Nuke

i actually rather like the rail-rocket approach, the missile is a fully guided warhead with enough delta-v to make minor course corrections en route to target. it is however launched from a big honking rail gun (or perhaps gauss, not sure which is better on power usage and dealing with waste heat) so that it may reduce the close in time (and thus the reduce deltav needed to stay on target), and increase the ke of the projectile. just because the idea is ripped from star trek, doesn't mean its not a good idea.

this is what i like to call the iter yardstick. you take a well understood design, the tokamak, which is also one of the most complicated and expensive reactors to construct. then you create a plan for a prototype reactor that will take a 50 year 2-stage multi billion dollar research program which does not result in a commercial design, and even if it does it will be so expensive that no one could afford to build one. then you use this as the yardstick by which to measure every other reactor concept. this just perpetuates that silly notion that fusion is always 50 years away. fusion is however many years away it is. even though i think the results will actually work, i dont think its the best use of research funds because the end result is less economically desirable than fission plants that we already know how to build. id rather fund all the small fusion concepts that show promise (dont fund quack science) and economic feasibility, than stick all my eggs into one very expensive basket.

the only example i could find was the german RMK30, a 30mm recoiless autocannon. more info here, but its in german.

emcc gives the cost to develop a 100MW demo polywell reactor at 200m and will only take 4 years. there are no intermediate test reactors that need to be funded, unlike iter which needs to do 20 years of construction+science with the iter reactor before building their demo reactor. i dont really follow focus fusion (its too far embedded in the green movement, which makes articles on the reactor itself rather unpleasant to read). focus fusion seems to be in a similar boat. thing is if we fund both of them, it will still be cheaper than funding iter. both are relatively small reactors and this leads to much faster build -> test -> analysis cycle.

if i owned an electric car and needed to do a long range trip with the thing, what id do is stick a small gas generator in the trunk for recharging at rest stops. sort of like a makeshift hybrid. when im not driving long ranges, the genny goes in the shed and i would recharge from the grid. most of your driving will be daily commute kinda stuff. you dont take vacations every week, so most of the time the range capability isn't needed.

thing is we get power from a hodgepodge of sources. here its almost exclusively hydro power (rainfall that makes seattle look dry, mountainous terrain, prime dam territory) with some backup from fuel oil generators, electric cars are somewhat popular here. i would stick to gas in locations where a large fraction of power is coal based. then comes the question, why not just use gasoline power plants? you can bring the effitiency way up with turbine powered generators, you can better collect and utilize waste heat. there are lots of things you can do in a power plant that you cant do in an engine block.

i dont think a sabot would be neccisary in space. you usually use them where you have a finned projectile designed for atmospheric use. there is no air resistance, so using a wider, shorter shell is less of an issue. i would also use a recoilless design where the end of the barrel is open and counter mass is expelled to reduce the overall recoil of the cannon. your round is essentially a tube, with a shell coming out of one end and a wad of counter mass, usually compressed wad of metal foil at the other end, and two or more times the usual powder charge. the foil is of a metal with a low vapor point, it vaporizes on its way out the back end, while the shell goes in the other direction. this is to minimize the damage zone behind the gun.

electric makes more sense than hydrogen. its better to leave power generation to the industrial plants where efficiency can be maximized and pollution can be minimized (or eliminated). you also dont need to carry the weight of your power plant around with you everywhere you go. using hydrogen as energy storage is less efficient, it takes a lot of energy to make it, and then you burn it in an internal combustion engine, where you only get about 25% efficiency (and thats after the process of creating and storing the hydrogen).

i would just have centralized hot water near fusion plants. that heat still winds up in the environment, but at least you are putting it to good use before it gets there, and the people using it wont need to use so much electricity to heat water.

id say the "worth watching once" category is different from "classic" or "good" categories. it contains good movies, horrible movies, new movies, old movies, etc. star trek: tmp is also one of those worth watching once kind of movies. it was long and drawn out, it seemed to crawl. but its effects were pretty good for '79, and its not the worst trek movie (points at nemesis).

its one of those movies thats worth watching. once. its not one of those ones you can watch over and over again. some movies are just like that. doesn't mean its not a great movie though.

