acatalepsy
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Post by acatalepsy on Oct 4, 2016 19:00:36 GMT
Now hold on a second... what the heck do you think having naval rank titles actually means? You seem to be rather married to an idea of how you think military structures work. All that the ship needs is a chain of command and a proper assignment of ship jobs. Having naval rank titles just mean you call whatever your ranks/grades are after stuff that originated in a boat on Earth. Admiral (rather than General or something else), Petty Officer (rather than Sergeant), etc. Having a naval rank structure means that individual ranks/grades have some kind of correlation to...naval ranks/grades. With corresponding levels of education, commitment, etc. Like having three to four low grades of 'enlisted' personnel on short term service, then a bunch of non-commissioned officers, then company officers, field officers, and finally general officers. Like you don't need to have that structure to have a space navy...but that's kind of the point I'm making. If that structure makes sense for a spacey (space navy? whatever). If it doesn't, what does?
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acatalepsy
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Post by acatalepsy on Oct 4, 2016 18:54:38 GMT
I could probably shave some mass, but it exists. That's how we do it, apophys.
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acatalepsy
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Post by acatalepsy on Oct 4, 2016 18:46:07 GMT
Wikipedia defines in-situ resource utilization thusly: In a trivial sense, ISRU has been achieved by the time of Children of a Dead Earth; after all, no materials are being brought from Earth. But ISRU for military expeditions seems like a key factor; the ability to recover usable supplies from hostile territory seems like a critical part of forward logistics. This will be the responsibility of the logistics fleets, coming hours or days behind the combat spacecraft, and part of their biggest job will be to find some way of extracting usable propellant - and thus delta-V for the combat fleet. Methane and Hydrogen are easy enough to come by; hydrogen can be electrolyzed from water, carbon can be found pretty much anywhere (including human exhalation), and between them various chemical processes such as the Sabatier reaction can be used to produce the desired reactants. And water can be found a number of places. Other options are to harvest methane directly from a body that contains it, principally Titan, or the atmosphere of Neptune. What fuels can be extracted easily, and whether or not mobile logistics bases can be defended in the face of aggression, seems to be a major factor in determining the flow of an interplanetary war. Other fuels may be harder to come by. Deuterium can be produced in a nuclear reactor, and possibly combined with regular hydrogen to produce hydrogen deuteride; whether or not this reactor is feasible to lug around the solar system to produce HD fuel is in my mind a big factor in determining whether or not HD fuel is viable as a primary fuel source for a fleet. Thoughts on ISRU in Children of a Dead Earth?
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acatalepsy
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Post by acatalepsy on Oct 4, 2016 18:28:05 GMT
Back on subject though here is a rough crew cross section of some 35 member ship. Break down is pretty straightforward. Crew sizes are a bit bigger than that, though. I'm less interested in arguing what the crew sizes should be - I'd be doing a lot of things differently if I was doing it - and more looking for implications as to how the crews actually are in CoaDE (unless qswitched is around and for some reason cares about my input, in which case I'll be happy to talk endlessly about it). Doctor seemed strange as well, seeing as you would have full medical records, you would know their past history, likewise as long as no one brought a flue bug on board the microbiology of a ship should stay consistent, Granted perhaps one of the bridge crew or a weapons operator could be trained in providing first aid and basic surgery, or a robotic doctor could be provided instead. Alternatively you could train each member of the crew in one specific area of anatomic expertise and distribute the load evenly. Doctor is one of those that I would be least sanguine about cutting. If there's a medical situation - any medical situation at all - you have no one else and zero possibility of rescue or recovery. And a lot of things can happen in the potentially years - remember it took two years to get from Mars to Vesta? - that a crew may be embarked. NASA has a team of flight surgeons check in with shuttle and ISS crews on a regular basis, but at least in LEO a potential medical problem can be 'solved' via mission abort; that's not an option on an 19-month Hohmann to Saturn. Operation of a starship being more analogous to operation of a naval vessel in terms of maintenance required and time in operation isolated from support necessitates a naval style structure regardless of the arbitrary titles applied. Using traditional naval terms merely enforces that it's a naval structure despite the small differences. A lot less maintenance and running about is needed to make a war rocket work, so crews are smaller than wet vessels contending with constant operation and the environment I don't think the operation of a spacecraft necessitates a naval style structure. The idea that they do is something of a pet peeve of mine; the maintenance of a spacecraft is not like the maintenance of a boat, it's like the maintenance of a spacecraft, with its own idiosyncrasies and rhythms and logic. Similarly, the crewing strategy for a spacecraft is different from the crewing strategy of a boat, it's like the crewing strategy of a spacecraft. If you squint and ignore all the ways in which they are different, sure, being in a metal box for a long time is similar...but only if you squint and ignore all the ways in which they are different. Second, my main thought was that, for example, the distinction between officer and enlisted ranks might be completely superfluous, if every member of a spacecraft crew needed to be the equivalent of an officer (ie, college graduate) anyway. That changes things significantly. Also, how the RFP's military might divide itself; the existence of Admirals implies to me the existence of generals, but the actual size of the spacy might be comparatively tiny - simply because nuclear spacecraft are expensive. Maybe the spacecraft combat division of the RFP's military are more like the Army Air Force (a branch of the army) rather than its own equal division? It doesn't seem likely, but it does seem possible. In that case maybe ranks for the military only diverge above a certain rank.
