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Post by apophys on Oct 7, 2018 22:29:25 GMT
BTW, what's the Osmium (No expanse) and Tungsten (No expanse)? I mean what does it represent irl? That's a hack to simulate having multiple thermocouple stages in the reactor. It allows you to have a higher total temperature gradient than you can achieve with one stage, because each stage has its own smaller gradient (which it can survive). If qswitched adds such capability to the game, I will use that instead, but I don't expect the modded reactors to change very much overall if that happens.
The hack just reduces thermal expansion by a few orders of magnitude, so that the game doesn't get any problem with thermal expansion stress. All other properties of the metal are unchanged.
It may alternately be possible to build the thermocouple under a heat gradient to begin with, so there is no expansion stress on the thermocouple at all while operating (instead, the stress would break it if it came to a uniform temperature).
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Post by apophys on Oct 7, 2018 21:47:11 GMT
apophys you don't have NPP?!? Did they piss you off or something? Wordpad is good enough for my simple needs with *.txt or *.rtf files, so I haven't bothered to try others. I didn't even know about Notepad++ before I saw it mentioned on this forum. I use Open Office for any serious word processing (*.doc files).
(For programming code, I used Eclipse, but I don't have a regular need for that anymore.)
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Post by apophys on Oct 2, 2018 14:13:58 GMT
Update! Vanilla module collection is now v1.6 Changelog: - Completely reworked the railguns. They are now built to mesh well with the 30 frames per second of the game's physics engine. The default payload is now a 200 mg 10 cm needle. The alternative flak payload has been rebuilt to match. - Updated reactors to not use diamond. They now use a similar volume of pyrolytic carbon instead. Together with a few other changes, they are slightly lighter, slightly more expensive, and leak about 50% more radiation. - Switched the armor of the 100 MW laser to polyethylene. It's now slightly cheaper. - Added Li-6 rad shields.
Updated installation instructions to take into account the bug in the current game patch.
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Post by apophys on Oct 1, 2018 18:22:44 GMT
You wish. apophys will simply update his rapid-firing hypervelocity microflak RG to match and slag arbitrarily powerful computing hardware.
Funny you should mention that. I'm currently preparing an update of my railguns to better take into account the 30 shots/sec hardcap on firing rate. (Also swapping the regular payload from microflak to needles, because they're more lethal.)
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Post by apophys on Oct 1, 2018 7:22:43 GMT
In particular, the first one is a natural Earth, with clouds.
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Post by apophys on Sept 21, 2018 23:58:33 GMT
Elaborating on the above, the file you make in \CDE\Mods\Data\ has to be exactly named Designs.txt , because it modifies the base game's Designs.txt where all the stock ships are. If it had a random name, the game would not load it, and it would do nothing.
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Post by apophys on Sept 21, 2018 23:45:43 GMT
Apotheon If you want me to see something, tag me. I don't often check this section of the forum. Yeah, never use Notepad. For anyone without Notepad++ (like me), use Wordpad instead (comes with any copy of Windows). In the most recent CoaDE patch, there's a bug that causes putting modules in \CDE\Mods\Data\Imports\ to not properly save ships made with those modules. You can instead place modules in \CDE\Mods\Data\Designs.txt (you will have to make this text file). (It works by modding the default game's Designs.txt, where the stock modules and ships are.) They will be correctly marked as mod-imported modules ingame, which putting them in \CDE\UserDesigns.txt would not accomplish.
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Post by apophys on Sept 21, 2018 22:22:43 GMT
What I’m REALLY curious about is the following: is there anything that should be added to or change in CDE, which would affect the mass or volume by spaceships by about >5%? My working theory is that it’s only the command module and rocket that significantly affects this. The rocket determines the amount of propellant for a given dV, which determines almost all the mass and volume along with the command module. I.e. for realism, focus on those two modules! The other modules, including power and radiators, have an insignificant mass and volume in civilian ships, any objections to this? It appears to be true if you play with (excessively?) min-maxed modules.
