ghgh
Full Member
Still trying to make kinetics work.
Posts: 136
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Post by ghgh on Aug 31, 2018 20:51:28 GMT
How about a treaty on the total number of railgun shots allowed to be stored on a ship. This would be to prevent a weaponized kepler syndrome essentially blockading a planet and creating long lasting no-fly zones.
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Post by The Astronomer on Sept 1, 2018 4:10:07 GMT
Limits on how powerful lasers can be?
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Post by Kerr on Sept 1, 2018 10:15:54 GMT
Limits on how powerful lasers can be? Then they use two lasers with one main optic?
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Post by The Astronomer on Sept 1, 2018 10:41:21 GMT
Limits on how powerful lasers can be? Then they use two lasers with one main optic? I was thinking about combined intensity per ship/platform or things like that. Probably a limitation on laser platforms to prevent them from growing too big to the point they could snipe other planets. Not that I know a lot about those stuff :/ But lasers are sure one dangerous thing. Can't imagine there being no treaty regarding them.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Sept 1, 2018 10:58:51 GMT
Mirror size limitations.
Interestingly, to avoid it being easily circumvented by "accidentally" building your telescopes in such way that you could readily swap sensor package for a laser, it would mean that nearly all actual telescopes would need to be joint international projects.
Then of course phased arrays, but you can still make some interesting worldbuilding with treaties if they are enforceable.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Sept 1, 2018 12:41:54 GMT
Regarding lasers, I can really see them being targetted by treaties - even though they are precision weapons rather than WMDs, they are pretty much the only weapon that can be used to strike, across large distances, without a warning.
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Post by SevenOfCarina on Sept 1, 2018 14:38:53 GMT
If your setting features large-scale industrialisation of space and the astronomical energy requirements that will naturally follow, then it's likely that most factions would have set up several large-scale orbital solar arrays that can beam power to where it is needed. Expect these to be watched very carefully.
In any circumstance, due to the energetic nature of space travel, you're likely to see more treaties restricting or regulating the use of potential weapons of mass destruction than any kind of conventional fleet. An 'accidental' de-orbiting manoeuvre by a US freighter that throws it on a trajectory that ends with it lithobraking in the midst of Moscow may very well provoke nuclear war, even if it has sufficient reaction mass to divert.
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Post by thorneel on Sept 1, 2018 18:09:25 GMT
How about a treaty on the total number of railgun shots allowed to be stored on a ship. This would be to prevent a weaponized kepler syndrome essentially blockading a planet and creating long lasting no-fly zones. That would only be for the railgun shots that don't go much faster than local escape velocity, so high-end railgun would escape that kind of treaty anywhere (except maybe Jupiter). So this would drive even more the development of supervelocity railguns.
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Post by Anon1 on Sept 3, 2018 1:29:18 GMT
I seriously doubt that anyone would ever build a spacecraft with less than a fully shielded NTR if for no other reason that economics. If your NTR is not fully radiation shielded, then would be so radioactive as to be unserviceable; so when the current fuel runs out, you have to throw away a billion dollar or multi-billion dollar engine. By just adding sufficient radiation shielding, you can re-use said engine for decades. People creating designs of nuclear rockets with only a shadow shield are not thinking like investors or legislators. That may work for a one-off NASA science mission; but you are not going to get an economy in space, or a military in space throwing away expensive equipment like that. Plus, you have the problem of what to do with all of the highly radioactive spent engines? Real world politicians would look at the economics of throwing these things away and tell the end-users to just accept lower acceleration and longer trip times; because they are fully shielding these things or the people with the pocketbooks aren't paying for them. This is also why I don't expect to see nuclear powered missiles in space, because they would be entirely uneconomical. In any event, if a fully shielded nuclear engine/reactor was de-orbited and hit the ground, then there would be a hole in the ground with an intact engine/reactor inside of it. Well, the pricing of ships in CDE strongly implies that that the shipyards are more-or-less giant 3D printers, and that there's little cost to machine complexity. The cost of the engines is almost entirely the radioactive materials; once they're expended you may as well toss the engine, the savings from refueling it instead of building a whole new one are not a huge deal. I was talking about in reality and not inside of an unrealistic video game.
