TheGatesofLogic

What is the purpose of the deuterium-tritium cryogenic container? It seems to lack any use as of right now...

it's not really that we don't know how to fit them together, we do really, it's just that as you increase the size of a system everything necessarily turns into advanced statistical mathematics that emulate classical mechanics. Most people assume that the problem is that stuff on vary large scales doesn't add up when considered from the very small scale, but the issue we're really having is that we aren't seeing what causes the very large stuff when looking on a very small scale and that messes with our statistical calculations and causes chaotic predictions when we don't know all of the details.

well, it's been a while, and i was wondering if you could post a download for the radial antimater collector .obj file? It would be awesome if you could do that.

eh, the first space race was about missiles and defense, i don't see the motivation nowadays

no, that's not right at all, i have a station with a productivity of about 40 and it would take my crew MUCH less than that to finish such a project.

so is this a no? Nobody seems to have responded to my inquiry. I feel like the current antimatter collectors are awkward and chunky, and don't attach to things in a way that looks right... I would build the part myself, but the model isn't publicly available and i'm not incredibly familiar with unity.

is there any possibility that you might make a kolonization module that produces the RocketParts Resource for a link into EPL, that would honestly be awesome.

Is the radial antimatter collector from the hi-tech bits dev thread planned to be added? It would be an incredible addition. If it isn't i'll probably make it for myself if anyone wants it.

If you want something you can do with KSP without much hassle (Rama's a good book, but the ship in it wouldn't be possible to build in KSP) then I would recommend Pushing Ice by Alastair Reynolds above all others. Given that asteroid capturing is now a thing in KSP this would be a straightforward job with exciting features. Good luck man!

Shhhh!!! That's a secret!!! You don't want Iran finding out now do you?

So you understand the basics of nuclear fission but want to understand why it causes an explosion? You obviously understand a nuclear fuel pile, but to clarify, a nuclear fuel pile is a critical mass of nuclear material, which means that for every neutron that hits a fissile atom more than onje neutron is produced that actually goes on to trigger fission of another atom. The way this works comes in two processes actually. The first is a slow neutron reaction, which is what is used in nuclear reactors. In slow neutron fission the neutrons from split atoms are slowed down by a moderator. Although it might not be immediately intuitive, slow neutrons are actually better at splitting a nucleus in a chain reaction than fast neutrons. This means that reactors don't need a large quantity of highly enriched fuel. Fast neutron reactions, on the other hand, are what is used in nukes. Fast neutron reactions produce enormous amounts of energy in short periods of time if they can be sustained, but therin lies the problem. When the reaction occurs it increases the temperature of the material, pushing the atoms away from each other and making it less likely for neutrons to hit a nucleus, but this is not a problem with slow neutrons since they have more time to pass through the material. With fast neutrons this is a major issue, making a much higher critical-mass necessary to sustain. In a real nuclear weapon this is overcome by either assembling this highly enriched material in a very short period of time (gun type), or by compressing the material down extremely quickly, since critical mass is actually lower at higher densities (implosion type). When this happens the chain reaction occurs enormously fast, since these are incredibly fast neutrons, and the energy released is sent off in waves of gamma and x-ray radiation, as well as an enormous pressure wave generated by the expansion of the nuclear material in the bomb at incredible speeds due to the extreme temperatures caused by the reaction. All this energy adds up to both a thermal/radiation front which burns the landscape from the intensity of the rays, and a pressure/heat front which expands rapidly as a rsult of the rapid change of temperature and the expansion of materials under the thermal pressure. The radiation front is essentially what melts a city, and the pressure front is essentially what levels buildings in this case.

power is not something you can store for god's sake! i've tried to iterate this to you multiple times but you don't seem to understand. I could have a device that stored a single joule of energy and it could supply as much power as i could possibly want, albeit for only a fraction of a fraction of a second. a flywheel holds a maximum energy proportional to mass and the tensile strength of the material, so yes carbon nanotubes would have great energy densities, but even then when that math is considered its a factor of 10 less than the energy density of batteries we can build right now because nanotubes simply aren't that dense. We can't build functional macro-scale low-defect nanotube structures yet. Density is also all that matters in this situation as dV is determined by mass and energy only since the thruster is without stored exhaust.

