Official ICE Forums
Systems & Settings => Spacemaster => Topic started by: markc on January 07, 2008, 06:14:34 PM
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How big is a andrium[anti-matter needed for light speed travel] processing plant? Can you have one on a spaceship?
MDC
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Based on the Silent Death information I'd guess that an Andrite factory is huge unwieldly and expensive. The government was deliberately holding back advances and subsidizing the industry to stay expensive.. An Andrium factory in the new millenium is probably a reasonable ship board installation but it's probabably still pretty large, reasonable for a cruiser but not a destroyer.
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David,
Thanks I am prepairing to run a SF game with a lot of the SM2 setting material. That is if it is approved by my players.
Thanks again
MDC
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The Official Andrium ( the one you can buy from API ) comes probably from huge and expensive factories.
Now, there's a SM adventure ( The Durandrium Find ) that more or less hints that you can find naturally occuring Andrium that used with minimal refining and that last longer than the Official one.
[ Note : I deliberately didn't take into account the events contained in the Silent Death timeline ]
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There's also the problem of power consumption. It's rather useless to have am Andrium plant on a ship, if it takes more energy to produce the andrium than the ships engine can produce (using the same Andrium.)
After all, if you could put an Andrium plant in a ship, you might as well integrate the plant in the engine and have almost unlimited range in your space ships.
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I am mulling over ideas to limit FTL travel and the Andrium idea in one of them.
I think I would disallow big A production while in hyperspace and require a time, energy and space required min. to product big A. For example 10,000 cubic meter workshop to produce 1 big A unit, X energy units over Y time [easily produced by solor enery but cannot be speed up by more energy.] So a ship could have multiple 10,000 m^3 shops but it should be cost, space, manpower prohibitive. Maybe the area around the workshop can only have 1 shop functioning at a time for a radius.
Thanks for the info and ideas.
MDC
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New idea; illegal Andrium production, i.e. smuggling.
Ship based andrium plants require an outside energy source. While illigal in all sectors of space, andrium runners take big ships with plenty of runners into deep space where they find energy sources to run their process. The process involved is very dangerous and typically involves taping solar flares. From technology developed during some war, the now antiquated equipment is dangerous and the process leaves vast radiation clouds of debris moving at high speeds through systems, many take on comet like orbits.
Additionally, at some point the truth of the technologies quiet retirement can be revealed that with certain types of stars under certain circumstance, the mining process could destabilize the star...
If ya wanna go all HP on us, such an action could cause a shift in some big worded phrase that sounds impressive thingamicbob.
Enter the lost...
Or, another dimension, a lost civilization is contacted/old technology awakened (read a bezerker, which is why/how first war ended and solves puzzle of how planet Home of Whomever was destroyed by the Standard Historical Reference #15/Lost Empire/Race and how both armadas were destroyed in the process), ancient portal opens allowing/forcing via gravitational pull from portal to another sector of space/dimension/past/what-ever-floats-your-boat-buddy, cuz it's sci-fi.
Fodder for thought.
lynn