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Post by dpidz0r on Feb 27, 2017 18:15:31 GMT
Supposedly the only thing keeping fusion from being a reality is reliably containing the superheated plasma, and keeping it from destroying the reactor that surrounds it. Granted I may be way out of date here or talking about the wrong kind of fusion reactor, but iirc from the facility I toured a few years ago, destroying the reactor wasn't really a concern if the plasma lost containment. There's so little thermal mass the reaction just stops if the stream hits the wall.
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Post by dpidz0r on Dec 15, 2016 19:08:36 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").
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Post by dpidz0r on Dec 14, 2016 20:03:21 GMT
I wouldn't recommend having a 1kg rare-earth magnet "just laying around". If you get one you should have a special storage bin for it, and I'd recommend wrapping it in several layers (like, more than 10) of high visibility duct tape. The tape gives it some padding, helps keep it from sticking flush against the surface of things (magnetic field drops off rapidly by distance), and gives you something to grip in the event it sticks to something metallic.
Something closer to the 1cm cube range should be fairly safe though.
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Post by dpidz0r on Dec 13, 2016 21:31:41 GMT
Actually, speaking of this tactic... I'm trying to wrap my head around how you plan an approach that starts nuking the enemy far enough out they can't reach you with long range lase or kinetics that doesn't leave you eventually thrusting away from them. I mean, yeah - sure - as long as you have deltaV to spare you can pick your engagements, and it takes a special kind of crazy to charge at you... Use really small pulse units? Downside of that is you don't really get effective blinding or harming of enemy sensors... Presumably you would have a secondary weaponized bomb unit for such situations. Either an NEFP or a true Casaba Howitzer. But why bother throwing bombs at them if you've got bomb pumped x-ray lasers? As far as I can tell from reading, we had that tech working in the 70s. Just release a handful of x-ray attenuating rods with each propulsion charge. Slap some small reaction wheels on them so they can fine tune their aim in the few seconds before the bomb goes off and you're good to go. I bet you could even pack a pretty dense cluster of them around the bomb to make good use of whatever parts of the detonation aren't hitting your pusher plate.
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Post by dpidz0r on Nov 22, 2016 16:22:37 GMT
I've been experimenting with launching micromissiles from a nose mounted coilgun. Problem currently is the missile guidance. Sometimes they'll be on point and smash into the target with all ~15km/s built up from the gun + rocket motor (2-3 solid hits like this the target is dead), and then other times it's like the target has a deflector shield causing them to spazz out and miss at the last second.
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Post by dpidz0r on Nov 18, 2016 17:17:34 GMT
Coilgun launched 10kg frag missile I've been working with this idea as well, but haven't gotten very far due to lack of time to play with the module designer. My thinking was something that has ~1-2km/s of deltaV and a very very high acceleration (like it burns all its fuel in half a second). The idea was that the coilgun is effective even with an unpowered projectile, and aims to hit as if that were the case. If we're still on course in the last few seconds, then great, the engine will add another 2km/s to the impact velocity. If the target has moved while the projectile is approaching (or the guns aim was slightly off), then the projectile has some opportunity to correct with a last second high acceleration burn.
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Post by dpidz0r on Nov 18, 2016 4:35:33 GMT
If you don't have a Alcubierre style displacement drive, then a ship will likely fly by flinging itself around planets and asteroids where it will use these fields to slingshot itself and propel itself against their mass. What part of the planet would it push against? Some kind of vague field pushing on the entire thing, or a focused point? If the force can be focused enough at a distance, I could imagine a deranged spaceship captain using the mass of his ship to literally squish people like ants.
