I tried to make reasonable assumptions about the costs of various components and here is the result.
How realitic is this?
Is it too overpowered or are parts not availabe in the huamnx comonwealth?
Is it too underpowerd?
It is basicly meant as a carrier that can assemble it's own fighters, modified boomers (dobermans, even stupider than the original, but with micro fusion powerplant giving it more power than before, and better at swarm tactics.).
Chloe's basic strategy would be to sit in hyperspace for a few days, then jump in, release a few thousand boomers and jump out. They should be able to handle fighters and other small craft with their weapons and they can board larger craft through forcing the airlock or something, and then wreck the ship from the inside (probably by removing the weak and vulnerable biological component gennerally refered to as crew.).
I thought I would post something like a draft desing so that I can get some input on wheter and how to change the ship.
As for the overkill on backups... Chloe was thaught to build like this, so this is how she builds, yes in many ways the desing could be made more efficient or reliable but the multiple redundacies would be lost and they are a central part of Chloe's engineering style.
Most of the tech here is not understood by Chloe, but she does carry a laptop with desings for the various systems with her, and most of the things are just bought from the Humanx or Narn.
Ship Costs:
Hull (650m, 150m, 150m, big hollow Cyliner): 1'050'000
Extra Armoring: 150'000
Magnets, fusion reactors, and other things for powersupply, engines & Dampening Field: 25'000'000
Navigational computer and hyperdrive & backup: 15'000'000
Capacitors, wiring, additional computers, etc: 7'500'000
Sensors: 5'000'000
Nanite manufactering plants (X4): 40'000'000
Aditional manufactering: 4'400'000
Food and medical nanite facs: 50'000
Internal furnishing, paint, lightbulbs, live support, food, ect: 250'000
Stealth Paint & systems: 5'000'000
Raw materials/fuel: 65'000
Interceptor turrets (X 600): 15'000'000
Ship Shape, a Giant cylinder with rounded front end and the thrusters arranged in a ring at the back.
Length: 650m
Radius: 150m
Max Acceleration, straight ahead: 50 or so G’s. People inside go splat and structural integrity becomes a problem quickly though. This is mostly due to the odd properties of a VASIMR based engine and the numerous backup engines.
Reason why VASIMR engines are not common in the spiral: They need a lot of power to run efficiently, although they use comparativly little fuel they do use humongous quanteties of electricity to run, esspecaily to run with a semblance of efficiency.
Max Acceleration, straight ahead that is survivable: 7G
Max compensation by artificial gravity: 4G
Max turning Acceleration: 2.5 G, without redlining structural integrity: 2G
Using just maneuvering thrusters, or reverse thrusters: 1.8 G
Propulsion:
Primary: 6 Cyan Tech MinarsNei VASIMR Fusion Engines mk3.
Primary Backup: 3 Humanx Plasma engines
Maneuvering & Emergency backup: 197 Humanx plasma maneuvering thrusters.
Primary FTL: Humanx Super Deluxe jump point Generator, with quadruple normal capacitors to make rapid re-jumping possible (at least until the hyperdrive melts).
Backup FTL: Humanx jump point Generator.
Powerplants:
Primary: 1 Cyan Tech MinarsNei Antimatter Reactor mk2, (2.7e16 W)
Secondary: 18 Humanx Large Fusion Reactors, (18 * 6.3e11 W = 1.13e13 W)
Trinary: 7 Cyan Tech Large fusion Reactors mk3, (7 * 1.4e11 W = 9.9e11 W)
Primary Backup: 32 Humanx Micro Fusion Reactors, (32 * 3.7e9 W = 1.2e11 W)
Secondary Backup: 3 Humanx Fusion Reactors, (3 * 6.1e10 W = 1.8e11 W)
Emergency Battery Supply: Standard High Yield Batteries: 7.8e14 KWH
Redundant Emergency Batteries: Some systems like life support and antimatter containment have additional emergency batteries just for them.
