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Post by Pttg on Nov 16, 2018 6:13:53 GMT
Anytime you've trimmed the cost of the vehicle down to less than the cost of the crew, you're doing something impressive. Also I like that you're pulling off 1.3 gs and 8.5km/s. I might say that engine might be over-engineered if anything...
I also like your radiator positioning. Despite the bargan-basement cost, you've at least made it hard for lasers to snipe your cooling.
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Post by Pttg on Nov 13, 2018 8:34:53 GMT
If mass isn't an issue but cost is then laserstars with low 4.3% efficiency lasers and calcium radiators will win yes? Do we have a limit on fissile materials for reactors and ntr's? Do we have a limit on mass? I'm judging this one with the soft restriction that it needs to be plausible in the setting, so nuclear reactors are OK, but they probably need to be either low-enrichment or low-mass. Also, I'm thinking of updating the OP to add a clause that will make that budget proportionately smaller...
Bigbombr, that looks quite good, but I realize now that the budget is way too high for this starting scenario, so that's probably going to need serious refactoring.
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Post by Pttg on Nov 13, 2018 3:52:43 GMT
Wealthy plastics magnate Hui Chia has decided to play privateer. She's put out quiet contacts to a number of shipyards to express her interest in purchasing a number of light combat warships designed for purchase by her newly-formed PMC, Star Strategic Synergies, or S3. While true space piracy is a bad deal, a PMC that focuses on distributing small forces near points of interest and renting out firepower as an instant force multiplier has, in her opinion, promise. Throw in salvage rights and S3 has the possibility of becoming a valuable property in this war-torn system.
As a non-governmental military force, the PMC has no nuclear warheads. Additionally, conscription is not an option, so each crew member costs 200k credits. Your budget is 200M credits total.
Additionally, extra weight will be given to designs that feature unconventional tactics of any kind. A small force needs creative and flexible.
Materials used should be sane -- no running water through lithium radiators, for instance.
EDIT: Reduced budget from 500M to 200M, representing the fact that the PMC plans to launch at least two separate ships to start, and wants to have budget left over for administration, maintenance crews and facilities, and so on.
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Post by Pttg on Nov 11, 2018 0:33:46 GMT
Fun thing about this is we can have challenges like, "An eccentric trade magnate wants you to design a fleet of PMC warships. Your budget is 200M¢, but because you can't conscript people, you must pay 200k¢ per crewman. Since this is a non-governmental ship, nuclear warheads are forbidden."
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Post by Pttg on Oct 30, 2018 21:25:42 GMT
Build the flywheels to be freely rotating inside the ship.
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Post by Pttg on Oct 30, 2018 7:33:36 GMT
In order to better estimate the longstanding question "how much is a credit worth," I decided to figure out what salaries probably look like in the CoaDE universe. For this, I'll use ¢ as the unit name for credits, and SI modifiers.
Let's start with the bare-minimum number. This is exceedingly low: 0-credit slavery, minus 0.21¢ per day for oxygen (based on material cost), 4.3¢ per day for water (water rental, really), and a varying cost for food, but probably in the 40¢/day range for daily food. That last number is taken by using the credit cost of a biomanufactured organic compound, specifically spider silk.
Yes, getting conscripted would suck awfully, but if the alternative is death, many people would just struggle through, accumulate debt, and just hope to get back home before getting irradiated or evacuated. Still, we'd probably see more mutinies if the conscripts were janissaries. It's safe to say that the lowest possible salary is something like -44.5¢/day, or -16,209.15¢/year. We can also take 16k¢ as the bare minimum cost of life support for a year, not counting ablative radiation shielding and other incidental consumables.
Alternatively, the non-structural elements of a crew module come out to 9.5k¢. Almost all of that is internal "aluminum" which represents electronics, heat management, and such, but since that is all rentable, repairable, and bare-minimum mil-spec essential hardware, I feel safe in including it in the costs. Since the minimum mission spec is six months, then the annual cost is something like 18k¢, close enough to my other figure for me to say OK. I'll point out the 16k¢ number comes from buying a year's supply of consumables all at once, with no machinery. the 18k¢ number is buying a coffinfull of air, a glass of water, and a meal, plus enough equipment and spare parts to keep re-using those three things for a year. The fact they're so close despite using very different methods makes me pretty comfortable with the numbers.
If the society is stable at this point, than at least civilians are paid enough to stay alive without going into comical mega-poverty over a lifetime. So they're getting paid bare-minimum 15k¢/year (presuming they live in hyper-dense complexes with better efficiency than spaceships through scale alone).
