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Post by nerd1000 on Oct 27, 2016 22:55:39 GMT
Also appears to be an issue with redundancy. If you have many redundant radiators for a powerplant, the total heat output of your ship is higher. I have a ship with 2x radiator capacity for the powerplant, and the heat output is 2x higher. Doesn't seem to make sense. I'm betting that this is because the reactor implementation mandates a constant radiator temperature. Really the radiators should start hot at one end and gradually get cooler over their length, as the returning coolant is often relatively cold (use liquid sodium as your outside coolant and it will come back from the radiators at 371K). Doubling the number of radiators would then leave a smaller portion of each radiator running at peak temperature, and all would be in balance.
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Post by nerd1000 on Oct 27, 2016 11:43:51 GMT
I've been toying with the idea of doing a mod based on the Expanse series. Looks a lot more possible now that I discovered the "black box" functionality in the game, since the Epstein drive in that setting is, as I understand it, borderline impossible in real life. *rocks hand side to side* Yes and no. Yes the accelerations mentioned in the books make no physical sense(ships with drives so powerful that their limited by human g-tolerance). On the other hand, if we make a much more reasonable assumption that ships start with 1g acceleration when fully loaded, we can get the same sort of travel times as in the books. The catch is that to get the require thrust power without requiring square kilometers of radiators, you have to use Hydrogen-Boron fusion (no neutrons or x-ray emissions, just IR) and an incredibly thermally reflective shadow shield. Problem is now you have to wonder how torpedoes actually manage to catch any ship with an Epstein drive without mounting an Epstein of their own. IIRC not even a NSWR can match an Epstein. Perhaps an Epstein drive is cheap enough that you can afford to throw one away with every torpedo? I mean if underfunded belters can afford to run one to haul ice from Saturn back to the belt (Remember the Cant!), and the Mormons are building a freaking generation ship to go to another star system (!) then presumably the Martian navy can afford some pretty fancy missiles.
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Post by nerd1000 on Oct 27, 2016 6:48:15 GMT
Out of curiosity, has anyone ever built anything worthwhile out of the 1MW ruby lasers? Every test I've done with them has ended as an utter failure with either the 400kw IR laser or the 13GW YAG laser being superior options. Ruby lasers have inferior pump efficiency and need an enormous lasing rod, which is why they are so rubbish. Better to use Nd:YAG or Ti:Sapphire (frequency doubled of course).
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Post by nerd1000 on Oct 27, 2016 3:31:45 GMT
Fascinating thing I have discovered. If you have a decane fueled combat ship you can equip it with resistor jets that have better thrust velocity than the nuclear engines and still have a worth quite a good deal of thrust. So you can have some very high thrust nuclear rockets for combat maneuvers and a few nongimballed resistor jets for maneuvering around a planet. The power draw isn't going to be massive and you get so much more thrust than using an ion engine and you only need one type of propelent Indeed. Hafnium-Tantalum carbide (the highest melting point material available, it can withstand 4200K) is the best material for a resistor jet coil: With it you can easily build a Decane resistor jet that rivals Methane NTRs in exhaust velocity or a hydrogen resistor jet that beats the stock Xenon MPD! It's a touch expensive, but the coil can be very small and light even on a extremely powerful thruster so that's basically a non-issue. I'd love to have access to something like ATTILA for electric propulsion. I reckon MPDs would be essentially obsolete at that point.
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Post by nerd1000 on Oct 26, 2016 9:46:32 GMT
Don't forget to keep it frictionless, too! Well, the PTFE is on the materials list for a reason. Funny, I thought it was so I could barbecue spherical beef on my radiators without using excessive amounts of oil.
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Post by nerd1000 on Oct 26, 2016 2:15:27 GMT
I thought it was more or less the opposite of that, at least so far as ability to penetrate barriers? Newtonian impact depth is all about density and length - do the plasma effects really flip the script that aggressively? Yeah it really does here is a comparison of with a whipple shield and without: The issue is that plasma is a gas and begins to rapidly expand out ward as soon as it exists so if you can make the projectile into plasma which isn't that hard at these velocities all you need is enough distance between the whipple shield and the hull to be able to shrug it off. So what matters is the amount of plasma you have and how fast it is going forward. As more plasma means more energy, mostly heat, delivered to target and the faster the plasma is going the shorter the amount of time it has to dissipate. As such behind a whipple shield what you mostly want is something that can soak up heat not kinetic projectiles. Not the same test but an example of what happens to a solid mass of armor without a whipple shield at these types of velocities: The whipple shield works because it greatly reduces the cross-sectional density of the impactor. While heat is important, the plasma still has enough kinetic energy that I wouldn't use silica aerogel as my inner bulkhead (maybe basalt fiber composite would be a good compromise?). One thing I'd like to test is the differences in performance between short, flat 'coin' impactors and longer thinner ones (Coilguns typically fire the former, railguns the latter). It may be that, much like thinner flak bombs produce a wider spread (and smaller splinters) than short fat ones, thinner projectiles get spread out more if they hit a whipple shield while 'coin' type projectiles produce a tighter jet of plasma.
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Post by nerd1000 on Oct 26, 2016 2:07:55 GMT
/!\ Module Bovine Bioreactor is unmilked, and will be unusable. FTFY.
