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Post by Kerr on Sept 6, 2017 15:12:07 GMT
You know a dusty plasma radiators is just an MPDT shooting out extremely hot plasma. And 10,000K is pretty cold for that, IMO. Yeah, but the game will only let me go up to 10000K. Basically I'm modelling a couple of different levels of technology at the moment with the only real proviso being that each model has to be internally consistent. At one level I'm looking at fission powered ships driven by MPDTs. In the middle level I'm looking at fusion powered ships, still using a mixture of open cycle fusion and MPDT with no magnetic confinement. That gives me about 5 milligees acceleration for Procellarum and Morokweng. At another level I'm messing with some really exotic tech such as you saw in that picture back there. The ships become really interesting because they are almost more composed of magnetic fields than physical matter. Sounds kinda like an soft hard sci-fi equivalent of hard light. But I fear that this story will shift more and more into the speculative spectrum were completely made up and semi-feasible hyper tech start blurring the line. At which point my interest in such usually drastically drops. Few exceptions of course. But they often manage it with unique and imaginatively worldbuilding. Maybe you just trying these things out and see how well they do in your world. It's your novel you are writing nonetheless, and the elements you implemented makes this story very interesting in my eyes. Looking forward for the release. How is your novel called? Or at least the working draft. |
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Post by ironclad6 on Sept 6, 2017 15:38:04 GMT
Yeah, but the game will only let me go up to 10000K. Basically I'm modelling a couple of different levels of technology at the moment with the only real proviso being that each model has to be internally consistent. At one level I'm looking at fission powered ships driven by MPDTs. In the middle level I'm looking at fusion powered ships, still using a mixture of open cycle fusion and MPDT with no magnetic confinement. That gives me about 5 milligees acceleration for Procellarum and Morokweng. At another level I'm messing with some really exotic tech such as you saw in that picture back there. The ships become really interesting because they are almost more composed of magnetic fields than physical matter. Sounds kinda like an soft hard sci-fi equivalent of hard light. But I fear that this story will shift more and more into the speculative spectrum were completely made up and semi-feasible hyper tech start blurring the line. At which point my interest in such usually drastically drops. Few exceptions of course. But they often manage it with unique and imaginatively worldbuilding. Maybe you just trying these things out and see how well they do in your world. It's your novel you are writing nonetheless, and the elements you implemented makes this story very interesting in my eyes. Looking forward for the release. How is your novel called? Or at least the working draft. The thing is mate, once you get into things like magnetic confinement nozzles and dusty plasma radiators (My only two really speculative techs at the extreme end of my literary dilemma) things get pretty weird because you really have almost no upper limit on how much heat you can dispose of except for the comfort of the crew, which can be handled by simply moving them further away from the drive portion of your ship. You tend to find that your only limit in determining the offensive power of your ship is the heat tolerance of the components in your weapons. You don't have to speculate very much for your cases to get very extreme indeed. As it happens I am not really setting the power output of my stellarators as a function of how much power I need but rather I worked out an approximation of how much heat the ship would absorb from back scatter from the open cycle fusion rocket at a given thrust. I set the outlet temp to 10000K basically because that's as high as the game would let me go. It's much more likely that I'd actually need to be thinking in the order of 25000K or thereabouts. This is what I meant when I said "If you hand-wave those away suddenly you are catapulted into star trek levels of performance and speculation." I don't think it matters exactly where I set the level of technology, as long as the level is internally consistent and well defined. The working title as it stands is "Dust". |
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Post by Kerr on Sept 6, 2017 16:06:23 GMT
