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Post by apophys on Aug 19, 2018 23:13:08 GMT
IIRC mass/cost budget is autocalculated from default fleet. I create a default fleet, and the budget remains unlimited. Might be something else I'm doing, idk. On that note, did anybody ever figure out where the faction emblems are stored? I'd like to add a hammer and sickle for... reasons.... They are hardcoded. All you can do is recolor an existing emblem.
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Post by apophys on Aug 19, 2018 20:03:57 GMT
I tried out the level editor a bit. It works, and being able to load separate campaigns makes this really able to take off with community effort. Can't seem to figure out how to add a mass/cost budget, though.
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Post by apophys on Aug 19, 2018 4:01:48 GMT
God damn those spaceship nuclear lamps. I want to see some real stars. Why do you have to use high power ion drives on a ship that's just going to the Moon? Well, if you've already got it for transfers to/from Mars, you might as well use it for short distances also; simplifies construction and resupply. Nothing technically wrong with having a few thousand extra lights in the sky.
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Post by apophys on Aug 19, 2018 3:47:30 GMT
Okay, well you move it over to suggestions I guess? argonbalt is the forum mod (yes, the only one). Direct any requests about moving threads to him. If you want it done faster, go to the CoaDE Discord channel and poke him there.
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Post by apophys on Aug 19, 2018 3:24:17 GMT
As I understand it, I want the nozzle temperature and mach in the nozzle to both be as high as possible to get the exhaust velocity as high as possible?
Does regenerative cooling do anything? (It didn't seem to matter what I did with it) What about this 'gas wall' and 'liquid wall'? They also don't seem to matter. You want the chamber temperature as high as possible (the upper limit on it depends on the materials you are using; you want to get close to having errors). You seem to be doing well in this regard. You then want the temperature exiting the nozzle to be as low as you can reasonably get it without spending too much mass on a long nozzle. This gets your propellant to do as much work as it can from its expansion. To reiterate, you want to maximize the temperature difference between the chamber and the end of the nozzle.
Regenerative cooling isn't always useful. But it almost never hurts, at least for diamond bells, so I always have it.
I don't bother with the other listed data much. Haven't figured it out.
The significant flaw I see with your design is the low chamber contraction ratio. I'm not sure exactly why, but you are wasting about 20% of your potential thrust and a bit of exhaust velocity by setting it to 1. A good range for it to be is 3-6; higher is better, but puts more stress on the chamber material, which then needs thickening (mass).
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Post by apophys on Aug 18, 2018 23:28:04 GMT
So I *should* be focusing on the exhaust velocity to maximize delta-v efficiency of the engine?
What's the relation of the injector to the overall design? I noticed that reducing its size seemed to have a direct impact on the general power rating of the engine, with a smaller injector leading to 50 - 150MN engines rather than 300+ MN's as I currently have. Mostly I'm just unclear on what each part of the engine I'm changing is actually going to do to the engine.
Yes, to make the most out of your propellant, you should be focusing on high exhaust velocity and low mass.
The injector only determines the mass flow rate, i.e. how much propellant you're pumping through the engine each second. The hotter you manage to get that propellant, the higher your exhaust velocity will be (so don't pump too much compared to your reactor, or your heat will be spread thin). You can cut mass from the injector by making it larger and slower-spinning while maintaining the same flow; a good target for the spin is a bit under 100 RPM.
To get a 5.4 kt craft accelerating at 1.5 G, you need about 81 MN of thrust. Higher thrust engines will always be heavier. You might want to take another look at my standard 100 MN HD NTR. Or take a bundle of my 10 MN ones, maybe stripping their gimbals and attaching them all to one new gimbal.
