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Post by apophys on Aug 25, 2018 15:05:02 GMT
Out of curiosity, why isn't the 100MW laser extruded? Is it to lower the targetable area? It's to lower cost, since the turret armor is the majority of the cost. If you put all lasers in the front, facing forward (as I like to do), the increased angle of movement from extrusion isn't relevant, while the cost reduction is. You can easily make a duplicate with extrusion if you need one.
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Post by apophys on Aug 25, 2018 14:24:30 GMT
That said, what are the 'no expansion' materials, and why? Have all the material expansion problems been completely solved in real life thermoelectric fission reactors? You can build the thermocouples in a heat gradient to begin with, or failing that, you can use multiple stages of thermocouple to lower the gradient an individual stage experiences while still retaining the large overall gradient. Either way, ingame thermal expansion limits can be engineered around (qswitched must have not expected us to hit those limits quite as hard as we do).
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Post by apophys on Aug 24, 2018 21:35:52 GMT
Companies involved are chosen from the OP, and as of now consists of newageofpower 's Altarris Heavy Industries as the owner of the cargo station where the player will bring the freighter to, and apophys ' Apophys Electrics, a company which constructed many space infrastructures in the Mercury orbit. Currently, ships and stations used are stock placeholders. Custom ships are welcomed, especially if they're designed by AHI itself. I think NAOP put their ships somewhere a while ago... According to the first post in this thread, AHI is at Mercury, while AE is at Venus and Callisto.
What is your stance on diamond (vanilla or mod-fixed), and on using modded materials in general for the ships here? Anything specific you need in terms of ships?
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Post by apophys on Aug 24, 2018 0:23:58 GMT
Would it be feasible then to make my ship out of layers and layers of nothing but whipple shields, spall layers, and graphite gel? Probably. Test it!
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Post by apophys on Aug 23, 2018 19:27:17 GMT
Welcome to the laser problem of space combat. Yup. Though it ceases to be a problem at around a light-minute of range, or a bit less. With ion drives or better, you are able to continuously accelerate in random directions (for weeks if necessary) to throw off enemy aim (light lag will make properly locking on impossible). Even if a pulse could one-shot your ship, it is useless if it misses. Scaling beyond one-shotting is pointless, because extra energy and infrastructure is wasted. So the optimal strategy would be to use a light-minute laser, with a power ranging from the minimum effective up to the strongest that still doesn't overpenetrate, and spam ships with one spinal laser each, for redundancy.
It becomes a lot like old naval battleship combat. Damage control in combat is actually relevant again due to the rarity of successful strikes; this even makes a valid reason to have humans on board, since strong AI is probably farther off than this scenario.
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Post by apophys on Aug 23, 2018 12:56:41 GMT
Pyrolytic Carbon is great! However, when it comes to bigger reactors, Titanium Diboride is a way better option than Hafnium Carbide, requiring you to sacrifice a few percent of efficiency for significantly lower mass and much lower cost. Tested it on 100 MW and 1 GW reactors. Oh, oops, it seems I set the stock HfC there (I didn't notice, because I use none anyway). The choice was intended to be HfC-encased boron carbide, the modded material that is used for control rods. Its simulating a shell of hafnium carbide holding molten boron carbide. Depending on the amount of shielding you go for, pyrolytic carbon may be better. I didn't expect people would want to actually shield their cores, so didn't test.
Titanium diboride has a much, much lower melting and safe use point. Lower than pyrolytic carbon, even.
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Post by apophys on Aug 22, 2018 17:12:11 GMT
I’ll look into it later. What is pyrolytic carbon’s melting point, again? 3923 K. Its safe use temperature is 3727 K. It is literally heated graphite.
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Post by apophys on Aug 22, 2018 16:53:52 GMT
apophys We decided to introduce our own shielding material, made out of titanium diboride The appropriate shielding material for each reactor is already picked for you; HfC-encapsulated B 4C for the high power ones, and either that or pyrolytic carbon for the lower power ones. I'm guessing there's no possible way to make a (practical) 100MW reactor with anything less than 97% enrichment? : ( It is possible. But why? There's nothing technically wrong with 97% enrichment. Note that all the modded reactors here will maintain criticality and be capable of functioning down to 5% enrichment or below, with of course a shorter run time by using higher neutron flux. (If you go this route, you will want spare fuel rods, as cargo containers).
