|
Post by argonbalt on Feb 21, 2018 14:11:00 GMT
The main issue with this notion of mass vs cost optimisation is that all cost optimisation ships already shave off as much mass as possible. Rather i think the point that is more worthwhile and fun to play/test is dont shy away from experimental and crazy(albeit expensive) material design as it can yield interesting results. I for example once made a hundreds of millions of credits ship simply by wanting to use that one weird element that makes the armour green. I think the nice thing with cost optimisation is that fundamentally if you are testing ship AX10 vs ship BX1 and only mass is focused on it does not equal out very well. For me cost optimisation has been first and foremost always about how trying to specialise entire single ships to counter enemy fleets was fun but made for some Frankenstein bastardisation of any form of regulated ship doctrine. Instead say Ship B is 10$, this meant i could optimise 5 2$ versions of ship A and see how that works out.
|
|
|
Post by AtomHeartDragon on Feb 21, 2018 19:02:23 GMT
The main issue with this notion of mass vs cost optimisation is that all cost optimisation ships already shave off as much mass as possible. Rather i think the point that is more worthwhile and fun to play/test is dont shy away from experimental and crazy(albeit expensive) material design as it can yield interesting results. I for example once made a hundreds of millions of credits ship simply by wanting to use that one weird element that makes the armour green. I think the nice thing with cost optimisation is that fundamentally if you are testing ship AX10 vs ship BX1 and only mass is focused on it does not equal out very well. For me cost optimisation has been first and foremost always about how trying to specialise entire single ships to counter enemy fleets was fun but made for some Frankenstein bastardisation of any form of regulated ship doctrine. Instead say Ship B is 10$, this meant i could optimise 5 2$ versions of ship A and see how that works out. My main gripe with cost optimization is that, in a game essentially dedicated to modelling what would and wouldn't work in space combat and modelling large number of materials for this purpose, it injects a layer of arbitrary assumptions and renders half of those materials impractical. Even base on solar system abundances some prices are dubious at best - I don't think deuterium or hydrogen deuteride are any easier to store than plain hydrogen (and it will take some serious citations to convince me otherwise - deuterium IS hydrogen, after all, and while it does differ chemically from normal hydrogen more than most isotopes do, it's not like those extra neutrons will catch on tank's atoms to prevent penetration and resulting leaks and embrittlement, or anything like that), so both are going to be VASTLY more price-y than plain old H 2; similarly, I don't think RCC - which can already be produced in bulk - is going to be cheaper than bulk quantities of diamond. Meanwhile mass is completely non-arbitrary so it makes more sense to try to find out what's the best thing you can make out of given amount of stuff. Another good, non-arbitrary criterion is manpower - while the specifics of what should be considered necessary crew are not agreed upon, there doesn't seem to be much doubt regarding what needs crew and ships generally need a somewhat balanced set of components. It seems both more fun and more interesting considering game's stated purpose to first try and build the best thing possible (per given finite quantity of material) and only then economize.
|
|
elukka
Junior Member
Posts: 73
|
Post by elukka on Feb 21, 2018 23:21:11 GMT
Even without considering the inevitably arbitrary nature of costs, the way it's measured in game is just weird. A 10 GW reactor and giant laser and hundreds of missiles cost peanuts, and what breaks the budget is... an armor layer of aramid fiber. I don't think it makes sense that the cost is primarily based on raw materials rather than manufacturing. It might seem a bit less arbitrary that way, but I think the end result is more unrealistic.
|
|
|
Post by AdmiralObvious on Feb 22, 2018 6:58:55 GMT
Here's the thing though, in order to MAKE Reinforced Carbon, you need to actually manufacture it with a variety of methods in order for the compound to be useable.
The reason why Diamond is so cheap,is because it occurs naturally almost everywhere in the asteroid belts, AND, the big reason, "diamonds" don't need to be "manufactured" under the same principle as a composite, or a fiber. I think this is simply an oversight in terms of stock pricing which might need a cost override, since it's almost impossible to find a single contiguous piece of diamond big enough to make an armor plate on a spaceship, let alone an entire nuclear reactor casing (and that's not even mentioning decomposition of the diamond once heated).
Deuterium is cheaper than hydrogen because it's a stable hydrogen atom, which has enough chemical bonds keeping it from seeping through containers as readily, or reacting with the containing unit (correct me if I'm wrong, it's been a while since chemistry for me). Yes, it should arguably cost more to make the deuterium, since hydrogen is immensely more abundant, but hydrogen binds with literally almost everything, unless it's container is already "inert" to any other molecular interference.
