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Post by Pttg on Nov 5, 2016 22:41:52 GMT
For me it'd be interesting to see some kind of espionage/military-political story. A faction has managed to gather one or more scientific geniuses who have together designed a new superweapon. Said faction then needs to proceed carefully - to what extent have they been permeated by enemy spies? What if one or more of the greatest minds involved in the project is sympathetic to an enemy faction? What if a test of the device is necessary to proceed but would be difficult if not impossible to conceal from the other factions? Is the weapon significant enough to be worth the cost in terms of political fallout? In essence, the manhattan project 2: electric boogaloo in spaceThis is COADE, the invention is probably like an alloy that has 20% higher specific strength than CVS. Or maybe a roomish-temperature superconductor.
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Post by Pttg on Nov 5, 2016 22:35:26 GMT
I'm curious about the population of the system. It seems like people aren't dramatically different from a tactical perspective (such as electrically-powered carbon dioxide catalysiers implanted in the lungs). AI is at best a curiosity, not practical for spaceflight... but that still leaves a lot of room for very different people. I'm curious what people do for fun in this setting, what cultures exist. It seems that overwhelming censorship is a given, which is odd, seeing how omniscient a crew can be.
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Post by Pttg on Nov 5, 2016 19:24:51 GMT
I'm a little skeptical of it being metastable. Even if it is, I'd be worried about exactly how stable it could actually be. A room-temperature superconductor that explodes if you sneeze on it is not exactly useful.
Nonetheless, this is incredibly exciting. Not in the least because pellet-fed metallic hydrogen rockets would combine a remarkably energy-dense fuel with an outlandishly light and high-velocity exhaust.
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Post by Pttg on Nov 4, 2016 19:07:18 GMT
What would be the point of turning such an asteroid into a fortress? There's no reason for your enemy to attack it, since it has little inherent value, and they can always go around it to attack something else. If you're going to fortify something, it should be something valuable. Also, how would you aim a mass driver built deep into the asteroid? Asteroids are the population centers. They are likely loaded with fuel depots, too.
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Post by Pttg on Nov 4, 2016 6:55:28 GMT
No ship type exists in a vacuum. But seriously, on the small scale it would depend on context. While it's hard to state just how effective things can be based on our sandbox battles, I can relate to my experience with a other simulation type game, Star Ruler. Star Ruler is a 4X game using newtonian physics that allows you to construct any ship type you want from a number of modules on a variety of different scales. In broadstrokes it could be thought of as a "strategic" outlook whereas CODE is a 'tactical" outlook. My experience is that a single type of ship will have a weakpoint that can be exploited by the enemy. Rely too much on missiles and the enemy will develop and deploy effective PD or countermeasures. Rely too much on expendable drones to get around the PD or CM, and the enemy will develop interceptors. Rely too much on frigates to kill the interceptors, and the enemy will field cruisers, ect, ect. You need a Flak boat to keep the missiles and fighters away. You need a gunboat to kill the flak boat. You need a missile boat to kill the gun boat. And you need fighters to slip in between the cracks of them all. Up to a point With a sufficently large and capable warship this stops mattering. We've seen 1km long ships already, and at larger scales effectivness goes up. That 1km dreadnought with 300 500MW lasers that carries 4000 NEFPs, 500 drones, enough KE to create a solid wall of fire, and enough DV to get from Luna to Pluto and back is going to outrun and out gun any fleet of 15mc destroyers you try to field. It is basically a fleet-in-one. Its size allows for redudancy, its mass allows for it to tank fire, and it's volume allows it to carry more standoff ordinance. It's massive size allows room for crew quarters, staffing, provisions, recreation; it would basically be a flying fortress city. NO need to worry about patrol times when you can just rotate between three different crew shifts. They're expensive, but since we don't have to deal with resource aquisition, real cost, holding territory, construction time, or labor I don't see a superdreadnought not being the end-all be all. I see your point, but I maintain that the rock-paper-scisors game continues even unto that scale. It is inevitably a single point of failure, and one infiltrator can have outsized impact on a superdreadnaught than otherwise. Or it may be that a kind of MAD (Mutually Assured Dreadnaught) comes into play. "I won't spend 40% of my GDP on a superdreadnaught if you don't spend 30% of yours." Or, perhaps, a fleet of ultra-high-speed, ultra-long-range KKV missiles are all that is required. Acceleration is never going to be a strong suit of a war-space-city.
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Post by Pttg on Nov 3, 2016 18:04:08 GMT
I have to agree that some kind of coolant system (maybe as simple as throwing a turbopump on there) would go a long way to making propellant guns feel more realistic.