Basically, my theory is that someone interested in writing a book with realistic spaceships could simply determine the dV, determine the mass and volume of the command module, determine the rocket performance (the parts that affect dV) from which the amount of propellant and its mass and volume follows, and based on that, have a +/-5% accurate estimate of what mass and volume it would have and be free to design the spacecraft according to those constraints, while remaining realistic. Power, radiators, and other things, such as communications, don’t make a difference in mass or volume. In other words, if a writer wanted to design a ship that goes to Mars (6 km/s dV) and the writer accepted Apophys rockets performance and CDE's command modules mass and volume as realistic, then it would follow that the ship should have a mass of about 110 tons +/- a few tons, just like I got in the original post, because all things follow from that, unless you add armour/weapons and this would be a realistic rule of thumb. Depends on the main drive type and acceleration profile of your civilian vessel. If you use an MPD or other ion drive (alone or with an NTR secondary), your non-payload dry mass will be dominated by the power system, so any changes to the power system may change that mass a fair bit (for example, Curie point radiators, better pumps, reinforced pipes, thermophotovoltaics, concentrated solar for a heat source rather than a reactor, etc). But unless you're going for maximum speed with basically no payload (like Homecoming speedruns), you can afford to carry more dry mass due to the high exhaust velocity; your payload fraction can be quite high regardless. Payload mass (passengers/cargo/drones) can even exceed propellant mass. If you use NTRs or chemical thrust only, the power system is indeed insignificant if you have no weapons. On the other hand, you have noticeably higher acceleration, and this will require structural reinforcement of your ship, which is currently not modeled at all. That is likely to change dry mass quite a lot if your ship is large, or has very high acceleration. If you consider materials weakening with high temperature, you may need to additionally reinforce things like radiators and reactors. Payload fractions aren't nearly as good as on ion drive ships, so dry mass changes are more visible overall. You can avoid these issues by having very low acceleration (i.e. a small, weak rocket), though that is a design choice. But yes, as for the engine itself, how deeply you minmax its mass & cost has relatively little bearing on the end results, only its exhaust velocity. For any decent engine (like SpaceX's Merlin; that's already good enough), its mass is dwarfed by the crew and payload and structural reinforcement. No, I have no idea how much mass the reinforcement would actually take for normal vessels. Pure aluminum is a very poor choice for structural material, btw.
Seeing how ion drives allow very high payload fractions, and faster possible travel times due to high maximum dV, they are almost certainly the more relevant one.
Radiation modeling is questionable. Reactors should definitely be outputting more than just fast neutrons, and Li-6 is probably not quite that good at neutron shielding (more likely, we'd see LiH or LiBH4, using Li-6 and B-10). Unfortunately, it's hard to say how much effect that will have when fixed up. In particular, distance shielding may be employed, which takes very little mass.
Communication equipment is pretty trivial, and can be hidden from enemy fire, so that isn't really relevant.
Sensor equipment could make a significant mass difference in a war scenario when engagement ranges are long (as they are in the meta), since the sensors necessarily need to be more powerful. Qswitched did not expect lasers to be as useful as they are shown to be (stock reactors and lasers are much, much worse optimized than guns), so engagement ranges were assumed to be short.
Disabling sensors by laser fire is a topic of varied debate. On one hand, they are clearly more fragile than hull. On the other hand, filters can be added in front to reduce the incoming light by an arbitrary amount, which means disabling fragile sensors immediately gives hardened sensors the precise location of the attacker (as well as giving everyone else its location due to diffraction of the laser). On the third tentacle, it may be possible to mask it by using a cloud of reflective chaff. Such concerns are integral to warfare and have the potential to be the defining concern in ship design. This of course means the mass allotted can vary greatly. Fortunately, the aperture of a laser can double as a telescope for a sensor, so a laser-heavy fleet doesn't need quite as much extra mass allotted to sensors.
Sensor modeling would take quite a lot of development effort, so it is reasonable that it hasn't been implemented up to this point (qswitched is just one guy). You can't have ships without thrusters, propellant, power, and crew; you can't have proper warfare in the first place without weapons. Those obviously had to be done first, they aren't bug-free yet, and we still would like more options among them (like neutral particle beams, other laser types, or using guns for thrust).
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Post by apophys on Sept 16, 2018 9:15:53 GMT
My questions: - How realistic is CDE propulsion/power? I assume it's possible to re-create real propulsion or power and get accurate results within an order of magnitude, at least within reason, or is it coarse?
- How realistic is Apophys propulsion/power? The stuff is highly optimised and that makes me wonder if it's because he's getting his information straight out of rocket books or just abusing the code?
- How realistic are command modules? The dimensions are kind of arbitrary and the volume apparently comes straight out of NASA research (I've read it), which leaves me only wondering about the mass.
- Also, for command modules, I'm making mine out of polyethylene... sounds awesome... and it's freaking plastic. Can someone reassure me that this doesn't wear out or degrade in any way on the inside or outside from air, vacuum, cosmic and solar radiation, the acids on human skin, or anything such? Apparently, NASA already use some kind of "reinforced polyethylene", is this what we have?
- My propellant tanks are made out of vanadium chromium steel. I've not idea what it's used for IRL, but it's steel and I guess it does what it says on the box?
