Post your designs here!

In thermal rockets it is very similar to water. Higher thrust, lower velocity, denser.

In combustion rockets it's faster than methane, has more thrust than RP-1, and is more dense than water. Pretty amazing. The only drawback is that it burns hotter.

Oh sorry no, I meant compared to LOX-methane, it's worse than fluorine-methane in thrust/velocity.

We could always make a fluorine-cubane though...

Yeah that's the problem, most of these reactions don't have data on them, or they're hidden behind peer-reviewed paywalls.

coaxjack , dragonkid11 CO2 is 1600kg/m3 dense and 1.48c/kg in price vs cubane which is 1300kg/m3 and 2.68c/kg, so probably something like that.

Here's the rest of the things, let me know where the optimization differences lay.



EDIT FYI, that railgun sux, I'm no good at designing either railguns or coilguns because my game gets too laggy to enjoy, just tried to mimic coaxjack's drone, I should check what I can do with a conventional cannon instead.

Anyone have any extremely small yet efficient & effective weapon? (Is there a word for efficient & effective??)

The CO2 copy parts are relatively similar, the difference between the two drones really come down to minute design choices. I spent a few minutes upgrading the reactor and railgun to fit in the same form factor:




And the Slugger engine for reference:

Ninja'd

I updated to a single tank, though didn't change things much, mostly a performance improvement. I had to use 20 for form factor to fit it though, lol.

coaxjack , interesting that you used Titanium Nitride for control rods, what experience have you had with those?

What about Ethane for the outer coolant? I thought the only reason not to use Sodium is on the inner loops of reactors for use as a moderator.

Is your gun accurate? Mine was not. At all

I love how there are so many minute variations that there can take place to make very similar designs DIFFERENT. Beautiful.

One thing I did not realize until today is that I don't NEED to use 97% enrichment, lol, I can probably optimize the reactor more by tweaking that down.

EDIT David367th, your 18mm sounds too big for these drones, how much does it weigh?

Microdrones are useful if you can get a few hundred/thousand into range, and are cheaper than nukes. However, a nuke or two can pop an entire drone swarm that would be necessary to saturate laser defenses, and they're more expensive than missiles. I'm a bit dubious on their utility, to be honest.