BattleTech Race Style ?

[Suicide Junkie]

I thought the reactors were fusion reactors not fission. from what i remember of the description of them they worked (scifi technobabble description of course) by shooting a deuterium pellet with lasers to the point of a fusion reaction that was contained in a magnetic bottle.

Fusion via pellets is a pretty good design, and realistic given the beastly lasers you have available.

Magnetic bottles are just that; magnetic fields. They can't be "breached", though they could be distorted by an EMP (if not for the big metal faraday cage of a mech they're carried in) or the generator (big electromagnet?) could be disabled.

Fusion is hard to start, so you'd only get one of the pellets fusing during your explosion. (Ie: the one that was burning at the time.)
And since the reactor can handle these things going off steadily during combat, it certainly isn't going to be a city buster (Note that the magnetic bottle will hold charged particles, rather then neutral ones, so there will have to be a decent physical container too.)

[ March 31, 2003, 03:42: Message edited by: Suicide Junkie ]

[Desdinova]

Originally posted by Dawn Falcon:
Fusion reactors like BT CAN explode..but ONLY if their shielding fails catastrophically. If there's time for the (hydrogen) feed to shut down, no boom.

But if there's a critical failure? boom.

like being hit by a PPC through the chest? (after you have lost all armor and stuff like that of course)

[Mephisto]

A fusion reactor will not explode IIRC. To keep the plasma at the required temperature of several million ° Celsius you have to keep up a high degree of pressure. The moment the magnetic fields are distorted the pressure is released and the fusion reaction ceases. The temperature of the plasma declines dramatically. You get no explosion whatsoever and only the plasma may damage the reactor and the vicinity. But as I already said, with the magnetic field gone the plasma cools down imminently to the point were it isn't harmful any more to the reactor.
The BT rule crew was even aware of it but kept the catastrophic damage event in the rules for “eye candy” (it’s written somewhere in the rules).

[RiTz21]

hehe It's interesting how the topic of the thread has evoled to the current Renegade Leagion/Fusion reactor discussion !!!

Hell, I do not even remember posting about a BattleTech shipset.. hehe How much information does one looses to memory loss !!? (oUPS another off subject topic.. hehehe)

RiTz21

[Dawn Falcon]

Suicide Junkie, pulsed fusion is pretty different to the constant-feed fusion I was talking about. I'm pretty sure that BT fusion is constant-feed.

And you "breach" the field by destroying the generators for the magnetic fields, yeah.

Mephisto, the explosion won't be massive but it'll still be an explosion. I wouldn't like to be within a hundred meters or so of a deacent sized reactor going up... (it'll also be pretty clean, mind you)

[Suicide Junkie]

Do they not run on deuterium pellets?
You could keep them dropping into the reactor at a fast rate, and though you'd still only be "burning" one at a time as they reach the laser focus, it would appear continuous to the naked eye.

All you really need is a reasonably steady output (capacitor), and adjustable power for when you need the extra juice to run and shoot.

Yeah:
The explosion would be basically a bunch of super-hot hydrogen, helium and disassociated mech parts flying around.
Tin foil on riot gear should protect you from the bLast and heat. You'll have to depend on luck to not be splattered by the hail of oversized nuts and bolts.

[Dawn Falcon]

Nope, as I recall they use a steady hydrogen flow.

Certainly the HH and Starfire fusion reactors are constant flow.