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there doesn't seem to be any jet fighters in CE which led to me being unable to play one since the GM is only allowing stuff from the CE books. we have the jet fighter skill but nothing to use it on, what would be options.

there are no jet fighters because the atmosphere is so choked with volcanic ash that aircraft were grounded on day one of the cataclysm. a condition that would remain for months or years given the conditions and the way ash stays in the atmosphere. anything that needs to be more than a few hundred feet off the ground in flight is just a no-go. and even the relatively ground skimming hovercraft and SAMAS units were grounded for the first several weeks because of the ash fall.

the jet skill being still in there is largely an artifact of palladium's cut and past skill section. they have a lot of skills that are largely useless, and are missing skills that would be important to have. because the book basically just copies the rifts skill section with anything rifts specific cut out.

We do have examples of pre-Rifts aircraft in the Underseas book. The New Navy has two jets, one also goes underwater. But these would be rare and as was said before not be able to fly in the months after the apocalypse.

I use Robotech conventional fighters from the RDF manual.

I've ruled in my campaign that all high speed flight is dangerous to the point of being one-way. The primary danger is that navigation is extremely uncertain due to inaccuracies and discrepancies in *every* navigation system. The only safe speeds are slow enough to check ground landmarks. No radio beacons obviously and handwave doing these checks at high speed not working.

Certain airbases with sufficient aircraft and pilots have sent out "dove" flights with orders to carry messages to any station encountered and then land at the best available airstrip at the end of the flight. Obviously only NPCs should be flying these.

Well, part of that would be explained by all of those ex-fly boys being grounded after the Cataclysm, & those skills being left over from their former occupations.

However...it got me thinking. The way I understand it, all of the other jet fighters in the Rifts settings (with the exception of perhaps any GAW conversions) operate using "fusion thrusters", & rather than burning JP-4/-5/kerosene like real-world aircraft engines do to heat up their exhaust they heat the air via the output of their onboard fusion reactors. Not directly, of course -- I'm sure that none of the governments on Rifts Earth (however they may feel about their neighbors or enemies) really don't want to be dusting their crops & their citizens with radioactive dust every time one of their aircraft goes up -- but either by heat transfer (i.e. using the air flowing through the thrusters the same way that water- and liquid-cooled reactors use water, liquid sodium, or their other liquid coolants; most likely direct heat transfer, I don't think they'd have the room for the dual systems used in modern-day reactors) or by channeling some of the power generated by the reactor into heat generators. Which means, of course, that you need to have air flow through the fusion thruster at one end so that it can exit the other end...& since I seriously doubt you can get enough air flow just from having the fusion thruster essentially be a big hollow tube, that means turbine blades & air compression stages just like modern-day turbojets & turbofans. So the fusion thrusters (or fusion turbines, if you will) would have similar problems dealing with ash & smoke that regular aircraft engines would -- maybe not the damage of a flameout, per say, but almost certainly issues with the turbine blades getting clogged up, maybe even some overheating issues.

The main concern with that? I imagine this is also the same way that the thrusters on the USA-106 Silver Eagle (& its descendant, the PA-06A SAMAS) work. Which means that it wouldn't have been only the fighters & other aircraft grounded right after the Cataclysm, but also any of the flight-capable PA suits (at least none that don't utilize alien Contra-G tech for flight)...at least not without perhaps some repurposed sand filtration systems to help keep the ash from clogging them up.

lower altitudes (under a few thousand feet) are generally clearer of ash, at least when you aren't in the immediate vicinity of the volcano. this is because the jet stream and other high altitude aircurrents suspend the ash in the atmosphere. at lower altitudes the ash tends to fall down to the ground, leaving the air a bit clearer. thus while low altitudes have ash in the air that is still damaging to moving parts (enough that you have to do repairs and replacement more frequently) you actually can fly in it as long as you are careful. though given the location of the midwest relative to the known volcanos, every so often you'll get a heavy ashfall as a load of ash from a volcanic cloud gets blown over the area. in that situation everything would have to be grounded again.

the atmospheric ash in the western half of the US (where the ring of fire and yellowstone are) is so thick it even causes ground vehicles to stop working (CE pg21), it is likely the ground vehicles mentioned were mainly hover vehicles.

Things that can be flown more than a few hundred feet off the ground and not worry about volcanic ash in the air intake.
Things that don't use engines
Hot Air Balloons
Anything that doesn't breath air.
Rockets
Gliders taken aloft with JATO packs
Anything that does breath air but doesn't rely on moving components or filtered air
Ramjets
Scramjets
Things that are electrically powered and don't require air through ports, vents or filters.
Ultralight
Maybe some prop planes were converted to battery
Dirigibles
powered paragliding

MAYBE extremely unlikely the jets are fusion powered and rather than using compression to accelerate the air going through the engine they finally developed workable MHD?

keep in mind, that even if you aren't ingesting ash into an engine, you are still going to be flying through clouds of the stuff when up high. basically sandblasting your aircraft. that the ash clouds would also have suspended sulfuric acid droplets (which literally eat away at the aircraft) would make this worse, since that would effect even slower moving stuff.

this means that even something like a slow moving hot air balloon would only be able to fly for a period of time before it took so much damage it would stop being usable.

