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(TFT) converting Azhanti High Lightning over to TFT Melee scale



okay, I recieved a copy of Azhanti High Lightning awhile back and decided to draw it up in TFT Melee hexes. I thought the roughest part would be squeezing in an extra hex every ~ 6.5 squares and still keeping all the nooks and crannies off of hexsides as much as possable. it turns out that square hexes help show some mistakes in the High Lightning deckplans.

1.3m ~ 4.26ft (TFT, average stride of 6ft tall Figure while running)
1 cubic TFT hex ~ 2.197m^3
1.5m ~ 4.9ft (Traveller, chosen for decimal pruposes perhaps?)
1 cubic Traveller square ~ 3.375m^3 (note that standard deck hight is 3m or 2 T-squares)
2.6m ~ 8.5ft (2 TFT hexes)
3m ~ 9.8ft (2 Traveller squares)
3.9m ~ 12.795ft (3 TFT hexes)
4.5m ~ 14.76ft (3 Traveller squares)
1 ton ship displacement equals approzimately 14 cubic meters therefore one ton equals about two squares of deckspace (b2p21) {as B2 indicates that standard deck height is 3m, or two squares in height, one displacement ton is a little over 4 cubic T-squares or 6 cubic TFT-hexes}

so I started figuring liquid Hydrogen...

This is from a current liquid H ventless storage system pattent.

"A hydrogen storage and delivery system is provided having an orifice pulse tube refrigerator and a liquid hydrogen storage vessel. A cooling system, coupled to the orifice pulse tube refrigerator, cools the vessel and abates ambient heat transfer thereto in order to maintain the liquid hydrogen in the vessel at or below its saturation temperature. Hydrogen boil-off, and the necessity to provide continuous venting of vaporized hydrogen are minimized or avoided. In a preferred embodiment, the hydrogen storage vessel has a toroidal shape, and the pulse tube refrigerator is a two stage pulse tube refrigerator and extends within a central void space defined at the geometric center of the toroidal storage vessel. Also in a preferred embodiment, the cooling system includes first and second thermal jackets, each having a substantially toroidal shape and enclosing the storage vessel, wherein each of the thermal jackets is thermally coupled to one of the first or second stages of the pulse tube refrigerator in order to cool the vessel and to abate ambient heat leak thereto. The hydrogen storage and delivery system is particularly suitable for use in vehicles, such as passenger automobiles."

A big doughnut with a refrigerator it the middle works very well with the deckplans as given. However, there is a big chunck of fuel missing physically on the plans, around 50% of what's called for.

It turns out that an old issue of Space Gamer (#53) tried to address this but it comes off alot more confusing to me rather than clearing any of this up, especally the 2.3m square height citation refering to 1 ton liquid H = 2 1.5m x 1.5m x 2.3m squares... MY High Guard has no such reference on page 33 or elsewhere, where as my book2 says standard deck height comes in at 3m or 2 T-squares high. The letters author also figures total fuel cap @ 37,800 tons rather than the stated 32,000 tons from supplement5, although this does make a point about total fuel shuttle trips to refuel.

So I checked on how much liquid H I could put into 4 cubic T-squares.
Liquid Hydrogen comes in at just under 71g per liter @ 20deg K which is around 1/14th the density of water @ 4deg C (1kg per liter for water and 1000 liters per cubic meter). A check of the math takes four cubic T-squares to be ~14 cubic meters or about 14,000 liters. With a density of 70.99g per liter for liquid H four cubic T-squares equals about 2,191.086 lbs which checks for the displacement figures as given in the rules and makes a little more sense to me because spaceships are more about containment rather than displacement huh? ergo figure to hold your most common cargo. (notice that sub displacement is closer to 1.4m^3 per ton but water is about 14 times denser than water) The map and suplment indicates that there are about 250 1.5m by 1.5m squares per side on a fuel deck and that there are 3 squares in height @ 1.5m per square height to account for the 4.5m standard deck height given in sup5. 500 T-squares of deckspace by 3 squares height (4.5m) is 1500 cubic T-squares @ 396.156 tons liquid H per deck @ 20 K and 1 atmosphere. Going with the 400 tons per deck times 43 decks we get 17,200 tons of fuel, and I can now agree with the point that the ship dosen't appear to have enough space for fuel showing only about 50% of nesecary space depending on which fuel tonnage you go with.

w/o bothering with lower temp densities (H freezes @ ~ 14 degrees K) or high pressure tanks (liquid metallic H @ ~ 1,000,000 atmospheres w/high temps) I think the easiest fix is to assume a fuel-deck "height" of 9m or twice the standard deck height of 4.5m to help account for the remaining fuel to fill 'er up. Should I add to the dimensions of someone elses ship just to fix a fuel problem? After all, Mr. Weisman states that the large fin on the box art holds fuel.