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Post by Pttg on Nov 3, 2016 18:01:00 GMT
A few variants of hypothetical superconductors would be interesting to replace borosilicate glass....
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Post by Pttg on Nov 3, 2016 16:37:13 GMT
I made the minifrige somewhat cheaper: It's scalable, too. Increase the neutron flux and the thermocouple height to account for the increased pressure and you can get maybe annother hundred kW out of it. What's the cheapest 100kW+ reactor someone's gotten yet?
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Post by Pttg on Nov 3, 2016 3:51:38 GMT
I think it's more efficient to switch to lower-density wheels if the turret is large, rather than shrinking them.
As for the drones, that actually makes a lot of sense for very small corrections. Large corrections should probably use RCS.
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Post by Pttg on Nov 2, 2016 2:09:25 GMT
I really wish I could mark reactors as "shielded" or "unshielded" for use on drones versus manned vessels.
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Post by Pttg on Nov 1, 2016 20:59:55 GMT
One major advantage of manned ships is that they can provide maintenance and repair of their vessel. However, many missions might include months of drifting during which crews currently appear to play solitaire. The addition of a "manufacturing" module which produces replacement parts from feedstock and scrap would make the crews of vessels dramatically more useful on long missions. The blog mentioned that manufacturing uses additive approaches (3D printing) and has a fairly high precision. On the other hand, chemical processes are clearly not an option, nor would we expect ships to produce artificial isotopes or otherwise refine radioactives. Therefore, consider the following:
A manufacturing module is a high-energy system. The most energy-intensive part of any industrial operation will not greatly exceed the melting point of any solids being worked, and one can equip a ship with low-powered machining tools if it only needs to work with low-temperature materials. Therefore, the main features of a manufacturing module are the composition of the tools it carries, the coolant it will use, and the energy budget it has for its melting/cutting tools. A secondary attribute of the manufacturing module is its work envelope, which is presumably slightly smaller than the module's own dimensions.
The crew presumably takes components from the manufacturing module and installs them in the ship. Since most modules are made up of smaller components, the entire module need not fit inside the work envelope, just the entire component being worked on. If a hole is punched through a thrust bell, only the bell need be replaced, not the reactor, gimble, etc.
Naturally, constructing replacement components requires the materials. While some materials can be collected by scavenging (i.e., if your ship has three damaged NTRs, the crew might be able to construct two working NTRs), a cargo hold carrying useful materials may be wise. Replacement armor materials, laser crystals, or simply spare aluminum, all could be stored in a raw form in cargo holds.
Not every ship would require these systems; rather, a tender with a manufacturing module and cargo might follow military craft. However, such a ship is useless while actively in combat unless it has, for instance, a laser to take advantage of its power supply. Defending, or attacking, maintenance tenders seems a natural goal for military spacecraft.
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Post by Pttg on Nov 1, 2016 20:39:03 GMT
Wavelength immunity would be a fascinating meta for multiplayer.
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Post by Pttg on Nov 1, 2016 20:35:59 GMT
That superdreadnaught is insane. I don't know how we can convert credits to dollars, though.
How would you guys go about armoring a space station as opposed to a vessel? I would presume it has a few stationkeeping thrusters but nothing more powerful.
I suppose the biggest weakness would be the radiators -- if I could, I'd load it with a lot of ammonia and have it vaporize the ammonia and dump it into space rather than risk losing radiators... would two meters be wide enough for the exhaust port?
Anyway, since mass is irrelevant, density, hardness, and cost are more relevant. I'm thinking two or three meters of solid iron. Maybe an interesting surface layer for heat conduction, and certainly an internal layer of something anti-spalling. I'm thinking that the laser layer could be a few centimeters of something thermally conductive, isolated from the iron layer by a meter or so. Run the generators as hot as possible so as to ensure tiny, tiny radiators, and have two or three spares, of course. Have to find a way to make cheap, high-temperature radiators, but remember, it doesn't matter how massive they are.
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Post by Pttg on Nov 1, 2016 0:11:36 GMT
I reproduced this issue. I was able to resolve it by re-saving my UserDesigns.txt file. Note that some text editors won't actually save unless you make a change first -- that slowed me a little bit.
I've attached the corrupted version.
Edit: Well that is interesting. It turns out that re-saving the file doesn't help.
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Post by Pttg on Oct 31, 2016 23:21:42 GMT
If we get heat pumps, I'd like to hook one up to the room-temperature coolant of my life support and heat it up to a nice orange glow for my radiators.
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