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Post by nerd1000 on Oct 25, 2016 7:46:31 GMT
snip My experience so far is that missiles hold an extremely dominant position, and armoring against them tends to prove futile. So ship armor and that armor's layout is rarely relevant at all. I have some ideas about CWIS drones that I'm still waiting to try out. I do hope we get multilayer eventually. I designed CWIS or 'fighter' drones and promptly found them to be better anti-capship drones than the ones they were intended to shoot down. I then replaced my standard drones with them entirely- battles soon devolved into roughly 1:1 exchange rate drone v drone jousting matches. Interestingly they tend to lose to missiles, at least if the missile involved is one of my 9.5Mt city-busters. The nuclear blast destroys their radiators.
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Post by nerd1000 on Oct 24, 2016 3:29:04 GMT
Hafnium carbide currently has a thermal expansion coefficient of 600 MK^-1. This is many orders of magnitude greater than other similar materials (e.g. Hafnium Tantalum carbide), and seems a bit suspect.
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Post by nerd1000 on Oct 23, 2016 13:33:55 GMT
Hmmm some interesting Science! with a 3 kt pocketnuke and a 26cm diameter 40cm thick aluminium (50~60kg IIRC) rad shield on top. It seems to generate alot of spalling and fragments on the rear armor in the usual stock ships armor lay outs. Entry hole seems like the usual you expect with a big EFP. I wonder if the Al pill is shattered into a tighly constrained mass or the velocity is low enough that it shatters wildly what it impacts. My basic targets are the stock silo ships without an engine. What you usually see on em is that impacts are clustered around the big radiator section taking out the methane tanks directly behind em. During this test the impacts were in the usual location but the spalling was from about 30 degrees rearward to about 70ish degrees forward. It took out basically everything inside except the forward most crew section and the nuke reactor. Did you use more than one missile at the same time? I've had that effect happen with regular, non-efp nukes when (due to the proxy fuse bug) the first missiles in a swarm hit the enemy ship and punch a hole in the side, allowing a subsequent missile to fly through the hole and explode inside the ship.
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Post by nerd1000 on Oct 23, 2016 9:14:36 GMT
Not really a pocket nuke, but a cheap one: Depleted uranium as fissile material? What magic is this?
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Post by nerd1000 on Oct 23, 2016 5:01:07 GMT
I'm working on surviving nuclear strikes; I've got decent near-miss survivability with a 4mm RCC cover and some redundancy for the crew compartment radiators, but the engines remain a really soft-spot in the design. Anyone figure anything out on how to harden these against nuclear hell-fire? Have you had any luck hardening the powerplant radiators against nuke strikes? That seems to be the primary cause of death when you are being nuked. As for engines I have had no luck what so ever. So far what I've done is just slap on some shity resistorjets so that way at least some of those will still be alive allowing my ship to be facing the right way next time its attacked. Mind you it isn't going to have any notable acceleration left but at least it can still maneuver in a very much crippled state. Well we can't optimise for all characteristics at once. I think nuke resistant thrusters are possible, but only at the cost of thrust:weight ratio and isp. I can't test it at the moment, but I'd try making a NTR from hafnium carbide. That stuff melts at over 4000K, so damaging it with heat should be difficult. Downside is that it is brittle and not especially strong, so you'll need to compromise on thrust. Edit: Okay, Hafnium Carbide is a rubbish engine material (too low specific heat, and thermal expansion of 600 MK^-1. Yes, that is almost certainly a bug). In testing, I found out a few things: 1. Any damage (no matter how slight, the ablation of tiny bit of material from the surface is sufficient) to the engine bell on a gimballed thruster will result in that thruster becoming unusable. 2. Non-gimballed thrusters are extremely resistant to nuke damage, even when you open up the back of the ship so they get full exposure. 3. If your main fuel tank is damaged by a nuclear explosion but you still have a different RCS propellant in another tank, the game can bug out and give your ship negative delta-V
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Post by nerd1000 on Oct 23, 2016 1:57:17 GMT
The projectile's cross sectional density should give some idea of armour penetration by railguns or coilguns.
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Post by nerd1000 on Oct 21, 2016 4:07:58 GMT
This, I think, is why a combat ship would not use wide band IR sensors when in combat range- instead you would use systems that can be protected against laser fire, e.g. IR sensors with filters that only allow one specific wavelength through or phased array radars. Also worth noting- for ranging by parallax to work you need the sensors as far apart as possible, so optimally the long range passive systems would be clustered at the front and rear of the ship and used to scan broadside, wheras in combat you want to be presenting your smaller frontal cross-section to the foe. Honestly as long as your ship is a few 10s of meters across it should be big enough. Most war ships have used optical range finders using about that range and the human eye so I am fairly sure a computer and advance sensors should be able to make it work with the width of a ship Increasing the distance between the sensors increases the maximum distance that can be accurately measured by the rangefinder. You can have front-mounted ones with a smaller width too, but over really long distances you want the extra length that a side-mounted set of sensors provides.
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Post by nerd1000 on Oct 21, 2016 2:50:08 GMT
Has anyone tried to make neutron bombs as anti-nuke warhead, to cause other nukes to fizzle with neutron flux? I dint think that's possible in the game engine The tutorials do mention this as an issue, however it is apparently fairly easy to build a boosted fission warhead that is almost invulnerable to such things.
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