So I'm having this argument with an acquaintance

[Kerbal01]

He says that his battleship ( from a game now discontinued called battleship craft) is powered by a "hybrid nuclear engine/ion drive" which he thinks is some super awesome thing, but when I tell him what it actually is( two low power engines that are useless in atmosphere) he insists that they produce power in huge amounts and are really efficient . How should I tell him to make sure the the knows the correct thing?

Edited September 26, 2013 by DarthVader

[SargeRho]

Nuclear ion engines could refer to fusion engines. Or to an engine that can run like an NTR, or like regular ion engine. Having a nuclear reactor powering your ion engines could give you quite a bit of thrust compared to current ion engines though.

[Kerbal01]

Hes claiming That ion engines make power that can be used to power ion cannons, from my experience in KSP, this is not fact ion engines use a lot of power, but don't make any.

[softweir]

It's never wise to argue with the "seriously ill-informed", they pull you down to their level and defeat you with their greater experience at being stupid. Just avoid the subject in future, rather than try to correct him.

The idea that an ion drive of any sort can work in an atmosphere - let alone on water - is ridiculous. You try to spray out ions like that anywhere except in a vacuum and you just get huge electric arcs and a lot of hot air and steam.

There is an electrical drive that can in theory work at sea, and that is a Hall Effect thruster - in principle, you have a tunnel full of seawater running from bow to stern, and use an applied current and magnetic field to create a crude electric motor, only with the water as the moving part which gets squirted out the back. In practice, the enormous current needed makes it completely unviable, even with advances in superconducting magnets. And, same as an ion drive - it consumes huge amounts of power, it doesn't generate any.

[Pds314]

Remember that KSP is based on the present, in the future, Ion-engines may well be able to generate ludicrous amounts of thrust.

Also, nuclear engines could do the same, they are just not very advanced right now.

Could he mean Ion engines powered by nuclear power?

[qeveren]

Hes claiming That ion engines make power that can be used to power ion cannons, from my experience in KSP, this is not fact ion engines use a lot of power, but don't make any.

Considering that ion cannons aren't a thing that exist, he's basically talking science fiction.

[Awaras]

I looked at the battleship craft game wiki page and I can find no mention of ion drives on there. And it's a game about sea-going ships, not space ships, so any kind of 'ion drive' would not be at all similar with the ion drive used for space propulsion. Maybe he is thinking about something similar to the "caterpillar drive" from "The hunt for the Red October" (a magnetohydrodynamic drive).

[hugix]

Nuclear ion cannon sounds like technobabble to me.

[Holo]

It's medium-firmness sci-fi them. You could try to make it realistic, but if the creator's aren't, then you're doing a pointless task.

Anyway, "nuclear/ion engine" sounds like fission and fusion to me.

[Nuke]

he means a nuclear electric spacecraft. but id say hes grossly overestimating the capabilities of such an engine. the main limiting factor is power output. your going to use engines with very high specific impulse but really high power requirements, on the order of megawatts-gigawatts. the current state of the art is probibly vasimr, which for 200kw can give you 5n. but with a higher power source, you could do arrays of smaller engines, or more more powerful engines. different types of ion engines give you different theoretical maximum isp and thrust, but i dont think we are anywhere near a theoretical maximums. the hold up till now has been power availability on spacecraft. rtgs and solar can only go so far and so fission (or fusion) reactors are needed. its a viable setup for interplanetary travel.

while ion engines dont work in the atmosphere, there are things like ionic lifters which could provide usable thrust by accelerating the atmosphere, but they use a lot of power and so haven't really been considered for aircraft. iirc the lifting capacity is 1g per watt, so it would take megawatts to gigawats to do anything useful with it. if we can build lightweight compact fusion reactors (think polywell or dpf reactor), expect to see ion powered aircraft.

[Motokid600]

Sorry if this is off topic, but has anyone seen the end of Prometheus? They fire the ships ion engines in atmosphere as a last ditch effort to slam into the alien ship. So saying we developed ion thrusters that powerful would they actually generate thrust in atmosphere before destroying the craft? What would happen?

[tom1499]

Sorry if this is off topic, but has anyone seen the end of Prometheus? They fire the ships ion engines in atmosphere as a last ditch effort to slam into the alien ship. So saying we developed ion thrusters that powerful would they actually generate thrust in atmosphere before destroying the craft? What would happen?

Don't listen to anything they say. Ever. I think it was bad enough that they came in from an interstellar (was it interplanetary?) trajectory and just cruised through the atmosphere.

[kyle.mk.howard]

Maybe don't be a pretentious dick about it and tell him to look it up himself, the internet is a hell of a drug.

It looks like you're more eager to prove him wrong than anything.

[ZedNova]

Why don't you argue that battleship craft doesn't have Hybrid Nuclear-ion engines in it?

[softweir]

Maybe the game is Battlecruiser 3000AD? That might well have "nuclear-ion drives" or some such sci-fi stuff.