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Post by ironclad6 on Sept 3, 2017 4:15:56 GMT
As if this morning I threw all my work out and started over. I am starting to think fusion ships just aren't plausible without hand waving too much stuff and making a litany of absurdly optimistic assumptions. I'm sad to hear this. My personal suggestion is that you stop focusing on selecting technologies and making them work, but by starting from the other end and trying to define the needs of your plot or setting. Make a list of requirements, going from strictest to most lenient. THEN try to find technologies which fit and iterate between adapting the requirements to the specificities of the technology, or finding reasons to reject a technology to avoid its unintended side-effects. Funnily enough that's what I'm doing. The broad outline of the plot is written, the characters and agendas are finished. I just wanted to really flesh out what a lot of these things mean. I've made progress by discarding all of my previous work on the Adamite fleet and switching to MPDT powered by tokamak fusion reactors. This closes the performance gap vis a vis The Commonwealth. I actually have the first novel mostly finished and ready to be published but I want to get my world building bible finished so I can do re-writes. I hate retcons so I don't want to leave any scope for that. |
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Post by Kerr on Sept 3, 2017 4:24:49 GMT
Alright. Status update on your ships? As if this morning I threw all my work out and started over. I am starting to think fusion ships just aren't plausible without hand waving too much stuff and making a litany of absurdly optimistic assumptions. Fusion ships can be plausible. But the whole stellerator providing mega-giganewton exhaust is over the top. I'll post some ways later. |
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Post by ironclad6 on Sept 3, 2017 5:12:43 GMT
I am running Morokweng at roughly 1 giganewton and about 656 milligees of acceleration. I'll have write ups with maths for you shortly. I'm almost finished reworking Morokweng. Goyathley will be easy to do. I'm not sure at all how to re-work Ravel and Tchaikovsky but I have a couple of interesting ideas.
Basically I've got it set up so my blackbox stellarators have 5% of total thrust power as their power generating capability. Outlet temperature from the stellarators is 4600K. Then I'm assuming 90% heat to energy transfer and a combination of droplet radiators and coiled wire frame radiators with easily replaced, modular components. That gives me a fixed standard for how much radiator space I need and how hot I can run.
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Post by Kerr on Sept 3, 2017 5:19:09 GMT
I am running Morokweng at roughly 1 giganewton and about 656 milligees of acceleration. I'll have write ups with maths for you shortly. I'm almost finished reworking Morokweng. Goyathley will be easy to do. I'm not sure at all how to re-work Ravel and Tchaikovsky but I have a couple of interesting ideas. Basically I've got it set up so my blackbox stellarators have 5% of total thrust power as their power generating capability. Outlet temperature from the stellarators is 4600K. Then I'm assuming 90% heat to energy transfer and a combination of droplet radiators and coiled wire frame radiators with easily replaced, modular components. That gives me a fixed standard for how much radiator space I need and how hot I can run. Cool, how about plasma jet magneto inertia? It has a fusion gain of 50, meaning every watt input results in 50 watt thrust power, if you use 4% of thrust power in a 50% MHD you get enough energy to power the engine. |
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Post by ironclad6 on Sept 3, 2017 5:23:44 GMT
I am rapidly running out of research time and need to nail things down so I'm satisfied that I've found plausible solutions to my radiator problems. I think I have just about time to rework the Adamites from NSWR to MPDT and redesign all of their missiles for higher performance. The NSWR powered nuke you showed me is now an MPDT powered nuke and so on and so forth. I really like the relatively low signature of MPDT. Got lots of potential.