Sensors:
Primary: 2 Humanx Enhanced Sensor Arrays
Secondary: 6 Cyan Tech Photonic Sensor Arrays
Trinary: 1 Narn Standard Heavy Cruiser Sensor Array
Backup: 1 Humanx Standard Merchant Ship Sensor Array
Stealth:
Cyan Tech Solenoid Dampening field
I-Field
Special Stealth Paint
Manufacturing:
4 Separate Lines for the materials produced by the nanofacs, 12 macro scale construction lines. Max output: 2 boomers a minute, or 3000 a day
4 Separate particle accelerators for the production of Antimatter.
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http://www.angelfire.com/anime4/cattynebulart/index.html
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Catty: "So That we all may have a future." *Zaps the director who kept insisting on more realizm for her deathscene.*
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>Max Acceleration, straight ahead: 50 or so G’s.
>People inside go splat and structural integrity
>becomes a problem quickly though. This is mostly due
>to the odd properties of a VASIMR based engine and
>the numerous backup engines.
Speak to us on VASIMR engines - what are they, for one thing?
Let's see... inertial control systems aren't really known in the Centauri Sextant, at least not on that scale (IIRC some of the more exotic Humanx exos have limited IC). Most races with cause to worry about that use gravdrives, which produce their own form of intertial damping. The Jurai have it (integral to the treeships) and the Vorlon have it (...well, you could *ask..*)
Antimatter.. Amat, while a powerful fuel, is expensive as all hell for a reason - it takes incredible amounts of energy to manufacture. It's also something most governments make sure to monitor the supply - sort of like plutonium today.
Antimatter is not something that I would expect a rogue pirate group to be able to maintain a steady supply of.
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>Speak to us on VASIMR engines - what are they, for one thing?
They are real engines that we have developed and are testing (was developed at the school where I go, they even have a prototype there.).
It's technically a form of Plasma engine, but it has seval advantages and disatvantages compared to all traditional desings of plasma engines.
It has variable thrust something which most 'primitive' engines like ours lack, and they are quite small. About the size of an SUV. A single one could theoreticaly push a deathstar at 10G's with a few grams of fuel... if you could meets it's energy requierments, which are so high for that that the main gun would be less than a drop in the bucket. The VASIMR uses either Hydrogen or helium and heats it up so that it will 'fall' out of a mag bottle at very very high speed, and with a temperature ussusaly found in a star's core. The efficiency of the engine depends on the amount of electricity supplied, the more is supplied the more efficient it becomes, and on the amount of fuel used is inversly related to efficiency, the more fuel you use the less efficient the engine becomes.
A VASIMR can create an increadible push if you can supply it the energy it needs, but your stealth profile will be gone.
It differs from other plasma engines due to many things but mainly the temperatures it uses, rougly 1000 times the temperature for a normal engine is used, and that is at low efficiency(IE: What we are trying to use, if we can sway the public that fision powerplants are safer to use in space), at high efficiency (IE: if you can supply the power, which is why the ship has so many powerplants) it will make the core of a star look cold.
In the spiral these engines could be quite a bit more efficient if they used fusion reactors to make helium and then use the superheated helium as fuel, that way you don't have to heat it up, cutting away most of the inefficiency of the engines and providing minimal power to the engines too.
> Let's see... inertial control systems aren't really known in the Centauri Sextant,
Well the mimbari and some other races have gravity manipulation according to some posts but not according to others (Note to Nathan: You told me to remind you of making a codex of accepted ideas... it's looking better all the time.). Anyway the tech for the artificial gravity Chloe is using is also quite powerhungry, and sort of decended for Solenoid Tech.
> Antimatter.. Amat, while a powerful fuel, is expensive as all hell for a reason - it takes incredible amounts of energy to manufacture. It's also something most governments make sure to monitor the supply - sort of like plutonium today.
