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Post by jasonvance on Jan 28, 2017 14:01:14 GMT
Hey could someone who has experience with reactors help me with something? I'm trying to design something that produces ~10 kilowatt+ range energy, but with the restrictions of being no larger than 50x50x50 cm, weigh no more than 25-55 Kg, and most challengingly have minimal heat output temperatures, without creating too much excess heat. And as if that wasn't enough, I would prefer as low radiation leakage as possible, but it might be easier to just make a ship and surround it with some Lithium-6 This is going to help with part of my next big thread, so you'll see why I need these parameters then (If you don't figure it out on your own by then) Thanks Well my 1MW reactor fits the size and weight requirements already I can make a more toned down version (to 10kW) if you give me a specific outlet / other specs you actually want.
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Post by jasonvance on Jan 23, 2017 6:28:09 GMT
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Post by jasonvance on Jan 22, 2017 19:04:37 GMT
The required power assumes you are firing only one weapon at once -- which might make sense if you put two weapons on opposite sides of your ship. If you want to be able to fire everything at once, you have to take care of the available power yourself. Hmm that makes sense. And I just had a revealibg experience when I tried to slap 20 drone railguns on a ship and saw them all turn their turret one after the other. But I am sure that I could use other guns in anpunts which far exceeded my power generation some time ago... those didnt have turrets though. Ill go test this again. Check the ammo draw / second when it looks like all 20 are firing. It is possible that the guns are just alternating which ones fire (possibly to spread ammo usage around if ammo is built into the gun). If the ammo drawn / second is 20x greater even though you only have slightly more power than would be needed to power 1 gun it is for sure a bug. Each individual weapon should require its own power to operate (this is true for sure with lasers). It can be pretty hard to tell the difference between 100 rounds / second and 2000 rounds / second since the tracers all form a solid line most of the time.
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Post by jasonvance on Jan 22, 2017 16:03:14 GMT
Can you tune the 14.4 Mt U-233 bomb down to 10 Mt and see if it's worth it then? Imo not worth it over a 9.64Mt bomb with boron neutron reflector (that is listed on the main standards page) due to mass and cost from the osmium but this is the more reasonable 10Mt:
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Post by jasonvance on Jan 22, 2017 8:50:16 GMT
I actually lied you can make 14.4Mt U-233 nukes but they aren't worth it and if you really want the strongest nuke possible and most impractical am-243:
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Post by jasonvance on Jan 22, 2017 8:44:56 GMT
Has anyone managed to get more than 10Mt out of their nuke assembly? Real life example Tsar-bomb was around 57Mt and it originally ought to be a 100Mt+ device. Not since the update. Best I've personally gotten was 10.2 Mt out of a plutonium boosted fission nuke. You can do 10.4 out of a U-235 nuke but I haven't been able to get higher than that either. I think they should boost the core mass limit to 10 tons or more from 1 ton to allow for larger nukes. Imo you are better off just massing cheap 9.64Mt nukes though (you can also get 10.2 Mt out of U-233 which is cheaper using osmium reflector and the same principle but quadrouple the mass and an extra 90kc doesn't seem worth it).
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Post by jasonvance on Jan 22, 2017 7:17:09 GMT
are you supposed to not be able to see your own pictures? I can't even see the icons. here copied them to imgur (these are enderminion's screenshots)
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Post by jasonvance on Jan 22, 2017 5:56:13 GMT
"Only costing three earth GDPs each!" are you supposed to not be able to see your own pictures? I had to right click it and view the image in a new window (only showed up as an icon on the forum) It would be really cool if you manually placed all those guns to get them all on one side so they could all alpha strike together with one massive broadside.
