[Spaceships] A Few Questions

[Daigoro]

Originally Posted by Daigoro

Armour's not obligatory. As per SSp10, unarmoured sections have DR2/dDR0 (DR3 if streamlined).

Thinking about it, this seems incredibly low. DR2 is leather armour. Even a car has DR4, though I'd have thought that should be the DR7 of 1/8th inch of steel.

Perhaps give DR10/dDR1 as the baseline of spaceship structural integrity, then armour adds on top of that.

Also, I imagine that realistically the orbit of a gas giant would have a fairly large amount of rocky debris, so you'd need armour for random meteorite hits.

[scc]

Originally Posted by Daigoro

Also, I imagine that realistically the orbit of a gas giant would have a fairly large amount of rocky debris, so you'd need armour for random meteorite hits.

That's a good point, but any armor used in a situation like isn't going to be plate steel (which I'm currently using) but rather some sort of foam or something that even cheaper to replace, the increased depth would also be incredibly useful to prevent damage.

[Daigoro]

TL6 suggests cotton-waste wadding to me.

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

Winged or not, reentry shielding only needs to be on one face. How you model that in basic Spaceships design if the face is the 'bottom' rather than the nose or tail is of course a thing.

You decide if that's better represented by DR on the front or the centre, and armour that section. Spaceships is fairly abstract. Many such re-entry shields should be part of a soft-landing system rather than being actual armour, too.

[scc]

Originally Posted by Daigoro

TL6 suggests cotton-waste wadding to me.

As the stuffing in a quilt that might work. Only problem is that as shipping is normally insane (or should be) the quilts (or whatever) would have to come from a colony, which creates a minor problem as I figure that upbound cargo already outweighs downdown there.

[dcarson]

The Saturn V used kerosene in the first stage because pumps work by volume not mass. So you can pump and burn a larger mass of kerosene then hydrogen.

[Michael Thayne]

Originally Posted by Rupert

You decide if that's better represented by DR on the front or the centre, and armour that section. Spaceships is fairly abstract. Many such re-entry shields should be part of a soft-landing system rather than being actual armour, too.

A soft landing system represents an ablative heat shield. This doesn't really work for spaceplanes because ablation would screw up their aerodynamics on reentry. Also, I checked and the space shuttle's thermal protection system was about 8-9% of the orbiter's weight on liftoff. Maybe could be represented with two armor systems?

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by Michael Thayne

A soft landing system represents an ablative heat shield. This doesn't really work for spaceplanes because ablation would screw up their aerodynamics on reentry. Also, I checked and the space shuttle's thermal protection system was about 8-9% of the orbiter's weight on liftoff. Maybe could be represented with two armor systems?

In what sense is the shuttle's system non-ablative?

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

In what sense is the shuttle's system non-ablative?

In that it didn't ablate.

Ceraic tiles, thermal balnkets , reinforced carbon-carbon panels, none of them dwindled away during use. They could be damaged but this was not a normal (much less good) thing.

Apolo and earlier capsules used ablative heat shields.