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Post by matterbeam on Aug 29, 2017 17:50:21 GMT
Correction. Neutron absorbtiond peaks at roughly 2cm. Before that energy amount are still pretty high. I got the number from Fourth Generation Nuclear Weapons: Military effectiveness and Collateral effects" the example was for Polyethylene, but the depths shouldn't change much because inelstatic and elastic scattering cancel each other out. Even if 5mm Boron shell can absorb 50% of the energy it would weight 1.3kg for every 100g D-T, it might be less if you use somethinh likd LiDT, or an small DT charge surrounded by LiD. I've did the math. If the DT was in form of an LiD ball then the balls volume is only 125cm3. A 5mm Boron shell would weight 300g. If this shells absorbs 100% of the neutrons it will improve the exhaust by an factor of 1.18x. At 75% it won't really at all besides absorbibg most of the lethal neutrons. But I don't think an 5mm thick shell could absorb anything near that. Heck, I question if 0.5cm Li-6 can stop radiation from a normal reactor. Also shouldn't the boron ions have similiar problems to that of the water afterburner? To get back to the water afterburner. Oxygen ions might have worse charge-ratio than the alpha particles. But they are also alot slower and have way less kinetic energy. A 10x thrust boost requires 100x more mass. Making the average particle 10x slower. I'll try and find data on my side, but I can say for certain that the larger the fusion fuel pellet, the less negative impact the neutron absorbing shell has due to the square cube volume/surface law. Are you sure about that x1.18 number though? AFAIK, D-T fusion has 80% of its reaction energy carried away by the neutron it produces. If we capture that energy, yield would improve by 5 times over other methods. Oxygen ions would be travelling at the same velocity as all the other particles in the gas because their velocity averages out. So, the oxygen nuclei will have four times the momentum of alpha particles with half the charge. Its doable, but it might require some other tricks I am unaware of. |
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Post by ironclad6 on Aug 29, 2017 17:52:44 GMT
So, if I understand your suggestion, I'd have a stellarator from which I can draw electrical power in proportion to my thrust power. I'd need a secondary piwer plant for hotel load and to power my particle accelerator. A couple of massive flywheels for startup juice and a number of magnetic confinement nozzles to direct the thrust generated in my stellarator. The MC nozzles would have to be fed fusion products from the stellarator and power from the powerplant to maintain their fields? This is surprisingly similar to my original design idea. my suggestion is 1. Get an decent fusion reactor providong both hotel and medi ocre engine and weapon power. 2. Use the fusion reactor to power your engine. Flywheels have to charge. And when you already used your charge and have to wait to recharge, then you are fucked if something attacks. 3. Put MHDs around your magnetic nozzle. Why? Because magnetic nozzles are never 100% efficant. A good nozzle has 85% efficiency meaning 15% escape. Absorb 1-10% of the particles. My 16MN D-He3 engine has a 163TW Thrust power. 24.5TW escape. 2.45TW hit the MHD's. At 50% efficiency you get 1.2TW power. Theres a problem. You have to deal with 1.2TW of heat deposited in your MHD. And you most likely want more than 16MN. So you end up with few terawatts. Sufficant to provide mayhem. Where should I look for a fusion power mod? |
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Post by Kerr on Aug 29, 2017 17:54:54 GMT
my suggestion is 1. Get an decent fusion reactor providong both hotel and medi ocre engine and weapon power. 2. Use the fusion reactor to power your engine. Flywheels have to charge. And when you already used your charge and have to wait to recharge, then you are fucked if something attacks. 3. Put MHDs around your magnetic nozzle. Why? Because magnetic nozzles are never 100% efficant. A good nozzle has 85% efficiency meaning 15% escape. Absorb 1-10% of the particles. My 16MN D-He3 engine has a 163TW Thrust power. 24.5TW escape. 2.45TW hit the MHD's. At 50% efficiency you get 1.2TW power. Theres a problem. You have to deal with 1.2TW of heat deposited in your MHD. And you most likely want more than 16MN. So you end up with few terawatts. Sufficant to provide mayhem. Where should I look for a fusion power mod? There is non in CDE. Make an black box module with the stats of a fusion reactor. I am talking about lore. In CDE the fusion fuel ignites if you sneeze on them. |
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Post by Kerr on Aug 29, 2017 17:58:38 GMT
Correction. Neutron absorbtiond peaks at roughly 2cm. Before that energy amount are still pretty high. I got the number from Fourth Generation Nuclear Weapons: Military effectiveness and Collateral effects" the example was for Polyethylene, but the depths shouldn't change much because inelstatic and elastic scattering cancel each other out. Even if 5mm Boron shell can absorb 50% of the energy it would weight 1.3kg for every 100g D-T, it might be less if you use somethinh likd LiDT, or an small DT charge surrounded by LiD. I've did the math. If the DT was in form of an LiD ball then the balls volume is only 125cm3. A 5mm Boron shell would weight 300g. If this shells absorbs 100% of the neutrons it will improve the exhaust by an factor of 1.18x. At 75% it won't really at all besides absorbibg most of the lethal neutrons. But I don't think an 5mm thick shell could absorb anything near that. Heck, I question if 0.5cm Li-6 can stop radiation from a normal reactor. Also shouldn't the boron ions have similiar problems to that of the water