Re: [HOE] Basic Junker Question

[Robert Holland <robert@macauley.com>]

>Hears a Quickie that I don't remember reading anywhere.  Can the Juice
>from one spirit battery be transferred to another?  It seems a basic
>enough task.
>
>Example
>Junker Joe has 2 half full 50 pt batteries, and needs to travel light
>and fast for a bit when his last invention went haywire and destroyed
>half the settlement.  Is it possible to transfer the 25 pts from battery
>A to Battery B, leaving one empty and the other Full?

The Junkman Cometh is pretty damn vague on the specifics of all the various
means of power generation transfer. Here's the system my Marshal and I have
worked out.

Charging a spirit battery requires converting the spirit energy into a stable,
storable format. (I won't try to make up a convincing technobabble explanation
for this; I got a C in Physics 231, and anyway I don't think you can reasonably
assume that normal electricity and Pure Crackling Evil(tm) are governed by the
same physical laws.) This requires considerable amounts of both time and energy.
Ghost rock was created by the Reckoners to be easily harnessed as a fuel source,
so a G-ray collector can convert it *relatively* efficiently, charging batteries
at the rate of one G-ray every 45 seconds (60 minutes/hour divided by 80
G-rays/pound). (I say relatively because it's still massively inefficient
compared to burning ghost rock directly to power, say, a steam turbine. A
quantity of ghost rock sufficient to run a steam train for weeks or months will
power a junker-built car for a few days.) Most other spirit power sources use
the rules in the Cyborgs book--1 drain per round per 10 points of the battery's
capacity, requiring ten minutes per 1 G-ray of charge. This applies to spirit
fetters, soul taps, IGR reactors, and Brain Drain devices. Energy from harnessed
tech spirits is highly unstable and cannot be stored in any way (otherwise a
1-point tech spirit would become a free and limitless power source).

Once the energy has been converted for storage, it can easily be transferred
between batteries. Some sort of connection is required, of course--at the
minimum this requires a device with two appropriately-sized battery jacks and a
selector switch to determine which way the charge is flowing. For greater
distance, use two devices, each with a battery jack, power jack, and selector
switch, connected by a length of spirit cable. Energy can be transferred this
way at the rate of one G-ray per round. (This seems fair to me, since you can't
possibly gain any more energy than you started with, but if you want to limit it
further you could say that something like 10% is lost in the transition, or take
a cue from the cyborg rules and say that the transfer time is equal to one round
per 10 points of the target battery's capacity, perhaps with 5% lossage per 10
points of capacity.)

The conclusion we'd come to about oversized tech spirits is that they provide
their drain once per round, the same as browser spirits. This makes them
extremely useful for hourly-drain devices but not a lot of help with weapons
(you probably want to be able to fire that gun more than once per round...),
which keeps munchkinism more or less in check. From my point of view, the
purpose of oversized tech spirits is to let you build things that are really
very appropriate and junker-ish but that are horrendously impractical with
normal power sources. EG, I worked up a servbot for my junker Jared to build--a
little three-foot-tall humanoid robot buddy, with no weapons and no particular
combat skills. Between AI, Brains, Agility, Locomotion, Sensor, and Commo, he
wound up needing 13 drain per hour--312 per day, or almost four pounds of ghost
rock! Storywise he should be underfoot and causing trouble most of the time, not
just activated for an hour or two once or twice a week. The little guy is
thematically appropriate, but impossible to run for any length of time unless
you've got an IGR reactor or your own personal ghost rock mine. That's what tech
spirits are for, to my mind.

This does lets you run pretty much any conceivable hourly-drain device
permanently with a level one tech spirit (1 drain/round * 12 rounds/minute * 60
minutes/hour = 720 drain/hour). If this bothers you, you might change it to,
say, one drain every ten minutes. That way each level of tech spirit will only
alleviate six drain/hour, so that 13-drain servbot would need either a size 3
spirit or a size 2 spirit and 1 drain/hour.

I've got some more stuff to say on the subject of building charge transfer
devices, but you're all probably sick of reading this pedantic crap by now so
I'll save it for another e-mail.

--Robert Holland