Sounds kinda like an soft hard sci-fi equivalent of hard light. But I fear that this story will shift more and more into the speculative spectrum were completely made up and semi-feasible hyper tech start blurring the line. At which point my interest in such usually drastically drops. Few exceptions of course. But they often manage it with unique and imaginatively worldbuilding. Maybe you just trying these things out and see how well they do in your world. It's your novel you are writing nonetheless, and the elements you implemented makes this story very interesting in my eyes. Looking forward for the release. How is your novel called? Or at least the working draft. The thing is mate, once you get into things like magnetic confinement nozzles and dusty plasma radiators (My only two really speculative techs at the extreme end of my literary dilemma) things get pretty weird because you really have almost no upper limit on how much heat you can dispose of except for the comfort of the crew, which can be handled by simply moving them further away from the drive portion of your ship. You tend to find that your only limit in determining the offensive power of your ship is the heat tolerance of the components in your weapons. You don't have to speculate very much for your cases to get very extreme indeed. As it happens I am not really setting the power output of my stellarators as a function of how much power I need but rather I worked out an approximation of how much heat the ship would absorb from back scatter from the open cycle fusion rocket at a given thrust. I set the outlet temp to 10000K basically because that's as high as the game would let me go. It's much more likely that I'd actually need to be thinking in the order of 25000K or thereabouts. This is what I meant when I said "If you hand-wave those away suddenly you are catapulted into star trek levels of performance and speculation." I don't think it matters exactly where I set the level of technology, as long as the level is internally consistent and well defined. The working title as it stands is "Dust". Thanks for the insight. But don't think that your magnetic nozzles and plasma radiators can hand-wave all your problems away. Your maximum thrust power is limited on the blade shields which have to absorb the heat. Your ship can have radiators which can deal with tera-petawatts levels of heat, but every grams of magnetic nozzle would have to deal with extreme amounts of energy. As said by matterbeam, deflecting all particles requires more energy than the particles have. But I predict that this only means that your power demands for your magnetic nozzle grows exponentially compared to the efficiency of it. Which means that your ships would have Mag-nozzles with efficiencies of maybe around 90%. Leaving you with 500TW waste heat from exhaust on a 5PW Drive. Even if 99,9% of the heat escapes into space the 500GW of heat are still pretty hard to deal with. Hydrogen has an specific heat of 20kJ/kg at 4000-4500K. That means every kg Hydrogen can absorb 80 MJ of heat. If let's say your coils, blades shields and support frame have an area of 100m² every square meter will have to deal with 5GW/m². You'd need to flow 65kg Hydrogen over it every second to keep it from drastically heating up and risking heat leak to the Mag-Coils. I don't even have an idea how you get your plasma up to 25,000K when your coolant only runs on a fraction of that temperature, there are ways. But I doubt it would work on this scale. |
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Post by matterbeam on Sept 6, 2017 16:16:14 GMT
Basically once you start messing around with things like dusty plasma radiators thing get really wild. You know a dusty plasma radiators is just an MPDT shooting out extremely hot plasma. And 10,000K is pretty cold for that, IMO. Technically, it's a radiator where tiny dust particles are the coolant, and plasma is used to organize and manipulate them instead of physical, electrostatic or direct magnetic containment. No high-velocity MPDT stuff involved, it works even at 10m/s average velocity  Also, I must warm you ironclad6 and @wtfitsomg that radiators must be cooler than whatever you're trying to remove waste heat from. If your radiators operate at 2000K, then there's a component inside your ship that is sitting at that temperature or higher. This is understandable it its the hot uranium core of a nuclear reactor. However, if you're pushing your radiators to extreme 4600K, 6000K, 10000K or more... just what are you cooling? Is there a component inside your ship sitting at that temperature that needs waste heat removed from it? The only things I can think of operating at those temperatures is probably the plasma surrounding the center of a fusion reactor. But... why would you want to dump that heat overboard in the first place? You convert it to electricity in a generator, and that generator converts that heat into lower temperature waste heat. The difference in temperature is what you extract energy from. |
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Post by ironclad6 on Sept 6, 2017 16:17:00 GMT
Yeah. I keep thinking I'd rather go back to fission plants and MPDT thrusters.