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Post by ironclad6 on Sept 3, 2017 5:58:43 GMT
 Okay, I am satisfied with the Crater Class. They're monsters. 8.8 petawatts of thrust power. 440 terawatts of electrical power. I'm assuming 80% efficiency from some sort of DEC and using a combination of notional droplet radiators not implemented in game and graphene coil wire radiators to both double my effective surface area and raise the working limit for my radiator outlets. Aside from the power plant she carries 192 Whisker IV drones, a battery of high performance coaxial rail guns for orbital gunfire support and about 120 GW of high performance lasers. Unless you guys point out a grievous mistake I really hope I can call this one good and move on. |
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Post by Kerr on Sept 3, 2017 6:01:29 GMT
Okay, I am satisfied with the Crater Class. They're monsters. 8.8 petawatts of thrust power. 440 terawatts of electrical power. I'm assuming 80% efficiency from some sort of DEC and using a combination of notional droplet radiators not implemented in game and graphene coil wire radiators to both double my effective surface area and raise the working limit for my radiator outlets. Aside from the power plant she carries 192 Whisker IV drones, a battery of high performance coaxial rail guns for orbital gunfire support and about 120 GW of high performance lasers. Unless you guys point out a grievous mistake I really hope I can call this one good and move on. DEC are projected to reach 90% efficiency with current technology. In 400 years it would be standart. |
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Post by ironclad6 on Sept 3, 2017 6:06:47 GMT
Okay, I am satisfied with the Crater Class. They're monsters. 8.8 petawatts of thrust power. 440 terawatts of electrical power. I'm assuming 80% efficiency from some sort of DEC and using a combination of notional droplet radiators not implemented in game and graphene coil wire radiators to both double my effective surface area and raise the working limit for my radiator outlets. Aside from the power plant she carries 192 Whisker IV drones, a battery of high performance coaxial rail guns for orbital gunfire support and about 120 GW of high performance lasers. Unless you guys point out a grievous mistake I really hope I can call this one good and move on. DEC are projected to reach 90% efficiency with current technology. In 400 years it would be standart. Great. I'll adjust and call the excess radiator capacity insurance for battle damage. The hard part will be redesigning the Composer Class. Small and sleek due to low weight doesn't totally work in this setting I think. |
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Post by Kerr on Sept 3, 2017 6:30:18 GMT
DEC are projected to reach 90% efficiency with current technology. In 400 years it would be standart. Great. I'll adjust and call the excess radiator capacity insurance for battle damage. The hard part will be redesigning the Composer Class. Small and sleek due to low weight doesn't totally work in this setting I think. Maybe use an heavy ion beam inertial confinement fusion. The lower your burn efficiency the better your thrust but the lower your isp. Per given heat |
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Post by ironclad6 on Sept 3, 2017 6:47:36 GMT
 The Adamite Super-Dreadnought "Golden Monarch" passes into the inner Saturnian system during one of her "Flying the flag" patrols. |
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Post by Kerr on Sept 3, 2017 8:48:04 GMT
The Adamite Super-Dreadnought "Golden Monarch" passes into the inner Saturnian system during one of her "Flying the flag" patrols. Did you found out how much power your magnetic nozzle consumes? Need that to estimate effective fusion gain. |
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Post by ironclad6 on Sept 3, 2017 16:46:00 GMT
The Adamite Super-Dreadnought "Golden Monarch" passes into the inner Saturnian system during one of her "Flying the flag" patrols. Did you found out how much power your magnetic nozzle consumes? Need that to estimate effective fusion gain. According to the Wendelstein example they reckon they can get to about 10ish percent. |
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Post by Kerr on Sept 3, 2017 19:05:37 GMT
Did you found out how much power your magnetic nozzle consumes? Need that to estimate effective fusion gain. According to the Wendelstein example they reckon they can get to about 10ish percent. The nozzle requires 100GW for 1TW thrust power? |
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Post by ironclad6 on Sept 3, 2017 21:29:43 GMT
According to the Wendelstein example they reckon they can get to about 10ish percent. The nozzle requires 100GW for 1TW thrust power? Yes but further reading suggests that it might be possible to get to about half this figure. |
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Post by Kerr on Sept 3, 2017 21:39:25 GMT
The nozzle requires 100GW for 1TW thrust power? Yes but further reading suggests that it might be possible to get to about half this figure. That would be good, I fugured out that to create an 1TW p-B11 fusion you need 57GW Ion accelerators to produce sufficant 500kev protons. This means an 80% MHD can extract 7.2x times more energy out of this reaction then it requires as input. |
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