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Post by RiftandRend on Feb 7, 2017 19:36:05 GMT
Even better, its not some incredibly complex thing that would need decades of research to build. I could see this being added to the game relatively easily.
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Post by RiftandRend on Feb 7, 2017 19:25:19 GMT
Small question, why are we limited to 2 frequency doublers? Allowing us to add as many as we want and a new failure condition (mirrors become ionized) would be nice. That way we can get the ~4% efficiency of ND:YAG with the intensity of Titanium:Saphire.
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Post by RiftandRend on Feb 7, 2017 19:21:35 GMT
Wait, how often is your railgun design limited by not having enough current? Mine always complain about breaking the barrel, the projectile, or melting the projectile. If I have a really resistive barrel, maybe, just MAYBE, I hit problems with reload speed taking too long (due to cooldown). If barrel resistivity is not your limiting factor, making it superconductive won't help you. By using this system you could use materials that are normally too resistive. VCS or diamond railgun barrels. Heck, if you are willing to invest a huge ammount of mass you could use supercooled UHMWPE or boron as your railgun barrels. This can also apply to your projectiles, supercooled armatures are superior to standard ones. Considering that most of my railguns fire 1g projectiles this would be relatively easy to implement. I am not suggesting this system for drones or small ships. This would only become viable on larger ships where weapon mass is an irrelevant fraction of its total mass. In that setting even a 5% increase in performance in exchange for 300% more mass would be desirable.
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Post by RiftandRend on Feb 6, 2017 19:35:51 GMT
Thin, highly angular ships with tangential turrets and spinal cannons are probably the best possible design. The loss in volume is more than made up for by the armor multiplication.
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Post by RiftandRend on Feb 6, 2017 19:23:02 GMT
Just an idea, would adding radiators along railgun barrels allow them to reach superconducting critical temperatures? Some materials are superconducting at ~30K and the boost in muzzle velocity might be worth the loss in fire rate. Even if superconductivity is not a possibility it should still have some performance benefit and shouldn't add too much to weight if you use lithium radiators.
Superconducting BiSrCaCuO railguns with UHMWPE reinforcement might compete with lasers for ship main armament.
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Post by RiftandRend on Feb 6, 2017 19:12:42 GMT
Someone already suggested this. I don't think it has it's own suggestion thread though. Wouldn't the rapid heating and cooling cause a lot of thermal expansion stress or make the fuel brittle? I imagine that can be solved with some bracing or clever arrangement of the fuel rods.
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Post by RiftandRend on Feb 6, 2017 19:09:20 GMT
I want those turrets more than Orion.
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Post by RiftandRend on Feb 3, 2017 2:57:03 GMT
Would coating the edges of radiators with thermoelectrically sensitive materials allow for power generation?
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Post by RiftandRend on Jan 26, 2017 9:01:00 GMT
I should mention that my laser is not anywhere near a Tw array. In the conversation has moved on from that, sorry for interrupting.
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Post by RiftandRend on Jan 26, 2017 2:53:31 GMT
The energy should be applied so instantaneously that blackbody radiation should play no part in this laser's function. Think about that for a sec. Laser damage primarily through heating up the atoms of the material they are focused on. So how is it that that heat will only be radiated to that one area and not act as heat normally does? A laser isn't magic, it's science. Some of the energy must be radiated away right? And when things get hot they vaporize or they melt or whatever, and just like sweating, when matter changes states, that cools things down a bit. Plus since Laser is made of light, or light like waves, some of it can be reflected. I'm not making any definitive statement here, I'm just saying that the idea that all of the energy in a laser beam will convert into energy given into the material doesn't make any sense. If that were true for starters, how is the beam even able to be built up inside the laser? If materials inside the laser can be made to reflect and deliver the beam, then the materials of ship hulls, some have mentioned nitrile rubber or some such, could obviously have a similar although reduced effect. On second thought, radiation would play some part in the laser damage, but so little as to be irrelevant. On a laser with a larger target area it might matter more, but my laser targets over 300 Mw on a sub millimeter target. That point would become plasma in nanoseconds.
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Post by RiftandRend on Jan 25, 2017 20:37:07 GMT
Remember that the main reasons lasers are so dominant right now is that we built ridiculous nuclear reactors, which may not function IRL. The way I see it, we should verify reactor functionality before coming back to lasers. Yeah, how did RiftandRend power that thing? With a massive stack of stock 60 Mw reactors.
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Post by RiftandRend on Jan 25, 2017 20:35:41 GMT
I was arguing that the game has an inaccurate representation of laser damage. Think so? I have no idea... If we assume that all of that energy is transferred to the material in reality, then yes of course the game must be wrong. But if in real life most of the energy of lasers is wasted in heat that is radiated away? The energy should be applied so instantaneously that blackbody radiation should play no part in this laser's function.
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Post by RiftandRend on Jan 25, 2017 1:03:50 GMT
Did I do this right? I had to lower the Young's Modulus from 1000 GPa that I saw in the literature to 800 GPa to keep the game from crashing because of the Poisson's Ratio. I'm not a materials scientist so I'm doing this somewhat blind. I'm sure the values are way better than you'd get in reality even after a bunch of development, if I knew what they did I'd probably make them worse but as it is I'm not sure what direction to change them in (besides obvious stuff like melting point or yield strength). The stuff I couldn't find quickly I just assumed (probably wrongly) to be close to graphite. Material Graphene Elements C ElementCount 1 Density_kg__m3 2230 YieldStrength_MPa 130000 UltimateTensileStrength_MPa 130000 YoungsModulus_GPa 800 ShearModulus_GPa 280 BulkModulus_GPa 8 MeltingPoint_K 4900 SpecificHeat_J__kg_K 51000 ThermalConductivity_W__m_K 2500 ThermalExpansion__K -8e-6 ThermoelectricSensitivity_V__K 9e-5 Resistivity_Ohm_m .001 RefractiveIndex Graphite RoughnessCoefficient 0.9
I had to replace the file in Data/Materials to actually get this to load, putting it in Mods\Data\Materials\Nonmetals.txt didn't seem to do anything. The density seems more like 2.23 kg/m3, not 2230 kg/m3
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Post by RiftandRend on Jan 22, 2017 8:23:16 GMT
Perhaps injecting LOX into a jet of superheated NTR hydrogen exhaust would bypass the reactivity issue.
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Post by RiftandRend on Jan 22, 2017 7:41:04 GMT
Because of that LOX-Hydrogen/Hydrocarbon systems are probably going to be the only viable use of this system.
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