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Post by newageofpower on Dec 8, 2016 17:18:32 GMT
Ah. I've tried Methane NTRs and the propellant tanks are enormous; hard to build decent armored warships with them.
I did build a monstrous 300kt Decane Ultratanker to resupply entire battlefleets, but realized that it would burn more than half the payload to even get to said battlefleet ;_; so I swapped to MPD and installed 200 GW of power on it for 1.99 mg of acceleration, lol.
Anyways, thanks for the suggestions; cutting a few percent efficiency more than halved my engine's mass! Awesome!
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Post by newageofpower on Dec 8, 2016 8:44:51 GMT
I tried rad shields. They don't seem to crash, but some lag is experienced. However, their minimum mass is far, far higher than using Flak Payloads, massively decreasing needlegun performance : /
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Post by newageofpower on Dec 8, 2016 7:27:49 GMT
Is that so? I don't know how to improve this design without going below 5.3 km/s
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Post by newageofpower on Dec 8, 2016 4:23:13 GMT
Problem is your engines will emit a ton more than 1 MW heat, unless you have a ridiculously low thrust... Use MPD? And have the sole weapon being stealth drone that also use MPD to launch missiles away from the main craft? ... I actually like this idea. Yes, magically generate all the electricity without emitting heat.
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Post by newageofpower on Dec 8, 2016 0:49:49 GMT
Shurugal, the man dragon with the golden bullets.
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Post by newageofpower on Dec 7, 2016 23:43:32 GMT
I said nothing about a ten-minute stealthy burn. Running stealthy low-impulse burns only makes sense in deep interplanetary space where you will get the most bang for your dV. As you draw within sensor range, it makes far more sense to fire high-impulse, short-duration burns to try and fall into gaps in sensor sweeps. An exhaust plume travelling at ~5 km/s will spread out fast enough that it will cool down to background levels in a few minutes at most, thanks to Boyle's Law. If we only used one sensor sweeping half the sky every 7 hours, then in the average of 3.5 hours between burn and sweep, the exhaust plume will have moved 63Mm from the point of the burn, and will have lost all heat. Even if you catch the plume 5 minutes after the burn, it still will have moved 1.5Mm. You could still trace it back to the point of origin, but if the burn was enough to make a significant shift in orbit, then by the time you trace the gasses back to their points of origin, calculate the old trajectory, and then make a guess at what the new one could be (remember, you might be able to see how much gas was expelled and how fast it is going, but you don't know the mass of what it was pushing, so you can't calculate acceleration), the ship could have travelled tens of Mm, and could be hundreds of km away from your predicted trajectory. Why would you ever only use one sensor? Once you can see how much gas was expelled (and at what energies) you then see how long the burn was for. I think this is where our disconnect is. Hot burns are easy to track. But to track a burn, you have to already know where it is. To catch a burn that you don't know about before time, you have to be scanning the sky in intervals less than the duration of the burn. You could use a system that takes 7 hours to sweep half the sky to track things all day, but you need to be sweeping the sky much, much more often if you expect to catch an unknown object burning. Again, why would you ever only use a single sensor system?
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Post by newageofpower on Dec 7, 2016 16:20:25 GMT
I've put an unprecedented amount of time and effort into finding the limits of Decane cooled nuclear thermal rockets, and my efforts have been rewarded with these three beauties. You are a gentleman and a scholar. Er, on the designs you showed, I didn't catch any specifications.
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Post by newageofpower on Dec 7, 2016 7:53:06 GMT
So you will be spending your military budget building 100 Hubble telescopes and defending them? Ok that's fine... Btw that still does not answer how your telescopes will see stealth ships that do not conveniently have reflective/emissive surfaces to spot... Are you actually that stupid, or are you being deliberately obtuse? What has been said before: If a ship launches with a hot burn (i.e. almost fucking rocket in the game or IRL), you only need to spot the burn and then you can figure out where it's trajectory will take it. If it makes another burn to change the path, welp, that's another dead giveaway. The only combat spacecraft with realistic stealth (and even then, its highly conditional and extremely fragile against real warships) I've seen has been the Hydrogen Steamer.
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Post by newageofpower on Dec 7, 2016 4:21:35 GMT
Thank you, I was sure there was a better way than what I was doing. Ok so I'll look at toning down the acceleration a bit and see if thatll calm these things down some You want your turnabout time to be between 1 second to 1.25 seconds. I see your turnabout is about 1.44; you may want to INCREASE acceleration to reduce the turnabout to the correct zone.
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Post by newageofpower on Dec 7, 2016 3:15:09 GMT
What? You are telling me you DON'T use a few mm of Li-6 on all your capship's innermost armor layer?
YOU MONSTER!
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Post by newageofpower on Dec 7, 2016 1:19:45 GMT
This one's just a lil' one, but you could scale it up. 247 g0 TWR is high enough, yes? No, not really, I'm looking for a little more performance... Yeah, my flagship thrusters are horridly inefficient, I gave up on the flagship concept awhile back and stopped working on them. But something a little closer to 1000 Power/Weight would be a little more tasteful.
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Post by newageofpower on Dec 7, 2016 1:04:40 GMT
I tried straight depleted uranium dioxide, doesn't work very well as a moderator material... it's much cheaper, too.
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Post by newageofpower on Dec 6, 2016 22:46:03 GMT
This is the only serious, realistic space stealth design I have ever heard about. Learned something new. Somewhat dubious at the claims of extreme efficiency for the Solar Furnace, but if it's actual efficiency is even close this should work.
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Post by newageofpower on Dec 6, 2016 22:27:56 GMT
Sloping is a huge factor. If enemy impacts come at an acute angle instead of dead on, even hypervelocity shots can bounce.
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Post by newageofpower on Dec 6, 2016 22:26:29 GMT
Most missiles designs here have to be tuned down to accelerate less, not more. But you're in the opposite situation.
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