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Post by newageofpower on Nov 10, 2018 22:28:29 GMT
An insightful and well-reasoned analysis.
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Post by newageofpower on Oct 22, 2018 0:44:13 GMT
On the one hand, player-optimized reactors totally clobber chemical batteries in both power and energy density. ( Wiki says 20 kW/kg for state-of-the-art Li-ion. Player-optimized reactors are >60 kW/kg including radiators.) You'd be better off building for Moar Power in the first place than storing it. And capacitors are already in the game for pulsed-power. On the other hand, that *is* ridiculous. Reasonably sized missiles and non-capship-sized drones can be deployed with 100 kW or less. Try gadolinium for the stator and calcium for the forcer. For very small missiles, blast launchers may be lighter overall because of their smaller crew requirement, and they don't need power at all. Optimal material is boron filament, if you care about cost, or UHMWPE fiber, if you don't. Optimal propellant is nitroglycerin if you're minimizing mass and don't care about launch velocity, or either nitrocellulose or octogen if you want high launch velocity. I did a calculation showing you can exceed 2 MJ/KG using Spectra (UHMWPE) flywheels, and with carbon nanomaterials you hit ~ 150 MJ/KG... I don't think manufacturing microreactors will actually be cheaper than producing polymer flywheels, so, flywheels may be perfectly viable IRL.
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Post by newageofpower on Oct 16, 2018 19:20:48 GMT
#2. Panama Reactor Panama station would need a lot of energy, so you may need to build the biggest reactor in space. It should be able to run at full power longer than 5 years. Radiation should be omnidirectionally shielded lower than 1Sv/y.Why would you give a shit about in-reactor-module radiation protection? By separating the shielding from the reactor with insulative vacuum, you can use dead mass like water for rad protection, or molten lithium (preferably maintained by waste heat) if you want to gather tritium, etc.
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Post by newageofpower on Oct 13, 2018 21:48:32 GMT
That'd require the discarded part to be an optically flat mirror with attitude control. It might end up a lot heavier than the basic aluminized kapton sheet you could use otherwise. Plus, depending on how long the braking takes and the ratio of the masses of the main ship and the discard mirror, it might travel very far from the main ship and have to be very large to control beam divergence. Something else that might work would be to make a close pass to the destination star and capture with a solar thermal rocket, taking advantage of the Oberth effect and high intensity radiation. Then, use the planets in the destination system to gravity assist your periapsis out of the fire.
One of my regrets is that you don't post more. Every time you open your mouth I feel like I'm filled with more insights. Back on topic, you could turn on a magsail to increase drag against the interstellar medium. This isn't at all effective unless you're travelling at a high % of C, but it's one of the least mass intensive ways to drop from 90% C to 30% C, letting you use your AM/Fusion torch remass to complete the burn. Once your ship arrives, you can set up laser beaming and relay stations for deceleration, letting the two star systems send ships to each other without using any remass at all!
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Post by newageofpower on Oct 12, 2018 19:43:48 GMT
The easiest way to go interstellar is laser sail. There, I fixed that for you. Seriously, building a ship capable of operating for a few hundred or few thousand years is plausible, but with solar sails made from conventional matter you'd need hundreds of thousands of years to get to the nearest star; it's vanishingly unlikely you could keep a ship functional for that duration.
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Post by newageofpower on Oct 12, 2018 19:37:40 GMT
Depends on your expected combat alignment, too. If you're mostly expecting to be flying broadside using main engines to dodge, the nose won't be facing the enemy and it may as well be blunt. Broadside armor is massively, massively inferior to pointy needles, though.
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Post by newageofpower on Oct 10, 2018 3:25:26 GMT
What is the exhaust velocity on your MPD? Someone on this forum built a TW range MPD with enough eV to reach 1/100th C.
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Post by newageofpower on Oct 7, 2018 16:09:11 GMT
apophys you don't have NPP?!? Did they piss you off or something?
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Post by newageofpower on Sept 29, 2018 23:30:34 GMT
Image isn't loading, don't know if it's just me... It's not just you.
