Echos of Honor, Chapter 3 wrote:"Yes, I said 'fission,' " Truman told them after giving them most of a minute to absorb it, "and it's another thing we've adapted from the Graysons. Unlike the rest of the galaxy, they still use fission plants, thirty or forty years. But Grayson—and, for that matter, Yeltsin's asteroid belts, as well—are lousy in heavy metals . . . and fissionables. They'd bootstrapped their way back to fission power by the time of their Civil War, and by the time the rest of us stumbled across them again and reintroduced them to fusion, they'd taken their fission technology to levels of efficiency no one else had ever attained. So when we added modern, lightweight antiradiation composites and rad fields to what they already had, we were able to produce a plant which was even smaller—and considerably more powerful—than anything they'd come up with on their own.
"I don't expect anyone to be installing them on any planetary surfaces any time soon. For that matter, I doubt we'll see too many of them being installed in capital ships. But one of the new plants handily provides all the power a Shrike needs, and despite all the bad-history bogeyman stories about fission, disposal of spent fuel elements and other waste won't be any particular problem. All our processing work is being done in deep space, and all we have to do with our waste is drop it into a handy star. And unlike a fusion plant, a fission pile doesn't require a supply of reactor mass. Our present estimate is that a Shrike 's original power core should be good for about eighteen T-years, which means the only practical limitation on the class's endurance will be her life support."
Extending their fuel, would give destroyers and light cruisers into the eyes and hands roles that normally was reserved for heavy cruisers.
In Enemy Hands, Chapter 7 wrote:This, she realized suddenly, was probably the best squadron command she would ever have—unless, perhaps, she was ever fortunate enough to command her own battlecruiser squadron. Heavy cruisers were powerful units, too valuable to waste on secondary duties, yet small enough and numerous enough that they could be worked hard . . . or risked. There would always be something for squadrons like this to do, and those who commanded them would always enjoy a degree of freedom and independence from higher authority no ship of the wall would ever know. Capital ships must remain concentrated at crucial strategic points, but cruisers were not just the eyes and ears of the Fleet but its fingertips, as well. They were far more likely to be detached for independent operations,
Bold is the emphasis. To our knowledge, the fission piles were only ever used in the Shrikes, and presumably the Ferrets and Katana's.
Don't destroyers and light cruisers actually out number the heavy cruisers? So if their endurance gets increased by using the fission piles, they might need the occasional resupply of food. Something say, upto 4 Mt could resupply an entire region, say the size of Silesia or Talbott.
Additionally, by switching to fission would no longer require the emergency blowout ports for fusion reactors. This allows better structural integrity, and better armor layout, achieving Manticore's long-term plans of having ships that can survive in the new combat environment.
Thoughts, comments, insanity accusations