The dimensions of the ship are already off as both the hanger decks are described as being 18m in height, or 4 times the height of a "standard deck". If nothing else, this adds over 60,000 cubic meters to the things volume coming in at 900,000m^3 rather than the 840,000 stated (@ 61.2m * 36.4m = 2227.68m^2 "grav floor area" * 4.5m "height" = 10,024.56m^3 per 4.5m standard height deck which matches up with stated figures in sup5) and also adds 27m to the "length" and almost 5,000 more displacement tons.

Doubeling the "height" of the fuel decks to 9m plus adding the 10 missing fuel decks adds 33 + 20 standard decks in length or 53 * 4.5m or another 238.5m to her, making her about 670.5m in total "length", well over half again as long. She also gets an additional 530,000 cubic meters of volume, now totaling 1,430,000m^3.
We've now got over 90% of the total fuel accounted for.

The 9m (fin is shown spaning central tube, 6 T-squares on deckplans or 9m) by 17m by aprox half the length of the ship or 300ish meter fin covers around 7 tons of fuel per 1.5m of fin length, or over 1000 tons of fuel (~ 2.5 standard fuel decks or 25% over 1 of my double sized decks), as well as covering swaths of quite a few turrents effective fire-arcs.
I'm not sure I'd keep the fin...

The above gives me a MUCH better "visual" on what this thing looks like from an objective standpoint. A Typhoon class sub comes in at around 175m in length, and a Nimitz class aircraft carier is over 330m long. The Empire State Building is 381m by 129m by 60m roughly... Azhanti is 289.5m longer and about half the width and bredth... "built around three tubes".

Compare to Ohio class ballistic missile submarines. Displacement: 18750 tons submerged, 24,034.56m^3 (1.3m^3 per ton displaced?) Dimensions: 560 x 42 x 36.25 feet/170.7 x 12.8 x 11 meters. Azhanti Displacement: 100,000+ tons @ 1,400,000+m^3 Dimensions: 670.5 x 61.2 x 36.4 meters The High Lightning as described is in the ballpark of a subs dimensions now (instead of a flying skyscraper) so I don't feel the need to make the thing any wider, adding even MORE tonnage.

okay, so lets go to TFT.

Azhanti High Lightning
515.769 hexes (52bm n/s or 65bm e/w) by 47 hexes (5bm n/s or 6bm e/w) by 28 hexes (3bm n/s or 4bm e/w) 1 cubic Melee hex is 2.197m^3 and holds 155.965kg or 343.8lbs of liquid H per cubic hex. 5.8 cubic hexes hold 1 ton liquid H with 6 cubic hexes holding one ton of liquid H in a rectangluar box 1.5m by 1.5m by 3m (4 T-squares) with walls 1 inch thick (~12,960in^3). Each deck is 26 hexes n/s (3bm) by 47 hexes e/w (6bm) (bm equal two and a half by four feet in physical layout, a big table but not undooable I think) Useing the hex lengths above into pythag, the longest possable shot on any deck comes in at 55 hexes or 18.3 mega-hexes, which is under 80 yards (although shots down the lengths of the gun or launch tubes, or more likely along the lengths of "ladder" tubes or conduit could come in significantly longer... and the hangar decks are 57 hexes from floor corner to cealing caddy-corner)

Now before there was Zaphod there was JoeJim... but there's alot to talk about here before we put weapons in the mix.

How does this thing fly? Book 2 shows the clasic mid-point flip manuver but sup5 says the thing has artifical gravity. If that is the case then I'd expect areas like cargo holds, hanger decks and ladder tubes to be at or near zero g's. And why the almost 15 foot tall cealings if the thing has grav-tec? That's a "boat-load" of extra air-space that serves little purpose unless the thing has 2 floors depending on if your comming or going...

I've considered tumbeling the thing around the power plant on decks 41 thru 46 to get acceleration in the ladder tubes. I get a circle of about 300m radius rotating at about 22mph with gravity down to about 6% of earth normal about 4 decks away from the center of rotation. Torquing the spin is also intresting, although it mainly affects falling down a ladder tube. She's just so tiny compared to the colony ship in Orphans... which raises questions as to the ships lauder.

So what to talk about? Zero and multi-g combat, relitavestic travel and city/starport growth-change or tech-trees or something else entirly?


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