Let's call 15k¢/year our minimum wage. Using contemporary data to compare salary ratios.... Low-skill cleaning jobs and food prep workers, plus a few other tasks where the job description is "be like a velvet rope, but slightly less effective at keeping drunk patrons in line," are all the lowest-paid jobs in the highly-automated modern USA. Spaceflight may change that a little but when times are tough, these jobs are going to pay the minimum survivable wage, which is something like 15k¢ in the poorest habitats but higher in better ones. If habitats vary the same way countries do, then very wealthy habitats may offer minimum wages 1500% those of the very poorest.
That's where things get interesting. Let's pick a middle-of-the-pack habitat and say that an unskilled worker there can expect five times the rental-coffin cost of living. A manufacturing worker such as an assembler or something can expect about 150% of the pay of a nonskilled worker, or 112.5k¢/year. This is the guy who does manufacturing work that probably could be automated but isn't because it's not cost effective to do so, like assembly of small electronics after soldering and forming.
Let's go a little higher up. A dispatcher for emergency services is a reasonable job to preserve even in a highly-automated future (which this is only marginally). They're probably paid something like 150k¢/year in this middling hab, as are all the civilian maintenence workers for a lot of our ships. Not our nuclear techs or weapons techs, though... Nuke techs pull in something like 300k¢/year, as do civilian captains and other high-ranking civilian crew. That's nothing next to a skilled surgeon, though. A proper expert surgeon in our middle-wealth habitat can get over 900k¢/year, and in the most wealthy habitats they'd be making more than 2.5M¢!
Even if that average surgeon at a wealthy colony is spending half his money in taxes to fund his military defense and half of the remainder on a comfortable cost of living (giving him 46 times the space, resources, and technology needed for bare tin-can survival,) he can save up enough to buy a gunskiff outright in about 11 years.
That sort of calculation goes out the window when you start running into megawealthy individuals. It's a complicated issue I'll resolve by ignoring a bunch of things and saying that the average modern billionare has an income of about $80M, which is more an annual allowance but whatever. That converts to 225M¢. Surely half of that goes into maintaining an adequate lifestyle, but that means he or she must merely choose between buying a Corvette or a Laser Frigate this year, or maybe assembling a pirate fleet of three Corsairs.
Of course, none of that accounts for the crew salaries. At ~225k¢ for an Able Spaceman (from a wealthy hab) on a six-month cruise, only your Bill Gateses and Koches will be mounting very large privateer fleets. It's after midnight right now but rough estimate, a corsair's crew costs about 17M¢/Year. Not outlandish, but certainly not worth ignoring.
My takeaway is that spending 10M¢ to protect the habitat holding 20M¢ worth of brains and hands is actually a good investment. Any ship that costs less than its crew compliment is, on the other hand, a waste of money.
Oh, and converting credits to dollars is not really meaningful but if you're comparing apples to pears you can say very roughly that 10¢=$1.
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Post by Pttg on Oct 21, 2018 17:57:29 GMT
MPDs use electric power, so make sure you have enough to power all of them simultaneously (the game doesn't warn you if it can only power one at a time).
As for designing them, it's finicky. I still haven't mastered them.
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Post by Pttg on Oct 2, 2018 17:05:42 GMT
I think the point of the crews is that trivial events and damage are repaired live, and thus can be abstracted out. Otherwise, really these ships aught to be all automated.
Totally agree that the simulation should assume small variations during normal operation, though. Reactors need to have a little more clearance around safe operating temps....
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Post by Pttg on Oct 2, 2018 6:25:50 GMT
Selling it as DLC also opens it up to be more speculative. People who want sourced and precise stuff can stick to the base game. People who buy a DLC are saying they're willing to use best-guess stats.
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Post by Pttg on Sept 28, 2018 17:29:45 GMT
I think I've seen the same problem in my designs. Looks like your design should be sufficient to duplicate the problem.
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Post by Pttg on Sept 24, 2018 5:04:40 GMT
I've reproduced the issue by detonating any warhead while paused and remaining focused on the missile. The vessel that you jump to is subject to the teleporting explosion.
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Post by Pttg on Sept 9, 2018 22:38:58 GMT
Amorphous Carbon would probably be your best bet. Maybe carbon-carbon for the "realistic materials" cred.
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Post by Pttg on Sept 4, 2018 21:14:03 GMT
I figured that was pretty clear. Ethane happens to be a decent prop for tiny, tiny NTRs.
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Post by Pttg on Sept 4, 2018 18:29:44 GMT
Be sure you're using a good moderator as a coolant, and probably boron nitride for the control rods, and you don't need any hardware moderator. I like ethane, myself.
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Post by Pttg on Aug 30, 2018 9:01:17 GMT
This is the opposite of the old challenge I started with big ships... For this challenge, make a manned warship under 750 tons fully loaded. Pretend that it's being built on Earth and you only have a dozen falcon heavies to use to get it in orbit.
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