Well the ships tech and parts of it's basic desing come form one of the few other starships ever graced with Chloe's presence, a ship from which most of the tech used in this ship was used, and it included it's own crude antimatter reactor (in it's desingers mind, who coppied the desings from the solenoid but lacked the tools to build it properly) and it's own antimatter manufactering plant. Antimatter manufacture doesn't need to cost that much energy, you just slam particles together at the right speed and then you seperate the matter and antimatter that results. A fusion reactor is overkill for running one such plant and you get a fairly stable supply of antimatter if you can seperate and store it before it merges with it's matter counterpart also created in the collision. We are somewhat able to do this but increadibly innefficient at it, and storing more than a few atoms of antimatter is beyond us. I'd expect the spiral to be quite a bit better at this but being wary of the radiation damage that can result from not doing it right.
Chloe foolishly believes that the desings of the mashienes she has been given are safe. She is wrong, but they are quite a bit safer than the 'common' antimatter stuff in the spiral because of the insane amount of redundancies. Antimatter containment has power, and it's own emergency power but even without power it maintains containment quite well (if it's not jolsted around to much, and you can't move it, so reactor will go offline).
The antimatter in this case is more of a battery that can give prolonged hughe output (not quite since there is a gain in energy involved, but antimater production can't keep up with the reactor.), such as is needed durring a battle or when going full speed towards or away from something while the hydrogen fuel tanks are almost empty.
All in all if it is called Cyan something or other it was redesinged by Cy (The deity Chloe worships, he's not a god and Chloe knows this.) from some tech he learned somewhere (he even understands some of it.) so that he could take advantage of other tech too (such as combination of Fusion reactor and VASIMR). Cy got most of his engineering skills from his stay with the solenoids (in another universe, Cy bounces through dimensions like a demented ping pong ball, arguably not by his own choice), which is in part why their tech is holy.
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Okay, looked up VASMIR engines. I.. don't quite think that they're how you described 'em. At the very least, all the data I could find on VASMIR magnetoplasma drives suggests that they use reaction mass at the same rate any other reaction engine does. Not quite the "push the Death Star around on a few grams of hydrogen" level.
In effect, VASMIR is sort of the prototype of the standard Humanx fusion engines, which are about as effective as non-Cochrane fusion drives can get.
>Antimatter manufacture doesn't need to cost that much
>energy, you just slam particles together at the right
>speed and then you seperate the matter and antimatter
>that results. A fusion reactor is overkill for
>running one such plant and you get a fairly stable
>supply of antimatter if you can seperate and store it
>before it merges with it's matter counterpart also
>created in the collision.
Antimatter production is *very* energy expensive, especially when you're trying to make it in bulk. Creating a single antiproton by current-tech methods takes *10 billion times* the energy stored in that single antiproton. Spiral tech is obviously more advanced, or at least has bigger energy budgets, but that's still a lot of energy.
Bottom line: A shipboard fusion reactor, or even a doezen of them, does *not* provide enough energy for bulk antimatter operations - you need constant and regular power feed into the system to get a fraction back as amat. The best source for that kind of power is a star, a natural proton-proton fusion reactor. Ring it or a close planet (like Mercury) with high-yield solar panels and just drink in the juice. This is not something most mobile operations can do.
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>Okay, looked up VASMIR engines. I.. don't quite think that they're how you described 'em. At the very least, all the data I could find on VASMIR magnetoplasma drives suggests that they use reaction mass at the same rate any other reaction engine does. Not quite the "push the Death Star around on a few grams of hydrogen" level.
yes and no, yes on a pracical level with our energy budget, but the engines get more efficient as more energy is pumped into them (you can use more electricity to archive the same with less fuel being ejected), and note for the push the death star around I also said:
>>if you could meets it's energy requierments, which are so high for that that the main gun would be less than a drop in the bucket.
And the main gun of the deathstar does use quite a bit of power, a single shot requires as much energy as the sun gives of in 13'500 or so years. That falls short of the energy requierments for the VASIMR to use a few garms of hydrogen to push the death star around by so many powers of 10 it's not even funny.
