nyrath
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Posts posted by nyrath
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Anyway, picture of humanity ,so advanced and still fighting each other is very sad.
Yes, it is sad, but there are some reasons why it is not practical to become a culture that ain't gonna study war no more
http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacewarintro.php#id--Ain'ta_Gonna_Study_War_No_More
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Well, what would you think if a canister of self-replicating nanotechnology was fired at your country? First all the people would melt into gray goo, then the buildings would melt into gray goo, then the continents would melt into gray goo, then the oceans would melt into gray goo, then the planet's core would melt into gray goo. As would any spaceship stupid enough to visit the planet.
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A plague. Piffle. How quaint.
Lets get something really unstoppable. Self-replicating nanotechnology.
http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacegunexotic.php#id--Nanotechnology
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The top of the Orion plate would be a .5m tall, 3m diameter cylinder with a magazine of pellets on the bottom; then below that four very, very large hydraulic shock absorber pistons, with a scaffolding tube in between them that connects to the plate itself, which is a 10m diameter, VERY flattened cone or parabola that looks like it was cast out of a single piece of hardened steel or tungsten. A tiny hole in the center of the plate lines up with the scaffolding tube, which animates to drop a little cylindrical pellet through.
The early design for an Orion pulse drive had a plate that was only 10 meters in diameter. If you ever want to model such a thing, I have better resource pictures to use as blueprints. PM me.
Something like this:
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Please remove this
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I'm a bit shrouded on the exact limitations of the DevKit and the game itself without a plugin, are you 100% sure its possible to do this without external code? I also have this odd feeling that "1 billion kN" aka 1 Teranewton (currently practically unmatched even in explosive/propulsive power) would utterly rape the rocket apart rather than propel it, this simply because 100 ms is enough to impart the massive multi-G forces on the craft, meaning the shock absorbing code must really work and really defend the craft, otherwise (this requires lots of testing as you mentioned) we'd have to tone down the thrust but up the number of pellets, equaling the same effective delta-V, but more "applicable".
So I'm going to do some math here:
The original poster's estimate of the thrust from Orion Drive nuclear pulse units is a bit extravagant. The ones from the various NASA studies were more like 2,000 to 400,000 kiloNewtons per nuclear pulse unit.
(btw, the charges are nuclear shaped charges)
From my website
http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/enginelist.php#id--Pulse--Orion
For what is is worth, this is the best information I have on Orion pulse units. Detonating each unit results in the listed thrust being imparted to the pusher plate. This is why there are two stages of shock absorbers in between the pusher plate and the rest of the rocket.
NASA Orion pulse unit (pusher plate 10 meters diameter)
Yield 1 kiloton
Total Mass 141 kg
Propellant mass 90 kg
Cylinder
Diameter 0.36
Height 0.6m
Thrust 3,500 kiloNewtons
Isp ??
USAF Orion pulse unit (pusher plate 10 meters diameter)
Yield 1 kiloton
Total Mass 79 kg
Propellant mass 34.3 kg
Cylinder
Diameter 0.36
Height 0.6m
Thrust 2,000 kiloNewtons
Isp 15,290 seconds?
4,000 ton Orion (pusher plate ?? meters diameter)
Yield 5 kilotons
Total Mass 1,152 kg
Propellant mass ?? kg
Cylinder
Diameter 0.81
Height 0.86
Thrust 80,000 kiloNewtons
Isp 11,900 seconds?
10,000 ton Orion (pusher plate ?? meters diameter)
Yield 15 kilotons
Total Mass ?? kg
Propellant mass ?? kg
Cylinder
Diameter ??
Height ??
Thrust 400,000 kiloNewtons
Isp ??
The dirty little secret of the Orion drive is that it is best used to boost payload into orbit. Which is exactly where there is the most opposition to its use.
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And in case it was not clear, Blender is a free program.
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Came to this thread hoping for a Mission of Gravity reference. Left satisfied. Thanks Person012345!
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Nyrath, i have a question. I'm intrigued by the infamous Casaba Howitzer concept. I get that overall range of the missile depends on the rocket the warhead is strapped to. But what happens after warhead blows up? How long would be this "lance of nuclear fire" (love the name btw
)? Kilometers? Hundreds of meters? I guess the answer is buried somewhere inside the wall of math there, but finding it is way above my head.Yeah, I'd like to know that as well. Unfortunately that is still classified. The best information I have is from here
http://www.up-ship.com/eAPR/ev2n2.htm
and it is sketchy.