afterburner? To get back to the water afterburner. Oxygen ions might have worse charge-ratio than the alpha particles. But they are also alot slower and have way less kinetic energy. A 10x thrust boost requires 100x more mass. Making the average particle 10x slower. I'll try and find data on my side, but I can say for certain that the larger the fusion fuel pellet, the less negative impact the neutron absorbing shell has due to the square cube volume/surface law. Are you sure about that x1.18 number though? AFAIK, D-T fusion has 80% of its reaction energy carried away by the neutron it produces. If we capture that energy, yield would improve by 5 times over other methods. Oxygen ions would be travelling at the same velocity as all the other particles in the gas because their velocity averages out. So, the oxygen nuclei will have four times the momentum of alpha particles with half the charge. Its doable, but it might require some other tricks I am unaware of. okay. 100g DT. 300g Boron. 4 times mass. 5 times energy. Square root of 1.25 is 1.118. Oxygen ions will have 4 more times the mommentum the alpha particles at the same speed. Without the afterburner the alpha particles travel 10 times faster. The oxygen ions will have 2.5x less mommentum. Than that of alpha particle without afterburner The magnetic field strenght stays the same. Also thats why I choose 100g DT. You won't contain kilo-megaton explosions in your engine. The 100g are already overkill. |
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Post by matterbeam on Aug 29, 2017 18:07:36 GMT
I am reading and researching at the moment. I have a quick question though. Do you know of any fusion power mods and would that be the best way to represent my stellarator core? Is there a relationship between how much power I can generate to power on board systems and my total thrust power? If so, what is it? KSP Interstellar comes in mind. For CDE they are non. You can use an black box module though. Depends on how do you even power your ship. If with MHD's then yes. Otherwise no. If you use an reactor to power the fusion drive without MHDs of any kind. Yes. You have to decide between fusion ignition methods. In most cases your power input correlates into your output. matterbeam Is it even entirely safe to use MHDs in a fusion drive? These are still millions to billions kelvin beams moving at multiple percent of c. MHDs in a fusion rocket are not a separate component. They are just another way of using the same magnetic coils. Consider and electric engine in modern hybrid cars. To accelerate, they draw power to create magnetic fields that put magnetic pressure on a disk, which in turn drives the axle. During braking, they produce power by slowing down the disk, in turn slowing down the axle (regenerative braking). In a magnetic nozzle, you produce a magnetic field that bounces off charged particles for thrust. The charged particles all move out of the nozzle at the same velocity. MHD is like regenerative braking: instead of bouncing off the particles at 100% of their initial velocity, you allow some of their energy to be absorbed by the magnetic coils and drive the current instead of the other way around. You produce net power. Alternating between full mirror and full braking moves your thrust from 100% to 0%, and power generated from 0% to 100%. The temperature and velocity of the charged particles matters little, only their magnetic momentum. This MHD method is proposed for the HOPE fusion design: "As is standard operating procedure with many such pulse engines, some of the energy of the detonation is tapped and stored in capacitors. This energy is used to power the next pulse (for the plasma guns and to create the magnetic nozzle). Electrical current is induced in the coils as the plasma cloud expands. Each plasma gun has its own capacitor to store power for the next pulse. The energy for the magnetic nozzle is stored in something called a Superconducting magnetic energy storage (SMES) device, located just below the nuclear reactor. For the first pulse each of the capacitors and the SMES has to be slowly charged up by the nuclear reactor (since the poor little one-lung SP-100 can only crank out a pathetic 300 kilowatts). With subsequent pulses the capactors are recharged almost instantly, by the power of nuclear fusion." Also: 1. An independent fusion reactor might be more complex than we need. We only need perhaps 1-10MW of power for a massive ship's hotel and upkeep consumption. 2. In the course of normal operations, the first few pulses of the fusion drive charge up the ignition energy capacitors, spin up the flywheels, put the weapons online and generate thrust all at once. This is because the fusion ignition energies are measured in megajoules per pulse while the MHD will produce terajoules per pulse. The flywheels can keep spinning for a long time and a few tons of spinning weight can contain enough energy to power hundreds of ignition attempts. Charging up from the hotel reactor is only something that happens if for some reason you've decided to completely power down and drain your energy completely after that. 3. Your MHD mode will be limited to producing only as much electricity as you can handle with your waste heat management system. |
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Post by Kerr on Aug 29, 2017 18:27:22 GMT
