Topic: Ertex Design Bureau - Battle for Aljadid - Strategy SY108 (Read 48456 times)

andrea · « **Reply #90 on:** November 22, 2017, 02:05:26 pm »

As pointed out earlier, it feels silly to delve into psicohistorical prediction of enemy actions before we have the means to do anything with it.

Plus, psicohistory works on large scales, tactical engagements. While it would still provide benefits at home, its use against the enemy would be wider fleet movement ( as in which planets) and perhaps which design doctrines they may use. But those are things decided by players, so the GM can't quite tell you anything, unless he wants to open a gigantic salt pit.

3_14159 · « **Reply #91 on:** November 22, 2017, 02:07:42 pm »

Quote from: cute cub

Blarington Orbital Center Piece (1):Blood Librarian
Vangaurd Powered Armor MK1 (1): Fallacy of Urist
Cuttlefish Laser corvette (2): joha4270, 3_14159

We need a spacecraft, simple as that.

BBBence1111 · « **Reply #92 on:** November 22, 2017, 03:54:42 pm »

Quote from: cute cub

Blarington Orbital Center Piece (1):Blood Librarian
Vangaurd Powered Armor MK1 (1): Fallacy of Urist
Cuttlefish Laser corvette (3): joha4270, 3_14159, BBBence

We should start work on a spaceship design.

Maybe add some armor to the design? We don't have shields yet, so basically anything hitting it would cause bad things.

Blood_Librarian · « **Reply #93 on:** November 22, 2017, 04:48:06 pm »

The "Obscure Space lift" is litterally just a space station placed into orbit for the express purpose of serving warships and act as a logistical node.

TheFantasticMsFox · « **Reply #94 on:** November 23, 2017, 12:00:24 am »

]

Quote from: cute cub

Blarington Orbital Center Piece (1):Blood Librarian
Vangaurd Powered Armor MK1 (1): Fallacy of Urist
Cuttlefish Laser corvette (4): joha4270, 3_14159, BBBence, TFF

NUKE9.13 · « **Reply #95 on:** November 23, 2017, 04:43:44 am »

Quote from: joha4270 on November 22, 2017, 01:41:14 pm

Design:ESC-FS 1 'Cuttlefish' laser corvette
The cuttlefish is a relatively low mass spaceship designed for space combat.
It takes the shape of an long tube becomming slightly smaller towards the nose. It's front, and to a lesser degree its sides are armored with ceramics able to withstand both kinetic attacks and lasers.

It contains a skylight fusion reactor near the back. This serves a dual purpose. It provides power to the ship, but it also runs the engine. By taking the plasma in the reactor and leading it out and into an electormagnetically shaped nozzle, it can archive huge amounts of thrust while still being very fuel efficient. For attitude control, it is equipped with chemical thrusters allowing it to control roll, and pitch and yaw without the engine active.

Its equipped with 3 lasers-- named Hewey, Dewey and Louie-- that are basically upscaled "Ranger"s placed around its center, on slight bumps. This allows all three to shoot forward or backwards and two to target any other direction at the same time. A capacitor bank provides power for the lasers and other systems when all power is directed to the engine.

It is furthermore equipped radar and a radio allowing two units to communicate within approximately 3 light seconds.

ESC-FS 1 'Cuttlefish' laser corvette (Hard): (3+1)-1=3: Buggy Mess
So... turns out turning a Tokamak into an engine is a bit trickier than anticipated. The Tokamak kind of relies on this unbroken loop; plasma only escapes the loop if something is going wrong. Now, we tried all sorts of things to make this work regardless. But if we're continually venting plasma, the amount of energy we need to put in to sustain the reaction regardless is prohibitive- it reduces the Q all the way down to 5 again, which means that taking into account inefficiencies and magnet power, the reactor just about breaks even. Even just managing that left us with almost no time to work on the drive itself; it produces relatively low thrust compared to what it could theoretically.
The rest of the ship... well, we didn't have a lot of time left over. The hull works, basic systems work. The laser turrets... technically work, but their predicted range is toilets, and even then the damage would be insignificant.

The finished Cuttlefish costs 2SPP, has turrets so weak we might as well not bother, and cannot actually move and power the ship at the same time. Capacitor banks let it move for short hops before needing to turn the reactor back into energy generation mode. It is Slow.

It is now the revision phase of SY98.

Detoxicated · « **Reply #96 on:** November 23, 2017, 05:56:59 am »

Secondary Weapon System Generators
To ease our powering problems of the spaceship turrets we install seperate generators for each turret. These smaller tokamals are able to power our weapons while it os maneuvering and due to the extra energy the turret can shoot with more power.

Chiefwaffles · « **Reply #97 on:** November 23, 2017, 08:11:41 am »

Revision: "Helios" Fusion Reactor
The Helios is the next iteration of our reactor, though its improvements aren't large enough to warrant anything near a design.

Helios utilizes Aneutronic Helium-3 reactions instead of Skylight's Deuterium-Tritium reaction that was picked for ease as we were trying to make the entire reactor in the first place. Aneutronic He3 reactions produce more power than D-T, and produce significantly less radiation. Less radiation means less shielding means less mass. Back on Earth, supplying He3 was difficult and it required higher temperatures. The effectiveness of Libum-265k and our spacefaring nature should solve both these problems.
More power and less mass. A general great improvement to our fusion reactors for little effort.

While on the topic of fusion reactors (namely, fitting it in the Cuttlefish design) we implement a simple-yet-effective mechanism to add water to the exhaust of the Helios reactor when used for plasma torch thrust. With some simple calculations, we add the right amount of water to massively increase thrust. It's at the cost of fuel efficiency, but we have way too much of that right now to ever be useful anyways. This should be perhaps the most trivial thing we've ever done.
The increased power output of the Helios and the adding of mass to its exhaust should greatly aid the Cuttlefish engine wise. (Hopefully allowing us to save some power for the rest of the ship as well.)

TL;DR: Switch the Skylight over to He3 Aneutronic reactions, decreasing shield mass and increasing power output; should be relatively simple. And add water to its exhaust when used as a Plasma Torch thruster in order to add mass and decrease isp, increasing thrust (while being super trivial even for a Revision).
This should have the hopeful immediate effect of making the Cuttlefish much faster and allowing it to still output useful amounts of power under thrust.