- My radiators are made out of lithium. Reasonable?
Many CDE stock modules can be clearly pointed out as unrealistic in their details.
My vanilla stuff is purely minmaxed within game limitations, with virtually no concern for realism. My modded stuff is minmaxed while addressing any realism concerns that I'm aware of that the game doesn't take into account. I assume that the game's modeling is reasonably accurate for most of what it does model, but I have no way to verify a lot of things (tell me if you notice anything unrealistic; I'm not perfect). I expect the overall performance values of my modded stuff to be close (order of magnitude or two) to the ultimate limit of possibility for the tech, but still possible. Different technologies than those implemented ingame may make things better in some cases (like electromagnetic pumps instead of mechanical turbopumps). I have no rocket science or materials science education (I'm a math major); I have no access to a rocket scientist IRL, and I'm not taking anything from any real-life source other than material data for the material mods I made. So take it all with a healthy pinch of salt.
Crew requirements are generally considered somewhat excessive. I have done no actual comparisons on the topic of how much volume or mass they take, but I assume you can pack people densely like in an airplane if you really need to (particularly since at least 1/3 will be asleep at any one time, at least out of combat).
Polyethylene degrades when exposed to UV (which should not be the case if you have any armor). Otherwise it has great longevity, as the great Pacific garbage patch shows. Some plastics exposed to vacuum have significant outgassing issues, but iirc high-density polyethylene is not one of them. Borated polyethylene is actually used for radiation shielding in space, iirc. Human skin is oily, not acidic.
VCS is a tool steel, and our VCS is the best such alloy available. As steels go, it is pretty extreme, but it exists. Making it in large plates may not be currently practical. However, the game doesn't allow us to use fibrous materials to reinforce propellant tanks, which would be possible IRL; it would probably improve things over pure VCS if we use UHMWPE fiber. So I think ingame VCS is good enough for modeling purposes.
Lithium is really soft, so don't use that for radiators of any kind if you want realism. Possible but not at all reasonable. Use carbon, aluminum alloys, or a ceramic. Lithium makes a nice liquid coolant for things in the 1000 K range, though.
Realistic micrometeorite armor is a whipple shield: roughly, 1 mm aluminum or other light material spaced out 1 m from a 1 cm-thick bulk armor layer. Stuff the gap with aerogel for better results. Larger debris is best countered with a laser broom.
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Post by apophys on Sept 16, 2018 6:37:42 GMT
Boron nitride for vanilla. Vitreous carbon for modded.
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Post by apophys on Sept 15, 2018 22:23:33 GMT
The only way to fix it is to have a double-walled container, and use a vacuum pump to constantly remove and re-condense the hydrogen leaking into the gap. This of course worsens your already-poor mass ratio via the double wall, and adds a mechanical point of failure (the pump & condenser) along with constant electricity use. Methane is much more reasonable.
Fusion ships would want their fuel to be lithium-6 deuteride if possible, since that does not have the problem of hydrogen leaking out. (Farther future fusion could use hydrogen+boron, stored as a borane mixture. But that's hard to ignite.)
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Post by apophys on Sept 15, 2018 22:08:56 GMT
I modded the small-text inverted to have extra-small text. The relevant Themes.txt mod is included in my standards thread modpack, but here it is separately:
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Post by apophys on Sept 15, 2018 21:57:37 GMT
Why are there RP-1 and heavy water NTRs? Heavy water is a fair bit denser than RP-1, so it may find use if you have extremely thick armor. It is the densest available NTR propellant that has decent exhaust velocity and no issues with dissociation.
RP-1 NTRs have the best TWR, in addition to being a good density/velocity compromise for armored ships, so they are an auto-include.
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Post by apophys on Sept 4, 2018 8:14:33 GMT
AtomHeartDragon , there's no need to beat a dead horse. The point has been made; rubbing it in further is rude (and derails the topic). For Z (aka atomic number) less than or equal to 8: Dose=Dose Initial*e^(-(0.19*Z^-0.743)*density*thickness) For Z greater than 8: Dose=Dose Initial*e^(-(0.125*Z^-0.565)*density*thickness)
This doesn't take into account the neutron capture cross-section in barns, at all. For Li-6, that is 940 barns.
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Post by apophys on Sept 4, 2018 7:26:31 GMT
This game was explicitly intended to be realistic, not to have entertaining gameplay. Some things are hard to model, but in a case like this where it is already modeled, inaccuracies are a bug, not a feature. qswitched , please take a look at radiation modeling, especially with regard to lithium-6.
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