KSP Interstellar comes in mind. For CDE they are non. You can use an black box module though. Depends on how do you even power your ship. If with MHD's then yes. Otherwise no. If you use an reactor to power the fusion drive without MHDs of any kind. Yes. You have to decide between fusion ignition methods. In most cases your power input correlates into your output. matterbeam Is it even entirely safe to use MHDs in a fusion drive? These are still millions to billions kelvin beams moving at multiple percent of c. MHDs in a fusion rocket are not a separate component. They are just another way of using the same magnetic coils. Consider and electric engine in modern hybrid cars. To accelerate, they draw power to create magnetic fields that put magnetic pressure on a disk, which in turn drives the axle. During braking, they produce power by slowing down the disk, in turn slowing down the axle (regenerative braking). In a magnetic nozzle, you produce a magnetic field that bounces off charged particles for thrust. The charged particles all move out of the nozzle at the same velocity. MHD is like regenerative braking: instead of bouncing off the particles at 100% of their initial velocity, you allow some of their energy to be absorbed by the magnetic coils and drive the current instead of the other way around. You produce net power. Alternating between full mirror and full braking moves your thrust from 100% to 0%, and power generated from 0% to 100%. The temperature and velocity of the charged particles matters little, only their magnetic momentum. This MHD method is proposed for the HOPE fusion design: "As is standard operating procedure with many such pulse engines, some of the energy of the detonation is tapped and stored in capacitors. This energy is used to power the next pulse (for the plasma guns and to create the magnetic nozzle). Electrical current is induced in the coils as the plasma cloud expands. Each plasma gun has its own capacitor to store power for the next pulse. The energy for the magnetic nozzle is stored in something called a Superconducting magnetic energy storage (SMES) device, located just below the nuclear reactor. For the first pulse each of the capacitors and the SMES has to be slowly charged up by the nuclear reactor (since the poor little one-lung SP-100 can only crank out a pathetic 300 kilowatts). With subsequent pulses the capactors are recharged almost instantly, by the power of nuclear fusion." Also: 1. An independent fusion reactor might be more complex than we need. We only need perhaps 1-10MW of power for a massive ship's hotel and upkeep consumption. 2. In the course of normal operations, the first few pulses of the fusion drive charge up the ignition energy capacitors, spin up the flywheels, put the weapons online and generate thrust all at once. This is because the fusion ignition energies are measured in megajoules per pulse while the MHD will produce terajoules per pulse. The flywheels can keep spinning for a long time and a few tons of spinning weight can contain enough energy to power hundreds of ignition attempts. Charging up from the hotel reactor is only something that happens if for some reason you've decided to completely power down and drain your energy completely after that. 3. Your MHD mode will be limited to producing only as much electricity as you can handle with your waste heat management system. I have an completly different question. For an p-B11 drive you suggested using particle beams accelerating proton beams to relativiatic speeds. Wouldn't it cost extreme amounts of power to accelerate multiple grams of protons every second? |
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Post by ironclad6 on Aug 29, 2017 18:33:35 GMT
I'll try and find data on my side, but I can say for certain that the larger the fusion fuel pellet, the less negative impact the neutron absorbing shell has due to the square cube volume/surface law. Are you sure about that x1.18 number though? AFAIK, D-T fusion has 80% of its reaction energy carried away by the neutron it produces. If we capture that energy, yield would improve by 5 times over other methods. Oxygen ions would be travelling at the same velocity as all the other particles in the gas because their velocity averages out. So, the oxygen nuclei will have four times the momentum of alpha particles with half the charge. Its doable, but it might require some other tricks I am unaware of. okay. 100g DT. 300g Boron. 4 times mass. 5 times energy. Square root of 1.25 is 1.118. Oxygen ions will have 4 more times the mommentum the alpha particles at the same speed. Without the afterburner the alpha particles travel 10 times faster. The oxygen ions will have 2.5x less mommentum. Than that of alpha particle without afterburner The magnetic field strenght stays the same. Also thats why I choose 100g DT. You won't contain kilo-megaton explosions in your engine. The 100g are already overkill. Seriously man, pure gold. This is why I wanted to use flywheels. Not to supply long term power but as a sort of mechanical capacitor bank. The interesting thing about them is that if you put counter-rotating flywheels of sufficient momentum at either ends of the hull you can do absolutely insane drunkwalk maneouvres that will make enemy predictive calculators weep tears of pure frustration. |
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Post by Kerr on Aug 29, 2017 18:34:50 GMT
okay. 100g DT. 300g Boron. 4 times mass. 5 times energy. Square root of 1.25 is 1.118. Oxygen ions will have 4 more times the mommentum the alpha particles at the same speed. Without the afterburner the alpha particles travel 10 times faster. The oxygen ions will have 2.5x less mommentum. Than that of alpha particle without afterburner The magnetic field strenght stays the same. Also thats why I choose 100g DT. You won't contain kilo-megaton explosions in your engine. The 100g are already overkill. Seriously man, pure gold. This is why I wanted to use flywheels. Not to supply long term power but as a sort of mechanical capacitor bank. The interesting thing about them is that if you put counter-rotating flywheels of sufficient momentum at either ends of the hull you can do absolutely insane drunkwalk maneouvres that will make enemy predictive calculators weep tears of pure frustration. You quoted the wrong person. |
