From v03.n457 Fri Oct 3 12:08:23 1997 From: Tracy Ratcliff Date: Sun, 22 Dec 1996 04:59:18 GMT Subject: Vehicles of *SCIENCE!* Submitted for your approval: here are a couple additions for Vehicles 2. I'd like to here some comments -- especially a cost for methane. ============================================================================ ========= Bladeless Turbines Nikola Tesla, in his pursuit of more powerful electical effects, also turned his mind to the generation of elecricity. He spent years attempting to perfect his bladeless turbine. Tesla claimed that his design was much simpler, and more efficient, than bladed turbines of the time. The bladeless turbine had a rotor made of stack of closely spaced thin metal disks. Steam entered tangent to the outside of the disks and was exhausted out the shaft. The steam turned the rotor by "adhesion" (a modern physicist would call it boundary layer effects). The same principle could be used in a gas turbine. A bladeless steam turbine has the same statistics as a TL7 steam turbine (V83) A bladelss gas turbine, like standard gas turbines, comes in Optimized, Standard, or High Performance versions. An "early" bladeless gas turbine is equivalent to a TL7 gas turbine. A "late" bladeless gas turbine is equivalent to a TL8 gas turbine. In a universe where Tesla's ideas reached production (such as Alternate Earth's Gernsback) an "early" turbine would become available around 1915, and a "late" turbine around 1950. Exotic Lifting Gases The villains and heroes of steampunk and pulp fiction find the puny lift of hydrogen too small to lift their Stratospheric Dreadnaughts, and must resort to gases unknown to conventional science. Kipling's Gas gives the lift equivalent to a vacuum of the same volume, the most lift possible due to buoyancy. Doyle's Gas has a lift that is a pulp staple figure, 10 times that of hydrogen. Burroughs' Gas is 1000 times as efficient as hydrogen. Both Doyle's Gas and Burroughs' Gas must depend more an anti-gravity effect than mechanical buoyancy. Kipling's Gas 13.7 Doyle's Gas 1.48 Burroughs' Gas 0.0148 The cost of these gases is dependant on GM judgment. In the literature, a gas is typically created either from a simple chemical process from sea water, or from the atomic action of rare radium salts. The gases would cost respectively $0.10 or $100 per pound of lift depending on the method. They are typically non-flammable, but dramatic exceptions are possible. One non-cinematic lifting gas not in Vehicles 2 is methane. Civil War balloons were often filled with "town gas", a variable mixture of hydrogen, methane, and other hydrocarbons. Methane-filled aerostats have been proposed as a way of transporting natural gas from distant oilfields. Methane 31.3 ? Methane has the same chance of explosion as hydrogen (V183, V185).