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Post by jasonvance on Jan 21, 2017 3:03:34 GMT
... Nothing you've stated here counters my point: What stops my MPD (primary) drones from decelerating before entering combat range? As for targets moving 1-2+ Gs vs a 10km/s interceptor, I've managed to achieve hits on them. Even then, they may dodge direct impacts, but NEFP and near-10 MT weapons can inflict damage at kilometers of range. In case of long range drones and NEFPs you're right, it won't matter. If however you are dealing with hypervelocity missiles or small (non-NEFP) nukes, it becomes feasible. I think the real problem is people are assuming last second maneuvering or zipping a ship around really fast actually does anything. A ship making an emergency thrust 2 seconds before intercept from a drone moving 10km/s is only 20km away. You have to think of drones (and even missiles) in terms of their sphere of influence. Most weapons are effective at about 100km (even with projectiles) and you have to dodge the entire sphere of influence to stay "safe" with high thrust movement. Even if you did hit your burn from a super powerful 20G acceleration rocket (which would kill the occupants of the ship) you only managed to move yourself ~400 meters off your current course in those 2 seconds which is nearly meaningless in terms of effective ranges of weaponry. I guess I should've stuck to drones in the example. Indeed, even a microdrone and its sub-hypervelocity wafer gun will be able to hit you at those velocities (10km/s, 2 sec out). But flak, KKVs and nukes will have a problem if they can't turn and burn fast enough. Actually, projectile weapons can be competitive, both in terms of mass and cost. Your projectiles aren't effected by fall off, but they will suffer from inaccuracy and will take time to travel to their target. However an almost 40 km/s amorphous carbon/titanium-aluminide coilgun and 10,000 metglas rounds cost less mass and credits than a comparable laser system, and is really just about as effective. I've found that such a system is effective even at 1000 km, and probably even beyond that. Could I get some cost / mass numbers on those AC/TiAl coil guns? I've built some really cheap lasers and I'm actually curious because I haven't been able to build anything close to the lasers at 1,000km performance. My current go-to laser is 25,000c and 3 tons (with power and radiators).
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Post by jasonvance on Jan 21, 2017 2:11:58 GMT
So you agree with newageofpower? I think if you spent billions designing a drone or missile with the purpose of intercepting and destroying capital ships thrust isn't going to save you delta-v might though to stay away from it. Relying on tanking damage through evasive maneuvering or CIWS is not a good strategy those should all be last ditch efforts when all else has failed. The main goal should be to evade intercept completely and the only way that can be done is through high delta-v not high thrust. If you have high thrust at the cost of delta-v you can get burned out by the interceptor and be "dead in the water."
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Post by jasonvance on Jan 21, 2017 1:55:26 GMT
I'm not contesting that missiles/drones can catch up to a ship for an intercept. What I am referring to is what happens when the intercept actually takes place. As in seconds before impact. In this frame of reference the ship is effectively standing still, and the missiles are traveling at high velocities to overcome the laser death zone (especially with Cerium doped lasers), interceptor missiles, interceptor drones and and array of cheap sandblaster CIWS. What a ship can do in those few seconds before impact is fire it's engines, and assuming it has a sufficiently high trust to weight ratio change its relative position by dozens or even hundreds of meters. Those missiles now have to change course. But this takes time, and when you are already traveling at 10+ km/s, takes a lot of deltaV. Notice how difficult it is to change course if a multi-G enemy ship evades minutes from the intercept when your missiles are traveling at over 10 km/s? This is even harder if this happens two seconds before impact. Even more so if their relative velocity is dozens of kilometres per second. Even if your missiles can pull 20Gs and have a few kilometres of delta V left they're going to miss. Now, of course we could spread out the missiles or have them travel in a line. In the first case we can just focus on the missiles that are most likely to impact the ship, and then repeat the last second manoeuvre and combine it with front and rear mounted directional thrusters to further reduce the chance of a successful impact. In the second case we will have an easier time to destroy the missiles individually, because for this formation to be effectiveness you need significant distance between the missiles for them to still reliably get an intercept with their multi-G propulsion. The formation system is difficult to test in the first case, and highly impractical in the second case (Unless you have the time to space a thousand or so 1 missile fleets 1-2 kilometres apart). But the whole act of dodging at the last second is already possible in game. ... Nothing you've stated here counters my point: What stops my MPD (primary) drones from decelerating before entering combat range? As for targets moving 1-2+ Gs vs a 10km/s interceptor, I've managed to achieve hits on them. Even then, they may dodge direct impacts, but NEFP and near-10 MT weapons can inflict damage at kilometers of range. I think the real problem is people are assuming last second maneuvering or zipping a ship around really fast actually does anything. A ship making an emergency thrust 2 seconds before intercept from a drone moving 10km/s is only 20km away. You have to think of drones (and even missiles) in terms of their sphere of influence. Most weapons are effective at about 100km (even with projectiles) and you have to dodge the entire sphere of influence to stay "safe" with high thrust movement. Even if you did hit your burn from a super powerful 20G acceleration rocket (which would kill the occupants of the ship) you only managed to move yourself ~400 meters off your current course in those 2 seconds which is nearly meaningless in terms of effective ranges of weaponry. You wouldn't even be able to move that far in actuality since you need to make randomized defensive maneuvers by changing trajectory every few mili-seconds to make your acceleration path non-linear and that non-linear path would have to have greater variance than your ships cross-section (if your ship is a sphere of 10 meters you need to make your projected trajectory move yourself back and forth in addition to away by greater than 10 meters to make shots miss). You aren't going to be escaping a sphere of influence doing that. You will dodge a few shots from projectile weapons and maybe prolong your ships life and buy time for CIWS but you won't dodge it and as the drones close the effect of dodging maneuvers becomes less and less as the relative time to target from projectiles will out weigh your acceleration's ability to move your cross section out of the way. I think everyone can agree how useless evasive maneuvers would be against lasers and the drones using them with millions radius spheres of influence. The point is you can't out accelerate combat you have to out delta-v it and dodge it before combat occurs. I personally don't see the use of projectile weapons though their spheres of influence are too small to make sense when compared to laser weaponry.
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Post by jasonvance on Jan 20, 2017 6:48:41 GMT
I mean, that's a cool drone, but it exceeds what this post was looking for in terms of weight and cost. Plus, it's goddamn huge. Goddamn huge, has even less delta-V than the Stinger, more expensive, and heavier, and more expensive. It's an outright downgrade. I wouldn't go that far, that laser can probably swat standard Stinger drones by the hundreds well beyond their effective range. The addition of a MPD would give it more delta-v to play with. The (probably NTR?) decane rocket attached to it atm is a bit overkill putting out almost 35gs. So some improvements could be made... I think just swaping to a Neon MPD would bring the cost and mass down to below the current stinger and give it more delta-v
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Post by jasonvance on Jan 20, 2017 2:56:19 GMT
Part of me want's to "haha" and keep my silence/let you retain your innocence... but I'll explain. My MPD drones will eventually catch your caps when they run out of fuel, as long as I have more dV. if your caps have 20 km/s dV and 2G accel, while my drones have 50km/s dV and 0.1 g accel, you'll be able to outrun me while your fuel holds out... which won't matter, because I'll still have 60%+ of my fuel just to match velocity with you when you hit 0% fuel. Thrust is important, but more so from breaking free of low orbit/dodging stuff. Raw dV efficiency will beat thrusty craft at sufficient dV advantage. But is that fun? Efficient warfare is usually not fun...
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Post by jasonvance on Jan 18, 2017 21:35:19 GMT
Hmm see that is what i thought as well, but would you guys agree that with the amounts of juice we can pump into some of these MPD's that that is no longer a real issue? Fuck no. The setup it takes to get to the energies required to achieve meganewtons of thrust from an MPD is so massive your acceleration is measured in milligees. Dozens, not hundreds of milligees. You can get Mercury MPDs in the hundreds of mG (even at low-ish power)... But honestly ship maneuvering is mostly irrelevant you are never going to achieve more thrust than an intercepting missile or some other high acceleration design. Unless you have higher acceleration than what you are trying to dodge you will never dodge it (all it has to do is mirror your burns). So the difference between a 10mG spaceship and a 10G spaceship (which would kill its crew for prolonged thrust) is irrelevant when compared to a 11G missile. If the industry standard is 20G maneuvering ships the industry standard intercepting missiles will be 25G you can't win that battle and there is actually a hard limit on how fast you can accelerate with squishy humans in your ship.
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Post by jasonvance on Jan 18, 2017 21:07:48 GMT
In the more reasonable power ranges of 10GW and below you can use a reistojet to cover the thrust problem
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