Gas Stations, or....

Vince wrote:
On a different point (economic/financial), I suspect that just as today, time is money in the Honorverse. For merchant ships, they would probably fill up on hydrogen when in orbit around their destinations at the same time they are loading and unloading cargo...It just makes more sense financially if the merchantman makes more money for the time spent moving cargo (after deducting the costs for hydrogen) than it does making no money but saving the cost of hydrogen for the time spent using hydrogen catcher fields to refill the fuel tanks...

MAD-4A wrote:This doesn't necessarily have anything to do with Hydrogen/fuel. the statement about the money hole is true of any merchie, even today. Even discounting fuel, you have Crew Pay, interest on the note (if one) maintenance to maintain the ship (entropy doesn't stop in port). then there's the indirect cost of not gaining interest on the pay you would have gotten earlier if you had been out delivering a load. The overall truth is that a merchie is ALWAYS a money pit, even when carrying cargo. The only time a merchie is making money is when it's unloading cargo. When its loading, carrying or just sitting without cargo it is spending money. The primary difference is that, when the ship is sitting in port, it's not getting to its next unload which is delaying the next unload and the next... the same is true of Convoys - having to wait on the slowpoke means a faster (or earlier loaded) ship is not getting to its next unload, & next... This is where the bulk of damage from commerce raiding occurs. Not from dead ships and lost cargo but from lost trips as loaded ships sit in port waiting for an escort.

Jonathan_S wrote:With a big convoy you also lose a lot of time in the destination port because you compressed what would normally be, say, 5 ships a day into one 50 ship lump. But if the port's only capable of unloading a max of 5.75 ships a day... That's a lot of ships sitting around the destination waiting for a pier to open up to let them offload.

MAD-4A wrote:Lots of pages - not sure what's been brought up but: all stars are mostly Hydrogen. Hydrogen is also the lightest element so (Like the Earths atmosphere)it floats to the top. With the enormous amount of energy produced by a star, it tends to blow much of that hydrogen off (that is what solar winds are). technically the Earth you are currently standing on is inside the Sun, it's within the Corona. HH Ships use directed gravity for propulsion, there is no reason that same technology couldn't be used to produce "Hydoscoops" a "funnel" of gravity "in-front" of the ship that scoops up stray hydrogen/solar winds, and condenses/compacts it into a stream that is directed into an intake port. There, freezers convert it into liquid hydrogen for storage. This gives the ships effectively unlimited range, just drop into a system and scoop some more. Space stations would, as a matter of SOP have scoops on them to store additional Hydrogen for it's own use and to provide ships berthed with them (primarily to damaged ships who limped in short on fuel before repairs) & to undamaged ships as a convenience not a necessity.

SWM wrote:Earlier in the thread, I actually presented numbers for collecting solar wind. It doesn't produce hydrogen fast enough, unless you have truly huge surface areas for collecting. At the orbit of Mercury, a collector 1000 km by 1000 km would only get 2 tons of hydrogen per day.

I'm afraid you are incorrect about the size of the corona. The corona extends millions of kilometers into space, but even Mercury is outside the corona. But what you really were trying to say is that material is continually flowing outward from the sun which can be collected, which is absolutely true. The problem is that the solar wind has such a low density. It takes collecting surfaces at least the size of large planets to get a decent hydrogen production from the solar wind.

SWM wrote:Earlier in the thread, I actually presented numbers for collecting solar wind. It doesn't produce hydrogen fast enough, unless you have truly huge surface areas for collecting. At the orbit of Mercury, a collector 1000 km by 1000 km would only get 2 tons of hydrogen per day.

SWM wrote:I'm afraid you are incorrect about the size of the corona. The corona extends millions of kilometers into space, but even Mercury is outside the corona.

MAD-4A wrote:

SWM wrote:Earlier in the thread, I actually presented numbers for collecting solar wind. It doesn't produce hydrogen fast enough, unless you have truly huge surface areas for collecting. At the orbit of Mercury, a collector 1000 km by 1000 km would only get 2 tons of hydrogen per day.

Don't know how accurate those calculations are, but they are for a static collector - not a ship approaching at a fraction of C & then back out the other side (faster than the solar winds blow out). & how much does an HH ship need to refuel/carry. Also, that is for the Earths tinny Yellow Dwarf sun. This will vary depending on the type of star.

SWM wrote:I'm afraid you are incorrect about the size of the corona. The corona extends millions of kilometers into space, but even Mercury is outside the corona.

That's the inner corona - the outer corona extends 1/2 way between Earth & Mars - Its like the Earths atmosphere - there is no real hard line between in-atmosphere and in-space. the region between the "surface" of the sun & where the sun ends is vague.