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Post by ironclad6 on Sept 6, 2017 16:18:36 GMT
You know a dusty plasma radiators is just an MPDT shooting out extremely hot plasma. And 10,000K is pretty cold for that, IMO. Technically, it's a radiator where tiny dust particles are the coolant, and plasma is used to organize and manipulate them instead of physical, electrostatic or direct magnetic containment. No high-velocity MPDT stuff involved, it works even at 10m/s average velocity Also, I must warm you ironclad6 and @wtfitsomg that radiators must be cooler than whatever you're trying to remove waste heat from. If your radiators operate at 2000K, then there's a component inside your ship that is sitting at that temperature or higher. This is understandable it its the hot uranium core of a nuclear reactor. However, if you're pushing your radiators to extreme 4600K, 6000K, 10000K or more... just what are you cooling? Is there a component inside your ship sitting at that temperature that needs waste heat removed from it? The only things I can think of operating at those temperatures is probably the plasma surrounding the center of a fusion reactor. But... why would you want to dump that heat overboard in the first place? You convert it to electricity in a generator, and that generator converts that heat into lower temperature waste heat. The difference in temperature is what you extract energy from. I am sorry. I don't understand. |
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Post by matterbeam on Sept 6, 2017 16:19:24 GMT
The thing is mate, once you get into things like magnetic confinement nozzles and dusty plasma radiators (My only two really speculative techs at the extreme end of my literary dilemma) things get pretty weird because you really have almost no upper limit on how much heat you can dispose of except for the comfort of the crew, which can be handled by simply moving them further away from the drive portion of your ship. You tend to find that your only limit in determining the offensive power of your ship is the heat tolerance of the components in your weapons. You don't have to speculate very much for your cases to get very extreme indeed. As it happens I am not really setting the power output of my stellarators as a function of how much power I need but rather I worked out an approximation of how much heat the ship would absorb from back scatter from the open cycle fusion rocket at a given thrust. I set the outlet temp to 10000K basically because that's as high as the game would let me go. It's much more likely that I'd actually need to be thinking in the order of 25000K or thereabouts. This is what I meant when I said "If you hand-wave those away suddenly you are catapulted into star trek levels of performance and speculation." I don't think it matters exactly where I set the level of technology, as long as the level is internally consistent and well defined. The working title as it stands is "Dust". Thanks for the insight. But don't think that your magnetic nozzles and plasma radiators can hand-wave all your problems away. Your maximum thrust power is limited on the blade shields which have to absorb the heat. Your ship can have radiators which can deal with tera-petawatts levels of heat, but every grams of magnetic nozzle would have to deal with extreme amounts of energy. As said by matterbeam, deflecting all particles requires more energy than the particles have. But I predict that this only means that your power demands for your magnetic nozzle grows exponentially compared to the efficiency of it. Which means that your ships would have Mag-nozzles with efficiencies of maybe around 90%. Leaving you with 500TW waste heat from exhaust on a 5PW Drive. Even if 99,9% of the heat escapes into space the 500GW of heat are still pretty hard to deal with. Hydrogen has an specific heat of 20kJ/kg at 4000-4500K. That means every kg Hydrogen can absorb 80 MJ of heat. If let's say your coils, blades shields and support frame have an area of 100m² every square meter will have to deal with 5GW/m². You'd need to flow 65kg Hydrogen over it every second to keep it from drastically heating up and risking heat leak to the Mag-Coils. I don't even have an idea how you get your plasma up to 25,000K when your coolant only runs on a fraction of that temperature, there are ways. But I doubt it would work on this scale. To be fair, the Expanse's James S.A. Corey explained that his (their) spaceships 'run on efficiency'. The engines produce petawatts of power but they have so little waste heat that the ships can handle it without big glowing radiators. Kind of magitech. |
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Post by Kerr on Sept 6, 2017 16:23:08 GMT
