Implenting Case Lacoon I & II after Oyster Bay

I am sure the next book will get into part of this discussion much more. Then we can all beat our chests or groan together. << Personally, I have been doing the groaning recently >> =)

Please stop pounding points that everyone already agrees on. That type of argueing just makes folks mad at having to reread regurgitation. IE Food being transported into core worlds. That isn't the question. Its all about: How much.

IE Beef from Montana as Beef prices are far higher in core worlds. Why? Because said beef or in Rozaks case the giant herbivore that he thinks tastes even better, reuire a lot of herbacious food to grow. No one is denying the obvious there either.

And arguing that the earth can't sustain twice the population now, is rediculous in light of HHU technology called fusion, meaning cheep, plentiful water. IE we could do it today with a thing called... Fission especially as said fission process seperates said water quite nicely compared to desal plants today regarding efficiency of energy. Check out INL for more info. IE turning desserts into giant perfect gardens. Ever been to the vegetable capital of the world? IE California? Its a freaking dessert, only limited by the amount of water available, otherwise they would grow even more as the Southern half of Southern California is perfectly suited to growing of crops, but has no water. Same with the rest of the SW and Mexico, along with vast parts of Africa, South America(Argentina) and Asia.

This will be obviously true on a planet like Beowulf as well. As it ony has 50% water hydroshere. This will cause little rainfall and lots of arid dessert regions. IE far more land area than say earth. With desalination plants that become cheeper(more efficient) everyday and the availability of fusion power to drive said desal plants the cost of water drops dramatically and the farming of desserts becomes economically feasible. Add in OTEC, IE cold ocean water and warmer top ocean water methods(IE vapor pressure differential) and the cost shrinks in half or more compared to today. The problem is that there aren't OTEC power plants currently running. Desalination is in its infancy. Currently even here in the USA, land of the million dollar permits and billions of regulations and NIMBY's, Desalination is only about 20% higher than water sold by normal munincipalities. Its all tied directly to the cost of energy really. Its why Japan, the smart folks they are use Nuclear power to get their fresh water. They have 4 of them even in Japan whom gets quite a bit of rainfall. Why, becuase unlike us idiots here in the USA, they embrace Nuclear power and don't make it impossible with ignorant lawyers and even more ignorant population with pointless lawsuits and fearmongering over nuclear power. They like to point out 3 mile island, except it was PROVEN at 3 mile island that the safety measures installed WORKED. Not that the ignorant Greenies will ever admit it as that would require them to have 2 brain cells to rub together as the amount of radiation from the sun is far greater than anything released from 3 mile island...

Personally, I say that for every lawsuit you lose you have to at minimum pay the winners lawyers/peoples salary and at least 1/2 of the damages you were seeking to get from them. This would put an end to all the BS frivolous lawsuits in our legal system and would dramatically drive down insurance, for things like hot button topics of say medical insurance because doctors won't be getting sued by lazy jerks who think they can poach a golden egg because some doctor made you feel uncomfortable or made a minimal mistake. Not the legitimate lawsuits would still work as those who really DID have a problem would actually file for a lawsuit, but all the lazy jerks who are simply looking for a way to steal from someone else won't even file because if they lose, THEY would have to pay for the damages their irresponsibility caused.

Ok off my rant, back on topic.

Add in things like politicians who like to stay in office and if they "create" jobs by creating farms, eh hem, the obvious, so we can feed ouselves even if it has to be subsidized, eh hem, USA farmers, THEY WILL DO SO! Not to mention it makes sense from a practical perspective as well. Only completely greedy shortsighted idiots wouldn't do so.

Once again, its not that anyone is arguing that they don't import food, as even way back in Flag in Exile? when they attacked Basilisk there were transports who had food on board and were pissed because their food would be worthless without said wormhole junction, its HOW MUCH.

Star Knight wrote:

Dane Dryss wrote:I fail to see how three wormholes contribute to feeding the entire population of the SL. That would be stupid.

Well DW says that with Manticore closing the wormholes, transit times will increase twelvefold.
That means that the economy collapses (and DW says so) and nobody will be able to ship food to anywhere in time.

Dane Dryss wrote: Do they get all their food from Manitcore?

No, but to make the closing of the wormholes worse, a majority of solarian trade goods are transported in Manticoran freighters (at least for some time during the trips). So with Manticore going to war against the League the Royal Manticoran Merchant Marine will stop shipping Solly goods.

Dane Dryss wrote: Or from Silesia? Or the Andermani? I would say that if the SL had to import most of their food then why don't the other star systems import their food? Where would all this food be coming from?

Doesnt matter where it comes from.
The issues are:
Nobody can get it to another world in time.
Nobody has the neccessary cargo space when the RMMM (?) quits.
Nobody will have the money to buy goods after the economy collapses.

