Missile Madness

 Once upon a time, there was a magazine called Journal of the Travellers' Aid Society. Then there wasn't. Then there was. Then there wasn't now there is. The first incarnation of the JTAS dealt with Classic Traveller for 24 glorious issues!

One of the goodies in JTAS were articles and supplements by the Emperor himself and I still marvel at the man's brilliance. Anyway he did Special Supplement 3: Missiles and went into great detail on the little death dealers. Some of it really belonged in Book 2 (like acceleration and number of burn turns!) but what is done is done. Sadly the supplement needed a ton of editing which came out in the Consolidated Errata for Traveller, including notes by Mr. Miller himself and addenda. And t also included errors in the tables for the missiles. Use the Errata and the formulas given. Write your own tables.

Missiles had limited fuel and accelerations similar to starships. The engines were described as continuous with solid fuel, and limited and discretionary with semisolid and liquid fuel. Note the term used is fuel which makes me believe that the missiles use an engine similar to maneuver drives. Rockets use propellant. Apparently you can cobble together a continuous burn engine at TL 5. This doesn't surprise me. My Zaonians were building grav vehicles with tube technology. 

A 50 kilogram missile can accelerate at four gees for 2000 seconds with a continuous burn casing (I take this to mean the engine as well as hull)weighing 4 Kg and fuel weighing 8 kg. 1000 seconds will get you to orbit. I added anther turn to account for ar resistance, maneuvering and other niceties that kept downing my rockets in Kerbal Space Program. Twelve kilos is 24% of the craft's mass or a fuel ratio of 1.3 to one. The technical term for this ratio is fan-fuckken-tastic. Current rockets guzzle propellant and have mass ratios of ten or more (fueled weight is ten time dry weight). These brutes, assuming you can scale them up, give even a low tech planet access to the stars. Let's say a dTon masses 5 rl tons. Then to contest a rocket to orbit using these engines, you'd need to multiply the weights and prices even by the supplement by 100. A 100 dTon space craft (Scout sized) would mass 500 real tons or 500,000 kilograms. Propelling a scout would require ten tons of propellant for every kilo a missile with similar performance would have.

Lifting a 100 ton  craft to orbit would require an engine massing 40,000 kilos and 40,000 kilos of propellant or 8 displacement tons for each component, a fuel ratio of 1.16 to 1 is fandamtastic. This is for a TL 6 continuous burn (solid fuel) rocket with incidental maneuvering. Total cost for propellant is MCr 4.  The engine also costs MCr 4. That isn't bad to reach orbit ,with 84 displacement tons, for an early Industrial Age world. Limited bud rockets are much more useful and at TL 8 barely in each for a TL 6 world. 

So even TL 6 worlds could have a home grown orbital element. Assuming a 100 ton vessel costs the same as a Scout say MCr. 30. Assume MCr 4 for propellant. Say the ship needs annual  maintenance equivalent 1/1000 of cost Cr 30, 000 a launch. Peanuts next to high tech propellants back engineered. MCr 4 for 84 dTons or Cr 10 per kilogram is not too shabby. Make it Cr 20 per kilogram for a craft with 50% dedicated cargo hauling. You can make a station of unstreamlined ships. You can parachute cargos from there to the surface. For maybe a tenth cost? That will bring you traders. In unstreamlined ships. Traders who may not wish to bother with using their shuttles to land and lift for meetings and to deliver cargo and freight. Provided those 'chutes land in the right spots, get recovered by the right people, and do not burn up. 

There's a darker side to this. Imagine a TL 6 balkanized world at war. Look to our own Earth ca. 1943. Imagine a Third Reich with V-2s and V-3s using the technology. They could hit New York City. No need for long range bombers. Nowhere on the planet they couldn't hit eventually. 

Afterword: In case I wasn't clear, these engines are remarkably efficient. Perhaps they use nuclear thermal rocket technology. Still they are at least an order (a whole order!) of magnitude better then the usual TL 6-7 rockets developed historically. Talks about alternative technology paths. This one is a tube train. 

For my part I just like seeing where a device or technology is mentioned and apply it liberally.