Shadow shield for NTR

[regex]

 

On 1/11/2016 at 8:32 PM, Bill Zarr said:

The LV-N  has already been nerfed repeatedly below what it's performance should be if it were a direct analogue of an NTR. Giving it another brutal pounding with the nerf bat seems counter productive. I guess some people just want to nerf this engine to the point it's unusable.

Yeah, pretty much this.  Plus the fact that we have to use awkward form factor fuel tanks for it, or lose mass fraction.  Adding radiation to the mix complicates the base game and I don't necessarily trust the devs to get it right (unless they put NathanKell on it...)  There would have to be a ton of new parts to handle tractor designs (check out the ship from Avatar, those antimatter drives are ahead of the payload and the design makes sense) plus raycasting from the engine to irradiate things slows down the already bogged down sim.  Then, if you add radiation you'd have to take into account neutron embrittlement, and how are those fuel tanks doing absorbing radiation before it hits the crew compartment, and wheres the solar radiation, etc...

I mean, face it, you've got a thermal engine running on what basically amounts to Aerozine50, an eminently storable liquid fuel that doesn't worry about boil-off, getting near liquid hydrogen performance in both thrust and isp (in practice, with that fuel, it should have much less isp and more thrust) with a terrible TWR.  If you want to add more "realism", fix the obvious, glaring problems first.

[Renegrade]

By the way, regarding the "poor TWR" of the Nerv, keep in mind that the chemical engines ALSO have poor TWR compared to their real world analogs.  If the Nerv was ever buffed to 'realistic' TWRs, I want the chemical engines buffed to realistic TWRs too.  Back in 0.90, the top liquid fuel chemical engine was that KR-2L thing, at about 39:1 if I recall correctly (and most engines were more like 25:1 or less), whereas real chemical engines can go upwards of 150-180 (Merlin 1D).  Unfortunately my little TWR chart is out of date, but I do believe the current crop of engines are actually worse than the 0.90 ones.

(Note also that NTRs have never flown in real missions and thus I consider any and all numbers on them to be extremely speculative/guesstimates/WAGs and may turn out to be totally wrong and/or impractical.  It wouldn't be the first time the unexpected kicked something in the butt, rendering it useless)

@regex - a thermal engine running on Aerozine50 with hydrogen-level specific impulse.  AerozineH2!   It's magic stuff!