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Post by ironclad6 on Aug 29, 2017 18:42:16 GMT
KSP Interstellar comes in mind. For CDE they are non. You can use an black box module though. Depends on how do you even power your ship. If with MHD's then yes. Otherwise no. If you use an reactor to power the fusion drive without MHDs of any kind. Yes. You have to decide between fusion ignition methods. In most cases your power input correlates into your output. matterbeam Is it even entirely safe to use MHDs in a fusion drive? These are still millions to billions kelvin beams moving at multiple percent of c. MHDs in a fusion rocket are not a separate component. They are just another way of using the same magnetic coils. Consider and electric engine in modern hybrid cars. To accelerate, they draw power to create magnetic fields that put magnetic pressure on a disk, which in turn drives the axle. During braking, they produce power by slowing down the disk, in turn slowing down the axle (regenerative braking). In a magnetic nozzle, you produce a magnetic field that bounces off charged particles for thrust. The charged particles all move out of the nozzle at the same velocity. MHD is like regenerative braking: instead of bouncing off the particles at 100% of their initial velocity, you allow some of their energy to be absorbed by the magnetic coils and drive the current instead of the other way around. You produce net power. Alternating between full mirror and full braking moves your thrust from 100% to 0%, and power generated from 0% to 100%. The temperature and velocity of the charged particles matters little, only their magnetic momentum. This MHD method is proposed for the HOPE fusion design: "As is standard operating procedure with many such pulse engines, some of the energy of the detonation is tapped and stored in capacitors. This energy is used to power the next pulse (for the plasma guns and to create the magnetic nozzle). Electrical current is induced in the coils as the plasma cloud expands. Each plasma gun has its own capacitor to store power for the next pulse. The energy for the magnetic nozzle is stored in something called a Superconducting magnetic energy storage (SMES) device, located just below the nuclear reactor. For the first pulse each of the capacitors and the SMES has to be slowly charged up by the nuclear reactor (since the poor little one-lung SP-100 can only crank out a pathetic 300 kilowatts). With subsequent pulses the capactors are recharged almost instantly, by the power of nuclear fusion." Also: 1. An independent fusion reactor might be more complex than we need. We only need perhaps 1-10MW of power for a massive ship's hotel and upkeep consumption. 2. In the course of normal operations, the first few pulses of the fusion drive charge up the ignition energy capacitors, spin up the flywheels, put the weapons online and generate thrust all at once. This is because the fusion ignition energies are measured in megajoules per pulse while the MHD will produce terajoules per pulse. The flywheels can keep spinning for a long time and a few tons of spinning weight can contain enough energy to power hundreds of ignition attempts. Charging up from the hotel reactor is only something that happens if for some reason you've decided to completely power down and drain your energy completely after that. 3. Your MHD mode will be limited to producing only as much electricity as you can handle with your waste heat management system. Seriously man, pure gold. This is why I wanted to use flywheels. Not to supply long term power but as a sort of mechanical capacitor bank. The interesting thing about them is that if you put counter-rotating flywheels of sufficient momentum at either ends of the hull you can do absolutely insane drunkwalk maneouvres that will make enemy predictive calculators weep tears of pure frustration. |
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Post by ironclad6 on Aug 29, 2017 18:43:44 GMT
Seriously man, pure gold. This is why I wanted to use flywheels. Not to supply long term power but as a sort of mechanical capacitor bank. The interesting thing about them is that if you put counter-rotating flywheels of sufficient momentum at either ends of the hull you can do absolutely insane drunkwalk maneouvres that will make enemy predictive calculators weep tears of pure frustration. You quoted the wrong person. Thank you for pointing that out. Don't think because I haven't responded to a lot of your work yet that it's gone un-noticed. I'm working my day job at the moment and I'm mashing my way through a murderously complex investigation so I only have a limited amount of brain power to invest. |
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Post by Kerr on Aug 29, 2017 18:56:28 GMT
You quoted the wrong person. Thank you for pointing that out. Don't think because I haven't responded to a lot of your work yet that it's gone un-noticed. I'm working my day job at the moment and I'm mashing my way through a murderously complex investigation so I only have a limited amount of brain power to invest. Alright. Also if inner radius is the actual radius of the flywheel disk. Then I found out that an 100kRPM flywheel weighting 23.tt of CNT contains 4TJ in it's disk. A bit over the top but this shows the potential of flywheels with supermaterials. |
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Post by Kerr on Aug 29, 2017 19:23:39 GMT
ironclad6Could you please post the equations you used to calculate your magnetic nozzle? Doing research would take till the heat death of the universe with my mobile internet currently being the only source of my internet.
