Bill Phil
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Posts posted by Bill Phil
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Dang, for real? Sweet.
Also, are there any other advanced fission engines like NSWR, Mini Mag Orion, liquid core NTRs, and PuFF?
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We will be able to finally properly use the ultimate in transportation technology: boats.
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Nice. I think I’ll let things settle with the patches but then it’ll be time to finally complete the tech tree and go to every planet.
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Damn. I’ve had this game for 9 years. This is almost surreal.
But, I don’t exactly think this is bad. Eventually it needed to end, and while it’s not perfect there will be mods, and they’ll hopefully be able to maintain stability much easier. Plus the addition of an alarm clock and a maneuver app is awesome. Along with the rest.
I’ll finally have no excuse to restart for every new version... until KSP2 at least.
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Sustainable population is difficult to really quantify. This is because you can get different numbers depending on your assumptions.
Like for example, if you don't assume agriculture you get a significantly lower number than the current population. If you assume sustainable agriculture with current technology, a few billion may be doable unless you run into the heat limit. But you can do some wild things with more advanced technology. Eventually the carrying capacity of the biosphere vs. the carrying capacity of the civilization become two distinct things - the biosphere could support this many of the species, but with some set of technology we can support much more than the biosphere could support.
The main limit is the heat limit, which is primarily an energy/power limit. So really you'd need to figure out energy use per capita. For the US that's roughly 10 kW averaged over a year. So if you need a population of 10 billion with 10 kW per person, you need a total average power of 100 TW. More in peak times. But, if you had more energy per capita you could potentially do more interesting things on a per person basis - and in my opinion more energy per capita makes sense if immortality is involved. So I'd go with maybe between 500 million and 5 billion if you go with a total average power of 100 TW, leaning on the lower side.
Now 100 TW is significantly lower than the limit, but that's preferable as far as things go.
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Just now, mcwaffles2003 said:
Sorry for being so dismissive then, I thought you were just suggesting undercutting the fundamental difficulty of the probe to diminish my statement about difficult as a cheap gotcha. What is it about the comms mechanic you dont get though? It seems fairly straight forward to me.
Ah, no worries.
I just never bothered to learn much about it. I could probably figure it out if I tried but I'm kind of set in my ways in how I play KSP. I don't play as often as I want to though, so I usually just end up doing an Apollo style mission to some target planet/moon and back. I do want to do some probe missions as well but I usually end up sending Kerbals.
6 minutes ago, mcwaffles2003 said:As for probe being awkward to design around I always felt that about capsules since many of them come in odd shapes with angled sides. I like probe cores cause you can just build off them in all directions and they take very little space where as capsules normally need to be at the tip of a rocket.
Being at the tip of the rocket makes it easier to design around in my experience.
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18 minutes ago, mcwaffles2003 said:
Ok, have fun with that i guess. Ill just use alt F-12 to teleport a lone kerbal outside of any capsule to the moon. Wow... look at me go
I don't see the point of this statement. I was saying that your argument about probes being more difficult only applies if the communication mechanic is left on. It's a mechanic that I never figured out, and I have always played without it from the beginning, long before it was even added. I know there's a number of others that do so as well. Still, not everyone plays with the same settings. But I don't see what your response is supposed to mean here.
I do think that probes are more awkward to design rockets around though.
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13 minutes ago, mcwaffles2003 said:
Is it really? Why?
It is no harder and in some aspects... it's even easier. Go land a manned capsule on the back of the mun , now go land a probe on the back of the mun. The probe was harder, wasn't it? You had to send a relay along with the probe and keep it in high orbit with line of sight to both your probe and Kerbin simultaneously while your manned craft could just land.
Not if you turn off the comm mechanic of the game, like I regularly do.
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23 hours ago, KerikBalm said:
The thing is, I am a bit of a misanthrope that thinks that overpopulation is the biggest problem in the world right now, so that kind of colors my views about what should be done. :p
I'm the opposite. I'm more concerned about the negative effects of the slowing growth rate.
