Warringer Posted July 11, 2011 Share Posted July 11, 2011 I thought it would be fun to add a nice nuclear engine to the game.So I made one based on the liquid engine.I do wonder where Jeb managed to acquire the nuclear material needed for the engine...Pros:It has a higher thrust then the liquid engineIt has a higher temperature toleranceIt needs lesser fuelCons:Its a princess and likes to messily explodeIts runs rather hotIt weight more then the normal liquid engineIt can't be turned off completely. Due to engine design there has to be fuel flowing through it to cool it down.Trying it out a first stage with SAS and a single tank was able to get me past the atmosphere and about half the way to escape velocity.A two tank nuclear stage with liquid upper stage got me into orbit.Might need some modification... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Psyckosama Posted July 11, 2011 Share Posted July 11, 2011 Needs a higher probability of violent explosion Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Warringer Posted July 11, 2011 Author Share Posted July 11, 2011 True. But too low and it is unusable. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Psyckosama Posted July 11, 2011 Share Posted July 11, 2011 True. But too low and it is unusable.It's nuclear. It should be unstable as all hell and when it explodes it should EXPLODE ;D Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
frosty113 Posted July 11, 2011 Share Posted July 11, 2011 Nice engine man its fun to use Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Soldats Posted July 11, 2011 Share Posted July 11, 2011 Nice engine man its fun to uselol why is it that every time you add radioactivity to something people think it should explode? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Psyckosama Posted July 12, 2011 Share Posted July 12, 2011 lol why is it that every time you add radioactivity to something people think it should explode?Because only a lunatic would trust the Kerbal with Nuclear-Thermal Rocket? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pariah Posted July 12, 2011 Share Posted July 12, 2011 Question: How does a nuclear engine accept liquid fuel? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
duk3luk3 Posted July 12, 2011 Share Posted July 12, 2011 Hydrogen is excellent nuclear fuel. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pariah Posted July 12, 2011 Share Posted July 12, 2011 Hydrogen is excellent nuclear fuel.Well I am sure the heat generated could combust the fuel? But surely that's not how a real nuclear engine would work. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Psyckosama Posted July 12, 2011 Share Posted July 12, 2011 Well I am sure the heat generated could combust the fuel? But surely that's not how a real nuclear engine would work.Here, let me check... ;D Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pariah Posted July 12, 2011 Share Posted July 12, 2011 Not understanding what I am saying here. Scientist have been theorizing that true nuclear propulsion can get us really far into space really fast. No way could this technology be it, but at least this part makes sense to me. I was just expecting something else, something more technologically advanced. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
duk3luk3 Posted July 12, 2011 Share Posted July 12, 2011 Well, it's just a tweaked liquid fuel engine - it's a bit of a joke essentially. I'm sure there will be exciting new propulsion methods added to the game - photon drive! solar sails! - you just can't do those with pure cfg modding. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sunday Punch Posted July 12, 2011 Share Posted July 12, 2011 'Nuclear Engine' is a very general term. It could be anything from a nuclear thermal rocket (actual hardware built and tested), an Orion-type nuclear pulse system (extensive R&D work completed, no hardware), an inertial confinement fusion drive (like Project Daedalus, some research performed) to a magnetic confinement hydrogen-hydrogen fusion drive (basically science fiction at our current technology level). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
EatThePath Posted July 12, 2011 Share Posted July 12, 2011 Or the completely hypothetical as far as I know, completely bonkers, completely awesome, nuclear salt-water rocket. Now thats a beautiful idea. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sunday Punch Posted July 12, 2011 Share Posted July 12, 2011 Or the completely hypothetical as far as I know, completely bonkers, completely awesome, nuclear salt-water rocket. Now thats a beautiful idea.Riding a continuously-detonating atomic bomb would certainly be exciting at least. You might want to avoid the highly radioactive exhaust though! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Soldats Posted July 12, 2011 Share Posted July 12, 2011 Because only a lunatic would trust the Kerbal with Nuclear-Thermal Rocket?Hey to their credit its not really the kerbal hardware that is the issue it seems to be just how they design their rockets.... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Warringer Posted July 12, 2011 Author Share Posted July 12, 2011 A new version (the final I guess) can be found in the new 'Projects and Releases' forum.It has some tweaks of the engine, such as being more likely to overheat, and being as fragile as possible without being unusable. Actually the value for that was set to '1' instead of '0', because at '0' it would explode from sitting on the launchpad or being separated from a lower stage... As for the engine design, its a simple solid core nuclear thermal engine using hydrogen and propellant and uranium or plutonium or both as fuel.With Jeb you never know... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ultimuh Posted July 12, 2011 Share Posted July 12, 2011 At any rate, I think it needs a more nuclearish explosion. ;D Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cjameshuff Posted July 13, 2011 Share Posted July 13, 2011 Not understanding what I am saying here. Scientist have been theorizing that true nuclear propulsion can get us really far into space really fast. No way could this technology be it, but at least this part makes sense to me. I was just expecting something else, something more technologically advanced.And practically all of those nuclear rockets use liquid fuel. The only exceptions are a few variants that use explosive propulsion charges, and oddball things like fission fragment reactors. The power source is nuclear, but you still need reaction mass, and that's generally going to be a tank of liquid.'Nuclear Engine' is a very general term. It could be anything from a nuclear thermal rocket (actual hardware built and tested), an Orion-type nuclear pulse system (extensive R&D work completed, no hardware), an inertial confinement fusion drive (like Project Daedalus, some research performed) to a magnetic confinement hydrogen-hydrogen