10-28-2015, 03:52 PM | #21 | |
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Re: [Spaceships] Perpetual Motion?
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Reliability, commonality/cost of fuel, radiation/toxic dangers, complexity, hassle of maintenance, etc.
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10-28-2015, 04:40 PM | #22 | |
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Re: [Spaceships] Perpetual Motion?
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As example quite many of the warships in the SS series have two reactors. Being able to reduce that to one or less would be a tremendous boost for many of them. In addition the higher TL ones with force screens could run with the improved DR always in combat. Basically at minimum a ship with a reactionless drive has 6 modules: 3 armor, 1 control, 1 drive, 1 reactor, leaving 14 modules for other stuff. Thus a reduction in power density where you can reduce one module you get 7% more capacity, if you can reduce two you get almost 15% increase. |
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10-28-2015, 05:34 PM | #23 |
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Re: [Spaceships] Perpetual Motion?
Technically, unless travelling at reasonable percentage of C, or through atomsphere, spaceships don't need any armor.
Control modules can be smaller than a full 5% if you don't mind it steering like a drunk whale. Power Plants are only necessary if you have energy hungry modules like energy weapons, shields, or most reactionless drives. I understand why energy density is important for militaries. But the differences between most fusion and fission designs isn't that, except for types that can do away with shielding. Antimatter plants seem more like light superscience to me, especially since they don't seem to include shielding.
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10-28-2015, 08:23 PM | #24 | |||||
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Re: [Spaceships] Perpetual Motion?
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Military need in this context being actual conflict instead of long peacetime space navy that might indeed see serviceability as goal #1. Quote:
Shielding is really a smaller thing as most envisioned technologies for such actually also work as at least partial shielding, reducing the need for physical shielding considerably or totally. |
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10-29-2015, 08:49 AM | #25 | |||
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Re: [Spaceships] Perpetual Motion?
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10-29-2015, 08:56 AM | #26 | ||
Join Date: Jul 2008
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Re: [Spaceships] Perpetual Motion?
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Converting between Power Points and Power Cells/time is actually very doable by way of the beam weapon design article. Quote:
The issue is how efficiently you can contain antimatter. If your containment is several orders of magnitude heavier than the material contained, you're losing a lot off the theoretical density advantage of antimatter. (Though the relatively short endurance of AM reactors in Spaceships suggests that it's not extending that advantage anyway.)
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10-29-2015, 09:12 AM | #27 | |
Join Date: Jun 2013
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Re: [Spaceships] Perpetual Motion?
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Solar TL7 TL8 TL9 TL10 PP 1 1 1 1 kW/ton 1 2 5 10 Fuel Cell TL7 TL8 TL9 TL10 PP (endurance) 1 (3h) 1 (6h) 1 (12h) 1 (24h) kW/ton (end) 5 (4h) 10 (4h) 20 (4h) 20 (8h) Fission TL8 TL9 TL10 PP (end) 1 (25y) 1 (50y) 1 (100y) kW/ton (2y) 15 30 100 *Under my system, refueling the reactor is only 10% of the initial cost. Long-endurance reactors are also available, which have 1/3rd normal output but a 100 year endurance and cost 50% to refuel. Fusion TL9 TL10 TL11 TL12 PP (end) 2 (50) 2 (200) 2 (600) 2 (1200) kW/ton (200y) 100 200 500 500 From weapons, 1 PP for SM+5 can power a 10 MJ weapon indefinitely. As this weapon only fires every 20 seconds, that's 500 kW. An SM+5 vessel weighs 30 tons, so you're looking at around 1 PP = 15 kW/ton. Of course, that's output, where you're going to see some efficiency drops. The minimum here is actually 1 PP = 30 kW/ton, assuming the Improved versions of beam weapons have close to 100% efficiency. From a refinery, 1 PP for SM+5 can process 0.5 tons of water into rocket fuel every hour. Hydrogen has a heat of combustion of 141.8 MJ/kg (HHV); as there are around 907.185 kg/ton, that means we're dealing with around 600 kW/ton. Again, this is output, so there should be some efficiency losses along the way. This also helps demonstrate why the rate at which the refinery produces rocket fuel is probably broken - by the above, you'd need around 3 fusion reactors to run that thing! Using the SS7 fix, with hours replaced by days, results in around 25 kW/ton, which is pretty close to the output of Improved beam weapons, above. Last edited by Varyon; 10-29-2015 at 09:15 AM. |
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10-29-2015, 03:43 PM | #28 | |
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Re: [Spaceships] Perpetual Motion?
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Antimatter is nice for how simple it is to explain to us laymen. But I doubt it will ever be used for energy storage in our universe or reasonable hard science fiction setting.
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10-29-2015, 04:02 PM | #29 | |
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Re: [Spaceships] Perpetual Motion?
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Trap" which I believe holds about 100,000 anti-protons.
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10-29-2015, 05:05 PM | #30 | |
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Re: [Spaceships] Perpetual Motion?
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The issue with Power Points is that none of the outputs would agree with each other for previously stated reasons. They're so specialized for adventure and play balance amongst themselves that they simply won't work with real numbers ascribed. At least not without heavy adjustment. Of course, I'm fine with such adjustment. Some technologies should be orders of magnitude better than others. Some, like mass drivers and solar arrays, really do suck compared to every other usable form in the same category. They're niche techs that work for very specific settings.
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