Again, your a looking on only one factor of the the greater desaster.
You cant fix it, cause the hole economy will implode.
Food shortage will be one problem out of many and no independet systems or sectors will be able to do anything about it.

Dane Dryss wrote:If every planet in the SL need to import food then those planets would have never become planets with millions.

Wrong thinking. Look at the real world. Many countries could produce goods themselves but they import them.
Why? Cause its cheaper and others do it better. Called capitalism.

Dane Dryss wrote:Most of those planets had to have a thriving agriculture to become that big when they were colonized. Other wise they could not have supported themselves in an age where there space travel was not near as fast.

I dont think there were that many big colonies in those days.

Anyway, this discussion is pointless. Weber wrote in The Universe of Honor Harrington that there is food shipping in the Honorverse.
And if they ship cattle around the stars there is no reason why they shouldnt ship more basic stuff as well.

StarKnight

Overall I agree with you I just think that you are really overstating the case. Yes the Solarian economy will implode. Yes the countless repercussions of that will undoubtedly do chaos theory proud. That being said we are talking about extremely wealthy, highly developed, and exceedingly technologically advanced entities with strong local governments. Just as the Solly economy won't reorganize itself overnight, neither will those governments disappear overnight. Given the structure of the league most of them should be fairly strong governments and undoubtedly their number 1 priority when they recognize the magnitude of the disaster facing them will be to secure their food supply to whatever degree they need to. In that situation if I were the government I wouldn't care if I could pay for the shipping or if the company was out of business I would use my SDF to commandeer it if I needed to.

If the question at hand is whether or not there will be starvation as opposed to simply massive economic disruption. Then you seem to be using the most pessimistic possible assumptions to make your case. That being said I would be interested for you to clarify a bit more what assumptions you are making.

1.) I am unclear as to whether you are arguing that all food is shipped or rather that most food is shipped and its just a whole lot.

2.) If you are arguing the latter, then approximately how much are we talking about? 25% 50% 90%?? Ballpark for me here.

3.) When you quote DW as saying there is a 12 fold increase in transit times are you assuming this is before or after the sollies make the inevitable correction in their shipping routes that the disappearance of the wormhole availability demands?

I guess it just seems to me right now that we have been arguing so long that it is become unclear what the basic points of disagreement are...

Anyway, in case its unclear I'm not upset just intrigued. 'Cause maybe you are right and I am missing some key argument, but you haven't convinced me yet.

You are misinterpreting the nomenclature about "Winter Wheat" and "Spring Wheat". You don't get a "Winter Wheat" and a "Spring Wheat" crop out of the same ground each year. This is a reference to crop variety and planting strategy. Winter wheat is planted in the fall, gets started, then remains dormant during the winter before maturing the following summer for harvest. Spring Wheat is planted in the spring and is harvested that summer. Both crops have advantages and disadvantages. If the winter is harsh, you loose a winter wheat crop. If the spring is too wet, you have difficulting getting on the fields in time to plant a spring wheat crop.

My comments about probable yields are based on eastern Oregon dry land which is more arid than the Palouse of Washington. Also bear in mind that a lot of the irrigated land in the Columbia basin is exploiting an acquifier that was created during the last ice age. That acquifer is almost exhausted after barely a century of exploitation. Replacing that irrigation water by tapping into the Columbia will create serious problems. Of course you can cope with irrigation issues with fusion powerred desalinazation plants although direct cycle OTEC would produce both power and a couple billion gallons of fresh water per day per GW capacity.

The point here is that feeding 10 billion people on Earth shouldn't be a problem. Feeding a population of 100 billion on Earth or a population of 12 billion after the Scrag War (whcih I presumed went seriously nuclear as well as biological) might be a severe problem. Feeding 10 billion or 20 billion people on an alient planet that had either been terraformed imperfectly or had terran plants, animals or people geneticly modified to suit the alien ecosystem might be a severe problem. Instead of feeding ten people per acre you might need 10 acres to feed one person. Also, keep in mind the sowing rate to harvest rate on crops. Wheat is typically 60 bushel yield for every bushel sown. Given a more hostile environment it might be only 10 to 1 or worse. Remember, yields were rather dismal during the middle ages.

Thirdbase wrote:

namelessfly wrote:An interesting calculation. Only problem is that you don't get multiple grain crops each year in most locations. Among the few exceptions is Israel because it is close to the equator. Nile valley also. However; most land close to the equator is tropical with intense rainy seasons that making farming utter hell. Dryland wheat farming in the Columbia basin you get only one crop of may be 40 bushels per acre every other year because of the rotation to accumulate water.

Odd I found this looking for wheat yields per acre.

Yields of Washington winter wheat are predicted this year to reach about 65 bushels per acre, up from 59 bushels in 2009, while the spring wheat harvest is projected at a record 56 bushels per acre, according to a forecast by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Agricultural Statistics Service.

