Future Tech (Fusion ship) thread

With high efficiency I meant the nature of Stellerators/fusion reactors where the fuel is completly fused instead of most fusion engines which burn only a small percantage. 8000km/s is too low for interstellar warfare and too overkill for solar system combat. If your setting plays in the later you should consider using a reaction mass like water, even more thrust fof less costs while still having sufficant Delta-v budgets.

Switching to bigger tanks won me 27 milligees acceleration and cut my turnover by about 28 seconds. Thank you. 

First of all, as I figure it, B11 and hydrogen are so cheap they are practically free. Second, there's no hyperspace ansible. There's a built in lag to any attempt to co-ordinate any operation, so the ability to turn and burn without really considering remass constraints is a huge virtue. I'm also dealing with planetary systems with much steeper gravity wells than any in our solar system. Providence, the main planetary sub system I'm dealing with with in my novel is actually about eighty Jupiter masses. Getting around in that context is actually extremely propellant hungry. Finally, the game engine forces me to use remass tanks as a sort of spine so that I have something to hang the rest of my ship off.

She's a warship. That's the point. Skimping on remass capacity is a false economy because then you have to forward stage. You want to be using your tankers to shuttle between well established, well defended hubs, not bringing remass out to the boonies where they're exposed to potential enemy action. My original design brief was Earth to Mars in four days followed by a knock down drag out fight with enough remass left over to reverse course. In the end remass is cheap as tap water while fissiles, man-hours and complex electronics are very expensive. Why economize on tap water?

The composer Class. You need to be a special kind of crazy to get assigned to one of these. The propulsion system from a Standout class on a ship less than a fifth the mass. We had to develop an entirely new line of acceleration couches and G-suits to make this design work.

Seriously great design and lore! I suppose the ships come from the Anglo-sphere given the RR powerplants? I would suppose for a more US centric design would include GE reactors, Lockmart fusion drives, General Atomics Drones/Railguns, etc

Thank you. I wanted them all to look like they'd been designed and built by the same engineering team, hence the same basic scheme (steeply sloped armour, compact turreted lasers, drone bays behind heavy armour etc) applied to ships of immensely different sizes and roles. As for mass, no. The RN's smallest capital class is the Composer class at 3.72Kt. The Standout class flight I (Jean Sans Peur, Goyathley, Bjorn Ironsides) were built to a 20Kt design. From Amina on they were built with a revised armour scheme. The Crater class of Drone Tenders are the largest warships in the Systems Commonwealth Navy at 122Ktonnes. The Fleet Auxiliary's fast fleet tankers are closer to 200Kton fully loaded. Operational experience has shown that bigger is better. Lasers seem to be the dominant weapon and spot intensity at range scales directly to aperture size. It's often more effective to use a relatively low powered laser with a very large mirror to generate a very destructive beam at very great distances. The Composer class are considered barely survivable in this context. There is after all, no replacement for displacement. 


L5Resident Avatar

Aug 28, 2017 0:28:43 GMT -7 L5Resident said:

Seriously great design and lore! I suppose the ships come from the Anglo-sphere given the RR powerplants? I would suppose for a more US centric design would include GE reactors, Lockmart fusion drives, General Atomics Drones/Railguns, etc

Thank you for noticing. It's nice to know when someone is genuinely paying attention. It's worth pointing out that I'm using the game engine to test ideas and develop lore for a separate setting. It doesn't really fit in with the CDE setting. There's no room in that canon for a post colonial parliamentary monarchy when literally every habitable and worthwhile rock is settled. The idea behind the Systems commonwealth is that it's a devolved commonwealth that grew out of a really quite brutally oppressive empire. As such it still carries a lot of it's Imperial forms around with it but in practice it's a pluralistic parliamentary democracy. The former colonies all govern themselves for the most part but foreign policy and common defence are still handled on the "Imperial" level. The professional head of the Systems Commonwealth military for example is still referred to as "Chief of the Imperial General Staff" of "CIGS" for short.

I am having some difficulty getting their principle opposition to work properly as CDE doesn't seem to be able to cope with aiming internally mounted weapons. I'll post up when I sort it out.