I don't think overpopulation is a problem, or rather, it's just one element of the world and is a very solvable issue. Not a problem in and of itself but it can feed other problems due to how the world is organized and the systems in place.
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11 hours ago, KerikBalm said:
Honestly, sometimes I think that we should have done nothing because of things like this.
Old people would die, but by and large they lived full lives with a quality of life better than younger generations - who are now even worse off.
We are crippling the young generation's future too buy a largely spoiled generation that caused massive problems another 5 years before something else gets them.
And I say this as someone who has benefited from the pandemic because I now work for a virology department at a hospital...
Doing nothing would have led to even more devastation.
Just because we could have handled it better does not mean that nothing would be better.
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8 hours ago, Popestar said:
Interstellar? We haven't even been back to the moon since the 60s.
Well, 72, but yeah.
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15 hours ago, StrandedonEarth said:
These concepts remind me strongly of this, because that's about what it amounts to...
Well that actually could work, if you had a strong enough fan. Not efficient though.
Catching spent propellant for a rocket though... not gonna work. You'll get nowhere fast.
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7 hours ago, Spacescifi said:
Even if we were, as far as I can tell the only sensible reason to go that far is if Earth is dying and it is not going any where.
It's almost always easier to fix Earth than go interstellar.
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12 hours ago, jimmymcgoochie said:
Beamed power feels a bit cheaty to me- just park a massive reactor in orbit or a huge solar array near the sun and magically beam the power for a power-hungry base or ship right there without having to actually produce the power on site. There’s also the question of how detailed to make it- one single type of beam, different frequency bands, individual frequencies with different stats for distance losses/accuracy/heating/atmosphere penetration/etc.?
I mean, being cheaty is by no means an issue when we already have torchships confirmed.
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NASA isn't a launch service provider. They'll probably keep trucking on doing much the same thing they've been doing.
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14 hours ago, kerbiloid said:
According to wiki, the world's supply of uranium is ~5 mln t, including 0.7% (i.e. ~35 000 t) of 235.
It's not just "few", it's "nothing" if talk about millenia. Even if increase it with oceanic uranium.
So, spending uranium now literally means to leave the future humanity without both fission and fusion.
The fission is just a short-term temporarily available technology given to us by Mother Nature to implement the fusion.
So, advantages of the fission above the fusion don't play any role, like advantages of oil and gas. Even if they are easier to use, their supply is very limited.There's a difference between what we think the supply is now and what it could be in the future. Indeed, there's a history of the supply for a given resource expanding in size over time as we discover or consider new sources. Even in the crust there's a high confidence that there's 2.2 billion tonnes of uranium in concentrations higher than 100 ppm. For conventional reactors that can last nearly a thousand years for 50 TWth capacity. Add in breeders and you get over 100 thousand years. And if the energy return on lower concentrations is reasonable in the future, then we could extract uranium from even lower concentrations and then have access to vastly more uranium - the numbers are mind-bogglingly huge. If we run out of uranium it won't be because there's no uranium to mine, it'll be because we stopped mining it. And that's not even getting into seawater uranium, which is practically renewable unless we go overboard and use a massive amount of energy beyond what we could feasibly need.
QuoteLithium (and uranium) are not a part of the deuterium reactor active zone process. They can be placed around the reactor like you can place thorium to produce U-233.
So, no problems with producing tritium.You misunderstand. They'll definitely produce tritium. But you have to extract it. This is generally done in dedicated processing sites.
10 hours ago, kerbiloid said:And they're spending uranium for last 100 years.
If the humanity doesn't want to finish 300 000 years later with stone axes, it should treat the uranium like a short-term gift to ease implementation of the artificial suns.
Physics and chemistry will stay same and 10 000 years later.