Total wheat production in Washington, Oregon and Idaho is projected at 310.2 million bushels, which would be a 10-year high, said Glen Squires, vice president of the Washington Grain Alliance.

Yields of Washington winter wheat alone are forecast to be 111.8 million bushels, up from 96.7 million bushels in 2009, according to the USDA. The bulk of the state's wheat is exported.

They were later upped another 2 bushels per acre.

Corn on the other hand is running around 150 bushels per acre, up from about 20 bushels 100 years ago.

I'm a very hard core technology optimists but even I don't believe that population can icnrease indefinatelyw ithout some severe problems.. We are feeding our current population of six plus billion people. We will be able to feed the probable peak population of 8 billion people and even the improbable peak population of 10 billion people. However; SLN core worlds were settled almost 2,000 years ago. Assuming that they've maintained modest, positive population growth (if they are europeans they are extinct) doubling only once per century, then their populations would increase by a factor of one million during that time. A world with only 10 million people ends up with a population 10 trillion after 2,000 years! This obviously hasn't happenned. However worlds with tens of billions of people are likely to exist in the core. These are worlds that had to be terraformed so their environments are probably marginal.

I thought that there was a mention of populations of Earth and other core worlds somewhere. The only mention I found was 12 Billion when the Graysons left.

It is mentioned that Haven couldn't feed its population, but they had 2/3 of the population on the dole. So how much of that was inefficiency or lack of farmers, and how much is just not enough land is a question.

You need to take anohter drive down I-5 then up 99W to see what the San Yanquin valley has become. Our fucktard in chief, (excuse me, President Obama) has cut off their irrigation water to protect a threatened fish that could be just as effectively protected by installing intake screens on the pumps. All of that prime agricultural land that used to account for about 10% of US agricultural production is reverting to dessert. Sorry to be disrespectful to the Poverty Pimp, I mean President, but Weber has made it obvious that the Solarian League is ruled by a bunch of arrogant fucktards who would make similarly stupid decisions.

I prefer OTEC plants over fission or fusion powerred desalinazation. You get the power plus about an order of magnitude more fresh water per Gigawatt capacity than you can with a nuke plant. The only problem is that you have to build very low temperature, low pressure turbines that are hundreds of meters in diameter. Are you up to the engineering challenge?

bafoote wrote:I am sure the next book will get into part of this discussion much more. Then we can all beat our chests or groan together. << Personally, I have been doing the groaning recently >> =)

Please stop pounding points that everyone already agrees on. That type of argueing just makes folks mad at having to reread regurgitation. IE Food being transported into core worlds. That isn't the question. Its all about: How much.

IE Beef from Montana as Beef prices are far higher in core worlds. Why? Because said beef or in Rozaks case the giant herbivore that he thinks tastes even better, reuire a lot of herbacious food to grow. No one is denying the obvious there either.

And arguing that the earth can't sustain twice the population now, is rediculous in light of HHU technology called fusion, meaning cheep, plentiful water. IE we could do it today with a thing called... Fission especially as said fission process seperates said water quite nicely compared to desal plants today regarding efficiency of energy. Check out INL for more info. IE turning desserts into giant perfect gardens. Ever been to the vegetable capital of the world? IE California? Its a freaking dessert, only limited by the amount of water available, otherwise they would grow even more as the Southern half of Southern California is perfectly suited to growing of crops, but has no water. Same with the rest of the SW and Mexico, along with vast parts of Africa, South America(Argentina) and Asia.

This will be obviously true on a planet like Beowulf as well. As it ony has 50% water hydroshere. This will cause little rainfall and lots of arid dessert regions. IE far more land area than say earth. With desalination plants that become cheeper(more efficient) everyday and the availability of fusion power to drive said desal plants the cost of water drops dramatically and the farming of desserts becomes economically feasible. Add in OTEC, IE cold ocean water and warmer top ocean water methods(IE vapor pressure differential) and the cost shrinks in half or more compared to today. The problem is that there aren't OTEC power plants currently running. Desalination is in its infancy. Currently even here in the USA, land of the million dollar permits and billions of regulations and NIMBY's, Desalination is only about 20% higher than water sold by normal munincipalities. Its all tied directly to the cost of energy really. Its why Japan, the smart folks they are use Nuclear power to get their fresh water. They have 4 of them even in Japan whom gets quite a bit of rainfall. Why, becuase unlike us idiots here in the USA, they embrace Nuclear power and don't make it impossible with ignorant lawyers and even more ignorant population with pointless lawsuits and fearmongering over nuclear power. They like to point out 3 mile island, except it was PROVEN at 3 mile island that the safety measures installed WORKED. Not that the ignorant Greenies will ever admit it as that would require them to have 2 brain cells to rub together as the amount of radiation from the sun is far greater than anything released from 3 mile island...

