UNLIMITED POWER (Reactor Thread (also radiators))

A few things from a newb doing research:
1. Nickel chromium iron and osmium seems like a good Ntype/Ptype combo(What even determens good thermocople matereal? Thermoelectric sensativity aint it thats for sure).
2. Polyethylene seems like a good turbopump materal, also reinforced carbon-carbon.
3. Thermocople lencth seems to work counter to what the tool tip says, why is that?
4. Water seems to be the best coolant but havent tested much.

I've been having some fun with nuclear reactors. 



This design, you'll note, is much less massive, much less expensive, has a higher outlet temperature (good for more efficient radiators), less radiation, narrower profile (for shadow shield, if it's even necessary), and produces a more than three times the power...at the cost of nearly halving efficiency, and putting out a staggering 1.61 Gigawatts of waste heat. You're not gonna be hiding anything packing one of these babies with a Nitrocellulose flare, that's for sure! 

Still, that's a metric shit-ton of energy to play with. If you've already resigned yourself to lighting up every IR sensor in a parsec, why not go all in? Throw in a 150 MW, 10mm railgun? Why not? Giant death lasers? Yes, please. 

It's based mostly on this design, by Tuna-Fish. 




The internals of his and my designs are available by following the links. 

Tuna's comments were thusly: "If I increased the output temp even more, I could have made it even better to the point of needing just a single radiator, but I wanted to keep output above 60MW to fit my legacy designs, and once I accidentally hit 666MW thermal, I had to keep it for entirely juvenile reasons.



Other findings is that you can min-max the reactor size to be really tiny by increasing the neutron flux, this makes the reactor nice and light, and radiation shielding very cheap. Also, the best thermocouple I could make work at high temperatures is definitely Tungsten/Tantalum. Can anyone make any power at all out of any carbon electrode (diamond, graphite, etc)? I feel like there should be a reason they are in the list, but they just produce no power for me.



Also, I think there are a few bugs in this screen and the laser design screen. Thermocouple thickness has the opposite effect that it's mouseover hints at, and thermocouple stress is computed between input and the melting point of secondary loop fluid, instead of input and output as it should (even if there is a carnot cycle of some kind going on there, it should be to the vaporization point, not to the melting point). On laser design screen, you get to pick cooling fluid entry temp, and after this gets heated in the cavity, the outlet temp is the cavity temp. This means that the cooling pump does not matter -- you can just pick your starting temp so it doesn't melt the cavity. Instead, the input temp should determine the outlet temperature, and the cavity temperature should be higher than this, the difference depending on how good a pump you have."

Can anyone do better, or even better than that, do comparable better and manage to have some efficiency? 

So having browsed the reactor designs on Steam workshop, I gather that the stock reactors are actually pretty damned good. Yes, there are quite a few big power reactors but they all seem to come at the cost of worse efficiency, ridiculous heat output and higher mass/cost.

So having browsed the reactor designs on Steam workshop, I gather that the stock reactors are actually pretty damned good. Yes, there are quite a few big power reactors but they all seem to come at the cost of worse efficiency, ridiculous heat output and higher mass/cost.

This is the best I've been able to come up with: 



It's a 1.15 GW  10 ton reactor with a rather low outlet temp of 1800k ,but an exceptional efficiency of 33.9% due to its Graphene/ Pyrolytic Carbon thermocouple. Its based off of the stock 542 MW reactor as I'm terrible at reactors for now. It only costs 178 Kc which is exceptionally cheap for a reactor of its power output as far as I can tell. Also only puts off 3.44 GW of heat which is also pretty low.