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Post by dpidz0r on Nov 15, 2016 21:41:12 GMT
I haven't bothered to exactly calculate the power draw, but here's picture of it: i.imgur.com/uC8FEAe.png Figure an average of ~28V @ ~375 amps for 14ms. Obviously the time is going to get longer as you add more coils, and shorter as you increase the power (projectile moves faster). For rapid fire sound without the impacts I could write some code to dryfire the coils in a fixed sequence based on data from a real shot. But I imagine it'd sound like the single click/thump from the single coil but multiplied by however many coils there (intervals getting smaller as projectile speed increases), then repeated for each shot. I don't really have any solid numbers for fire rate either except that it's going to be limited by the power supply. The issue isn't necessarily the overall power consumption (e.g. my gun can do hundreds (thousands?) of shots on a single charge with just 4800mah of battery), but the fact that the consumption is very bursty. Nuclear reactors are great at providing a constant current, but not so great at dumping gigawatts of power into something for just a few milliseconds at a time. You need a cap bank for that, at which point it becomes a question of how fast can you charge and discharge your caps without damaging them and how much weight/space are you willing to sacrifice. e.g. say you can't cycle your caps more than once every few seconds. You can add in more cap banks and rotate through them (actually, this may be ideal because it would help smooth the load on the reactor) to shoot faster, but these things aren't small or light. Here's an article with a picture of the kind of thing powering the railgun the navy plays with: www.naval-technology.com/news/newsraytheon-delivers-pulse-power-containers-for-us-navys-railgun-programme-4904013 Then if you watch the youtube videos of it fireing, there are often multiple containers like that visible in the background. So imagine tens of these things per coil/rail gun on the ship, and having to add more the faster you want the fire rate to be (though come to think of it, this may be kind of covered by whatever the "loading mechanism" is in the module designer.)
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Post by dpidz0r on Nov 15, 2016 14:57:17 GMT
THIS. All the this. My argument comes down to, if crew is well educated masters-degree-and-such, it makes less sense they'd be fanatical zealots. Where do you get these people from? How do you create these people? Doesn't their education include history and such? Have you been on a college campus recently though? You can find a lot of nutjobs if you get some distance from the STEM buildings Also, we may be overestimating the amount of education the crews would actually need. You can train someone in a very specific field to do very specific tasks pretty fast if you sacrifice breadth for depth. Especially if computers and automation are readily available. With a good enough expert system all your people would really need to know how to do was make observations, follow instructions, and be passable at whatever kind of physical tasks the system directed them to perform.
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Post by dpidz0r on Nov 15, 2016 0:01:13 GMT
On the other hand, human life seems to be very useless to our faction given they're happy to nuke the heck out of everything, so maybe everything I'm saying is rather pointless Yeah. And tbh I think you'd almost want crews that understood they were expendable and were willing to expend themselves. A lot of the encounters in this game tend to be a lose-lose scenario, it's just that the mission ends before the aftermath has a chance to kick in. e.g. yeah my railguns maybe sawed the enemy silo ship into 6 different pieces and we "won" with no immediate casualties, but the 120 nukes that detonated 1km away while chasing my flares probably means that in another 5 years my crew is all going to die of cancer. That sort of situation could also turn really nasty really fast. e.g. I lost the fight due to my ship having the engines and radiators nuked off of it and I know I'm going to die from acute radiation poisoning in a few days, so why not cut up all the structural bits of my ship just right and scuttle it in such a way as to make the debris a massive navigational hazard for the gravity well we were fighting over? And for good measure we could make sure all as much radioactive crap as possible falls on top of the inhabited areas of the planet. It's not like my side is going to take it back any time soon with transit times measured in years, and if we're lucky the reinforcements will arrive to take it back about the time the enemy has finished cleaning up the mess we left for them. Though having typed all of that, I guess you'd need a crew that's willing enough to sacrifice themselves but not so crazy that they'd commit some final act of spite that would push the enemy over the edge and turn the war into mutually assured destruction. I'm not sure where you'd find people like that. Maybe a dystopian future full of brainwashing and propaganda?
