UNLIMITED POWER (Reactor Thread (also radiators))

Hmm, it seems that minimum price of the reactor is hard locked around 3 kc

Unless weight saving is the point, then it's not really worth it to go any smaller.

Yep! 

I was about to post this:

Edit: looks like I can raise it to 1.8kW and make it lighter... I probably can still buff it.

Can you show an example of that reactor with radiators that are that light?  I have optimized in this power range for outlet temperature instead, getting something like this:

I think Sodium coolant at 3006K will be a GAS, so the 100W/mK thermal conductivity is unrealistic.  But liquid Copper, Germainium, and Cerium are still liquid at 3006K so the general reactor design is still sound.

Any chance we'll get nested thermocouples in a future update?  The current single surface design gets a tad bulky at gigawatt power levels.   I'd also love to have the option for 2-3 stages of thermocouples, thermionic generators, or gas-turbines.  I think if we can push efficiency above 50%, cooler radiators start to become viable again.

Lastly, this family of reactors makes MPD thrusters viable! Can easily get to 50mg0 and over 20km/s delta-V or over 100 km/s delta-V and 10mg0.  Been making some super-deadly space light-bulbs that can catch anything given a day or two.

Use amorphous carbon radiator if you want cheap, efficient radiator for high temperature.

I thought I'd take on the opposite paradigm and make an extremely cold reactor. I also wanted to run it on depleted uranium just 'cause that's the sort of thing people tend to think of as not viable for use, but it might be a waste of mass anyway. I'm not sure the savings of hot reactors on radiator mass are really all that great when you can use very light polyethylene and lithium below 400K outlet temp (these are good neutron reflectors too, so could they reflect nuclear blast energy and take less damage than their listed properties would suggest?). You have to shape them so they stick out really far to minimise how much space they take on the ship's surface and maximise their own surface area, but this isn't a problem — in fact it's good since it doesn't increase cross-section anyway and means when the enemy targets your radiators they aim further away from the hull. Obviously though once you run into the hundred-megawatt & gigawatt power levels there may cease to be any reasonable thermal radiation solution. With that in mind, I think ships with optimised power draw instead of optimised power generation may be a very viable design philosophy — one I will explore at least.

The negative coolant temperature appears not to be a bug, by the way: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_temperature

Oh, interesting. Admittedly I've barely touched lasers yet, and up to this point not designed anything requiring large radiators. I wouldn't expect it since I've never seen AI in games be capable of picking a particular part of an object to target. Things in games are always oriented toward the centrepoints of other objects (or other objects attached to said objects, as with subsystems like radiators in CDE), or some angle on a plane. Kudos to Qswitched if he actually prepared the AI to cope with unshapely player designs.