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Post by ambulatorycortex on Nov 14, 2016 18:33:27 GMT
So I was thinking about how I can run fluorine through a diamond reaction chamber and expect it to be fine, and I think some complicating factors should be added: - Components that contact propellant should allow you to specify a passivating layer and erode(modeled as seconds of operation) if the layer is not suitable.
- Cryogenic propellants should boil off and require heat pumps to limit boiloff. A kilotonne of liquid hydrogen should be energy-intensive to store.
- Hydrogen should cause embrittlement. Hydrogen is sneaky stuff and gets everywhere, damaging many materials.
- Knife-edge safety margin components should have some sort of cost or risk associated with quality control. Right now, running a rocket at a few pascals from burst pressure is one of the ways to keep it cheap!
- Material cost should include both rarity and cost of extraction/refinement. Elemental fluorine should be expensive stuff because of its strong bonds.
I'm sure there are more things I have missed, but these items would significantly improve the realism of our components. |
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Post by subunit on Nov 14, 2016 20:31:32 GMT
- Knife-edge safety margin components should have some sort of cost or risk associated with quality control. Right now, running a rocket at a few pascals from burst pressure is one of the ways to keep it cheap!
- Material cost should include both rarity and cost of extraction/refinement. Elemental fluorine should be expensive stuff because of its strong bonds.
Really like the first idea- some risk of component failure would be very cool. I agree with the second idea in principle, but I think if you took this seriously (how much energy is actually expended to get your propellants? fissiles?) you would very quickly realise that the EROEI on the vast majority of fuels, propellants, etc in game is very low (< earthbound renewables and <<< earthbound fossil fuels) or actually negative and that there are probably only a very small number of locations in the solar system that can support industrial activity. Since the EROEI of "space fuels" is generically going to be much worse than oil, far more of the energy surplus produced by any CoaDE society is going to be dedicated to the necessities of life than a 20th century industrial society, and it's not really clear to me how you would maintain an orbital shipbuilding program under those conditions. I think the long and the short of it is that the game's economy as it stands allows you to do all kinds of neat stuff that, practically speaking, is at least not economically viable, and in many cases may simply be energetically impossible (getting fissiles for NTRs from mercury to jupiter using NTRs may well be a net energetic loss, depending on how you mine them and transport them). Which is all to say, I definitely think the economy should be moddable by scenario designers but I think a full model of extraction/refinement/transport/etc costs would probably show up too many of the handwavy assumptions in the base game and make a lot of the stock designs impossible. |
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Post by wafflestoo on Nov 14, 2016 20:55:50 GMT
So I was thinking about how I can run fluorine through a diamond reaction chamber and expect it to be fine, and I think some complicating factors should be added: - Components that contact propellant should allow you to specify a passivating layer and erode(modeled as seconds of operation) if the layer is not suitable.
- Cryogenic propellants should boil off and require heat pumps to limit boiloff. A kilotonne of liquid hydrogen should be energy-intensive to store.
- Hydrogen should cause embrittlement. Hydrogen is sneaky stuff and gets everywhere, damaging many materials.
- Knife-edge safety margin components should have some sort of cost or risk associated with quality control. Right now, running a rocket at a few pascals from burst pressure is one of the ways to keep it cheap!
- Material cost should include both rarity and cost of extraction/refinement. Elemental fluorine should be expensive stuff because of its strong bonds.
I'm sure there are more things I have missed, but these items would significantly improve the realism of our components. Sorry, I'm still giggling over the lithium water propellant tanks someone mentioned a few weeks back. |
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Post by subunit on Nov 14, 2016 21:01:45 GMT
Sorry, I'm still giggling over the lithium water propellant tanks someone mentioned a few weeks back. |
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Post by jonen on Nov 14, 2016 22:17:27 GMT
Sorry, I'm still giggling over the lithium water propellant tanks someone mentioned a few weeks back. I'll do you one worse. Potassium is also valid prop tank material. |
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Post by wafflestoo on Nov 14, 2016 22:28:22 GMT
Sorry, I'm still giggling over the lithium water propellant tanks someone mentioned a few weeks back. I'll do you one worse. Potassium is also valid prop tank material. I guarantee whatever happens it wouldn't be unexciting XD |
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Post by thorneel on Nov 14, 2016 22:31:19 GMT
Material processing cost is hard to evaluate, but yeah, it should have an effect.
Note that "hard" doesn't necessarily mean that the industrial tool itself is expensive, but it can also be how long said tool takes for making it. For example, let's say amorphous boron only requires a cheap 3D printer, if said printer takes an hour per millimetre cube, amorphous boron will still be expensive.
While we're at it, there is no cost associated with extreme precision engineering, like in nukes. Even mass-produced, there should be some serious overhead due to what tools are necessary to build those.
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