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acatalepsy
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Lasers
Oct 4, 2016 17:24:25 GMT
via mobile
Post by acatalepsy on Oct 4, 2016 17:24:25 GMT
That's pokington's reactor design, not mine. Whoops! Fixed.
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acatalepsy
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Post by acatalepsy on Oct 4, 2016 16:49:52 GMT
I think that a ship crew is closer in general to something like an AWACS plane, albeit with a gunnery staff aboard as well. That's actually a good analogy, one that I haven't thought of - I was thinking more "submarine", but I do imagine that a combat between fleets requires something like an AWACs C4I capabilities, and especially with lots of drones and missiles. One other thing - it's worth noting that many - most, perhaps - systems on a combat spacecraft deal with nuclear power in some way. Another comparison to submarines - the crew will have to have 'nuke' officers. Especially the mini-nuclear reactors and RTGs that characterize carriers that mount beam drones. -6, now given the high stress, low privacy, high technicality environment of a ship, there is a seemingly obvious solution to relieving stress, growing intimacy, trust, physical comfort and ambient crew happiness. Needless to say a plentiful form of birth control would have to be present and crews would now have to also be appropriately selected for sexual preference as well, with an emphasis perhaps on "flexibility". But the benefits MY GOD the benefits are almost entirely perfect for this solution!, save for some liquid loss no extra equipment is needed, so no more mass is spent. Thus the crew becomes less a rigid stressful hierarchy of military order, and more like a happy sixties commune that also happens to pilot a death cylinder of aluminium. Some other possible offsetting materials for such long haul environments are of course narcotics, though they do take up some amount of mass, i have a possible solution: By breeding or genetically engineering, a lowering of CBD (which cancels hallucinogenic effects) and increasing THC production Hemp could provide a hundredfold benefit to on board life. One of the fastest growing crops available, perfect for dynamically solving a variety of on board construction needs, while at the same time possibly relieving stress(ideally through vaporisation so as to minimise fire risks) it can also obviously used to filter air and water. It structurally is stronger than wood in fibre form, i can imagine when combined with a sealant, being a quick and easy patch job for leaks and ruptures. ...this on the other hand, uh....I'm not so sure. This does not seem to describe other experiments in longer duration close habitation. Also I am like 85% certain that you were just looking to post that Strangelove pic and/or post about space weed.
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acatalepsy
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Post by acatalepsy on Oct 4, 2016 15:15:21 GMT
Alternatively, get over to the reactor thread and start mounting Dhan's pokington's nuclear minifridge. If the problem is that you don't have enough power to melt your enemies from two hundred kilometers away...get more power!
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acatalepsy
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Post by acatalepsy on Oct 4, 2016 15:06:29 GMT
It's interesting to me that the RFP's space forces seem to use naval ranks, when I'd assume that their spacecraft combat wing would need to grow out of their air forces, the way the US Air Force and Army have the Space and Missile Badge. (One reason that they might use naval ranks is to self-consciously distinguish themselves from the Army - despite its importance, the space service seems like it's going to be very small in terms of actual personnel, especially actual combat personnel. And, unlike in our world where there's an actual navy who might either object or try to muscle in on the newly-formed service, the world of CoaDE conspicuously lacks any actual navies. A stretch, admittedly, and not one I'm fond of, but there it is.) It's also interesting to see that the crew complement looks a lot smaller than you might expect on a naval vessel, and I was wondering how that might affect some kind of rank structure. With the largest ships - especially fleet carriers and gunships, which are ostensibly command ships where the admiral's staff might be located - having only a crew of less than eighty, one might expect ranks and such to be very compressed. One thing that's especially of interest is how a highly-technical field, like space warfare and operations, will handle the traditional officer/enlisted divide. Currently, all astronauts that I'm aware of with a military background were officers - often pilots, but even among payload specialists, many held the rank of captain (naval) and above, and all civilian personnel have at least some kind of advanced degree. And with "tours", especially of the outer system potentially taking a decade or more, might there be more of a push for more professional, more educated, more elite and proficient and consequently more officer-like space corps? This leaves out, though, groundside support and logistics. A fleet in CoaDE might have only 200 people at the pointy end of the stick, but be supported by two thousand intelligence, logistics, research, support staff. This is another divide - perhaps there's something comparable to a submariner's dolphin, that marks a member of the spacy as a member of a comparatively-elite group? Thoughts?