While physics and chemistry will be the same 10k years from now, the extent of human civilization may not be. We may be extinct by then, in which case it doesn't matter. If we aren't extinct at that time, then we will almost certainly have perfected alternative energy sources like fusion and if we haven't then it seems reasonable to assume that we have expanded beyond Earth and have found other sources. In any case, it's pointless to try and consider the problems humanity in 10k years will face. Our use of uranium won't really matter by then. Even if we conserve our uranium future humanity will probably use it at a faster rate than we do. Not much point in not using it today. Indeed, using fission to some extent is likely to be critical to the survival of civilization for this century.
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3 minutes ago, Nuke said:
is anyone still doing icf? i also think that is going to have a huge problem with getting to engineering breakeven due to the inefficiency of lasers.
jet is going to be going for the q record using d-t next year. iter is looking forward to the result. lets hope they raise the bar.
Yeah, people are still doing ICF. Lasers can do it, but I don't think they're the best for ICF as it is. Heavy ion beams seem to have better performance but no one has built a heavy ion beam ICF system.
But lasers are getting better and will continue to do so. It's just that there really isn't enough funding for fusion research, sadly.
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15 hours ago, Nuke said:
i have a feeling first gen reactors are going to be tokamaks. its just the most well understood arrangement.
I think that ICF is more likely to work out. It's hard on its own, but it looks like it has a better chance to me.
1 minute ago, kerbiloid said:I mean that if the complexity of uranium enrichment doesn't stop people from doing that, the lithium isotope separation would fear them even less.
(Why load useless Li-7 when you can have all lithium be 6 in the pellets to easily recycle it and reload again after extraction),But my point is that it's just one more obstacle to using tritium. Might as well try to avoid even needing it.
Li7 isn't useless, it can breed tritium too. It costs energy and releases a neutron though.
2 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:Uranium is very not endless, compared to deuterium.
So, why stop on the temporarily available fission.I don't understand what you're saying here. I never said to stop with fission. Fusion is worth developing. My point is that if early fusion reactors need tritium, we can breed it with fission reactors. And fission reactors have a much larger existing industry to leverage.
Not only that but there's plenty of fission fuel that we can use for quite some time, billions of tonnes in the ocean (which may be renewable even). There's way more deuterium, of course. But the point is that both are likely to be used and fission has many decades on fusion, and by the time fusion works fission may have a century of advantage over fusion. We need to leverage that. Fission and fusion can and should complement each other.
6 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:They don't need that tritium.
While the deuterium reactor can produce tritium for its own needs.Eh, in all likelihood the tritium containing material will need to be shipped to a processing site, so a deuterium reactor won't produce tritium for its own needs in that sense. Fission reactors don't need tritium but they can and are being used already to breed tritium. It's well understood and ripe to be taken advantage of for tritium used in fusion reactors.
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On 11/18/2020 at 11:09 PM, kerbiloid said:
I would remind about the uranium separation process. It's much more complicated, but they do it.
Also the natural oil and gas refining.The uranium separation process is complicated, but some reactors can be fueled by natural uranium. Even those that aren't are generally fueled by low enriched uranium.
On 11/18/2020 at 11:09 PM, kerbiloid said:This doesn't make the uranium itself endless. Deuterium is by orders of magnitude more available.
It doesn't have to be endless, my point is that the extraction is a mature technology that can be used for mature technologies (fission reactors).
On 11/18/2020 at 11:09 PM, kerbiloid said:Certainly, we want all tritium we get. From U, Li, and whatever else.
Actually, it's a a powerplant fueled with seawater.
But possible also on any other celestial body with available hydrogen.Fission reactors can (and do) breed tritium from Li.
14 hours ago, starcaptain said:For a second I thought you were talking about girlfriends.
I would think that a smaller reactor uses less material to build and thus costs less. But then again I'm not even an armchair layperson when it comes to fusion power. I'm like a know-nothing schlub when it comes to fusion power.
Yes, smaller reactors can be said to generally cost less. They also generally perform worse. There's a few reasons for this, but basically miniaturizing fusion reactors isn't really in the cards right now.
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8 hours ago, magnemoe said:
If you use hot and dry steam you have an risk of splitting water into oxygen and hydrogen.
Well then it mixes and explodes. This caused exlosions at Fukushima reactor as they had no way to cool the water it started splitting.