Stop making a fool of yourself, firstly you did the math wrong again. The energy stored in a fly wheel of 1000 kg with a surface velocity of 300 m/s is 22500000 joules, not 45000000 Joules, secondly your proposed amount of power is the amount of power one could supply FOR A SINGLE SECOND. No Longer. Power is a rate of energy transfer, not a stored potential of some kind as you seem to think, thus you cannot define a power density because it doesn't make any sense to do so. Thirdly, you contradicted yourself in saying that infinity has a real numerical representation, which of course it cannot or else a thousand years worth of revolutionary mathematicians have all been wrong, and the world we live in doesn't actually exist. (ninja'd and edited) please stop embarrassing yourself

again, no, it's a heck of a lot more complicated than that, and understanding it requires an advanced understanding of general relativity and spacetime metrics, I hardly understand the actual math at all really, but it just isn't as simple as people make it out to be. IIRC the gist of it is that you would accumulate all the acceleration you would otherwise accumulate from gravity over the time-period of the "warp" that you ought to accumulate from local spacetime curvature. This means that you can't warp to the opposite side of a star and slow yourself down with "gravitational drag" because the ship's relative velocity after the warp would instead be towards the star, rather than away from it due to the curvature of spacetime. (don't quote me on that.)

Q-Thrusters technically aren't even reactionless, but this is: http://www.emdrive.com/yang-juan-paper-2012.pdf Special relativity makes everything better

This exactly why I posted earlier. The Alcubierre drive has many interesting effects upon exiting the warp bubble, however one of them is NOT equal relative velocity. Like I said before the velocity upon exit of the warp bubble is a function of the curvature of spacetime over the extent of the transition.

not quite, the device in this study does not interact with an external electromagnetic field to impart momentum, but rather gains momentum from a system which ought to be closed from a newtonian standpoint. The thrust force appears when newtonian mechanics are overtaken by special relativity due to light being the resonant working-fluid. Other than this no known system can operate and produce momentum gain without imparting momentum on some external energy medium or mass. The key difference here is that this does not have ANY reactant, and no unequal radiation pressure produced by the system would have the ability to impart this kind of thrust on the testing device.

no, not possible. The warp bubble would instantly destabilize in earth atmosphere. Also, velocity would not be conserved by a warp drive, but would rather be a function of the curvature of space-time over the course of the journey.

Not entirely correct, see this here: http://www.emdrive.com/yang-juan-paper-2012.pdf but unfortunately no similar principle can be applied in the instance of gyroscopic inertial thrust, since it is by definition a closed system, and can't exploit relativistic principles the way this can. Any forces you may think you are creating in this experiment will result in nothing but mechanical strains without a net gain in momentum.

it's geared toward ksp and is not intrinsically linked to science so it should either go in the off topic section or general discussion, not here.

can a mod please move this to off topic? it doesn't belong here...

Yup, earth is a very lucky planet indeed, having the magnetic field it does. The fact of the matter is that rocky planets tend NOT to have strong magnetic fields or high core temperatures this late in their lifetime. Earth, being the more massive body in the collision, managed to absorb the core of the mars-sized world it collided with, spewing out mostly just the lighter surface elements to for the moon as we know it. As a result the earth has a core with a relatively high concentration of radioactive materials providing an excellent thermal energy supply that has outlasted all of the other rocky worlds around us, which in turn provides the energy required to support the earth's magnetic field, keeping us nice and safe from solar radiation.

like i said, momentum doesn't add up, the station would need to be rotating at about 3 times the rate it was in the movie to produce that kind of effect if the tether had minimal friction

Not too mention that the above statement is not entirely accurate since a bomb that fizzles still technically has a yield (but yes the EFFECTIVE yield in an Orion scenario would jump dramatically as the velocity of the male unit is increased, and would not be suitable for it). regardless, people fear nuclear pulse propulsion overmuch, if done with intelligent deigns and its course and detonation location and timing was computed by anyone smarter than the Department of Defense there would be absolutely no issue whatsoever, it is literally unimaginable that any noticeable radioactive fallout would occur anywhere if done properly.

efficiently, it takes more energy to do it EFFICIENTLY.