Personally, I say that for every lawsuit you lose you have to at minimum pay the winners lawyers/peoples salary and at least 1/2 of the damages you were seeking to get from them. This would put an end to all the BS frivolous lawsuits in our legal system and would dramatically drive down insurance, for things like hot button topics of say medical insurance because doctors won't be getting sued by lazy jerks who think they can poach a golden egg because some doctor made you feel uncomfortable or made a minimal mistake. Not the legitimate lawsuits would still work as those who really DID have a problem would actually file for a lawsuit, but all the lazy jerks who are simply looking for a way to steal from someone else won't even file because if they lose, THEY would have to pay for the damages their irresponsibility caused.

Ok off my rant, back on topic.

Add in things like politicians who like to stay in office and if they "create" jobs by creating farms, eh hem, the obvious, so we can feed ouselves even if it has to be subsidized, eh hem, USA farmers, THEY WILL DO SO! Not to mention it makes sense from a practical perspective as well. Only completely greedy shortsighted idiots wouldn't do so.

Once again, its not that anyone is arguing that they don't import food, as even way back in Flag in Exile? when they attacked Basilisk there were transports who had food on board and were pissed because their food would be worthless without said wormhole junction, its HOW MUCH.

Turbines 200 feet in diameter? What are you smoking man. Something BIG!

Ok, be nice time. You don't use water. You use a heat pump fluid like say Ammonia or R134. Where the temperature difference will vaporize the working fluid that will then go into a normal turbine for power and pull fresh water out of the final condensing cycle where the salt gets left behind. Holy scrubers needed though! Now that would be an engineering challenge!

=)

Or open cycle with simple low pressure turbine and collect the vaporized fresh water condensed...

@Buckfan328

Overall I agree with you I just think that you are really overstating the case. Yes the Solarian economy will implode. Yes the countless repercussions of that will undoubtedly do chaos theory proud. That being said we are talking about extremely wealthy, highly developed, and exceedingly technologically advanced entities with strong local governments. Just as the Solly economy won't reorganize itself overnight, neither will those governments disappear overnight. Given the structure of the league most of them should be fairly strong governments and undoubtedly their number 1 priority when they recognize the magnitude of the disaster facing them will be to secure their food supply to whatever degree they need to. In that situation if I were the government I wouldn't care if I could pay for the shipping or if the company was out of business I would use my SDF to commandeer it if I needed to.

Well how does an economy collapse in the modern world?
Just look at the crisis we are facing right now. Nothing really happened actually. The real economy wasnt affected at first. And yet it didnt matter when the artificial finance sector went down the drain.
We did go from all almost good to the brink of the abyss within years time. Suddenly we had the biggest recession since the war, all because the housing bubble in the US went out of control.
So, what does it matter how strong your on little local economy is?
You cant do shit if it all goes down. Our little financial crisis will be a joke compared to what will happen in the Honorverse.
The Stock Markets will not just crash, they exchange rates will be reduced to virtual zero.
Nobody will have any money to do anything. And no, the League members wont be able to flood the markets with new money. First they cant do it anyway. Most likely only the federal government (= the League) can do that. And second, it wont help. This is no crisis money can fix. This is not about some companies losing money because of the collapse of a bubble in the finance sector. This is about the entire trade system rendered useless overnight due to open warfare.
You cant fix that locally or with money. You cant fix it at all.
It doesn’t help a bit if you make food your number one priority. You are still fucked.
Sure, its possible to use force to get the necessary food. I expect that to happen.
But with transit times going through the roof, the available food wont be enough for everyone. The Solly will be fighting each other for vital resources, food only being one of them.
And that will make it all worse.

1.) I am unclear as to whether you are arguing that all food is shipped or rather that most food is shipped and its just a whole lot.

I never said that all food is shipped. I think that a fast amount is. Especially when it comes to the old, overpopulated core worlds. They are so wealthy, they don’t need to waste space and what remains of the landscape to grow food.
Furthermore, I never said that every Solly world will starve. Starvation will be only one problem of many after the collapse, some worlds will be much more effected than others.

2.) If you are arguing the latter, then approximately how much are we talking about? 25% 50% 90%?? Ballpark for me here.

Overall? I think its most likley in the 40 to 60 percent range for the Old League worlds.

3.) When you quote DW as saying there is a 12 fold increase in transit times are you assuming this is before or after the sollies make the inevitable correction in their shipping routes that the disappearance of the wormhole availability demands?

Good question. I don’t know, ask DW. Personally I think that 12 times sound extreme. I would have said 5 to 8 times or something but not 12.
Anyway, I think the economy will collapse with anything beyond threefold.

I guess it just seems to me right now that we have been arguing so long that it is become unclear what the basic points of disagreement are...

Rememmber; the turbines for direct cycle OTEC are low pressure, low temperature, and low RPM. All they have to do is exploit the differential in vapor pressure between the warm surface water and the cold deep water.