Its also known in steam engines on warships during battles.
So doing elextrolyze on steam might be an option, its interesting for an nuclear plant as you want to run it at base load all the time as fuel cost is an tiny part of the operational cost.Yeah it's something that you have to be careful with.
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13 hours ago, kerbiloid said:
Separation of what? Separate lithium isotopes, irradiate Li-6 (probably in form of, say, oxide), exttract and collect tritium (or wait until it decays in He-3 which is inert and escapes itself).
No other hydrogen isotopes are involved.Chemical and physical separation of the tritium from everything else. There's also He4 in there, too. Separating it is entirely possible, but I don't think it's desirable for fusion power reactors. Using a much more common naturally occurring fuel is preferred.
13 hours ago, kerbiloid said:It's used in much smaller amounts than should be in case of deuterium energetics, when BP, Shell, and others will start refining it as future oil.
So, it will be cheaper by order(s) of magnitude.Yes, it will be cheaper. But the cost of deuterium isn't the problem here.
13 hours ago, kerbiloid said:Fission reactors need limited fission fuel.
Though, of course D-D reactors can use depleted uranium and thorium pellets in additional induced reaction zone.Extracting and processing large amounts of uranium is a mature industry. Seawater extraction is also approaching reasonable costs, and may get there relatively soon. Tritium production won't need to be too large anyways for our energy use, and tritium extraction from fission reactors is already done.
13 hours ago, kerbiloid said:D-D needs to be much hotter to ignite. Some catalyzer in minor amounts may be or may be not useful to reduce the required temperature by local early ignition. T and He-3 are just the most obvious ones.
Yes, I'm aware that D-D needs to be hotter than D-T. The issue is, D-He3 is harder than D-D, and requires He3. A pure D-D setup is preferable, with a D-T ignited D-D setup being acceptable. D-He3 ignited D-D is not desirable since you're trying to ignite a hard D-D reaction with a harder D-He3 reaction.
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1 minute ago, kerbiloid said:
With atomic mass 6 and 7 rather than 235 and 238, even nothing to compare
While it's a luxury. When it becomes a fuel, prices will be near the floor.
Required only in the very first reactors. D-D catalyzed with He-3 (from Li) would need it only for ignition, in trace amounts.
D-D reactor gives a lot of neutrons, so the irradiated Li will get many times cheaper.
Eh, separation is still tough because the tritium will likely be in a chemical compound or some complex mixture.
Deuterium isn't a luxury, it's used in heavy water as a moderator. It may get cheaper, but my point was that it was still vastly cheaper than tritium.
You're better off sourcing tritium from fission reactors.
I think that we'd be better off not having to use something to ignite D-D reactions. If we do though, then a small chunk of D-T fuel in a pellet would probably suffice. And you can get tritium from fission reactors as is. By the time fusion reactors are widespread enough to produce appreciable amounts of tritium, they would probably (or at least hopefully) not need it.
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13 hours ago, kerbiloid said:
Tritium is oceanic lithium with radiation sickness.
Helium-3 as well.
Yeah, sure, it can be bred. But that then requires separating the isotopes.
A quick cost comparison should sum it up pretty well:
Deuterium: ~13400 USD per kg
Tritium: ~30000 USK per g, or around 30 million USD per kg
Tritium is more than 2000x more expensive than deuterium. Once we get DT to work, we need to get DD to work. As it stands, the cost of the tritium is too high to really be economical, though maybe cost be lowered with the right industry and technology. However, it'd be a lot nicer if we could get DD. Then we don't have to worry about producing tritium.
New launch sites. Gimmick or Feature
in KSP1 Discussion
Posted
Yeah, I'm gonna say feature (though... I probably won't vote... I'm weird I guess). Previously extra launch sites were only with Making History and, in my understanding, these new ones are available without the DLC. It adds interesting things to the game. The discovery aspect of it... you could maybe say that's a gimmick to get people to explore Kerbin more, but I don't think that's really an issue.