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Post by apophys on Aug 18, 2018 20:52:51 GMT
My first question: what is the ideal altitude for a space station orbiting around the Earth? IMO, if you want to be below the rad belts, you want to be as high as possible without risking hitting them. This is because it's easier to move around farther away from a gravity well using ion drives. Rad shielding will be possible to do using magnetic fields at some point soon-ish, so location may not remain an important concern for too long. If you don't want to be limited by transfer windows to/from Mars, then you need ion drives. If you have plenty of dV available, like ion drives provide, the ideal is to use pseudo-brachistochrone transfers, because they take the least time. Acceleration is very low (milligee), but that's fine; it's still much faster than NTRs because it accelerates/decelerates continuously for the majority of the trip instead of just at transfer points. See the Homecoming speedrun thread. For Earth-Moon transfers, anything works (even chemical); they're close enough that ion drives aren't quite as dominating, though still good. In particular, if you have laserlaunch from Earth's surface (the best launch method, imo), you may as well use laser thermal for the transfer, using the same laser infrastructure.
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Post by apophys on Aug 18, 2018 16:35:54 GMT
Well, the current engine so far: Tons: 47 Exhaust Velocity: 9.16km/s And it accelerates my 5.4kt rocketship at 5.8g, and gives me 9.77km/s delta-v Here was my baseline: Tons: 67.5 Exhaust Velocity: 9.15km/s Accelerates my rocketship at 9g, and gives me 9.24km/s delta-v. Which I really don't understand - it has higher TMR and thrust, and virtually equal exhaust velocity, and yet I get less delta-v out of it. Adding more dry mass to the ship, with basically the same exhaust velocity, and the same propellant amount, is clearly going to lower the dV you get.
Thrust and TWR are not really related to dV, only to acceleration.
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Post by apophys on Aug 18, 2018 11:07:55 GMT
Sounds super awesome that the awesomeness exceeded critical point and it's glowing like a star That make me feel better, since I was almost dead seeing 2 of your 101MW(with my first aid, 91MW) costs lower than stock 60MW. Stock reactors are extremely poorly optimized, and not even realistic.
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Post by apophys on Aug 18, 2018 10:41:10 GMT
Okay, found out that bigger reactors which needs moderator can't get along with graphite as one. Recalling the smaller one didn't need moderator, I guess your "JasonVance" method is something related to it. Can I get more info? I was to shoock my 1MW reactor makes more than a coal powerplant and still fit into my room, and guess know why. (evil but silly smile) + No water for moderator? but why? + The more I explore your designs, the denser the smell of corruption! What have you done, High Command! The method he used for small reactors has a certain amount of control rod in the moderator slot. This appears to me like a strange hack of game mechanics, but is necessary to get small amounts of fissile fuel to reach criticality. I use it for cost reduction, since I could simply waste fissile fuel if I didn't want to use the hack. Water is an absolutely terrible coolant for space reactors; its thermal conductivity is much lower than other options, resulting in you needing to use way overpowered turbopumps. It is also limited to lower temperatures in real life due to its low critical point. It has moderating activity, but forms of carbon (diamond, pyrolytic carbon, graphite) are an excellent moderator for high temperature. Diamond is merely the most dense form.
In the large reactors, it is possible to make some minor changes in order to have no moderator (indeed, my realistic modded counterparts have none): reduce neutron flux and increase fissile & control mass until errors go away, while maintaining the same waste heat. The moderator is mostly there to allow a slightly higher neutron flux, which saves fissiles and marginally reduces cost. Do note that reactors have multiple bugs and inaccuracies: - Reactors can be made that produce more heat over their lifetime than is actually possible to extract from their onboard fuel. My reactors would burn through their fuel in about a day or two, not the 6 months that the game counts them to work. To be realistic, neutron flux should not exceed 1.37e+18 . Note that even some stock reactors exceed this.
- Electricity generated is not taken from heat output. I.e. the game creates energy from nothing, forcing you to have bigger radiators than you truly need. There is nothing we can do about this.
