Post your designs here!

I'm sure that there are efficiency issues that could be ironed out, but I'm still obscenely proud of this little doodad.



Also my new Dread-nought, which mounts four of them and is powered by an array of apophys's 10.1 GW reactors.  Appropriately, when I took her out for a test run in the sandbox, her first iteration was christened Hellfire Impeller.

I've only just started, and frankly I'm still shaky even with just NTRs and combustion rockets.  I know what Tango Kilo's going to mount now, though, thank you!

Radiator redundancy. Plus, lasers take awhile to saturate (to glowing temperatures) a large radiator, so even suboptimal radiator area can still keep firing. More important is killing the reactor radiators.



Not absurdly efficient if you turn down the fire rate. Will be fixed soon.



Miniature particle accelerator. Consumes ludicrous amounts of power for minimal acceleration, sounds about right.



Plausible.



Without Earth's gravity, and with perfectly smooth surfaces, it's not a problem.



Ok, this one is a bit of an issue. Sub-5kg nukes are possible with really good explosive lensing and precise assembly... I don't know about the sub kilogram designs, though.



Please explain.

So... Overall, there is quite a bit of scientifc plausibility left. Yes, there are many, many issues, but qswitched is doing his best to fix them.

I'm not sure what this line of argument is about anymore. Please point me to a laserstar with at least one 1GW+ laser and hardened radiators and we will test how they hold against 18kt nukes.

Well, to tune it down you have to lower fire rate 25 times, by definition. But that's not the only problem with plausibility here. The other one is impossible to fix without capacitors.

Except it's neither cyclotron (which require huge magnets) nor a linear accelerator. It's a thin 6-centimeter long tube filled with gas (propellant) that you dump so much energy into that it would produce enough electric arcs you wouldn't be able to tell the difference between turning it on and exploding a small bomb.

This one is from Colony Ships thread, created by someusername6

No, it's not. Multiple nuclear warheads should cause each other to fizzle due to intense neutron flux, especially when they are packed so close together. This effect was used in ballistic missile defense, for example in US Sprint missile. At best, when explosive lenses on all warheads are perfectly synchronized, their effectiveness should not exceed that of a single warhead with the yield equal to multinuke warheads combined yield, but it is in the game. It was never even presented by the original author of the concept as anything else but exploit (along with the teleportation bug).

When these missiles are loaded, unloaded and move inside their ammunition drum they suffer plenty of lateral accelerations, not to mention the instances when the ship is hit in combat. There are also plenty of problems with chamber geometry. The most efficient chamber is a flat disc so after the reactor inside accelerates your propellant it hits the large flat bottom of the reactor chamber and should be decelerated, instead of being efficiently led to the throat by an inverse bell or a funnel like the original NERVA did.

You seem really confident. Can you give me some articles on small nuclear devices? I found out that precise numbers are hard to come by in this case. I have the same issues with miniature nuclear reactors as well, but with their physical properties and criticality.

There was a bug when clusters of MPDs could function perfectly well with power only enough for one of them. I still see designs based on this bug, especially with the renewed interest into strategic propulsion, as it is usually called.

You said " if half of the radiators are gone, chances are that big laser is no longer firing."

I don't agree. You need to kill more than half the radiators on a decent design.



I assume he will be simulating capacitors or compulsators or some other form of energy accumulator.



I was unaware of this. I've deliberately avoided teleportation designs as well ;p



Acceleration from weapon impacts should be negligible on large capships. A direct hit to the missile container tends to cause catastrophic failure (and detonation). Acceleration & stress from loading... okay, I'll give you that. It's not an issue on large drone launchers which have cycle times measured in tens of minutes, but rapid fire missile launchers could damage paper thin nozzles.



Right? Everyone can find "how to build a suitcase nuke" articles on google. /s

Obviously much data is hidden on purpose; but it's hard to hide physics.

As the ability to evenly compress fissile cores rises, peak density rises as well.

The probability for a neutron to hit a nucleus within a unit of distance travelled is directly proportional to the density of the material. Nuclear criticality is inversely proportional to the square of the density. If density increases by 1% and the mass decreases by 2%, then volume has dropped by 3%; the diameter by 1%. As Amimai pointed out, decades ago, it was possible to build sub-50kg devices.



It was fixed, IIRC? Do you need to beat a dead horse with still-active bugs to complain about?

I'm uncertain why you're taking such a hostile tone.

imgur.com/a/82pGa Just my carrier line-up, the Saturn-class holds 2'200'000 drones. If you feel your computer has committed a great crime and needs only the worst punishment, just load this up, hit launch all, and wait.

I don't think I will ever need that much drones. Also, that weak armor will make a bad defense against conventional weapons, not to mention the physics-breaking weapons...
The most I would ever need is about 200-300 railgun drones.