I would be interested in seeing some sort of system in game, at a later date, where you can have limited resources, due to your location/faction. It would be a bit interesting seeing how well you could make a ship while also missing certain key elements that are only found in certain spots in the solar system.
|
|
|
Post by AtomHeartDragon on Feb 22, 2018 8:02:42 GMT
I think this is simply an oversight in terms of stock pricing which might need a cost override, since it's almost impossible to find a single contiguous piece of diamond big enough to make an armor plate on a spaceship, let alone an entire nuclear reactor casing (and that's not even mentioning decomposition of the diamond once heated). Precisely. Most diamond is microscopic particles and good luck making anything with properties anywhere close to to what we have in game from them. Abundance should be abundance of usable form and making diamonds is going to be tricky because of pressures involved. Meanwhile, making RCC, while not exactly straightforward, isn't nearly as extreme for spacefaring civilization. Chemically deuterium and protium (standard hydrogen) are pretty much the same thing - bonds and all, because chemistry is almost exclusively determined by the electron shells, the volume occupied by nucleus is approximately nil compared to the whole atom and gravity is negligible at those scales (you'd probably need somewhere like surface of a cooled down neutron star to experience things like gravitochemistry). There are some minor chemical differences because the difference in mass is so extreme for a pair of isotopes, but they only really matter in very fine-tuned chemical systems (heavy water isn't good for you) - unless I get very concrete papers explicitly saying otherwise, from storage tank's perspective regular hydrogen, deuterium and hydrogen deuteride are going to be the same nasty crap seeping everywhere, leaking out and making cracks in the process. Meanwhile to have deuterium you need to first gather or make vastly more hydrogen and store it, then isolate deuterium and also store it. To have hydrogen deuteride, you first need to have and store deuterium, make the right deuterated chemical with it, react them with the right regular hydrogen containing chemical and store the result (which is also a kind of hydrogen). Yes.
|
|
|
Post by apophys on Feb 22, 2018 10:27:39 GMT
I think this is simply an oversight in terms of stock pricing which might need a cost override, since it's almost impossible to find a single contiguous piece of diamond big enough to make an armor plate on a spaceship, let alone an entire nuclear reactor casing (and that's not even mentioning decomposition of the diamond once heated). Precisely. Most diamond is microscopic particles and good luck making anything with properties anywhere close to to what we have in game from them. Abundance should be abundance of usable form and making diamonds is going to be tricky because of pressures involved. Meanwhile, making RCC, while not exactly straightforward, isn't nearly as extreme for spacefaring civilization. Diamond isn't that hard to make, just very energy intensive and slow. See chemical vapor deposition. You can feasibly coat things in a layer of diamond as thick as you like. Large-scale manufacturing and cheap heat/electricity (like solar concentration in space) would bring costs down significantly. As for the source of carbon, carbon dioxide is ubiquitous as dry ice in asteroids and on moons (and 96% of the atmosphere of Venus). Alternately, you can turn liquid CO2 into CO and O2 by electrolysis at high temperature, so you should also be able to do the same for CO into carbon and oxygen. Not sure what form of carbon you'll normally get, but you should be able to set the conditions right for diamond to form. Reactor casings are fine being graphite; the main uses of diamond in our ships are propellant tanks and engine bells. Both of which are relatively thin layers that can be grown by CVD. (And propellant tanks may just get made out of steel wrapped in UHMWPE fiber or something.) We also use diamond as laser components, but that's minor and may not be relevant with other laser technologies than arc lamp pumping.
|
|
|
Post by AtomHeartDragon on Feb 22, 2018 20:49:34 GMT
Regarding deuterium: Apparently it penetrates less into metals, but the difference isn't that pronounced. You can also store and separate heavy water first, but that merely means you'll have to store deuterium/HD that is only slightly less problematic than normal hydrogen, plus get through the trouble of separating heavy water from bulk quantities of water - still seems like far more expensive option. Diamond isn't that hard to make, just very energy intensive and slow. See chemical vapor deposition. You can feasibly coat things in a layer of diamond as thick as you like. Large-scale manufacturing and cheap heat/electricity (like solar concentration in space) would bring costs down significantly. Ok, I defnitely didn't expect CVD to work for diamond given that it's merely metastable in anything resembling normal conditions - I would have expected leisurely deposition at low to moderate pressures to just form graphite or some other allotrope instead (I definitely do feel better about my diamond armour layers and barrel bracing/armour/heatsinks now). Carbon is everywhere, no problem with that. Still, at this point we have both RCC and diamond that are grown slowly while being fed a lot of energy. There is still no reason for RCC to be significantly more expensive. AFAIK tankage is best made of VCS. As for engines, as much as I love them compact and hot, they'll graphitize when made out of diamond. Also, A 10 GW reactor and giant laser and hundreds of missiles cost peanuts, and what breaks the budget is... an armor layer of aramid fiber. I think that summarizes one of the key problems with the economy system rather well.
|
|
|
Post by AdmiralObvious on Feb 22, 2018 21:43:32 GMT
RCC is a system of making carbon fibers, which are then doped in a matrix of graphite and other stuffs (I think). RCC should be at least as expensive as diamond, but not more, since it's almost entirely carbon.