- Critical point of coolant is not taken into account; it doesn't even have an entry in material data. The sodium coolant in my reactors would not have the same properties due to being above its critical point, and also would burst its pipes due to its tremendous vapor pressure at this temperature. The appropriate coolants to use for this temperature are liquid aluminum or liquid silicon, which are mods. Due to the multiple problems that are difficult to address in the base game, I do not bother with any realism for vanilla modules, only for modded ones (which I am currently in the process of making). Incidentally, my modded reactors are a fair bit smaller and lighter than vanilla counterparts, though significantly more expensive due to having an actually appropriate amount of fission fuel. (Also, limits need to be edited for realistic modded 10 GW and 100 GW in order to put in more fuel and control rod mass.) Expect my modded reactors to be posted within a few days, as I have them, I'm generally satisfied with them, and I'm just refining them at this stage.
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Post by apophys on Aug 17, 2018 19:27:25 GMT
i made a TINY RTG with an outlet heat of 320 K. what is the best radiator material to use for such a temp ? I suggest lithium. I'm pretty sure it's the lightest/cheapest valid choice. One could argue that the standard modules should not be using diamonds in high temperature applications and that the safe use temperature for diamond should be changed in the base game -- or that the mod should not alter the properties of a base game material, instead. I'm planning to do a full set of standard modules that use modded materials with realism in mind (safety margins, concerns that CoaDE does not address like the critical point for coolant, etc). This is what the second post in the thread is reserved for.
Yes, I know it's taking me forever to get there. I am not a very hardworking person.
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Post by apophys on Aug 17, 2018 18:53:37 GMT
even if the optics were overly fragile, they should still, on the whole, be one of the most vulnerable components of the laser. Even if before it was to much, why are counter-lasers not a thing at all ? Intensity is what does damage. Whatever you consider your most fragile component to be, a certain minimum intensity is required to do damage to it. A stronger laser is defined as having a higher intensity at a given range, or equivalently, a longer range for a given intensity. A stronger laser is able to deal damage and destroy a weaker laser before the weaker laser is close enough to do anything. This is why counter-lasers are not a thing irl (and it's why we're going to have an arms race for the biggest laser once we have serious space warfare in the works, up to the range at which light lag allows dodging laser shots).
In CoaDE, we have a maximum range. So, you can use the weakest laser that is able to do meaningful damage at maximum range (and use as many copies of it as you have power for), and you won't be losing out on anything, because any stronger laser is not making use of its theoretical range fully. That is a lot of lasers, so it's more common to use lasers that reach the ablation cap at max range on common armor types; that's fine, and it's not much different in essence.
Going much beyond the ablation cap is pure waste. It might seem that weak lasers can take out strong ones favorably when in reality such strong lasers are just not properly supported by the game.
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Post by apophys on Aug 17, 2018 13:24:38 GMT
It's viable in the sense that fewer of higher power lasers are worse in basically every way than more of lower power lasers with the same turret, due to redundancy for defense and due to the ablation cap for offense.
No, counter-lasers are not a thing; there was a bug for a short while where laser optics were disgustingly fragile, but that bug was fixed a long time ago.
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Post by apophys on Aug 17, 2018 13:02:42 GMT
How about bigger ordnance ie. Casaba Howitzer? Anything large is best on a missile (because dumb projectiles with low muzzle velocity can be dodged; missiles home in). You may choose to give an initial boost to the missile with a chemical gun or blast launcher, though it's not strictly necessary to do so. Launching them normally from an MPD-driven missile-bus drone right before the encounter is the method I recommend.
Alternately, you can shoot the payload out of a gun that you put on a disposable drone with a high velocity intercept, so as to get close to the target and make dodging hard regardless of the nominally low muzzle velocity. (This is vulnerable to lasers killing the drone on approach.)
I haven't personally tried these tactics, though I'm certain they work; I'm more of a laser guy.
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Post by apophys on Aug 17, 2018 10:59:35 GMT
anotherfirefox , coilguns are completely outclassed by railguns for small projectiles (i.e. a few grams) due to muzzle velocity, and mostly outclassed by chemical guns or blast launchers for large projectiles (i.e. small missiles) due to ammo cost. I don't see a proper use case for coilguns in the current game.
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