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Post by argonbalt on Feb 10, 2017 16:41:04 GMT
The disadvantage of a ballistic cargo container is the launching ship has to reverse course in high orbit and then travel to wherever it is needed. There is a second tug on the receiving end. It docks with the cargo in high orbit and then maneuvers the cargo to its destination. You end up having two ships make two large burns at each planet. One burn with the cargo and one with only the tug. Having the Tug do two big burns to launch a barge and return isn't much of a problem. Climbing from Jupiter low orbit to an optimally timed Holman transfer *only* takes around 20km/s. Big MPD ships in CoDE have exhaust velocities that exceed 260km/s! So ball parking it with the good old rocket equation, my tug and cargo need a wopping 1.08 combined mass fraction. Aka, 7.4% of launch mass is fuel for the departure burn. If the tug is 1/10th the mass of the barge, getting home would need less than 2.2% (0.74%*3) of the launch mass. So the tug only has to reserve at most 30% of it's fuel for the return trip. TLDR even with tugs returning to base, cargo mass should easily be 8x larger than the tug's initial fuel mass. Eh i would not be too over optimistic with those MPD Dv readings, most of their thrust is awful unless you use mercury. Around any hefty body you can see them struggle to do the same things a 6 km/s NTR can do with no problems.
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Post by argonbalt on Feb 10, 2017 16:41:51 GMT
Hmm.. So flinging unmanned/unguided/unpowered cargo boxes around may not be the best idea. There may be some usefulness for short-range material hauls, but not interplanetary routes. The disadvantage of a ballistic cargo container is the launching ship has to reverse course in high orbit and then travel to wherever it is needed. There is a second tug on the receiving end. It docks with the cargo in high orbit and then maneuvers the cargo to its destination. You end up having two ships make two large burns at each planet. One burn with the cargo and one with only the tug. There is an advantage. The tug crew stays at their favorite planet and doesn't spend months to years in transit. You can have multiple cargo containers spaced out. So two planets, two tugs in between, four months transit and one week for each tug to grab or launch a container and be ready for the next. This means you can have a container arrive or depart every week. 4*4=16 containers and two tugs and two crews. See how that can be an advantage over 2 cargo ships and two crews, one arrives every two months? COUGH COUGH MASS DRIVER, COUGH COUGH MASS CATCHER, no fuel needed just a rail and a bit of juice
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Post by Enderminion on Feb 10, 2017 16:44:17 GMT
YES, Mass drivers why was no one thinking of Mass drivers
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Post by theholyinquisition on Feb 10, 2017 16:46:10 GMT
Well if it occludes background stars, you'll know it's there. Assuming it passes in front of one, while you're looking in the general area, with the proper instrumentation. Or try to pick out spectra from artificial alloys/compounds. Still, requires a lot more complexity than picking up a 2400k radiator. Given that combat itself is a very very short period of time compared to transit and maneuvering, a significant amount of time would be spent looking. The probability of a ship occluding a star your sensor is observing is miniscule. Not zero, but very, very small. Furthermore, to determine that the occluding object was a ship, and not an unidentified space rock or a piece of space junk or even just a sensor error is a non-trivial task in and of itself. Picking out spectra would be okay... if the Hydrogen Steamer gave off any spectral emissions. It's coated in the whatever the leading absorbent coating is - currently VantaBlack, which absorbs everything below UV (in theory, more advanced coatings can absorb anything below Xrays) and emits only IR... Which is problematic, because the IR emissions are pretty close to the background radiation of the universe, due to supercooling. Your move. How do you detect this thing without active scans? By the way... these arguments have been made before. Many times. Argued and debated to death on multiple threads. Not just on this forum. Why aren't you active scanning at all times? Assuming that I'm not a stealthship, nothing I can do can reasonably hide my emissions. Therefore, I should ALWAYS be active scanning.
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Post by theholyinquisition on Feb 10, 2017 16:47:44 GMT
The disadvantage of a ballistic cargo container is the launching ship has to reverse course in high orbit and then travel to wherever it is needed. There is a second tug on the receiving end. It docks with the cargo in high orbit and then maneuvers the cargo to its destination. You end up having two ships make two large burns at each planet. One burn with the cargo and one with only the tug. There is an advantage. The tug crew stays at their favorite planet and doesn't spend months to years in transit. You can have multiple cargo containers spaced out. So two planets, two tugs in between, four months transit and one week for each tug to grab or launch a container and be ready for the next. This means you can have a container arrive or depart every week. 4*4=16 containers and two tugs and two crews. See how that can be an advantage over 2 cargo ships and two crews, one arrives every two months? COUGH COUGH MASS DRIVER, COUGH COUGH MASS CATCHER, no fuel needed just a rail and a bit of juiceCOu Cough cough if something goes wrong you have kilotons of mass at km/s punching holes in your habitat.
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Post by argonbalt on Feb 10, 2017 16:54:54 GMT
Uh who let the retard install the mass catcher directly in front of a colony? Even in some of the older design studies i have found, they suggest unmanned mass catchers, Not to mention they literally end in A GIANT FUCKING NET.