Of course their (why the hell do I keep using the wrong spelling variation of "their" rather than "there" when I know how to spell it? More than just a differential in response times in my fingers going on) are indirect cycle OTEC plants that utilize a working fluid such as Amonia to run a turbine of more conventional size. The thermodynamic effeciency which is already sucky is even lower, but hell, you got 50 million square kilometers of ocean to function as solar collector and energy storage media.

The point here is an issue of carrying capacity. Humans along with the plants and animals that feed us were evolved to live on this planet. Even so, the carrying capacity of the planet was only a few million people until we invented agriculture. Even with agriculture, the global population was constrained to less than 1 Billion peoplle until the industrial revolution. This "stable" population wasn't the result of people limiting hteir reproduction. It was the end result of high adult mortality rates coupled with astonishingly high infant mortality rates combined with the occassional war or famine that would cull 50% to 90% of the populati8on. (and the fucktard greenie weenies want to go back to this?) The core worlds of the SL were settled back in a time when intersteller transport was STL rather than FTL and expensive as HELL. Weber has revealed that there are far more settled worlds per cubic LY in the SL core than in the rest of the HONORVERSE which suggests that these early colonists weren't as obsessive about finding really nice planets to settle as later colonists. Most of the planets of the core worlds either had to be massively terraformed or the people and their terran plants and animals had to be massively geneticly engineered to adapt them to their new world or both. Given this circumstance, I'd expect that the land area needed to feed a person would be much higher than is currently possible using high tech on Earth. Hydroponics are an obvious solution, but hydroponics are extremely labor intensive. Using mechanized, plant in the dirt agriculture, one farmer can feed 100 people. Using hydroponics it is more like 1 farmer can feed 2 or 3 people. Automation might help, but still SL core worlds would have an enormously high percentage of their work forces working in agriculture compared to what we are accustumed to.

Obviously; people in the Honorverse have modern contraceptives. Hell, even primitive peoples can use variations of the rythem method (Vatican Roulette) or the withdraw method which are actually almost as reliable as the condoms that the education bureaucrats pass out to our children as if they were passing out Holloween candy. However; I'd expect that people of the Honorverse are not like modern Europeans and Japanese who choose not to breed. I expect that the Darwinian failures who choose to fornicate rather than procreate have culled themselves from the gene pool by the beginning of the diaspora. The people of the Honorverse are descendants of either Africans and Arabs and may be Asians, along with the Tea Party Americans. (Ever notice how the Tea Party folk are worried about the debt that their children or grandchildren will inherit while the Democrats don't give a damn about debt because with the exception of the African Americans, they are reproducing so far below replacement level that they know that they will not have any children much less grandchildren who will inherit the debt? There is a reason beyond mere purience why the icons of the conservative renasaince are MILFs such as Sarah Palin. These quadruple "F" women, (Femal, Fecund, Fertile and, well, er "desirable") women are symbolic of the totally different expectations that conservative have about having progeny.) While there will be some societies in the Honorverse who mutate into European style, socialists nany states who then fornicate themselves into extinction, most Honorverse Worlds will be populated by people who prefer to procreate. They will have positive population growth. Even doubling once per century will result in huge populations which will be difficult to support on a marginally habitable world.

bafoote wrote:Turbines 200 feet in diameter? What are you smoking man. Something BIG!

Ok, be nice time. You don't use water. You use a heat pump fluid like say Ammonia or R134. Where the temperature difference will vaporize the working fluid that will then go into a normal turbine for power and pull fresh water out of the final condensing cycle where the salt gets left behind. Holy scrubers needed though! Now that would be an engineering challenge!

=)

Or open cycle with simple low pressure turbine and collect the vaporized fresh water condensed...

Star Knight wrote:Well how does an economy collapse in the modern world?
Just look at the crisis we are facing right now. Nothing really happened actually. The real economy wasnt affected at first. And yet it didnt matter when the artificial finance sector went down the drain.
We did go from all almost good to the brink of the abyss within years time. Suddenly we had the biggest recession since the war, all because the housing bubble in the US went out of control.
So, what does it matter how strong your on little local economy is?
You cant do shit if it all goes down. Our little financial crisis will be a joke compared to what will happen in the Honorverse.
The Stock Markets will not just crash, they exchange rates will be reduced to virtual zero.
Nobody will have any money to do anything. And no, the League members wont be able to flood the markets with new money. First they cant do it anyway. Most likely only the federal government (= the League) can do that. And second, it wont help. This is no crisis money can fix. This is not about some companies losing money because of the collapse of a bubble in the finance sector. This is about the entire trade system rendered useless overnight due to open warfare.
You cant fix that locally or with money. You cant fix it at all.
It doesn’t help a bit if you make food your number one priority. You are still fucked.
Sure, its possible to use force to get the necessary food. I expect that to happen.
But with transit times going through the roof, the available food wont be enough for everyone. The Solly will be fighting each other for vital resources, food only being one of them.
And that will make it all worse.

