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Post by goduranus on Nov 10, 2016 9:32:14 GMT
When I first played, I built huge 7m diameter rad shields like everyone else. But after some experimentation, I found that rad shields only needs to be 50cm across, as long as your ship has at most one fission reactor and one NTR and all crew modules are inline. This is because the radiation from fission reactors only comes from a tiny volume of the core itself, which for my ships is usually has a radius less 15cm. As long as the rad shield covers that tiny volume, it can be very small and light. Btw, the best material for radiation shield is polyethylene lithium-6(thanks Dhan). This material can't be used as neutron reflectors on reactors because of the low melting point, but make it a separate rad shield component and it works fine. This makes neutron reflectors on reactors and NTRs unnecessary, since polyethylene lithium-6 is so effective, 20 1cm of it stops nearly all radiation. Edit: Apparently the reason I quoted was not quite true. It seems that the crew module only detects radiation flux at its center, so as long as the rad shield is between the center of the reactor and the crew module, it could be arbitrarily small.Seen here, a 2.8cm radius radiation shield blocking all the radiation from 2 unshielded 10GW fission reactors. I could have made it 2mm and it would still have worked, but then it'd be so narrow it's hard to mouse-over.  |
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Post by jaberwo on Nov 10, 2016 10:40:48 GMT
Well, it's true that radiation shields are also sometimes called shadow shields. So the do have some geometry considerations to think about. However, exploiting the simplified way the game simulates the exposure of the crew seems not to be in the spirit of exploring realistic space warfare. Just my personal feeling though, hacking the mechanics like that is fun in its own way!  Not considering the volume from which the radiation emanates probably introduces less error than using only the center of the habitat as radiation gauge. (Kind of reminds me of how shortened school days in my old school in Germany on particular hot sommer days were determined: When the thermometer in the basement showed the temperature was over 36°C) |
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Post by Dhan on Nov 11, 2016 4:55:19 GMT
Best rad shield is lithium-6. You only need a few mm of the stuff.
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Post by dragonkid11 on Nov 11, 2016 6:36:08 GMT
Best rad shield is lithium-6. You only need a few mm of the stuff. Wait really? I tried to make the plate before and it didn't wor- Oh. Lithium-SIX Oh. Okay. |
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Post by Crazy Tom on Nov 12, 2016 0:25:08 GMT
qswitched, sounds like a bug to look into, eh?
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