What information would be required to model an Orion drive?

The NSWR is incredibly unstable - wayyyyyyy too unstable for combat craft when an Orion drive can give you similar performance. A single lucky hit near the engine could destroy your entire propulsion system(the whole ship if you're not lucky). Could be a good idea for long range torpedoes through.

Orion by comparison is safer: a hit to a pulse unit will at worst cause the tnt to detonate unevenly, like a radioactive hand grenade - this is a pain to clean up, but since the warhead will not achieve critical mass, you can handle it with blowout compartments as one would with traditional explosives.
The pusher plate is also a great deal more robust than the NSWR nozzle and can get hit multiple times and maintain functionality.

It's important to note that Orion at least had a (non-nuclear) proof of concept demo, and the science and engineering behind is, at least in part, known.  NSWR is almost entirely theoretical.  It's got a major cool factor, but in the "real world", would any nation ever allow it to be tested?

Concerning the Orion drive, it was very much on the cusp of feasible technologies. Everything is there except for certain aspects about the pulse unit.

Side Note: in game, if you drop nukes behind your craft and detonate them manually, you can actually accelerate your craft that way. However, the efficiency is mediocre, because the detonation is omnidirectional. Also, the energy is transferred via photons rather than mass, which increases exhaust velocity and drops thrust to abysmal levels.


The missing piece was how effective the pulse unit could transfer the energy into the channel filler and then into the propellant. From the papers on Orion that I found, they mentioned pulse unit would effectively channel the propellant into a cigar-shaped plasma jet which is... rather impressive. If you dump 10 million degrees K into a material, it will turn into plasma which will expand in every direction. By my calculations, with Tungsten, 10 million K will yield an exhaust velocity of about 100 km/s (it cools through space to the pusher plate, which is why the exhaust velocity is lower).

The pulse unit is somewhat shaped like a nozzle to contain the plasma, but temperatures as high as 10 million K, the nozzle will have very little effect on the propellant as it leaves the pulse unit. The shape will be less a cigar and more of a giant, sprawling cone at best. And since the nozzle will vaporize in microseconds too, much of the energy will still be emitted spherically anyways.

This goes back to a recurring problem that I've seen crop up a lot with many of these designs. To date, as far as I am aware, no nuclear detonation has ever been contained or controlled within a small container. At 10 million K, no material can withstand a nuclear detonation, and there is no data on how many microseconds something can stay together when a nuke detonates inside it.



Regardless, a giant cone of plasma is still pretty feasible for a drive, providing you're okay with far lower efficiencies than what the papers predicted. I could model the plasma jet as less of a jet and more of a fat cone or hemisphere, and the rest would work.

I am a little iffy on doing original calculations rather than taking calculations from peer reviewed papers. However, I have done it for one particular system in game. The explosive lens on the nuclear devices is completely classified, so the equations governing it's implosion is approximated based on various sources. I could do something similar in this case.



With all that in mind, implementing the Orion drive is something I have mulled over a lot over the last two years working on this project. I will say that it will not be in the base game when it ships, however if I ever do further post-ship updates/patches/content, the Orion drive would be very high on the priority list.

Sure thing, PM sent.

Absolutely, I think this issue was one of the reasons why the Medusa was developed. The engineers must have realized how wasteful the Orion was. With a full hemisphere sized Medusa drive, you could achieve 50% efficiency at least.