How big will the Star Empire of Manticore's economy be?

kzt wrote:It’s a good deal. Particularly after someone drops a container of lithium hydroxide for ‘later pickup’.

What are they going to do with a container of lithium hydroxide? Scrub some CO2?

I wouldn't want to take a bath in it but it's not particularly energetic.

Galactic Sapper wrote:

kzt wrote:It’s a good deal. Particularly after someone drops a container of lithium hydroxide for ‘later pickup’.

What are they going to do with a container of lithium hydroxide? Scrub some CO2?

I wouldn't want to take a bath in it but it's not particularly energetic.

Yeah, but when you store it next to a grav pinch generator that is being shipped with its power supply and "glitchy" control systems connected, interesting things happen.

Theemile wrote:

Galactic Sapper wrote:What are they going to do with a container of lithium hydroxide? Scrub some CO2?

I wouldn't want to take a bath in it but it's not particularly energetic.

Yeah, but when you store it next to a grav pinch generator that is being shipped with its power supply and "glitchy" control systems connected, interesting things happen.

50 kilotons per kg. IIRC, a standard honorverse shipping container is something like 40m long, 10m wide and 10m high....

kzt wrote:

Theemile wrote:Yeah, but when you store it next to a grav pinch generator that is being shipped with its power supply and "glitchy" control systems connected, interesting things happen.

50 kilotons per kg. IIRC, a standard honorverse shipping container is something like 40m long, 10m wide and 10m high....

I suppose, but who has that much enriched Li-6 just laying around?

kzt wrote:

Maldorian wrote:Don´t forget, that Manticore is the biggest traffic spot in the Honorverse. The Junction act as the biggest Harbour in the whole honorverse. The ships are not only crossing the Junction, they also use the Warehouses at the junction for Container exchange. For example: A ship could come from Trevor´s star and drop some containers with the target behind Beowulf and leave at the Basilisk whormehole. Another ship take the container and cross the Beowulf whormhole.

All the guiding at the Junction and all the Freight exchange should keep a lot of people employed.

Also, Manticore has still one of the biggest Trade Fleet. With the end of the war with the league, they shall go back to work.

It’s a good deal. Particularly after someone drops a container of lithium hydroxide for ‘later pickup’.

The most common use of Lithium-Hydroxide is as a lubricant. Must be shipping the shipping container full of the stuff to a brothel staffed by Prolonged Prostitutes?

A more likely product would be Lithium-6-Deuteride, a white chrystaline solid which is easily machinable and produces Tritium when it undergoes neutron induced fission and thus makes wonderful nuclear weapons. It might even be reactor fuel if you can figure out how to keep the neutron flux from vaporizing and irradiating the reactor, the ship and you, leaving behind an expanding cloud of radioactive plasma.

For this reason, the Honorverse might have multitudes of gas mining operations to extract Helium-3 to fuel aneutronic nuclear reactions. Based on the hints that Weber gives us about the amount of fuel carried by starships embedded in Honor's "sneaknattack" at Cerebus, ships haveabout 10% of there own mass in bunkerage. The Honorvese would be extracting, transporting and mining fusion fuel in about the same physical volumes that we extract coal, oil and natural gas. Helium-3 might be the one, critical natural resource that is limited enough to motivate Honorverse societies to go to war.


Alternatively; if you are using gravitic rather than magnetic confinement that is capable of creating a potential well equivalent to over 1/10 Cee, you can burn Lithium-6-Deuteride safely or even straight Deuterium. You still have to extract the Deuterium by the Gigaton per year.

kzt wrote:

Theemile wrote:Yeah, but when you store it next to a grav pinch generator that is being shipped with its power supply and "glitchy" control systems connected, interesting things happen.

50 kilotons per kg. IIRC, a standard honorverse shipping container is something like 40m long, 10m wide and 10m high....

If you figure that medium to large containers have their own countergrav, all you would need to do is hack the existing control program - nothing additional needed.

I suspect you can’t get stellar density with an off-the-shelf container. But given that honorverse freighters will hold up for a few seconds of 2000g acceleration...

kzt wrote:I suspect you can’t get stellar density with an off-the-shelf container. But given that honorverse freighters will hold up for a few seconds of 2000g acceleration...

Battleship guns generate more than 2,000 gees.
Rifles generate 100,000 gees
Think you would need bout 10eex7 gee to get ignition.

TFLYTSNBN wrote:

kzt wrote:I suspect you can’t get stellar density with an off-the-shelf container. But given that honorverse freighters will hold up for a few seconds of 2000g acceleration...

Battleship guns generate more than 2,000 gees.
Rifles generate 100,000 gees
Think you would need bout 10eex7 gee to get ignition.

NIT alert: Off by a power of 10. 10,000g from a rifle. And then this is only true for less than a mm of the barrel.

Galactic Sapper wrote:50 kilotons per kg. IIRC, a standard honorverse shipping container is something like 40m long, 10m wide and 10m high....

I suppose, but who has that much enriched Li-6 just laying around?[/quote]


Dont look at me. I already provoked a fecal storm by pointing out that anyone who wanted to steal the bomb grade Uranium from the core of a TRIGA research reactor would find it much easier to just unbolt the reactor from the floor of the cooling pool and lift it away through the roof ofthe building with abomb truck rather than spend hours dismantling the reactor. General Atomics was then tasked with designing new cores that used reflectors and reactor grade Uranium to replace the old cores.