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Post by dpidz0r on Nov 14, 2016 5:14:13 GMT
... That's actually pretty quiet. I kind of want just the firing sound just so I can see how much of the noise in the videos is from background stuff. Based on your description of the noise it made, I was expecting a 40 mm grenade launcher-esque "Thoomp" sound, or something like the Tesseract guns from Captain America: The First Avenger. It's quiet because it's small and low power. I guess you can't really hear it on that video unless you know what to listen for, but there's a bit of an impact sound as the coils twist around themselves and recoil against the sensor mounts. I took some video tonight of just a single coil triggering with no projectile: www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8DeC66kFs8And here's an older video with a projectile actually shooting but no crickets in the background: www.youtube.com/watch?v=81cW1bzAhMU&t=32sI've been on the other side of the safety glass from a 15kv cap bank repeatedly discharging into a dummy load and it makes a loud enough thoomp that osha would say you need hearing protection to be there. There's also a bit of a twanging sound as the various high current bus bars flex from the EMF. As to how the sound would translate to a rapid fire design, I have no idea. Probably a constant roar with some twanging at a frequency equal to some resonance of your power bus length? My opinion as an amateur builder is that the coil and rail guns modeled ingame fire way more rapidly than would ever be realistic. At least not unless you assume some kind of magical pulsed power storage system. I shot some video of a rapid fire test for the sound also, but we're not really setup for shooting a stream of solid metal: www.youtube.com/watch?v=HkPX3HebcZ4
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Post by dpidz0r on Nov 9, 2016 3:41:43 GMT
do you think nuclear missiles with a laser on top would work? In a book I read, completely forgot the name, there were missiles that had gamma lasers on top. Although, they also did use antimatter propulsion. The Honor Harrington series and Footfall both had bomb pumped lasers, though no antimatter propulsion. The Honorverse ones were on missiles that attempted to fly past the target and then detonate the laser head as soon as it has a clear shot (iirc they were also heavily programmable in that they could fly a huge subset of attack profiles to circumvent shields/armor/point defense/ECM). Footfall was harder scifi and had an orion drive ship that dumped some kind of expendable device out the back. The device would keep pointed at a target until vaporized by the next propulsion bomb. The process of being vaporized generated a very focused xray beam in whatever direction it was pointed, which basically meant the ship was keeping up a constant barrage of laser fire whenever it was maneuvering. It was probably based on project excalibur: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Excalibur
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Post by dpidz0r on Nov 8, 2016 0:12:01 GMT
Just watched part 5. For main belt extraction, burning straight at the encounter from a few minutes out to increase the intercept speed might have worked better. Literal last minute course corrections are what win or lose the actual engagement. I'd rather spend 2 seconds tanking unanswered railgun fire in order to have 8 seconds to melt the radiators with my lasers than 20 seconds of tanking it for 80 seconds of radiator melting action.
Then the vesta overkill strategy was interesting. Seems kind of like a cheese strategy, but then I could also imagine having rules of engagement about not pounding the nearby gravitational body into dust with hypervelocity weapons. Considering the campaign fluff, using civilian infrastructure as a shield seems like something the protagonists side might do.
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Orion
Nov 3, 2016 22:24:28 GMT
Post by dpidz0r on Nov 3, 2016 22:24:28 GMT
Do you think attacking with the plate forward is going to be a viable tactic ? Probably as viable as anything else. Especially if you start chucking sacrificial bomb pumped x-ray lasers out the back to take advantage of each detonation, it'd basically be your main weapon: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_ExcaliburThough I'd suppose the protection provided by the plate would depend on what's shooting at you. That might leave some interesting tactical options though, e.g. you could turn around and present the plate to a wave of incoming nukes, then rotate to present a whipple shield covered main body if they open up with hyperkinetic projectiles.
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Post by dpidz0r on Nov 3, 2016 17:03:58 GMT
As for combat being randomly successful, I've found that lowering the engagement speed in the few minutes before the encounter happens really helps make it less random. It wastes a lot of deltaV, but if you're not doing multiple engagements you don't need it anyway. The best way to do is is to set your reference frame to the target and start plotting burns away from your target several minutes before the encounter.
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