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Post by newageofpower on Sept 8, 2018 18:24:49 GMT
Large lasers could not only be used as surprise precision offensive weapons, but also missile defence creating risk of massive nuclear/KKV proliferation. I would expect beamed propulsion, power and large astronomical mirrors to be joint projects with everyone closely watching everyone else. Start building something like that on your own and you get slagged. Or whoever builds the first megalasers to become the defacto superpower-hegemon, slagging anyone else who dares research superweapons technologies just like the United States on Earth... Oh wait, that never happened. Whoops, teehee.
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Post by newageofpower on Sept 8, 2018 6:01:44 GMT
This game was explicitly intended to be realistic, not to have entertaining gameplay. Some things are hard to model, but in a case like this where it is already modeled, inaccuracies are a bug, not a feature. qswitched , please take a look at radiation modeling, especially with regard to lithium-6. Hmm. I'm fairly certain Li-6 would be an amazing neutron radiation shield material for IRL spacecraft, but one of the problems they aren't used as radiation shielding (on earth) today is the cost. First of all, you don't get Akali metals or even decent Akali ore on Earth. This means you need hilariously environmentally destructive mining processes using ludicrously toxic chemicals (okay, did my research, Lithium mining is much less destructive than the other rare-earths) to get lithium compounds, which then need more processing to form pure lithium. But wait, that lithium metal isn't all that useful yet - only 7.5% of it is Li-6! So now you need even more expensive isotopic separation... Next, competing uses. Major nation-states stockpile Lithium-6 for advanced nuclear weapons... as a result, they don't want to share the Lithium-6, or have civilians producing, stockpiling and experimenting with it!
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Post by newageofpower on Aug 28, 2018 16:08:30 GMT
Couldn't you theoretically create heavier elements through hydrogen fusion given that you have infinite energy? Depends on transmutation efficiency, but generally speaking Kugelblitz-Singularity power has a vastly higher theoretical maximal efficiency than that of Fusion power. You can fuse for elements you want and dump undesired substances into your singularities, I suppose.
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Post by newageofpower on Aug 28, 2018 0:58:48 GMT
Congratulations, you just solved the heat death of the universe. The cost is we transition to a dystopian society where we breed vast legions of Wandcrafters & Clerics, selecting for traits that make one conducive to becoming a cleric or wandcrafter
Quadrillion-Quadrillion-Quadrillion-Quadrillion humans inhabit a vast Birch World orbiting a supermassive black hole, as Seed-class AIs continuously optimize mankind for Faith and Wandcraft, continuously magicking entire solar systems worth of mass in water and feeding the conjured substances into optimized Kugelblitz singularities to generate exponentially increasing power, using the power output to fuel vast transmutation machines for the sake of increasing the infrastructure and supportable population size (and thus conjuration rate).
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Post by newageofpower on Aug 28, 2018 0:48:46 GMT
Mercury is an excellent source of raw material to start building a Dyson swarm of rotating habitats and power satellites around the sun. There is more than enough material there to set up starlifting, to extract material out of the sun once the planet is completely deconstructed. I'm expecting all of the planets and other rocks except Earth (for nostalgia reasons) to be eventually deconstructed for parts. You can fit a lot more people in purpose-built space habitats than just on the surface of a solid sphere. Why not earth? You don't need it once you transcended into a metal god How dare you profane the holy homeworld, heretical scum! My Church of Boron Carbon Drone armadas will see you in battle. Why not earth? You don't need it once you transcended into a metal god Keep your hands off my blue marble you damn toaster!!! What this guy said.
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Post by newageofpower on Aug 24, 2018 21:52:12 GMT
Do fluorine-hydrogen mixes destroy the nozzle, generally speaking? In that case, it sounds impossible to use for rockets, which is worse than I thought. Do fluorine-hydrogen mixes destroy the nozzle, generally speaking? In that case, it sounds impossible to use for rockets, which is worse than I thought. The combustion product of hydrogen and fluorine is hydrofluoric acid, which can dissolve almost anything. Some materials can be passivated when treated with fluorine, forming a protective layer and preventing further combustion. Hydrofluoric acid dissolves this layer. This is the reason fluorine tanks have to be perfectly dry before being filled. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrofluoric_acidAgain, a rocket engine that only needs to last 30 seconds or so (the terminal stage of a missile) seems just fine. It takes hydrofluoric acid a non-trivial amount of time to eat through materials anyways...
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