You know a dusty plasma radiators is just an MPDT shooting out extremely hot plasma. And 10,000K is pretty cold for that, IMO. Technically, it's a radiator where tiny dust particles are the coolant, and plasma is used to organize and manipulate them instead of physical, electrostatic or direct magnetic containment. No high-velocity MPDT stuff involved, it works even at 10m/s average velocity Also, I must warm you ironclad6 and @wtfitsomg that radiators must be cooler than whatever you're trying to remove waste heat from. If your radiators operate at 2000K, then there's a component inside your ship that is sitting at that temperature or higher. This is understandable it its the hot uranium core of a nuclear reactor. However, if you're pushing your radiators to extreme 4600K, 6000K, 10000K or more... just what are you cooling? Is there a component inside your ship sitting at that temperature that needs waste heat removed from it? The only things I can think of operating at those temperatures is probably the plasma surrounding the center of a fusion reactor. But... why would you want to dump that heat overboard in the first place? You convert it to electricity in a generator, and that generator converts that heat into lower temperature waste heat. The difference in temperature is what you extract energy from. Why you (tried) to tag me? If your (X) radiators was hotter than the thing (Y) it is trying to remove waste heat from heat is transferred to the thing you want to cool (X to Y). Hot to cold, or equilibrium. Simple thermodynamics. |
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Post by Kerr on Sept 6, 2017 16:24:52 GMT
Technically, it's a radiator where tiny dust particles are the coolant, and plasma is used to organize and manipulate them instead of physical, electrostatic or direct magnetic containment. No high-velocity MPDT stuff involved, it works even at 10m/s average velocity Also, I must warm you ironclad6 and @wtfitsomg that radiators must be cooler than whatever you're trying to remove waste heat from. If your radiators operate at 2000K, then there's a component inside your ship that is sitting at that temperature or higher. This is understandable it its the hot uranium core of a nuclear reactor. However, if you're pushing your radiators to extreme 4600K, 6000K, 10000K or more... just what are you cooling? Is there a component inside your ship sitting at that temperature that needs waste heat removed from it? The only things I can think of operating at those temperatures is probably the plasma surrounding the center of a fusion reactor. But... why would you want to dump that heat overboard in the first place? You convert it to electricity in a generator, and that generator converts that heat into lower temperature waste heat. The difference in temperature is what you extract energy from. I am sorry. I don't understand. If your reactor cooling coolant is 4600K hot and your plasma radiator is 25,000K then you're basically trying to heat up your food using the heat energy stored inside ice cubes, which wouldn't work. |
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Post by Kerr on Sept 6, 2017 16:27:02 GMT
Thanks for the insight. But don't think that your magnetic nozzles and plasma radiators can hand-wave all your problems away. Your maximum thrust power is limited on the blade shields which have to absorb the heat. Your ship can have radiators which can deal with tera-petawatts levels of heat, but every grams of magnetic nozzle would have to deal with extreme amounts of energy. As said by matterbeam, deflecting all particles requires more energy than the particles have. But I predict that this only means that your power demands for your magnetic nozzle grows exponentially compared to the efficiency of it. Which means that your ships would have Mag-nozzles with efficiencies of maybe around 90%. Leaving you with 500TW waste heat from exhaust on a 5PW Drive. Even if 99,9% of the heat escapes into space the 500GW of heat are still pretty hard to deal with. Hydrogen has an specific heat of 20kJ/kg at 4000-4500K. That means every kg Hydrogen can absorb 80 MJ of heat. If let's say your coils, blades shields and support frame have an area of 100m² every square meter will have to deal with 5GW/m². You'd need to flow 65kg Hydrogen over it every second to keep it from drastically heating up and risking heat leak to the Mag-Coils. I don't even have an idea how you get your plasma up to 25,000K when your coolant only runs on a fraction of that temperature, there are ways. But I doubt it would work on this scale. To be fair, the Expanse's James S.A. Corey explained that his (their) spaceships 'run on efficiency'. The engines produce petawatts of power but they have so little waste heat that the ships can handle it without big glowing radiators. Kind of magitech. Yea, I saw the quote, pretty disappointing answer in my opinion. They COULD have make it work out without their magitech. The so called Epstein Drives using "magnetic coil exhaust" |
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Post by matterbeam on Sept 6, 2017 16:28:19 GMT