Scott's best gestimate is that the Casaba Howitzer rounds would be little more than a specially modified Orion nuclear pulse unit (optimized as a weapon instead of propulsion), with a "pancake" solid rocket booster attached to the base (with about the same proportions as a hockey puck, burning for only a split second), and a reaction control system to allow it to keep itself aimed at the target.
He figures the round would only have to travel to a safe distance away from the launching ship, perhaps only a few hundred meters, then detonate the nuke, forging the lance of nuclear fire. He estimates that the nuke would be a few kilotons, and up to 50% of that destructive force would be in the lance. Whatever got hit by the lance would go poof!
The lance will be traveling several times faster than 150,000 meters per second.
He estimates that an Orion drive battleship armed with Casaba Howitzer in low Earth orbit could destroy all the ICBMs in an hypothetical Soviet nuclear first strike, and any lances of nuclear fire that missed their targets would only be partially dissipated by Earth's atmosphere, creating impressive damage on the ground.
This implies a range of at least 2,000 kilometers.
Sorry, that's the best I got.
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this link kind of pisses me off. yes some things are just fact. you can't hear explosinos in space. But you could certainly hear your own weapons firing! He's also making some huge sweeping assumptions based on our current tech. And bashing horizontal layouts? wtf? the space shuttle is laid out that way and it's real. Nobody wants a vertically laid out ship, that's a pain in the ass. And if you had a fleet of ships why WOULDN'T you use navy terms? _logistically_ speaking they are very similar in how crew, supplies, etc work. just because it's in space instead of on water doesn't mean our techniques go out the window. Screw that guy, what an opinionated ass. Just enjoy the dang movie.
Does that mean we are not friends anymore?
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what about a missile carrying a "bomb pumped x-ray laser warhead" ala David Weber's "Honor Harrington series? I admit there is a lot of handwavium and unobtanium used by the author, but the missile concept
used by the author seems somewhat reasonable. if feasible it would give your weapon a stand off attack ability and still give you a slight chance to try to dodge the return fire.
In theory bomb pumped lasers should work quite well. The only problems seem to be engineering, which goes away if you throw enough money at it.
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For what is is worth, this is the best information I have on Orion pulse units. Detonating each unit results in the listed thrust being imparted to the pusher plate. This is why there are two stages of shock absorbers in between the pusher plate and the rest of the rocket.
NASA Orion pulse unit (pusher plate 10 meters diameter)
Yield 1 kiloton
Total Mass 141 kg
Propellant mass 90 kg
Cylinder
Diameter 0.36
Height 0.6m
Thrust 3,500 kiloNewtons
Isp ??
USAF Orion pulse unit (pusher plate 10 meters diameter)
Yield 1 kiloton
Total Mass 79 kg
Propellant mass 34.3 kg
Cylinder
Diameter 0.36
Height 0.6m
Thrust 2,000 kiloNewtons
Isp 15,290 seconds?
4,000 ton Orion (pusher plate ?? meters diameter)
Yield 5 kilotons
Total Mass 1,152 kg
Propellant mass ?? kg
Cylinder
Diameter 0.81
Height 0.86
Thrust 80,000 kiloNewtons
Isp 11,900 seconds?
10,000 ton Orion (pusher plate ?? meters diameter)
Yield 15 kilotons
Total Mass ?? kg
Propellant mass ?? kg
Cylinder
Diameter ??
Height ??
Thrust 400,000 kiloNewtons
Isp ??
The dirty little secret of the Orion drive is that it is best used to boost payload into orbit. Which is exactly where there is the most opposition to its use.
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Combat wasps were small autonomous torpedoes with some small lasers and a fusion warhead that they could use as an area blast to destroy flights of enemy wasps or as a shaped charge for hitting the enemy vessel.
There are some pictures of Hamilton's combat wasps here:
http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacegunconvent.php#id--Drones
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Black holes don't need to be super-massive maelstroms of doom that suck in whole solar systems. They can theoretically be small enough to fly through a planet relatively unnoticed
But not unnoticed if they are too small. There is a little thing called Hawking radiation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_radiation
For complicated reasons, the smaller the black hole, the more Hawking radiation it emits.
If it gets to the point where the microscopic black hole had a mass of only 6.73 million tons, it would have a radius of one one-hundredth of the radius of a proton. This is very unnoticeable.