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Post by ironclad6 on Aug 29, 2017 19:44:40 GMT
I haven't worked that out yet. Looking for sources myself at the moment.
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Post by Kerr on Aug 29, 2017 20:47:11 GMT
ironclad6Hyperion Mk II B Type: Missile Bus Propulsion: D-He3 Fusion Isp: 760,000 Acceleration: 1G Dv: 800km/s Wet mass: 10t Dry mass: 9t The Hyperion fusion-based Missile Bus is the apex in high velocity delivering systems. The Missile is made out of two main sections. 1. Propulsion: this section contains an 1t D-He3 fuel tank, an SMES energy storage medium, an Z-pinch device and a magnetic nozzle with integrated MHD. Before launch the SMES is charged, the eletrical charge is then later utilized for an Z-pinch of the fusion fuel. The MHDs convert a small fraction of the exhaust into electrical energy recharging the SMES and powering both Z-pinch device and magnetic nozzle. 2. Head: This section consist of variety sensors which vary between the individual models of the Hyperion. And the warhead, which comes in two standart variants. 1a. 200x 25kg Submunition, powered by chemical fuel and having a few kilometers of Delta-v, which is mainly used to perform random thrusts to significantly decrease enemy hit probability, and to recorrect the course of the submunitions. 2a. An 450kg Flak Charge, consisting of an electric motor and flywheel to provide rotation. Which is used to launch the metal penetrators at a few centimeters per second. At 1 light-second distance the penetrators have spread to cover an 10,000m2 area. Releasing 3t every square meter. I got bored, hope you like the idea.
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Post by ironclad6 on Aug 29, 2017 22:22:59 GMT
1) What is Z pinch? Is that the same as a Bennet Pinch? (Edited to add, according to Wikipedia, it is.)
2) Thank you very much for the offered design. Unfortunately I'm not allowed to use anyone else's created designs for copyright reasons. It could make the novel unpublishable, or if I simply didn't tell the publisher I'd used someone else's work I'd likely wind up forfeiting a substantial chunk of my fees as a result. That said, I can take all sorts of input short of the level of outright plagiarism.
3) Is this a stab at developing a munition to displace my MH powered munitions? I like the design. It's the sort of messy and unscrupulous design characteristic of my Adamites. How would you re-work this using either NSWR or an NRT with two important considerations. A design weight of 40 tons and a minimum acceleration of 7g. An acceleration of 21g would be preferable. The composer class pickets for example can simply outrun this munition.
The Systems Commonwealth has magnetic confinement nozzle technology while the Adamites do not, but rather rely on NSWR for their military drives since it outperforms fusion drives from a thrust perspective unless you have magnetic confinement technology. In the settled parts of the commonwealth civilian transport needs are generally met with laser sale networks and magnetic acceleration gates moving mass cargoes with minimal human crew requirements. This is for two reasons. 1) You don't get to play with potentially civilization destroying weaponry until we know we can trust you. 2) Fusion drives are painfully expensive to build, much too expensive to be worth while for anything except emergency preparedness and war fighting. It's definitely much much too expensive to use for single use munitions. That said, it's possible the Whisker drone series might get retired in favour of a potentially re-useable design if I did the costing and it worked out as a net benefit to my prospective budget.
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