1.) I am unclear as to whether you are arguing that all food is shipped or rather that most food is shipped and its just a whole lot.

I never said that all food is shipped. I think that a fast amount is. Especially when it comes to the old, overpopulated core worlds. They are so wealthy, they don’t need to waste space and what remains of the landscape to grow food.
Furthermore, I never said that every Solly world will starve. Starvation will be only one problem of many after the collapse, some worlds will be much more effected than others.

If anything there will be more available space, as people move into Honorverse towers. These buildings taking up about one or two square kilometer house hundreds of thousands. At one hundred thousand per square kilometer, that is 250 people per floor of a tower like Hoskins Tower in TSVW, you could triple the population of Mumbai, India (the densest populated city on earth) without the city getting any larger. For a city like NYC it is closer to a factor of 50.

The Hoskins Tower was a one km diameter hexagonal prism 400 stories tall. If you allocate 500 sq meters for each home and other things, that gives you 1300 homes per floor, if only half the floors are homes, the rest are business. that is 260000 homes, at 3 people per family that is 780,000 people living in a tower sitting on a 1 km plot. Mumbai is 30,000 per sq km.

2.) If you are arguing the latter, then approximately how much are we talking about? 25% 50% 90%?? Ballpark for me here.

Overall? I think its most likley in the 40 to 60 percent range for the Old League worlds.

This is from EoH when Basilisk is under attack:

Those comforting reflections, however, did not appear to be foremost in the minds of the merchant skippers arguing vociferously with Michel Reynaud's controllers. Lieutenant Carluchi and her pinnaces had already been required to physically intervene to keep a big Andermani ore ship and a Solarian freighter loaded with agricultural delicacies for the inner League worlds from jumping the queue.
Despite his fury with both skippers and a personal dislike for the Solarian League which had grown with each report of technology transfers to the Peeps, Reynaud could summon up rather more sympathy for the Solly than for the Andy. Asteroid ore was scarcely a perishable commodity, and the skipper's flight plan indicated he was on a fairly leisurely routing anyway. But while the Solly was less than two hours out of Sigma Draconis on a direct transit via the Junction, she would add over two T-months to her voyage just to reach Manticore the long way if she was forced to run for it in hyper. And her cargo was about as perishible as they came. Understanding the reasons for the woman's blustering anxiety hadn't made him any more patient with her, however, and he'd watched with satisfaction as Carluchi's pinnaces chivvied her ship back into line.

Note that the ship is carrying "agricultural delicacies" not grain.

Also while the average time savings maybe a factor of 12, this captain is going from 2 hours to 2 months, just to reach Manticore, any guesses as to how much more time to Beowulf? Another 5 months there. So that 2 hours compared to 7 months, a factor of 600. (times are approximate)

A factor of 12 does seem high, unless there is a lot more stuff shipping from close to worm hole.

I'll be nice again.

Ammonia or R134 dramatically increase efficiency over a vapor differential low pressure only turbine in OTEC design, IE LOW temperature differential. Its why Heat pumps work for home heating/cooling far more efficiently than straight electric heat, NG, or oil and as far as I am concerned should be mandatory on all new construction throughout the USA, if one is going to go down the tyranical dictatorial government beaurocracy route anyways. WOULD BEAT THE HELL out of replacing our light bulbs with crappy CFL for energy reduction per household. You get high pressure and high temperatures out of it instead of low pressure differential and low temperature differential. IE a high energy sump instead of low.

Low pressure turbines these days are amazingly efficient and getting cheaper to build everyday. If this was 30 years ago, it would be a NO WAY JOSE! and WAY too expensive. Today we are installing Double low pressure turbines to gain energy out economically that pull the working pressure down to under 0.3psi or basically for all intensive purposes what most would consider a hard VACUUM. Yes, reheating is required to obtain this low pressure. Said low pressure turbines do work at lower RPM, but all this means is that one needs a larger diameter more # of poles generator.

Why we can achieve low pressure, but not low temperature differential between TH(temperature Hot) and Temp Cold.(Why the Carnot cycle will never match Rankine cycle even though it has a higher theoretical efficiency by 7% or so. Because the volume of said gas turns into a liquid when one gets to play with the volume constraints via pressure whereas there is a fixed floor of your condenser temperature and trying to force the ant 1/2 way to the wall again via thermal transfer verses simply moving the wall with the shape(volume) of a low pressure turbine is doable. One is a physical constraint the other is what actually propels the working fluid of the engine for the next cycle. Now, the Sterling cycle on the other hand COULD supercede both in efficiency and in fact has in the lab.

namelessfly wrote:Rememmber; the turbines for direct cycle OTEC are low pressure, low temperature, and low RPM. All they have to do is exploit the differential in vapor pressure between the warm surface water and the cold deep water.

