Post by luxardens on Jan 13, 2018 12:40:27 GMT
With the latest update I've been making my own scenario where I wanted to find out how ship designs change when propulsion and electrical power are extremely cheap and easy to come by. I used some modded materials for this that are not all that realistic (metallic hydrogen and carbon nanotubes), so a vanilla ship can easily have ~60 km/s of D-V, whatever acceleration they want, and 10 times the power output for the same cost.
I went and designed new vessels and expected to see more heavily armoured ships, because the disadvantages due to mass was so significantly decreased. But I ran into a problem: armour materials are just as expensive as the extremely high-precision built turbine blades in your nuclear reactor. Designs still gravitate towards having almost no armour for cost reasons. I think this is because the vanilla library only contains extremely high-grade materials fabricated with nano-scale perfection; whereas in my scenario people would likely start slapping cruder and lower grade, but cheap armour plates on all vessels. Vanilla Potassium may be cheap, but still ridiculously high-grade and not useful as armour. The first remotely useful armour material in the vanilla library is Diamond, which also (understandably) gets immensely expensive when you add 1000 tons of it.
My brainstorm suggestion to you is then:
"What would be the most cost-effective armour material, IF mass really isn't an issue?"
and
"What would the price in c/kg roughly be in-game?"
So I'm looking for armour stuff that's literally dirt-cheap. Dirt is actually viable suggestion. MPa's are still important, but only relative to the total price per kg.
And to start it off: my personal guess is that colonies would start to harvest the local regolith (insanely cheap) and melt it all down into a lava-like slurry, then slap it onto a ship frame and let it cool into meters thick of solid rock. The result being essentially volcanic rock armour; brittle, but extremely cheap. Cost would be on the order of a couple mc/kg.
Or maybe for some more metallic regolith it is still advantageous to apply some very basic process engineering and turn it into a rather random, impure alloy.
I went and designed new vessels and expected to see more heavily armoured ships, because the disadvantages due to mass was so significantly decreased. But I ran into a problem: armour materials are just as expensive as the extremely high-precision built turbine blades in your nuclear reactor. Designs still gravitate towards having almost no armour for cost reasons. I think this is because the vanilla library only contains extremely high-grade materials fabricated with nano-scale perfection; whereas in my scenario people would likely start slapping cruder and lower grade, but cheap armour plates on all vessels. Vanilla Potassium may be cheap, but still ridiculously high-grade and not useful as armour. The first remotely useful armour material in the vanilla library is Diamond, which also (understandably) gets immensely expensive when you add 1000 tons of it.
My brainstorm suggestion to you is then:
"What would be the most cost-effective armour material, IF mass really isn't an issue?"
and
"What would the price in c/kg roughly be in-game?"
So I'm looking for armour stuff that's literally dirt-cheap. Dirt is actually viable suggestion. MPa's are still important, but only relative to the total price per kg.
And to start it off: my personal guess is that colonies would start to harvest the local regolith (insanely cheap) and melt it all down into a lava-like slurry, then slap it onto a ship frame and let it cool into meters thick of solid rock. The result being essentially volcanic rock armour; brittle, but extremely cheap. Cost would be on the order of a couple mc/kg.
Or maybe for some more metallic regolith it is still advantageous to apply some very basic process engineering and turn it into a rather random, impure alloy.
(