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Post by wafflestoo on Nov 9, 2016 17:07:45 GMT
...and the added armor too.
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Post by wafflestoo on Nov 9, 2016 19:23:08 GMT
There might be a small window where you would rather use a RTG than a fission reactor to save up on some 5 people on a crew module, but that is not a lot of design space -- you need to save up more mass and cost on the crew modules than you would spend on extra radiators at a lower temperature. You can build a minimal station / living capsule with not a lot of heat signature, though. that thing is really cute XD There does seem to be a tipping point between reactors and RTGs, and I imagine it's at a different point for different players depending on how advanced their tech is (for me it seems to hover right around 75kw-ish) and how much armor cladding the ship has (since an unarmored ship has next to no volume penalty). Sorry for the double post, but still on the RTG topic: 1. Did anyone manage to use Tritium? I figure it would need to be cooled with something that is non-solid at temperatures where it is solid; Helium seems like the obvious candidate but the coolant temperature range doesn't go that far down. 2. Did anyone manage to build a thing out of Constantan / Nickel Alloy? Power production seems to shoot up at lower temperatures, but I can never radiate enough heat within the RTG design to make it work. The only electrode I've ever gotten to really work out for me is Nickel-Chrome-Iron/Pyrolytic Carbon using Promethium-147 (? or is it Polonium? I can't remember and I won't be able to check until I get home tonight) as the fuel source. I try to keep the temperature above 600K to keep the radiators in check and nothing else seems to hold up. I took a tip from the reactor thread and changed the coolant to Ethane and that improved the performance considerably. I was able to effectively eliminate the pump and reduce the thermocouple mass by about 70kg. I didn't really have time to mess around with the fuel mass though, reducing that while keeping the same power level seems key.
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Post by goduranus on Nov 10, 2016 6:03:11 GMT
No, what I said is I had a ship with a rough power requirement of 100kw and as an experiment I replaced the RTGs with a vastly cheaper, lighter reactor and what I found was the added crew needed to babysit the thing made the ship heavier and more expensive overall. Here's the girl now, post update. She lost a bit of dV because of the NTR changes so I'll have to do some fine-tuning to the engine to bring it up again. I'm sure some of you will nit-pick her to death but for the campaign setting I'm very happy with it. (you can see how "obscene" the radiator costs are) I built a similar ship with fission and 45-man can. Don't know exactly what your missiles cost, but I think this fission ship is better all around.
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Post by amimai on Nov 10, 2016 15:00:00 GMT
Your RTG-fu is weak!
Use Po-210 stick grenade RTG... a 22kg Po-210 RTG with thin calcium radiators can output stagering amounts of power at only the cost of massive radiators, which themselves cost peanuts because of minimal armour.
For my maned ships I tend to use those because you don't need crew if you just need an extra 100kW.
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Post by dragonkid11 on Nov 10, 2016 15:33:39 GMT
Huh, that sounds neat. How did you design it?
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Post by goduranus on Nov 10, 2016 15:43:16 GMT
I don't believe that until I see some designs, isn't polonium very expensive in the game?
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Post by dragonkid11 on Nov 10, 2016 16:05:28 GMT
I don't believe that until I see some designs, isn't polonium very expensive in the game? Apparently polonium was quite cheap in the game, less than 1kc per kilogram.
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Post by wafflestoo on Nov 10, 2016 16:15:29 GMT
I'd like to see it too! That sounds like exactly the kind of dialogue I was hoping for when I started this thread. Goduranus: Your coil-gun-fu is obviously much better than mine. I cannot figure the fiddley things out to save my life. But don't be disrespectin' the 25kw sand-blasters. Your radiators are mine! You're marginally cheaper, but its 500 tons heavier. I'm ALWAYS running out of tonnage before I run out of money so it's worth it to me to spend a little extra to limit the mass. The decane obviously gives you a big edge in the dV department but I think I can shave the margin to under 700m/s once I get some time to re-tune the engines (the patch! It broke all of my NTRs! Broke them I say!) The ASATs aren't anything special; take a stock flak-missile, replace the useless graphite with 5cm of sil-gel, and replace the TNT flak bomb with a 20kg tungsten rod. The only difference between the KV and the GP is the bursting charge inside the warhead (1g and 200g respectively). I eventually want to swap the nitromethane out for either fluro-methane or LOX-decane but only so many hours in a day (and I spend a depressing number of them in the office).
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