Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[DarkGhost]

If you missed the Live stream for the second anniversary :
http://www.twitch.tv/keencommunitynetwork/v/22056603 (Skip at 5 minutes)

[jocan2003]

ROFLCOPTER!!!! They muted the audio of the livestream... what copyrighted material they have on them is most likely from themself.... Some company or system really need a check up....

Edit: Big fail... sem i had my cound going to the TV and my TV was off when i saw the message and then scrolled trought the video with no sound...

[Aseaheru]

_{This means the space bugs can probably fit through them easily as well if you accidentally leave a door open but let's not talk about that.}

_{I think they are too big for that. I hope.}

In other data, what do you all think of the hydrogen thrusters, and the aggravating way that they dont have ice splitting correctly into two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen...

[forsaken1111]

And why is nobody mentioning that it doesn't take oxygen to burn the hydrogen?

[Mephisto]

And why is nobody mentioning that it doesn't take oxygen to burn the hydrogen?

One of the threads in the Space Engineers subreddit had a discussion about that. The consensus appeared to have been that the hydrogen thrusters heat up and eject hydrogen, not burn it. Sadly, I lost the link.

I'm more curious about how oxygen generators turn (pulling numbers out of rear ends here) ice into, let's say, five units of quantum gas which is a superposition of hydrogen and oxygen until you collapse it into one or the other by introducing gas storage of a particular type. Sage did some tests on the matter if you're interested.

[forsaken1111]

So it's a resistojet, not a rocket. Weird

[TheDarkStar]

So it's a resistojet, not a rocket. Weird

No, it's a rocket. It just accelerates its exhaust through (probably nuclear) heating rather than through explosions.

Edit: Actually there's not enough information to tell whether it's a resistojet or a thermal rocket.

[Aseaheru]

From what I could tell it does not seem to use any power...

[forsaken1111]

I think what it really is, is a lazy implementation.

[Zanzetkuken The Great]

I think what it really is, is a lazy implementation.

Might have been they only wound up getting as far as they did by the time the Thursday update came along and it had been a 'it works without causing crashes, toss it in for the players to mess with'.

[PTTG??]

I think it might be a really crappy fusion torch.

[forsaken1111]

I think it might be a really crappy fusion torch.

fusion takes power...

[Mephisto]

Not to keep beating a radioactive horse but this thing we can already make needs heat, not electricity.

[Sensei]

(response to removed post removed)

Anyway, the cool thing about nuclear fusion is that when you get a small number of protons to bond together and become an atom of higher atomic number, you get energy out (a LOT of energy), up until iron I think, after which you lose energy. After that point you get energy out through nuclear fission again, which is the technology we're currently capable of, since nuclear fission in heavy elements is easy to induce/happening on its own. Nuclear fusion releases HUGE amounts of energy, but also takes huge energy to start. Stars are self-sustaining nuclear fusion reactions, mostly using hydrogen as fuel, with ignition heat coming from a critical mass of hydrogen heating under its own gravity (IIRC).

Anyway, it seems unlikely to me that the hydrogen thruster would be a fusion torch, because if we could do that we wouldn't be using fission reactors for most of our power. The nuclear thermal rocket makes sense, if these hydrogen reactors used power (which could be explained away as potential electrical output lost to heating hydrogen, or the hydrogen being heated electrically, which would be too inefficient for a real rocket but in this game hey, we can have huge space ships with tons of reactors onboard). If it ran on hydrazine, it would probably just be called "rocket fuel" in game and there would be some process involved in making it. Hydrazine is harder to make than plain hydrogen. It's not ion thrusters because, again, the energy in those is mostly from electrical charge so we would see power draw.

I think the hydrogen thrusters operate on the principal of "it looks like a big rocket, so it goes fast! And red ones go fasta!" Keen haven't ever been in this for precise physics anyway (see: thrust acts on center mass in the thruster's vector no matter where thrusters are placed).

[PTTG??]

We're missing something here- the fission reactors can't possibly be simple modern fission because they can stop and start the reaction freely, and can even scale consumption.

Clearly, Space Engineers have access to something that manipulates atomic forces in a strange way. Reactors can pop uranium atoms freely, so maybe there's a small system like that in hydrogen engines that snaps hydrogen together. Presumably this takes energy, but maybe it's a trivial amount and there's enough excess energy from the thruster activating to fuse more material.

I'm looking forward to a harder-science engineers mod where we have a whole suite of engine types and reactors and reaction mass... Maybe even something like how KSP interstellar works where thermal energy can be produced in one place and sent to heat exchangers and pumped into the engines while charged particles are used directly for power.