Maybe I was out that week in Physics class in 1986. I do remember we spent way too many weeks on vectors, fulcrums and the stuff about lenses was boring. We never got nuclear or atomic stuff but near graduation, I vaguely recall electrical things like resistance. Oh yeah and how slow electrons really are, as in 16+ minutes to cover one meter of an electrified piece of metal. I just never got the gist of Watts, Joules and so on.
Why does this matter anyway? In my curiosity over how much closer we are to harnessing fusion (too late to stop the Climate Change disasters, it’s here) along with my on again/off again 2300 AD campaign, I’ve been hybridizing all my favorite RPGs to perfect interstellar travel. The key has been figuring out units of energy to coincide with what I call the Super Symmetry drive or as my setting calls it, the Alcubierre Drive, maybe AD drive for short. Those are both real-world references! The AD is a nod to the KK drive from one of my favorite Sci-Fi novel settings by Alan Dean Foster, the Humanx Commonwealth.
What a I learned in my research was a bummer. A Watt equals a Joule, fine. However, a Joule is only enough energy to move approximately 100 grams one meter. Why not a kilo or one gram? A hundred grams seems silly and arbitrary. The other thing that was a relief was getting clarification on how power plants or sources are rated, finally! When the stats say an installation produces n MegaWatts (usually), this is its maximum per hour. I wasn’t sure if this was per second, minute, hour, etc. Hell, it could’ve been for the lifetime of the power source. A government site clarified my confusion. Now I can extrapolate this for all the power plants listed in 2300 AD‘s supplemental starship construction rules while I rein in the rather absurd Energy Points from Traveller‘s High Guard. Ready, 1 EP = 250 MW. I’d say it’s a bit much when this is applied to today’s Space X or Artemis rockets given those rules say they’re Tech Level 6 or higher.