The Hawking radiation on the other hand would be about 1.11 petawatts, about the same as a 300 kiloton atom bomb exploding every second. This is noticeable.
I have a table here
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I've been looking around for stats to give to a gas core engine but I'm still trying to decide what would be in the realms of 'reasonable', and the parts in KSP aren't all that big so it'll be nowhere near any of those stats.
I've got a few stats you can look over here
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I'll just continue this where I left off. Uploaded an engine to Spaceport, although I'm in the habit of changing the stats wildly at the moment as I try to decide what's balanced: FTmN 400 Nuclear Rocket
I've been quite busy the past week or so making new components and I'm working on a pair of engines to accompany my large one (once I'm satisfied it's not ridiculously OP).
Also will be looking to put this stock-alike double NERVA up for download eventually.
Oh, my. Is that what I think it is?
That's a open-cycle gas core nuclear thermal rocket. The good news is that it has the ultimate performance of nuclear thermal rockets. The bad news is that it sprays glowing radioactive death like a flying Chernobyl.
The little monster has an Isp of 3,570 seconds, 3,500 kiloNewtons of thrust, and a mass of about 30 tons.
The theoretical maximum is about Isp 10,000 seconds, 3,000 kiloNewtons, and a mass of about 15 tons.
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Some fun with crossovers. ;P
I know this is thread necromancy.
But did you know that one of those recruits being yelled at is Ken Burnside, and the other one is me?
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The trouble with lasers is that they also get hot and the firing craft needs to radiate that heat to space, so laser equipped craft would have big heatsinks and a heat signature, making them easy to detect and a target for heat seeking ordinance.
It'd take time for a laser to burn through a hull, enough time for a retaliatory shot maybe?
Absolutely. Free-electron lasers have a theoretical maximum efficiency of 65%, while others are lucky to get a third of that. This means if your beam power is 5,000 megawatts (five gigawatts), and your cannon has an efficiency of 20%, the cannon is producing 25,000 megawatts, of which 5,000 is laser beam (hitting your target) and 20,000 is waste heat! (hitting you)
Ken Burnside describes weapon lasers as blast furnaces that produce coherent light as a byproduct. Rick Robinson describes them as an observatory telescope with a jet engine at the eyepiece. Laser cannons are going to need seriously huge heat radiators. And don't forget that heat radiators really cannot be armored.
http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacegunconvent.php#id--Laser_Cannon--Efficiency
But in compensation, if the laser has enough energy, it can burn through the hull in no time at all.
A single pulse with a total energy of 100 megajoules would have the effect of the detonation of 25 kg of TNT. Everyone in the compartment who is not shredded by the shrapnel will have their lungs pulverized by the blast.That same 100 MJ delivered as 1,000,000 pulses of 100 J each could very well drill a hole. The crew see a dazzling flash and flying sparks. Some may be blinded by the beam-flash. Anyone in the path of the beam has a hole through them (and the shock from the drilling of that personal hole could scatter the rest of them around the crew compartment). Everyone else would still be alive and would now be worrying about patching the hole.
Although it occurs to me that the jet of supersonic plasma escaping from the hole being drilled could have the combined effect of a blowtorch and grenade on anyone standing too close to the point of incidence, even if they are not directly in the beam. The effect would probably be similar to the arc flash you can get in high power, high voltage electrical systems, where jets of superheated plasma can cause severe burns from contact with the plasma, blast damage from the shock waves, blindness from the intense light produced, and flash burns from the radiated heat.
A continuous beam could have enough scattered and radiant heat to cause flash burns to those near the point of incidence, along with blinding those who are looking at the point of incidence when the beam burns through. If it burns a wide hole, people die quickly when the compartment explosively decompresses, throwing everyone into deep space. If it burns a narrow hole, the survivors who can see can just slap a patch over the hole to prevent the escape of their air.
http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacegunconvent.php#id--Laser_Cannon
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Will since we already have technology to convert heat into usable energy (electricity), wouldnt it be possible in the future when this method has been perfected to use the heat and reconvert it into energy? That way no radiators are needed and you save on power too. I am sure this is duable. Or maybe design the lasers in a way that they dont create excess heat that is wasted
Sleipnir, unfortunately that turns out not to be the case. It is a common misconception.
There exists no technology that can convert heat into usable energy. That is forbidden by the second law of thermodynamics.
What does exist is technology to convert a heat gradient into usable energy. The point being that after it does its work, you have electricity but the heat is still there.
