Talk:Starfleet/@comment-25584152-20141217034654/@comment-11135771-20141217045656

-shrug-

You can use whatever amount you like really, but you just have to accept the risks and costs involved with whatever amount you use. The only reasons I'm advising against using a whole gram on a ship are because it's super dangerous and too much for failsafes to likely be able to handle, and because it's way more than you would realistically need (also probably really, really expensive). I think one gram might be reasonable for something really large, like a massive 5km long capital ships, but anything less than that won't need nearly that much.

0.1 grams might be good for a ship's reactor, but IMO it's a bit much for a torpedo. Not that you can't have it of course, but again, risks and costs. You could have a hundred-gram torpedo if you wanted, but if it gets shot down by point defenses before hitting anything, you lose an insanely large investment, and the ship carrying it is very likely to explode if hit. 0.1g isn't too bad, but it'd be pretty expensive for a torpedo when you consider the amount of missile defenses people have, and having a bunch of them on a ship would be both costly and hazardous if you got shot at (remember that torpedoes won't have all the fancy failsafes that reactors will, so if you have them on board and get shot, you WILL explode).