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Post by amimai on Dec 15, 2016 20:09:23 GMT
They can do stupid pointless crap on commercial passanger flights because (1) civilians are by a large morons (2) powerless to stop it (3) don't actually matter (4) won't fight for their privileges. everything a comercial inter-planetary mega corporation is not.
Any government that wants to impose any regulation on space travel once it's actually profitable will get slapped down hard by the people actually running the show simply because the costs and profits involved would be enough to simply buy a new government to replace one that you dislike...
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acatalepsy
Junior Member
Not Currently In Space
Posts: 97
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Post by acatalepsy on Dec 23, 2016 10:08:18 GMT
The ship life question is actually interesting because it's built in to some of the reactor, engine, and crew module design parameters. The current assumption is that a minimum of six months is needed; no more, no less. It might actually be better if ship "shelf life" were variable, and different missions required ships with different shelf lives. Designing orbital gunboats that don't need to go anywhere might end up with very different constraints than something that might need to be on station away from support for years at a time.
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Post by amimai on Dec 23, 2016 19:10:44 GMT
Reactor lifetimes are not really an issue IMO. While yes most of our reactor designs would burn through their fuel in less then a year most ships do not have high power demands constantly. A small long lasting secondary reactor to power crew quarters and sensors, while primary reactor only switch on in combat or for MPD burns could make ships last for decades without needing to refuel.
For larger freight or military capitals inbuilt bio-recycling systems could quite handily manage to support large crews indefinitely as long as there is power. Once you are easily bringing crews of 100's and megatons of mass such systems become infinitely more practical. (the main limits for current space craft is lack of biomass and habitat space to make such systems cost effective)
hydroponic farming is pretty practical and much faster/space efficient then conventional methods, if you need years of food etc recyclers and farming is probably more space efficient and would pay for itself in a mater of a few years.
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Post by newageofpower on Dec 23, 2016 19:22:37 GMT
One problem is MPD burns can take weeks or even months.
But yes, I can easily turn down the flux in my reactors and add extra fuel to make them last years; its not a big issue.
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Post by amimai on Dec 23, 2016 20:00:41 GMT
One problem is MPD burns can take weeks or even months. But yes, I can easily turn down the flux in my reactors and add extra fuel to make them last years; its not a big issue. Most of the time it's more cost effective for a MPD to burn through all the fuel it needs in less then a month The best time for homecoming was a 3 week Acceleration burn and a 3 week deceleration burn to go from outer to inner solar system in 4 months. Obviously a trip the other way will need an extra 50km/s dV(at least) to get out of the suns gravity well but that would only add a week to the acceleration burn. now that I think it, we probably got it wrong in the other thread, our 250GW mega freighters should have been 750GW or more for same mass to have proper fuel/reactor efficiency and minimum burn times. Goes to show you can always make better! in any case a high performance reactor assuming it lasts 6mo on 1 fuel load is good enough for a freighter to operate for 2-3 years without refuling for power and make at least 5 round trips between any set of planets you want. refuling the reactors while costly would be minor compared to all the other needs such as spare parts and actual fuel. I worked it out to around 1Mc/year for my Nostalgia for Infinity, which considering it costs 1.2Gc is peanuts. It carries 150kt of trade goods and 200kt of methane(for trade) on top of 10,000 passengers. It would probably make at least 300Mc per trip (one way) so reactor fuel costs are a non-issue there.
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Post by newageofpower on Dec 23, 2016 21:32:34 GMT
The reason I limit to 200 GW is that resistojets are capped at 10 GW ea, and so going up to 20 resistojets caps the design nicely.
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Post by amimai on Dec 23, 2016 21:57:07 GMT
The reason I limit to 200 GW is that resistojets are capped at 10 GW ea, and so going up to 20 resistojets caps the design nicely. In space you can mount thrust on the side of the hull and go wild!
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Post by newageofpower on Dec 23, 2016 22:02:41 GMT
I like my nice looking designs, though ;_;
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Post by lawson on Dec 25, 2016 4:33:24 GMT
The best time for homecoming was a 3 week Acceleration burn and a 3 week deceleration burn to go from outer to inner solar system in 4 months. Obviously a trip the other way will need an extra 50km/s dV(at least) to get out of the suns gravity well but that would only add a week to the acceleration burn. Just saying, I've got ships that should do Homecoming in less than 4 months. I've been waiting for someone to beat my time before I set a record everyone assumes is impossible to beat. Back on topic, I haven't worried about short reactor lives too much. For NTRs, 6 months of burn time will take forever to accrue. While MPD and or laser ships can easily just carry a spare reactor core. Even 10GW reactors rarely have core assemblies massing more than one ton.
