 October 29, 2011 - 7:45am | I was wondering what sort of power rating one SEU translates into. How much electricity does it take to power a laser beam? I see that researchers managed to produce a laser beam that used 1 megajoule. It was in regards to researching nuclear fusion. What started me wondering was seeing how some of us allow players to modify an energy clip to be used to jury rig (another nautical term, btw) a powered door or some tech device or other. If a standard energy unit is one megajoule, how many times can you open and close a door with a full clip? If a megajoule is the approximate kinetic energy of a one-tonne vehicle moving at 160 km/h ( as per wikipedia) then can you use it power a hover bike to move it 20 meters down an alley? I realise that the game creators don't compare to the scientific brain trust we have here, so it may be more trouble than it is worth to nail this down. But can anybody come up with a reasonable measure of energy to represent one SEU? And what are you thought of using energy clips as a jury rigged power supply? |
 October 29, 2011 - 8:37am | IMO using a clip to power or door could open it, however the discharge would wreck the doors circuits. |
 October 29, 2011 - 4:43pm | IMO using a clip to power or door could open it, however the discharge would wreck the doors circuits. A trained or skilled player should be able to use an energy clip as a power source and not burn up the door circuits. This is a common electrical engineering problem, connecting a higher energy supply to a lower energy. Given the right circuit elements it can be done without damaging the door. Now is the player carrying these parts (transformers, switchers, LDO regulators, etc.) around all the time? Not likely! So they sacrifice a clip and the door circuits to break in.  But the ship engineer saving everyone's life aboard a drifting wreck borrows the parts from other things in the ship and re-engineers the door to run on power clips.  -iggy |
October 29, 2011 - 7:44pm | So maybe a techie with a real tool kit could rig up some way to reduce the voltage from the clip to the device and regulate the flow... What do you guys think of it being a very temporary quick fix power source for a vehicle? |
October 29, 2011 - 8:28pm | Posted from phone, fyi. I don't allow clips to power tech, they release their energy too fast, that's why there for weapons only. So to clarify my position, it would burn the circuits. :-) |
 October 30, 2011 - 7:14am | The questions and clarifications in Dragon addressed the issue of how far a robot could travel on 1 SEU and the answer was 1 km, IIRC. I've treated that the same for vehicles figuring a vehicle while heavier than a robot is designed to use power effectively for just this purpose. Plus the rough rule of thumb is easy to remember. I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
 October 30, 2011 - 10:25am | I'd allow someone with the appropriate skill and equipment to rig a robot or vehicle to run off a power clip (or belt or backpack). Of course, they'd have to sucessfully make a couple of skill checks to get it to work. The bots and vehicles normally run off parabatteries which deliver SEU's just like the more portable power sources so there is no reasone it wouldn't work. I'd just scale the range appropriately. e.g. My hoverbike has run out of juice in it's parabattery and I'm 30 kilometers from civilization. One repair machinery roll at a -10 to modifiy the bike's power intake, another at -10 to rig up an adapter for the 20 SEU clip. Since the hoverbike uses a Type I parabattery which has 500 SEU in it and nominally has a range of 1000 km on a new parabattery, it gets 2 km to the SEU so a new clip would give me an extra 40 km of range and just get me into the shop where I can recharge my parabattery. Larger vehicles take larger parabatteries and use more energy to get the same range. An aircar, which uses a type 4 parabattery (4000 SEU) uses 4 SEU per km traveled so your 20 SEU clip will get you 5 more km. Probably not very useful. And the roll to modify the vehicle should probaby be harder as well. Ad Astra Per Ardua! My blog - Expanding Frontier Webmaster - The Star Frontiers Network & this site Founding Editor - The Frontier Explorer Magazine Managing Editor - The Star Frontiersman Magazine |
