questions Yes, but this would result in more energy carried to to surface- Earth would warm up over time. The effect would be the same as for the greenhuse effect (though both phenomena are not directly linked). Rusing sea levels, more storms, etc. It would be indeed better (safer) for Earth as an ecosystem to gather that solar power in orbit and use it there to run an orbital-based industry that produces needed goods. So no energy loss for Earth, but merely added matter (which Earth experiences anyway every day).

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Life on a Lunar Colony I'd like to add that a beanstalk actually has to accelerated every time someone uses it to go up, and decelerated every time someone goes down.

I have the impression that the approach of merely writing together all abilities of, say, a spaceship, has the disadvantage that one might easily overlook some basic design principles which make, for example, a spaceship with chemical engines and a burn endurance of a month or more virtually impossible. Seconded. Deck plans (or at least rough layouts and cutaway images of the ship) are a great assistance in imagining the vessel.

I'd even say RPG books should not attempt to be too original. "Terran Empire" makes it easy for any SF fan to feel at home, and thus he/she can play without reading the entire book. Transhuman Space, for example, is quite interesting to read, but you'll need a bunch of die-hard fans to play it. Too many very original facts int that universe. Without reading the books, most people won't even know what the setting is like, because it is hard to explain. So I'd say Hero Games' strategy to cover the various genres with archetypical settings is a good one. RPG is not a very good medium to introduce new concepts into SF, Fantasy or the like. For that, one has to write novels, I'd say.

Well, a thousands-of-stars-spanning empire should be able to construct large sites that use solar power (or fusion power) to produce antimatter. Should even be economical, given the enormous perfomance increase throuhg antimatter rockets.

Well, I may have misunderstood the data given, but even then, several dozen million tons of reaction mass for a 100.000 ton-Ship (which thus is about as heavy as a modern-day US Navy Nimiitz class aircraft carrier) is too much anyway. I am pretty sure that the "chemical rockets" should be changed to fusion rockets, which use hydrogen as reaction mass. The latter is just as easy to obtain (or even easier) as Hydrogen-Oxygen fuel for chemical rockets, and the ships in question do already have a fusion reactor aboard. BTW, does anyone know why UV lists fusion rockets and antimatter rockets as "rubber science"? That does not make much sense, since the scientific base for both is as hard as that for a gauss rifle or a fusion reactor.

I bought Terran Empire and was amazed. I bought Alien Wars and, well, at least I liked it (though i like Terran Empire a lot more), and both are worth their money. But there is one detail I don't quite understand: The United Earth Ships in Alien Wars use chemical rockets for sublight propulsion. So we have a Centauri class battleship, 100 000 tons, that accelerates at 0.5 g, uses chemical rockets to do that, and has fuel for one month aboard. This computes down to... uhm. 250 million tons of reaction mass. Is that correct? I'd say that is a conceptional error- not a big one, easy to correct (if they were very high efficiency fusion rockets with a specific impulse of 1 million seconds, the reaction mass could go down to as low as 125 000 tons or so), but nontheless it should be mentioned. Or am I overlooking something?