fusion drive (basically science fiction at our current technology level).Actually, magnetic containment D-T fusion drives could be built with relatively minor developments of the plasma drives being developed now. The problem with fusion power is producing more power than the fusion reactor consumes...a propulsion system doesn't need to produce net power, a fusion drive could achieve better performance than a plain plasma drive even if it takes a fission reactor to run the thing.On the subject of nightmare drives, a while back I developed a concept for making NSWRs a bit safer by adding antimatter to the mix. The idea is that the tank full of highly enriched liquid propellant just waiting to go prompt supercritical is unnecessary if you have a neutron source to keep starting new chain reactions, so nest an antimatter-catalyzed fusion rocket in the middle of the NSWR as a neutron source and use less-enriched propellant. Only tiny amounts of antimatter would be needed to produce the neutron-generating reaction, and the big tank is filled with something significantly less terrifying.Admittedly, the justification came later, I just wanted an antimatter-catalyzed-fusion-boosted-nuclear-saltwater rocket. If ACFBNSWR's too unwieldy, he name 'cascade drive' seemed popular in the IRC channel where I mentioned it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ijuin Posted July 13, 2011 Share Posted July 13, 2011 Having a nuclear engine is a neat idea, but rather than making it both higher-thrust and higher-fuel-efficiency than the standard liquid engine, I would rather it be lower-thrust and higher-efficiency (e.g. half the thrust but four times the efficiency), reflecting how nuclear-thermal rockets work in our world. That would mean that you would need boosters to lift off, but you would gain the high fuel efficiency for your core stage. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Glushko Posted July 13, 2011 Share Posted July 13, 2011 Question: How does a nuclear engine accept liquid fuel?Nuclear thermal rockets use pretty much whatever working fluid you want. Water, ammonia, hydrogen... IRL NTR designs are low-thrust/high ISP due to the mass of the reactor. This is why the majority of nuclear thermal rockets intended for launch vehicles are used to drive the upper stages. You can also dump liquid oxygen into the exhaust for a nice afterburner effect - more thrust but it halves your ISP.Actually, magnetic containment D-T fusion drives could be built with relatively minor developments of the plasma drives being developed now. The problem with fusion power is producing more power than the fusion reactor consumes...a propulsion system doesn't need to produce net power, a fusion drive could achieve better performance than a plain plasma drive even if it takes a fission reactor to run the thing.That is a really optimistic view. VASIMR is a complete power hog - which is why the fast mission reference design uses a gas core reactor for power. D-T fusion is gonna take more then the hundred kW power draw they needed to bust out the exotic nuclear engineering for.Plus you have to deal with the neutrons. Cue embrittlement, activation, and fitting additional shielding into your payload mass. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cjameshuff Posted July 13, 2011 Share Posted July 13, 2011 That is a really optimistic view. VASIMR is a complete power hog - which is why the fast mission reference design uses a gas core reactor for power. D-T fusion is gonna take more then the hundred kW power draw they needed to bust out the exotic nuclear engineering for.Any high-Isp, high-thrust drive is going to be a power hog, simply because of P = m*v and E = 0.5*m*v^2. I think it's optimistic to use VASIMR for fast missions at all, it's good for long ones with high total mission delta-v...say, an asteroid surveyor like a extended and expanded Dawn, or a mission to an Oort cloud object, or perhaps for things like orbit maintenance.As for the neutron issues...embrittlement is a rather bigger problem for earthbound fusion power reactors that will have to produce very high reaction rates while supporting a large vacuum chamber against atmospheric pressure and all the equipment around it. It's an issue for spacecraft drives, but nowhere near as big a one. And neutron activation is much less of an issue when it's never going to go anywhere near a human again. We also have a fair bit of knowledge about how to deal with both issues due to our existing fission reactors, though the neutron energies will be a bit different, and both are less of a problem when spread out over time...atomic dislocations can be annealed out if parts get hot enough (something we have to deal with in fission reactors using graphite...Wigner effect), and short lived radioactive isotopes resulting from neutron absorption decay. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Glushko Posted July 14, 2011 Share Posted July 14, 2011 As for the neutron issues...embrittlement is a rather bigger problem for earthbound fusion power reactors that will have to produce very high reaction rates while supporting a large vacuum chamber against atmospheric pressure and all the equipment around it. It's an issue for spacecraft drives, but nowhere near as big a one. And neutron activation is much less of an issue when it's never going to go anywhere near a human again. We also have a fair bit of knowledge about how to deal with both issues due to our existing fission reactors, though the neutron energies will be a bit different, and both are less of a problem when spread out over time...atomic dislocations can be annealed out if parts get hot enough (something we have to deal with in fission reactors using graphite...Wigner effect), and short lived radioactive isotopes resulting from neutron absorption decay.I actually agree with you - Karl Schroeder actually had a piece about the advantages of a fusion reactor in space. My concern here is that material science developments were a factor in the documents on fusion drives I pulled off the NASA technical reports server - and the need for robust cryogenic stuff. It's gonna take significant work with reactors on the ground (trying real hard to not be biased with magnetic confinement configurations, I'm partial to Spheromaks). I don't see how a non-break even/high k value fusion system is going to be any better then a VASIMR running off of beamed power. The T/W should be superior, no neutrons to worry about, and it is higher on the TRL scheme. Granted I'm just totally mad about inertial/MTF pulse systems so it could just be my bias. And beamed propulsion - I do love my beamed propulsion. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Johno Posted July 15, 2011 Share Posted July 15, 2011 Nothing bonkers about the NSWR - just so long as thrust begins above 35km! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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