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Post by vegemeister on Feb 10, 2017 17:10:19 GMT
I don't think pure mass driver/mass catcher is practical. You need at least a little bit of on-board Δv to make correction burns.
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Post by Easy on Feb 10, 2017 17:16:59 GMT
Lets ignore the part where you're not going to send an unguided payload with no midcourse corrections and send it precisely into the mouth of your catcher. Lets instead focus on the part where you have a megaton payload on a collision course closing at greater than 10km/s. Hopefully nothing will go wrong.
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Post by newageofpower on Feb 10, 2017 17:26:52 GMT
Why aren't you active scanning at all times? Assuming that I'm not a stealthship, nothing I can do can reasonably hide my emissions. Therefore, I should ALWAYS be active scanning. Inverse square law. Active scan only goes out so far. You need exponentially more energy longer distances.
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Post by vegemeister on Feb 10, 2017 17:30:11 GMT
Why aren't you active scanning at all times? Assuming that I'm not a stealthship, nothing I can do can reasonably hide my emissions. Therefore, I should ALWAYS be active scanning. Inverse square law. Active scan only goes out so far. You need exponentially more energy longer distances. Inverse fourth law, in this case. Nukes work well for generating high energy x-ray pulses, but they'd be a consumable, so scanning all the time would be expensive.
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Post by Enderminion on Feb 10, 2017 17:40:37 GMT
Low power radar array's scanning the local 10Mm or so to make sure no Torpedos or Missiles get the drop on you seem logical
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Post by argonbalt on Feb 10, 2017 17:50:17 GMT
Lets ignore the part where you're not going to send an unguided payload with no midcourse corrections and send it precisely into the mouth of your catcher. Lets instead focus on the part where you have a megaton payload on a collision course closing at greater than 10km/s. Hopefully nothing will go wrong. Uh why not, it's space? If you are mass driving a package up from a surface to a mass catcher there is nothing preventing it from landing in the catcher, it is space, if you can calculate a trajectory you can launch a payload pretty consistently. And no a mass catcher in orbit does not act like it is trying to catch a shipping tanker. From: settlement.arc.nasa.gov/75SummerStudy/Table_of_Contents1.html, specifically:5. A Tour of the Colony THE MASS CATCHER AT L2 The problem of collecting the stream of material launched by the mass-driver is solved by a kind of automated "catcher's mitt, " the mass catcher, located at L2. Although the catchers are fully automated there is a 2-person space station at L2 for maintenance personnel. This station is adequately shielded against possible hits by stray payloads. Because it would be dangerous to navigate in the vicinity of the catcher while the launcher is operating, you are not able to visit the catcher personally. Instead you learn about it from an operator who is at the Moon base on recreation leave. He tells you that the mass catcher is an active device to capture payloads of lunar material shot by the mass launcher. The payloads are solid blocks 0.20 m in diameter, made of compacted and sintered lunar soil. Each payload has a mass of 10kg and arrives at L2 with a speed of 200 m/s. The catcher is in the form of a thin, light net, 10 m^2 in area, which is manipulated by three cables to position the net anywhere within an equilateral triangle. The cables are wound on reels which move on three closed loop tracks Each side of the equilateral triangle is 1 km, thus providinga 0.43 X 106 m^2 catch area The total mass of the catcher is 220 t.Now hypothetically you could launch a kiloton or megaton payload, sure i guess you could launch something that large in one go, but then even if you really need it to go 10km/s you could do quite allot to slow it a bit. A mid-course unmanned tug that aims and slows the package, shaping the package into a droplet and with a little guidance aerobraking off the denser worlds. Also you seem to have the wrong impression of a mass catcher, it is not simply a frying pan you are throwing eggs at, it is a series of arrestor nets that slow and then pass off the package to a secondary and then tertiary net before the final catch cone picks up the material. All in all it certainly is a more automated and efficient system than a bunch of tugs "tossing" cargo.
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Post by newageofpower on Feb 10, 2017 17:51:01 GMT
Low power radar array's scanning the local 10Mm or so to make sure no Torpedos or Missiles get the drop on you seem logical ... Did you not read my post? Vantablack absorbs all of that... I mean, at 10Mm the chance of detection is significant, but the Hydrogen Steamer is a strategic weapon, not a tactical one.
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Post by Enderminion on Feb 10, 2017 17:55:37 GMT
newageofpower I said Torpedos and Missiles not hydrogen steamers, do you have enough vantablack to coat all of your torpedos and missiles and drones?
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Hyperant
New Member
Owner of Hyper Productions
Posts: 32
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Post by Hyperant on Feb 10, 2017 20:28:53 GMT
@the stealth argument.
I think all off those assumptions are made from the fact that the solar system is completely devoid of ships, which is not.
Doesn't matter if you can detect a ship burning from a solar system's half-width away, if you can't distinguish whether it was just a civilian ship going on its duty or a military operation being undertaking.
IDK just my input.
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