The high cost of the modded reactors here, compared to vanilla, is due to the bug in the game that allows fuel to last much longer than physically possible. With manual calculation and ingame fiddling, 6 months of fuel corresponds to a maximum neutron flux of 1.37e+18 , assuming 95% burnup. This means there is a lot of fuel in the reactor, necessitating a lot of control rod, both of which are expensive.
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Post by apophys on Aug 22, 2018 8:47:01 GMT
Update! Modded modules collection v1.0 is finally here, featuring realistic reactors! *pokes The Astronomer * Modded modules are placed in the 2nd post in the thread, along with the mods they require. This is the first time I'm providing a modpack, so please tell me if things don't work out or if there's some conflict with others. Changelog: - Added modded reactors 100 kW - 1 TW - Added modded RTGs 1 kW & 10 kW (because it's not practical to scale realistic reactors down that far) - Added modded laser 100 MW. The 2000 K outlet with 25% efficiency may surprise you.
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Post by apophys on Aug 21, 2018 2:36:29 GMT
If anyone has uberweapons they'd like me to test against, post them here. I'd prefer stuff that doesn't freeze up/crash the game. I can't use Apophys' railguns that fire flak rounds for example. They fire for 10 seconds and then my game is a slideshow. If the flak is the problem, you can directly swap out the flak payload for the needle payload that is also in my module collection. The guns will still work, with exactly the same characteristics (and probably better penetration at the target). I'm getting enough complaints about my guns nowadays that I'm probably going to make the needle payload the standard one (somehow, I didn't get complaints for quite a while; something probably changed in the game).
If the fire rate is the problem, you can reduce the power fed to the gun, or reduce the loader power. Either one reduces the fire rate.
jtyot's guns are fine replacements if you don't feel like doing minor edits to my stuff.
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Post by apophys on Aug 21, 2018 2:14:40 GMT
Mercury is an excellent source of raw material to start building a Dyson swarm of rotating habitats and power satellites around the sun. There is more than enough material there to set up starlifting, to extract material out of the sun once the planet is completely deconstructed.
I'm expecting all of the planets and other rocks except Earth (for nostalgia reasons) to be eventually deconstructed for parts. You can fit a lot more people in purpose-built space habitats than just on the surface of a solid sphere.
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Post by apophys on Aug 21, 2018 1:33:52 GMT
I remember testing AI vs AI fights around Luna, and watching about a third to half of them have one side immediately suicide into the moon. If it's instant action one of the sides might have spawned inside the moon. No, they spawned fine, just pointed their trajectory to pass directly through the moon to more quickly reach the opponents on the other side, not aware that you can't do that.
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Post by apophys on Aug 20, 2018 15:42:14 GMT
Normally, you'd want to consider bulk cargo transfers (like phosphorus), specialized/priority cargo transfers (like reactor fuel rods), and personnel transfers; all in each direction.
Bulk cargo needs primarily low cost. Priority cargo needs primarily flexible launch schedules, secondarily low time. Personnel needs primarily low time, secondarily low cost. Having very high exhaust velocity helps all of these requirements, btw.
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Post by apophys on Aug 20, 2018 15:19:32 GMT
Low orbit combat! Yay! The enemy fleet rammed themselves into the rock! I remember blowing the tanks and propulsion on enemy Marauders with flaks during Jovian Lunar Tour, deorbiting one of them and forcing it to lithobrake. I remember testing AI vs AI fights around Luna, and watching about a third to half of them have one side immediately suicide into the moon.
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Post by apophys on Aug 20, 2018 11:38:41 GMT
Things I'd like to see tested: amorphous carbon (really, you didn't test that?), selenium, calcium, osmium, nitrile rubber, PTFE
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