Yeah, okay. Not to mention when it was fresh there is the possibility of hot ash. But all the stuff on the ground would eventually be facing the same stuff. And we are talking MD so is MD material effected by sulfuric acid? Would sandblasting at less than MDC speeds cause damage to MDC materials?

Bit off topic but if the ash is falling to ground level would it clog the engines of ground based hover vehicles and the air filters of environmental body armor? I have always said yes but I base that on just a few real world examples.

I would say that filters would get clogged a lot easier and could cause vehicles to stall out or have trouble starting, or worse


https://volcanoes.usgs.gov/volcanic_ash ... ine%20wear.

yes ash would mess up engines and clog filters. and that is one of the big hazards real world emergency responders have when dealing with volcanic events. though the fact that in CE the ash is coming down alongside freezing rain and snow will help.. the water mixes with the powdery ash and turns it into a almost concrete like slurry/paste.

and i think i've not done the greatest at explaining why the lower levels are relatively clear.. i blame the fact that having researched this stuff a ton for a CE writing project, i forget that not everyone will automatically know some of the finer points i'm often skipping over to get to the main points.

basically ash comes in a bunch of different forms. some are light, some are heavier. the lighter stuff goes up into the upper atmosphere very easily during eruptions, and stays suspended for a very long times (sometimes years) due to air currents and such. most of this ash doesn't come down as ashfall, but rather mixed in with rain and snow (as the ash particulates tend be ideal nucleating centers for raindrops and ice crystals) this is part of why the lower altitudes are usually more clear.. humidity and low lying clouds tend to absorb the ash and precipitate it out, especially the farther away you get from the volcanic event.

heavier ash types tend not to go as high in the atmosphere, and the wind currents do not kep them in the iar as long. these types of ash tend to fall out in the ashfalls we so identify with volcanic eruptions, the ones that look like dirty snowfall. this kind of ashfall is usually only seen close to the volcanic event, unless the winds are quite high.

we know that the chicago area has been subjected to the latter type of ashfall in CE, and quite a lot of it (several feet worth). this is somewhat to be expected from a yellowstone eruption.. though it would be one whopper of a blow, given that previous eruptions (going by geological surveys) didn't reach that far east with the kind of multi-foot ash deposits we see in CE. USGS map of previous eruptions, with predictive map showing probable ash thicknesses. to get the multi-feet levels from CE, it is likely that yellowstone would have to have "blown its top" explosively redistributing much of northwest wyoming's upper crust around the continent)

now if the eruption was constant this would be a huge issue. after all that sort of heavy ashfall would be a danger to hover vehicles and low flying SAMAS and such. but the saving grace here is that eruptions usually aren't constant.. since eruptions are the release of geological pressure, they tend to occur in spurts.. usually an initial eruption, then a period of relative quiet, then another period of eruption activity, another period of quiet, etc. the pattern and duration periods vary from volcano to volcano and eruption to eruption. sometimes you get one intense eruption then it goes relatively quiet for very long periods.

so for chicago and the midwest the most likely result would be that you'd have a period of a couple weeks of intense eruption and ashfall, followed by a period of relative calm where there is little 'heavy ash' falling. very likely you would have intermittent ashfall of that sort for months, as ash if blown in from the west coast and minor eruptions in the yellowstone crater. (as after such major events you usually see smaller volcanic vents open up in cracks and lava tubes the main volcano created. sometimes this serves to vent the remaining pressure less destructively. but they tend to generate a ton of ash)

Do we know what kind of filters the vehicles and armor use? I have always assumes that they are some sort of electrostatic or other washable filter but if it is some sort of disposable filter than supply will be an issue?

that they even have filters is an inferred feature derived from the fact that real world military vehicles and environmental gear do. so no we can't say for certain what kinds of filter tech they're using.

other than it clearly is more advanced than out current stuff since EBA can have filtered air without the kind of bulky filter canisters real world gas masks and hazmat suits use. many EBA suits don't even have much in the way of a backpack looking thing where suit equipment might be.

i would presume that they probably do have electrostatic systems involved, but probably also have activated carbon and the like physical filters for when full hazmat use is needed. i would also presume that the "stored air" EBA is listed as having (usually several hours worth) is probably a rebreather system with only a small amount of of actual stored O2.