Solar System Organization of Standardization [2017-01-31]

I had found slightly warmer (2500-2600) as optimal, but at that point it is almost personal preference.

Turbopumps/Injectors:

Here's a list of good materials for them, in order of lightest to heaviest. Pick the lightest/cheapest material that the particular application can withstand.
(I have not yet encountered an application that couldn't be satisfied by one of these.)


Optimum rotating speed in reactors is usually somewhere between 400-600 RPM. Too low, and coolant in the pump adds mass. Too high, and bracing adds mass. For different reactors, the optimum is different. (I haven't figured out the factors that move the optimum around within this range.)

Applications other than reactors can use slower rotating speeds, because there is less penalty on large size.



Reaction Wheels:

Here's a list of good materials for them, in order of lightest to heaviest. Pick the lightest/cheapest material that satisfies your desired traverse speed and power draw.
This list is probably not comprehensive, but close.




Engine nozzles:

For low mass and size, it is very important to keep throat radius small, because that controls the scaling of the entire nozzle.

Recommended material: diamond. It has very high thermal conductivity, very low thermal expansion, very high melting point, and high yield strength.
Thus, it will not easily crack from thermal stress, and it will have no difficulty spreading and radiating away its heat.



Resistojets:

Coil material should be Tantalum Hafnium Carbide, not Tantalum Carbide. Higher melting point, no downsides.



Lasers:

You can take all the information from this post to fill the section with.

While Li seems to be the best as far as weight/cost for rotation wheels it's very difficult to get decent speed on low power turrets. So far the best I've found for <1 Mw designs is Magnesium.

I've also got a nuke for you.

6.07 kt 6.26 kc 11.2 kg Screenshot

Thanks randomletters! Added Magnesium and the nuke!

Heya! That's awesome!! Very useful!

I'm trying to think here, but it'd be pretty cool if we could figure out a material ablation rate per MW per s. It's killing my brain and my notebook trying to figure out how to calculate this xD

Material Ablation Rate [cm/s] per Laser Power [MW/m²] for Amorphous Carbon:

Ablation Rate per W _{Amorphous Carbon} = ( 8.333... / 1,397.655 ) * ( cm/s / MW/m² )

Ablation Rate per W _{Amorphous Carbon} = 0.005962129424 * ( m / 100 s ) * ( m² / 1,000 * J / s ) => m³ / 100,000 s * ( J / s ) =>  m³ / 100,000 s * ( J / s )

Ablation Rate per W _{Amorphous Carbon} = 0.005962129424 / 100,000 m³ / J

Ablation Rate per W _{Amorphous Carbon} = 5.9621294 x 10^-8 m³ / J

Apparently? I haven't had physics in several years so I've no idea

Given this value it should be possible to extrapolate ablation rates on different laser intensities, which I'm going to test now

zuthal, haven't been able to give this a deeeep test yet in-game, but is it really linear?

I tried the following with 7 100MW stock laser on a missile with amorphous carbon armor at 1m separation, only the head plate (ie Start: 99%) and varying the thickness. I got these results:


Missile dV      Missile Acc     Armor Thickness         Missile Duration Under Fire     Average Durability per cm of armor
5.03km/s        13.7g           01cm                    05.85s / 10 tries ( 0.585s )    01 cm = 0.585s
4.38km/s        12.5g           05cm                    17.89s / 10 tries ( 1.789s )    05 cm = 0.358s
5.55km/s        14.4g           10cm                    42.69s / 10 tries ( 4.269s )    10 cm = 0.426s


This prolly has a huge error margin and 10 tests is not enough but that's all I've managed to do today

My apologies if I'm disrupting you on the sheet I got excited and wanted to try that out