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Post by apophys on Sept 3, 2018 2:57:07 GMT
I was talking about in reality and not inside of an unrealistic video game. In reality, we would be able to fully shield reactors with molten lithium-6 (or lithium borohydride using Li-6 and B-10), making mass concerns for neutron shielding largely moot due to its effectiveness.
Gamma radiation produced during normal operation does not transmute elements, so it doesn't contribute to later servicing difficulty. A shadow shield for that is fine, or even just distance.
The servicing issue would be reduced to gamma radiation produced from already-transmuted elements in the inner structure of the core. This to me seems possible to deal with. It doesn't make the servicing equipment radioactive (worst case, you can use robotic arms operated from behind a gamma shadow shield), and the radioactive waste is as little as possible.
Dealing with radioactive waste is much easier in space than on Earth. You can build a reprocessing and storage station in orbit for this purpose, set a dumping location on Luna, or even launch it into the sun.
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Post by Anon1 on Sept 3, 2018 10:06:32 GMT
I was talking about in reality and not inside of an unrealistic video game. In reality, we would be able to fully shield reactors with molten lithium-6 (or lithium borohydride using Li-6 and B-10), making mass concerns for neutron shielding largely moot due to its effectiveness.
Gamma radiation produced during normal operation does not transmute elements, so it doesn't contribute to later servicing difficulty. A shadow shield for that is fine, or even just distance.
The servicing issue would be reduced to gamma radiation produced from already-transmuted elements in the inner structure of the core. This to me seems possible to deal with. It doesn't make the servicing equipment radioactive (worst case, you can use robotic arms operated from behind a gamma shadow shield), and the radioactive waste is as little as possible.
Dealing with radioactive waste is much easier in space than on Earth. You can build a reprocessing and storage station in orbit for this purpose, set a dumping location on Luna, or even launch it into the sun.
Also, your comment about molten lithium 6 sounds like you haven't considered how thick said lithium shield would have to be. It takes ~6.87688 cm of liquid lithium to reduce the neutron flux by 50%. The next 6.87688 cm drops the remaining 50% of flux by 50%, reducing it to 25% of the original flux. The next layer drops the remaining 25% by 50% to 12.5% of the original flux and so on. So 68.7688 cm of lithium drops the flux to 1/1024th of the original and weighs 825.22 kg per sq meter. You are going to need more lithium than this to drop radiation levels to acceptable margins.
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Post by The Astronomer on Sept 3, 2018 11:06:46 GMT
In the link Anon1 gave, I noted that there is no mention about photofission on non-fissile materials.
Is Lithium-6 as fantastically great against fast neutrons in real life as what we see in the game? If it really is, that's an awesome news, since last time i test it, even 5 cm of it can stop pretty much all of the fast neutrons.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Sept 3, 2018 11:30:32 GMT
In the link Anon1 gave, I noted that there is no mention about photofission on non-fissile materials. There is photodisintegration for non-fissiles, but I think you might need stupid radiation intensities (as well as the right photon energies) for it to matter.
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Post by The Astronomer on Sept 3, 2018 12:13:06 GMT
In the link Anon1 gave, I noted that there is no mention about photofission on non-fissile materials. There is photodisintegration for non-fissiles, but I think you might need stupid radiation intensities (as well as the right photon energies) for it to matter. Well, seeing that reactors are usually the source to that kind of stupid radiation intensities... lol
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Sept 3, 2018 13:21:11 GMT
There is photodisintegration for non-fissiles, but I think you might need stupid radiation intensities (as well as the right photon energies) for it to matter. Well, seeing that reactors are usually the source to that kind of stupid radiation intensities... lol I'm not sure if normally stable nuclei share our definition of stupid.
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