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Post by jonen on Dec 25, 2016 8:32:01 GMT
I like my nice looking designs, though ;_; It's a freighter, not a sleek warship. If it doesn't look like an industrial site, you're probably not optimally designed.
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Post by nerd1000 on Dec 26, 2016 0:10:05 GMT
I like my nice looking designs, though ;_; It's a freighter, not a sleek warship. If it doesn't look like an industrial site, you're probably not optimally designed. With mpd it makes sense to put the crew module and thrusters at the rear. That way you can tumble end over end for artificial gravity without two different 'up' directions.
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Post by Rocket Witch on Jan 9, 2017 20:52:17 GMT
As far as propulsion goes, do you guys think there might be regulatory limits placed on the power plants or engine performance? A suicidal commercial airline pilot isn't unprecedented ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_by_pilot#By_pilots_in_control_of_whole_flight ), and I'd imagine a suicidal space captain dropping his ship on a planetary population center at relativistic speeds would be pretty bad. Would it even make sense to see regulations limiting performance of civilian engines as an attempt to mitigate that (either from a technical standpoint or a clueless politician doing it "for the children" because "if it saves just one life it's worth it"). You could drive a car through a market square but there was no regulation limiting people to horses-drawn carriages for that sort of reason... far as I know, at least. With the way energy usage has progressed so far I don't see a reason to think it would start to be seriously regulated going forward. If it were, though, merchant vessels might operate like red seal ships, where only trusted persons are given captaincy*. Perhaps at the point of privately-owned nuclear devices we'd see a massive spike in 'power control', though it depends on how government changes by that time too. Just looking at the in-game factions I'd say Nippon Prime is likely to have this kind of control while Liberty Exchange and USTA ships are likely to be totally and mostly unregulated respectively. For military ships, I can see them being limited by treaties to certain dry masses and other parameters like number/yield of nuclear warheads if advances happen anywhere near as quickly as on this forum. In that context the community's extreme minmaxing is quite appropriate. *What counts as a 'trusted person' would also depend on the nature of a future government.
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Post by newageofpower on Jan 9, 2017 21:41:23 GMT
For military ships, I can see them being limited by treaties to certain dry masses and other parameters like number/yield of nuclear warheads if advances happen anywhere near as quickly as on this forum. In that context the community's extreme minmaxing is quite appropriate. *What counts as a 'trusted person' would also depend on the nature of a future government. Washington Space Naval Treaty of 2022.
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Post by strikedragon on Jan 9, 2017 21:46:36 GMT
i think ~10% light speed will get you there in 133 years, so its not really that far...aa how much of that would you get in a gravity assist from Jupiter and possible the gas giants and how much would you need to burn?
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Post by argonbalt on Jan 9, 2017 23:52:41 GMT
You could drive a car through a market square but there was no regulation limiting people to horses-drawn carriages for that sort of reason... far as I know, at least. With the way energy usage has progressed so far I don't see a reason to think it would start to be seriously regulated going forward. If it were, though, merchant vessels might operate like red seal ships, where only trusted persons are given captaincy*. Perhaps at the point of privately-owned nuclear devices we'd see a massive spike in 'power control', though it depends on how government changes by that time too. Just looking at the in-game factions I'd say Nippon Prime is likely to have this kind of control while Liberty Exchange and USTA ships are likely to be totally and mostly unregulated respectively. For military ships, I can see them being limited by treaties to certain dry masses and other parameters like number/yield of nuclear warheads if advances happen anywhere near as quickly as on this forum. In that context the community's extreme minmaxing is quite appropriate. *What counts as a 'trusted person' would also depend on the nature of a future government. Would it really be viable though? on Earth we have shit like this happen due to the fact that running fighter jet defence is expensive, missile trucks parked all over the place make people nervous. Not to mention the equator makes things easier, and people would definitely not fly as much if cities had anti suicide pilot missile batteries. In COADE it seems like every fucking planet has AA silos and lasers tucked away just in case some nut uses a mass driver to turn a shipment of corn into a Kinetic weapon. This coupled with the whole no-damn-stealth would mean that unless your ship was moving at near c or accelerated inside a colony(limiting it's speed) you could see these guys coming from miles away and vaporise their asses(barring that they have some prominent politicians daughter aboard).
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