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Post by Pttg on Oct 31, 2016 20:43:02 GMT
This, my friends, is a monster. I recommend stripping the neutron reflector entirely off and putting it on large drones with heavy armor. Of course, this design has much room for improvement, but as it stands it's possible to get a 9g drone with a significant payload and armor, with 1 km/s delta-v. Aside from minimizing volume to save on armor costs, I'm not sure what use this has. Except, perhaps, to allow one to prove your credentials as the ultimate Captain Planet villain.
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Post by Pttg on Oct 31, 2016 3:32:12 GMT
Certainly an interesting idea. One problem with a slush-storage-tank is that it is, itself, going to require cooling, and a 195.4 K radiator is going to be colossal. Still, if it's designed to only be used when your radiators have been shot off....
It would certainly be an interesting contrast to normal design: building the coldest possible radiators so you can chill the densest possible fluid.
If I needed a kilowatt of power on a drone, then what I'd do is combine my thermoelectric reactor with my drive reactor and use a cryonic propellant. flush it with ultra-cold helium. Presumably there would be non-thrusting if you need to turn off the drive but not melt your core....
Oh here's something. Single-use lasers. I wanna hit someone with an ultra-high-power laser burst from a drone. Yeah the laser will melt. So what? I'm only gonna use the drone like once anyway. Would go well with super-capacitors or some other kind of cheap power supply.
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Post by Pttg on Oct 30, 2016 23:57:43 GMT
Heck, you can give any missile an extra 1-2km/s by using a coilgun instead of a launcher.
It's really beautiful to see a sleety line missiles closing with the enemy. They can try to lase them, but it's like trying to stop a firehose by throwing rocks into the stream.
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Post by Pttg on Oct 30, 2016 23:50:09 GMT
Turboelectric Fission reactors would be nice.
One thing that might be nice is a heat sink designed to allow a ship to "hold its breath" and launch flares to dodge missiles.
Oh, and an alternative to reaction wheels for gimbals. Sometimes I want to use the rest of the ship for reaction, particularly when the module in question is a tiny fraction of the mass of the rest of the ship.
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Post by Pttg on Oct 28, 2016 18:45:40 GMT
Are lithium and boron broken somehow? It seems crazy that it's a perfect engine bell, turbopump, and aftershave, but nobody uses it IRL.
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Post by Pttg on Oct 28, 2016 18:06:48 GMT
It's certainly clear that the prohibition of nukes is long gone in COADE. Furthermore, each faction is ideological/political, rather than ethnic/religious/clannish (except for Nippon Prime). Finally, it seems that manufacturing costs are almost exclusively determined by the bulk price of the source elements, considering that diamond is dirt cheap; that implies that manufacturing is highly advanced, and probably capable of working on an atomic scale. Also, fissiles are extremely, extremely common in everyday life as they are pretty much the sole source of energy in the outer planets.
Considering the military-political ideology of the factions, one would expect that infiltrating the other society and "turning" dissatisfied citizens to your own faction would be a common tactic. Consider it in-situ manufacturing of dissidence. The next step is to simply provide the dissident with the files needed to take the raw material inside a household nuclear reactor and produce a few tiny nuclear bowling balls. Of course you'll promise to provide an extraction before you set off the weapons (inside enemy space stations and planetside facilities, making armor worse than a moot point), but do you really want to hire a traitor?
Of course, this is regular espionage, and probably outside the normal considerations of the game. Nonetheless, I imagine that the opening hours of a hot war would involve mano-a-mano conflicts over dozens of stations and a crisis of trust throughout both sides. Nippon Prime is probably no stronger against this attack, although rather than finding bigoted dissidents and proposing to help them, one would seek out democratic dissidents.
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Post by Pttg on Oct 28, 2016 5:50:34 GMT
I thought that fusion reactors would be nice for power but when I thought about it the main advantage of fusion (for a spacecraft) is that it has an insane energy density. But 1kg of uranium is already so energy rich that the fact that you can carry centuries of fuel vs just a few years of fuel is not that important in the game. A plasma or gas core fission reactor with a magnetohydrodynamic generator will be powerful enough for anything that expects to only run for less than a century. For thrusters though, a 1,000km/s exhaust velocity will be killer even if the fuel (and also reaction mass) is D-T. An antimatter thruster with a 100,000km/s exahst velocity would be cool but the antimatter tanks will be kill you on their terrible mass ratio. Also "Well, someone just shot the radiators off my power plant. I've got about 3 seconds until I run out of power to contain my antima--"
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Post by Pttg on Oct 28, 2016 5:06:18 GMT
Using very small missiles, it is possible to build a 1kw launcher with 33 mm/s launch velocity and 20ms reload rate.
DO NOT DO THAT.
The missiles -- and this is a technical term here -- bunch up in space and explode each other.
Incidentally, even after I punched up the initial velocity and increased the reload speed to 500ms, I still had the problem of rapidly deploying over a thousand missiles and turning my computer into slag. I bet it would do great against laser defenses, though!
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Post by Pttg on Oct 27, 2016 22:16:46 GMT
I like the way you're thinking, Boomertiro. Crazy Tom also mentioned Nuclear Salt Water Rockets, and that's annother one I'd like to see alongside Orion-type engines.
Ooh! and liquid/gas core NTRs would be fun.
Interesting to say, but I also want to see fuel cells. They might be very interesting for low-power-use manned missions.
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Post by Pttg on Oct 25, 2016 20:46:14 GMT
I think an MMO approach is pretty much out of the question, but a multiplayer approach -- consisting of two to ~6 players -- is feasible from a usability standpoint.
Clicking "run turn" simply sets your next "check in point". When all players have clicked "run turn," the game advances to only the next "check in point" out of all players.
The game could do a few simple smart things like assuming AFK players will click 'run turn' after ten seconds of inactivity. Or something like that.
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Post by Pttg on Oct 25, 2016 18:22:30 GMT
Hi; first post boilerplate.
Now that that's out of the way, I was looking for mods and it's suprisingly hard to find anything. If nothing else, it seems like it might be easy to add in new materials (from the perhaps-reasonable molten lead coolant to the utterly insane Human Femur armor layer), new engines (lanterns and open-cycle gas cores, perhaps), or maybe something more ambitious (fusion related activities in general, antimatter initiated fusion reactors/explosives, life support concerns....?)
In particular, it might be interesting to have vessels that only have weeks of crew endurance which are married to motherships with practically endless endurance. Or having crewed ships be capable of self-repair over a few weeks.
Anyone know of any mod projects in progress, or have ideas for mods they haven't implemented yet?
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