Of course their (why the hell do I keep using the wrong spelling variation of "their" rather than "there" when I know how to spell it? More than just a differential in response times in my fingers going on) are indirect cycle OTEC plants that utilize a working fluid such as Amonia to run a turbine of more conventional size. The thermodynamic effeciency which is already sucky is even lower, but hell, you got 50 million square kilometers of ocean to function as solar collector and energy storage media.

The point here is an issue of carrying capacity. Humans along with the plants and animals that feed us were evolved to live on this planet. Even so, the carrying capacity of the planet was only a few million people until we invented agriculture. Even with agriculture, the global population was constrained to less than 1 Billion peoplle until the industrial revolution. This "stable" population wasn't the result of people limiting hteir reproduction. It was the end result of high adult mortality rates coupled with astonishingly high infant mortality rates combined with the occassional war or famine that would cull 50% to 90% of the populati8on. (and the fucktard greenie weenies want to go back to this?) The core worlds of the SL were settled back in a time when intersteller transport was STL rather than FTL and expensive as HELL. Weber has revealed that there are far more settled worlds per cubic LY in the SL core than in the rest of the HONORVERSE which suggests that these early colonists weren't as obsessive about finding really nice planets to settle as later colonists. Most of the planets of the core worlds either had to be massively terraformed or the people and their terran plants and animals had to be massively geneticly engineered to adapt them to their new world or both. Given this circumstance, I'd expect that the land area needed to feed a person would be much higher than is currently possible using high tech on Earth. Hydroponics are an obvious solution, but hydroponics are extremely labor intensive. Using mechanized, plant in the dirt agriculture, one farmer can feed 100 people. Using hydroponics it is more like 1 farmer can feed 2 or 3 people. Automation might help, but still SL core worlds would have an enormously high percentage of their work forces working in agriculture compared to what we are accustumed to.

Obviously; people in the Honorverse have modern contraceptives. Hell, even primitive peoples can use variations of the rythem method (Vatican Roulette) or the withdraw method which are actually almost as reliable as the condoms that the education bureaucrats pass out to our children as if they were passing out Holloween candy. However; I'd expect that people of the Honorverse are not like modern Europeans and Japanese who choose not to breed. I expect that the Darwinian failures who choose to fornicate rather than procreate have culled themselves from the gene pool by the beginning of the diaspora. The people of the Honorverse are descendants of either Africans and Arabs and may be Asians, along with the Tea Party Americans. (Ever notice how the Tea Party folk are worried about the debt that their children or grandchildren will inherit while the Democrats don't give a damn about debt because with the exception of the African Americans, they are reproducing so far below replacement level that they know that they will not have any children much less grandchildren who will inherit the debt? There is a reason beyond mere purience why the icons of the conservative renasaince are MILFs such as Sarah Palin. These quadruple "F" women, (Femal, Fecund, Fertile and, well, er "desirable") women are symbolic of the totally different expectations that conservative have about having progeny.) While there will be some societies in the Honorverse who mutate into European style, socialists nany states who then fornicate themselves into extinction, most Honorverse Worlds will be populated by people who prefer to procreate. They will have positive population growth. Even doubling once per century will result in huge populations which will be difficult to support on a marginally habitable world.

bafoote wrote:Turbines 200 feet in diameter? What are you smoking man. Something BIG!

Ok, be nice time. You don't use water. You use a heat pump fluid like say Ammonia or R134. Where the temperature difference will vaporize the working fluid that will then go into a normal turbine for power and pull fresh water out of the final condensing cycle where the salt gets left behind. Holy scrubers needed though! Now that would be an engineering challenge!

=)

Or open cycle with simple low pressure turbine and collect the vaporized fresh water condensed...

My late brother had a patent for a process that uses off peak power to run a refrigeration plant to make ice in large quantities which is then used as a heat sink when operating the turbines during the day time. Increases peak power as well as thermodynamic effeciency. Problem is that the energy to freeze the ice is greater than the extra energy squeezed out of the turbines during the day. It was still an interesting exercise.

bafoote wrote:I'll be nice again.

Ammonia or R134 dramatically increase efficiency over a vapor differential low pressure only turbine in OTEC design, IE LOW temperature differential. Its why Heat pumps work for home heating/cooling far more efficiently than straight electric heat, NG, or oil and as far as I am concerned should be mandatory on all new construction throughout the USA, if one is going to go down the tyranical dictatorial government beaurocracy route anyways. WOULD BEAT THE HELL out of replacing our light bulbs with crappy CFL for energy reduction per household. You get high pressure and high temperatures out of it instead of low pressure differential and low temperature differential. IE a high energy sump instead of low.