Technically, it's a radiator where tiny dust particles are the coolant, and plasma is used to organize and manipulate them instead of physical, electrostatic or direct magnetic containment. No high-velocity MPDT stuff involved, it works even at 10m/s average velocity Also, I must warm you ironclad6 and @wtfitsomg that radiators must be cooler than whatever you're trying to remove waste heat from. If your radiators operate at 2000K, then there's a component inside your ship that is sitting at that temperature or higher. This is understandable it its the hot uranium core of a nuclear reactor. However, if you're pushing your radiators to extreme 4600K, 6000K, 10000K or more... just what are you cooling? Is there a component inside your ship sitting at that temperature that needs waste heat removed from it? The only things I can think of operating at those temperatures is probably the plasma surrounding the center of a fusion reactor. But... why would you want to dump that heat overboard in the first place? You convert it to electricity in a generator, and that generator converts that heat into lower temperature waste heat. The difference in temperature is what you extract energy from. I am sorry. I don't understand. Okay, look at it this way. When you create a fission reactor and generator in the stock CoaDE game, you have three temperatures: core temperature, core outlet/generator inlet temperature and generator outlet/radiator inlet temperature. The generator is a thermocouple. The core temperature can be as high as 3000K. The thermocouple can't survive more than 2500K, releasing waste heat at about 2000K. Your radiators receive waste heat at 2000K temperature. Now let's look at your 4600K radiators. They are at the extreme melting point of any physical material. So, logically, no material can operate at higher than 4600K. Using the example above and working backwards, we get radiators ejecting waste heat at 4600, your generator extracting electricity out of a temperature gradient between 4600K (low end) and >4600K (high end). The generator receives heat from an even higher temperature nuclear core, so >>4600K. See where the problem is? You need all the other temperatures of the components before the radiator to be working at over 4600K. And not just a few kelvin above, but 500 or 1000K higher temperatures to extract any amount of useful energy. Problem is, no solid material component can handle those temperatures! Then I read through the thread and I see temperatures of 6000, 10000K. Sure, the radiator can handle it. But what's feeding it? Some material, solid component operating at even higher temperatures? You might want to explain this a bit more - or point me to where you decided on such high temperatures if I missed it on this thread. |
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Post by ironclad6 on Sept 6, 2017 16:28:39 GMT
So what do I need to change? Bigger, cooler radiators?
As I understood it from this thread and other sources, I'm using a magnetically confined stellarator to provide both thrust and power. I generate a star-hot plasma in my stellarator and then shoot some of it out a magnetic confinement nozzle to provide thrust. The stellarator uses a thermocouple to generate electricity from waste heat. I need to cool the blade armature that provides my magnetic nozzle, the lower side of my thermocouple and I need to dispose of the waste heat I pick up as back scatter from my magnetic nozzle? Is that right or did I miss something?
Also, I really like that pretty shade of blue.
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Post by Kerr on Sept 6, 2017 16:31:26 GMT
So what do I need to change? Bigger, cooler radiators? Simplified, heat goes from hot to cold. If your radiators is hotter than your ships coolant it would have the reverse effect you want to achieve. So, cooler radiators. |
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Post by ironclad6 on Sept 6, 2017 16:36:06 GMT
So I've got a 4600K thermocouple, a ~10000K plasma and a nozzle at 330 million K according to CDE. I need separate radiators for all three, which I have.
Also I checked and the stellarators I'm using are actually putting out heat to the radiators at 8750K. It's not a huge difference but it's some.
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Post by Kerr on Sept 6, 2017 16:39:59 GMT
So I've got a 4600K thermocouple, a ~10000K plasma and a nozzle at 330 million K according to CDE. I need separate radiators for all three (Accounted for) The plasma is 330 million K, this heat mostly flies away with the fusion fuel, a small percentage radiates at your blade shields (the thermocouple in this case). Having 4600K Coolant. The problem is you can't make 4600K to 10000K with heat exchanging. An heat exchanger tries to raise the temperature until both are the same temperature. Your plasma radiators can only reach 4600K at max. This is entropy. You can't revert chaos and unorder in a closed system (Universe/your ship) but you can keep it constant. |
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