many polywell proponents usually focus on d-d or p-b11 as the optimal fuels for the reactor. the d-d reactor would need a heat engine. robert bussard pointed out in his that you would initially have a d-d reactor that could just be retrofitted to existing coal fire plants. i dont even consider he3 a valid fuel supply until we have much better space infrastructure (which likely depends on us having fusion). he3 isnt the magic fuel everyone makes it out to be, its just another option among many.direct conversion reactors are sexy for space applications. you need much less radiator area, which reduces your ship's mass. but i think you are better off with a power reactor running electric engines, because you now have energy for life support, hydroponics, active radiation shielding, centrifuges, and isru while landed. in other words a reusable space bus.

i was more pointing out that i dont consider humans civilized at all, and i doubt that other life forms in the universe would be any different. hence 'lots of barbarians'. frankly, humans still act like monkeys, monkeys that have gone to the moon, but still monkeys. we are not as civilized as we think we are. our social structures still closely resemble the natural pecking order of your typical monkey troupe. the only difference is a matter of scale, and possibly our tools being slightly more advanced. it also makes things interesting in a first contact scenario.

even in a direct conversion reactor you still have heat to deal with. coolant needs to go through heat exchangers. its not your primary energy source, but you might as well recover what energy you can. perhaps you can run it into a molten salt heat storage tank, so you can use it to restart the reactor should it decide to stop reacting, rather than drawing power for ignition from the grid. it was less making fun of thermodynamicists and more taking a jab at tokamak proponents.

i think polywells with direct conversion would run steady state only needing dc-dc converter between the output and the input (for the coils at least, electron and ion guns would need their own power supplies). dc-dc converters usually have efficiencies higher than 90%. im assuming confinement is the lions share of the power requirements here. crude heat machines are for tokamak people.

even if you loose magnetic confinement or whatever, you still have the vacuum chamber. loosing confinement still results in negative pressure with respect to the outside environment.

Issue 3: what does implementing the feature do for the game? unless you do it all the way, the answer is nothing. there might be diamonds there but you can neither get them nor are they any use to you when you do. if you do go all the way, you cross into the territory of completely changing the mechanic of the game, but it can be fun to have more rocks to screw around on when you get there (several months at fastest warp, unless you cheat, oh crap, i broke my descent engine).

we cant stop cold turkey because that will cripple the economy that funds things like research into better fission, fusion, renewable, more efficient technology and so on. it would be nice if those things got more money though.

im quite fond of the p-b11 reaction, which uses regular run of the mill hydrogen, and regular run of the mill boron, both earthly abundant and with no neutrons. of course i have a feeling all first gen reactors will be of the d-d or d-t types. this will make the hippies very angry and they will want to ban fusion. we will go through a period like what we are in now with fission where fear mongering results in no power plants being built. instead, continued death by carbon will promptly ensue. until we start to run out in which case we will use the last of our energy on wars. the survivors will be promptly hit by an asteroid 3 decades later, due to being unable to fund a deflection mission.

its a licensing thing. natural point's interface is closed source, to use it you need to sign an nda and the resulting code must be closed. that doesn't fly with squad's plugin release guidelines. however freespace 2 uses the natural point interface through a closed source dll to wrap it into the open source freespace engine. now the contents of the dll is strictly closed source, but the interface to it is in freespace's code, which is available (this is in 'trackirpublic.h' i think, its easy to get lost in that code base).

we dont get many gators up here. ive seen one some 20 years ago, in a pet store.

they are related because you want one, you need the other. why generate a solar system you can never get to? or why have interstellar propulsion and not have anywhere to go? id even argue that you would need additional features like stock isru and off planet construction to make it playable. its one of those features that opens a can of worms, and if you dont address that the game looks incomplete and squad would have wasted dev time on something that will likely never be used. game reviewers ridicule that kind of thing. to be fair there are mods for everything in that can of worms, but thats not the point. if you implement procedural galaxy as a stock feature you must logically include features that let you exploit all those other solar systems, otherwise they are pointless. if you use the "i want it so mods can use it" argument, well there is a mod to add other systems. tldr: a implies b

steak: grilled, rare halibut: beer battered and deep fried dolly: pan fried in olive oil salmon: grilled crab: boiled in sea water pork ribs: baked 6 hours, sauced, then grilled 6 minutes beef ribs: crock pot deer: in a pot of chili moose: in tacos grouse: roast over a camp fire chicken: infinite possibilities, all tasty pork chops: grilled, sauced spam: on a spamwich

just get your evil uncle to buy it for you.

i want analog action groups for this kinda thing. bind axis to one or more of those tweak bars.