It's like a hydroelectric dam. It takes water at a different gravity gradient and converts it into usable energy. But after it has done its work, the water is still there. It is just that the water is downhill from where it started.
http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/thermodynamics.php
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Rune, I'm going to have to try some of that, It's too cool for school.
And I hope the KIDI thread regenerates.
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Edit: Crap, now that I've tried looking up the real-life ship, I noticed I messed up the name. It's HMS Dreadnought. Also, the first one was a 1573 41-gun galleon.
In his immortal Lensman series, E.E. "Doc" Smith insisted on misspelling it "Dreadnaught", and many authors inspired by Doc Smith propagated the misspelling.
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Main problem with nerva today is the lack of missions, current deep space missions involving sending probes of a couple of tons to Mars or less than a ton outside Mars. This can be done with chemical engines, using an nerva would increase cost without reducing weight much.
For manned missions past the moon or something like asteroid mining we need something like nerva.
The way I understand it, in this situation the (minimal) advantage of the NTR is increased thrust as well as increased Isp. The problem is that a manned mission to Mars using a Hohmann orbit takes long enough that astronaut exposure to GCR and solar protons storms becomes prohibitive.
I agree that for unmanned probes there is no need for NTR.
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Hey, Nyrath has come to play! It's too bad the recent forum outage nuked the Kerbal Interplanetary Defense Initiative. Before the forum outage deleted a good chunk of forum posts, some enterprising players had really interesting designs for stock weapon systems. I think would have been interesting for you considering the subject matter of your website.
Kerbal Space Program is currently a good place for missiles and small drones/fighters. Modded laser weapons have a limited range of 2.5km because that is the range of the "physics bubble" around ships. So current weapon designs are all kinetic killers, trying to slam into something with as much relative velocity as possible. There is an upper limit to how fast you can slam into something too, since if you are moving in a frame further than the collision box of your target, you will pass right through it (Essentially teleporting to the other side of the object). So effective KSP stock weapons are relatively heavy, so that they can pack more kinetic power while moving slow enough that they wouldn't pass through their target. A good example was a design posted for a high velocity "bouncing betty mine" type planetary defense. It launched high thrust rockets covered in chaff that enter into a wide ballistic flight. It creates a cloud of debris passing in front of orbiting enemies that is difficult to avoid and tends to shred targets badly.
Hammer Wizard, it sounds like it was a blast, I'm sorry I missed that thread.
Once again I am in awe of the cleverness of KSP. Let me explain:
Yes, as you stated, some of the behavior of things in Kerbal's physics engine are not quite according to reality, e.g., 2.5 km limit on lasers. But that's OK. The point is that there is behavior.
When I was growing up, many SF fans including me were enamored of the hard science novels of Larry Niven. In the years since, many have pointed out the scientific inaccuracies in the novels. That does not matter. The point is that in the novels there were the rules of physics, and many of the novels presented the protagonists with puzzles which could be solved by the application of the rules of physics. Us SF fans were taught that there were rules, and by playing the game you could solve the puzzle. Very similar to a mystery novel, can you solve the mystery before the detective calls all the suspects into the living room before the fireplace?
In other words, they teach you the method of science.
Kerbal like Niven might have a few of the details of physics incorrect. But the players and readers can learn latter the little details. The important thing is that they have learned how to play the game of science. This is why I get so excited about forum posts talking about young children becoming addicted to KSP, and learning about rocket science all by themselves.
By doing exploration and experimentation in the Kerbal universe, people have discovered in that universe kinetic weapons are superior to laser weapons. That's an impressive accomplishment.
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Well, seeing tiny poins of light exchanging invisible laser beam shots over distances of several thousand kilometers wouldn't be terribly exciting...
It can work.
http://www.toponeraegunbuster.com/gunbuster-episode-three41.jpg
In the anime _GunBuster_, you see the fleet emit a laser broadside at the enemy. You see the lasers trailing off into the distance, where they vanish. Then you see lots of faint fireworks exploding.
Then suddenly the enemy's broadside appears, there are laser bolts and exploding starships everywhere.
)? Kilometers? Hundreds of meters? I guess the answer is buried somewhere inside the wall of math there, but finding it is way above my head.
[Flying Sub]Just imagine something like this in KSP!
in KSP1 Discussion
Posted
Well, I prefer the Flying Sub from Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. Much more sexy.