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acatalepsy
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Post by acatalepsy on Oct 4, 2016 13:45:29 GMT
I'd say an unarmored dump-and-escape carrier or silo ship would benefit significantly from hydrogen fuel, but a brawler type would not. Two things about this. First, I think it's mostly irrelevant how well you can armor your fuel tanks. It's almost never, in my experience, worth it; any weapon that can hit your ship is going to puncture a fuel tank, and the only armor capable of actually stopping from all relevant angles is simply too heavy. Amorphous carbon fuel tanks hit by a railgun will have just as much of a hole in them as a UHMWPE fuel tank, so why not just go with the latter? Second, part of my solution to this is largely to outsource the problem to mostly-unarmored fleet tenders. Admittedly, adding a whole separate ship - with its attendant crew, pumps, defensive armament, etc - isn't as conducive to increasing the amount of mass you have at the pointy end of the stick as I'd like, but what you lose in raw mass you gain in flexibility. It doesn't necessarily do this better than a fleet tender that uses methane, but it does take a lot of the sting and design constraints out of needing to use the less dense fuel. On balance, I think it's still worth considering H reactant as a whole-fleet solution. The real answer may be "use hydrogen deuteride" but as of yet my research on how easy that would be to produce in mass quantities in space has not yielded much fruit.
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acatalepsy
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Post by acatalepsy on Oct 4, 2016 12:13:08 GMT
Whats the reactor design with the highest efficiency % people have made? Surely that determines power/mass ratio as much as anything? Also, whats the biggest people have made? I tried to make a gigawatt reactor, and i don't think its possible with the current materials. What elouda said. Also, efficiency just denotes the ratio of power produced to waste heat produced; it has nothing to do with the mass of the reactor. More waste heat is bad (because it requires bigger radiators and flares), but it's not the most important thing by a long shot. You'd rather have a lighter reactor producing more power (and waste heat) at a lower efficiency and higher output temperature.
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acatalepsy
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Post by acatalepsy on Oct 4, 2016 12:07:10 GMT
Okay, I threw this together to get through Vesta Overkill... but something is confusing me. I picked the 60MW generator so I could fire all the lasers and the coil gun at the same time. For some reason it's only using one at a time even though there's plenty of power available. What am I doing wrong here? How do I get everything firing simultaneously? Look at the weapons icons in the battle display. There should be a flashing icon telling you why it isn't firing.
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acatalepsy
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Post by acatalepsy on Oct 4, 2016 12:03:45 GMT
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acatalepsy
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Post by acatalepsy on Oct 4, 2016 5:27:31 GMT
My main reservation about hydrogen deuteride is that I have no idea how difficult it realistically is to produce in mass, especially if you're trying ISRU. Other than that, it looks to be tactically superior to plain hydrogen in every way - cheaper in credits, denser, higher exhaust velocity, etc.
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acatalepsy
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Post by acatalepsy on Oct 4, 2016 5:06:23 GMT
Silly question---what is the cost of hydrogen deuteride? It seems to have potential for comparable exhaust velocities while being slightly cheaper and 40% more compact, which should have a big payoff in tank/armor mass. Converting that carrier from hydrogen to hydrogen deuteride (stock engines), I reduced cross-section and cost by 40% and mass by 25%. Am I totally missing something? I don't know for sure, but I ruled out hydrogen deuteride simply because I have no idea how difficult it would be to actually produce in the kinds of amounts you'd need to fuel an interplanetary fleet and (especially) replenish in the field. Compared to hydrogen and methane, which you can get basically anywhere.
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acatalepsy
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Post by acatalepsy on Oct 4, 2016 5:02:49 GMT
Have you considered the possibility of having a single (or multiple) hydrogen engine(s) for orbital maneuvers and pairing that with higher thrust methane engines if thrust is an issue? You could disable the methane engines and make more efficient burns and then re-enable them as necessary for combat or high gravity orbital maneuvers. I have, and some methane engines have truly monstrous thrust to weight ratio (thanks, Tuna!) that makes this sort of thing viable - - I mean, holy shit, look at that thing! That said, between the propellant tanks, the engine mass itself, and the extra crew, it's mostly not worth adding to a ship that already has perfectly functional engines with .5g acceleration. Maybe for very specialized ships that want an "afterburner" to close with a target and rake them with railgun/coilgun fire?
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