Low pressure turbines these days are amazingly efficient and getting cheaper to build everyday. If this was 30 years ago, it would be a NO WAY JOSE! and WAY too expensive. Today we are installing Double low pressure turbines to gain energy out economically that pull the working pressure down to under 0.3psi or basically for all intensive purposes what most would consider a hard VACUUM. Yes, reheating is required to obtain this low pressure. Said low pressure turbines do work at lower RPM, but all this means is that one needs a larger diameter more # of poles generator.

Why we can achieve low pressure, but not low temperature differential between TH(temperature Hot) and Temp Cold.(Why the Carnot cycle will never match Rankine cycle even though it has a higher theoretical efficiency by 7% or so. Because the volume of said gas turns into a liquid when one gets to play with the volume constraints via pressure whereas there is a fixed floor of your condenser temperature and trying to force the ant 1/2 way to the wall again via thermal transfer verses simply moving the wall with the shape(volume) of a low pressure turbine is doable. One is a physical constraint the other is what actually propels the working fluid of the engine for the next cycle. Now, the Sterling cycle on the other hand COULD supercede both in efficiency and in fact has in the lab.

namelessfly wrote:Rememmber; the turbines for direct cycle OTEC are low pressure, low temperature, and low RPM. All they have to do is exploit the differential in vapor pressure between the warm surface water and the cold deep water.

Of course their (why the hell do I keep using the wrong spelling variation of "their" rather than "there" when I know how to spell it? More than just a differential in response times in my fingers going on) are indirect cycle OTEC plants that utilize a working fluid such as Amonia to run a turbine of more conventional size. The thermodynamic effeciency which is already sucky is even lower, but hell, you got 50 million square kilometers of ocean to function as solar collector and energy storage media.

The point here is an issue of carrying capacity. Humans along with the plants and animals that feed us were evolved to live on this planet. Even so, the carrying capacity of the planet was only a few million people until we invented agriculture. Even with agriculture, the global population was constrained to less than 1 Billion peoplle until the industrial revolution. This "stable" population wasn't the result of people limiting hteir reproduction. It was the end result of high adult mortality rates coupled with astonishingly high infant mortality rates combined with the occassional war or famine that would cull 50% to 90% of the populati8on. (and the fucktard greenie weenies want to go back to this?) The core worlds of the SL were settled back in a time when intersteller transport was STL rather than FTL and expensive as HELL. Weber has revealed that there are far more settled worlds per cubic LY in the SL core than in the rest of the HONORVERSE which suggests that these early colonists weren't as obsessive about finding really nice planets to settle as later colonists. Most of the planets of the core worlds either had to be massively terraformed or the people and their terran plants and animals had to be massively geneticly engineered to adapt them to their new world or both. Given this circumstance, I'd expect that the land area needed to feed a person would be much higher than is currently possible using high tech on Earth. Hydroponics are an obvious solution, but hydroponics are extremely labor intensive. Using mechanized, plant in the dirt agriculture, one farmer can feed 100 people. Using hydroponics it is more like 1 farmer can feed 2 or 3 people. Automation might help, but still SL core worlds would have an enormously high percentage of their work forces working in agriculture compared to what we are accustumed to.

Obviously; people in the Honorverse have modern contraceptives. Hell, even primitive peoples can use variations of the rythem method (Vatican Roulette) or the withdraw method which are actually almost as reliable as the condoms that the education bureaucrats pass out to our children as if they were passing out Holloween candy. However; I'd expect that people of the Honorverse are not like modern Europeans and Japanese who choose not to breed. I expect that the Darwinian failures who choose to fornicate rather than procreate have culled themselves from the gene pool by the beginning of the diaspora. The people of the Honorverse are descendants of either Africans and Arabs and may be Asians, along with the Tea Party Americans. (Ever notice how the Tea Party folk are worried about the debt that their children or grandchildren will inherit while the Democrats don't give a damn about debt because with the exception of the African Americans, they are reproducing so far below replacement level that they know that they will not have any children much less grandchildren who will inherit the debt? There is a reason beyond mere purience why the icons of the conservative renasaince are MILFs such as Sarah Palin. These quadruple "F" women, (Femal, Fecund, Fertile and, well, er "desirable") women are symbolic of the totally different expectations that conservative have about having progeny.) While there will be some societies in the Honorverse who mutate into European style, socialists nany states who then fornicate themselves into extinction, most Honorverse Worlds will be populated by people who prefer to procreate. They will have positive population growth. Even doubling once per century will result in huge populations which will be difficult to support on a marginally habitable world.

bafoote wrote:Turbines 200 feet in diameter? What are you smoking man. Something BIG!

Ok, be nice time. You don't use water. You use a heat pump fluid like say Ammonia or R134. Where the temperature difference will vaporize the working fluid that will then go into a normal turbine for power and pull fresh water out of the final condensing cycle where the salt gets left behind. Holy scrubers needed though! Now that would be an engineering challenge!

=)

Or open cycle with simple low pressure turbine and collect the vaporized fresh water condensed...