Fuel tanks consume the least amount of mass when made of VCS. Though that doesn't necessarily mean it will be ligter, or cheaper than a tank made of, polyethylene, for example, though the plastic tank won't be able to reasonably hold a lot of the liquids/gasses we use, for a variety of reasons.
The main reason a 10GW reactor can be cheaper than thousands of missiles, again, is due to the fact that fibers have an unnecessarily high multiplier added to the cost of the material, and also the fact that the missile can be made of mostly "pure" non manufactured materials. Graphite is a common outer missile armor, since it works for the job it's intended for. Aramid fiber is not common, because while it's still good, graphite does the job ever so slightly better for the mass (and cost, of course as things stand).
|
|
|
Post by apophys on Feb 22, 2018 22:12:59 GMT
As for engines, as much as I love them compact and hot, they'll graphitize when made out of diamond. Graphitization takes time, proceeds from the surface inward, and slows down if the high temperature also comes with high pressure. For our bells, the highest temperature zone also has the highest pressure. The thruster only has a few minutes of run time anyway, so you can slap on an extra millimeter or two to account for graphitization and call it a day. Here's a paper on the graphitization rates at high pressure and at no pressure: rspa.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/328/1574/413 Full text: sci-hub.tw/10.1098/rspa.1972.0086A mildly crazy idea that I had for slowing the graphitization rate would be to have the diamond pre-stressed (under internal compressive forces due to having tensile wires of osmium running through it, analogous to prestressed concrete in real-life constructions). I'm not sure how practical this would be, but I suspect not very.
|
|
|
Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Feb 23, 2018 1:50:09 GMT
This makes me think that material cost modding might be possible with decompilation and hex editing. At least changing constant multipliers for eg. fiber materials should be doable as long as the correct function can be found. If anyone has good ideas for better cost formulas, I might take a look at how material costs work in-game.
|
|
|
Post by AdmiralObvious on Feb 23, 2018 1:59:27 GMT
This makes me think that material cost modding might be possible with decompilation and hex editing. At least changing constant multipliers for eg. fiber materials should be doable as long as the correct function can be found. If anyone has good ideas for better cost formulas, I might take a look at how material costs work in-game. You can already mod the game to tweak the costs of materials. Anything in the mods folder overrides anything in the base game.
|
|
|
Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Feb 23, 2018 2:10:13 GMT
This makes me think that material cost modding might be possible with decompilation and hex editing. At least changing constant multipliers for eg. fiber materials should be doable as long as the correct function can be found. If anyone has good ideas for better cost formulas, I might take a look at how material costs work in-game. You can already mod the game to tweak the costs of materials. Anything in the mods folder overrides anything in the base game. You can't mod the cost though, can you? From my understanding it's automatically computed based on chemical composition and those fibrous, porous etc. tags.
|
|
|
Post by AdmiralObvious on Feb 23, 2018 4:19:46 GMT
You can already mod the game to tweak the costs of materials. Anything in the mods folder overrides anything in the base game. You can't mod the cost though, can you? From my understanding it's automatically computed based on chemical composition and those fibrous, porous etc. tags. I think in the last patch Q added in the ability for us to specifically set a price per kg of the material.
|
|
|
Post by Rocket Witch on Feb 23, 2018 19:50:22 GMT
You can't mod the cost though, can you? From my understanding it's automatically computed based on chemical composition and those fibrous, porous etc. tags. I think in the last patch Q added in the ability for us to specifically set a price per kg of the material. The exact lines that were made moddable are "Cost_c__kg" and "PoissonsRatio".
|
|
|
Post by Kerr on Feb 23, 2018 21:36:40 GMT
Some materials like basalt fiber are ridicously expensive considering that they are creeated from basalt that is heated up and then spun into fiber composites, this process is easer to do en mass than CVD-diamond farms and should use less energy. And the list goes on. If you want realistic material schemes inform yourself from other sources than CDE and ignore CDE cost there.
|
|