> Bottom line: A shipboard fusion reactor, or even a doezen of them, does *not* provide enough energy for bulk antimatter operations - you need constant and regular power feed into the system to get a fraction back as amat. The best source for that kind of power is a star, a natural proton-proton fusion reactor. Ring it or a close planet (like Mercury) with high-yield solar panels and just drink in the juice. This is not something most mobile operations can do.
We are extremly innefficient when doing so, spiral is more advanced, and it uses mashienes desinged for making Antimatter.
And the energy gain is from the conversion of matter to energy by the equation E=mc^2, and lightspeed squared is a big number. We lose energy because we can only seperate the particles very few times out of many tries, advanced tech would improve capture rate, even a mashien specifically desinged for Amat production would boost efficiency. And we don't use the energy that is released in the collision, which should be (exactly) enough to bring two more particles up to speed.
Of course tech isn't 100% effective, not even 80%, but you do get a net energy gain. (I could calculate the minumum effeciency for break even but I don't feel like it right now.)
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>yes and no, yes on a pracical level with our energy
>budget, but the engines get more efficient as more
>energy is pumped into them (you can use more
>electricity to archive the same with less fuel being
>ejected)
The less reaction mass an engine uses, the less force is generated - classic Newtonian physics. Take ion drives, for example. The io drive is proably the most efficient reaction drive system ever developed, but it's thrust output is a few grams a second. Over enough time, this can create considerable velocity, but the net acceleration is microscopic, less than a G.
>And the energy gain is from the conversion of matter
>to energy by the equation E=mc^2, and lightspeed
>squared is a big number. We lose energy because we
>can only seperate the particles very few times out of
>many tries, advanced tech would improve capture rate,
>even a mashien specifically desinged for Amat
>production would boost efficiency. And we don't use
>the energy that is released in the collision, which
>should be (exactly) enough to bring two more
>particles up to speed.
There isn't a net energy gain, thanks to this little thing called entropy. You are going to lose energy with each antimatter transaction. Period. It could be less energy than what CERN loses in their experiments - probably is, if amat engines are even close to useful in the Spiral, though it doesn't have to be - but you *still lose energy.* It's not a matter of better capture techniques, it's one of those Fundamental Forces of the Universe.
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>The less reaction mass an engine uses, the less force is generated
yes, if you assume velocity is constant, which in the VASIMR's case it uses more electricity to give the particels a higher velocity.
>There isn't a net energy gain
I never said there was a net energy gain (well my wording implied it, but it isn't what I meant), just a net gain in energy I can use. Matter and energy are the same thing, you could give energy messurments in grams if you felt like it.
But you are right the way I worded that was misleading.
I lose energy manufactering antimatter (entropy, esscaping radiation, etc.), but I gain some more when I combine mater and antimater and get photons from which I get the useful energy.
Fusion Reactors work by essentialy the same principle, since an electron and proton pair have a different mass than a neutron so the mass difference is converted to energy, or you must supply the energy for the reverse process (I forgot which one was heavier).
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>yes, if you assume velocity is constant, which in the
>VASIMR's case it uses more electricity to give the
>particels a higher velocity.
There's still an upper limit to the amount of thrust generated, though, based on the available mass. Specific impulse is not the question, the question is thrust - the amount in newtons of force generated to shove the spacecraft in the direction you want it to go. If a VASIMR ship has high specific impulse but low thrust, then it can reach very high velocity but takes forever to get there, which would make it a sitting duck for ships with lower specific impulse and higher thrust, who can't reach the same top velocity as the VASIMR ship, but can intercept and match acceleration much more easily.
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> There's still an upper limit to the amount of thrust generated, though, based on the available mass. Specific impulse is not the question, the question is thrust
One of the great advantages of a VASIMR is that it has both a high specfic impulse and high thrust, even with a constant powersupply, but not at the same time (The vasi part stands for VAriable Specific Impulse). Which is really the engines great use.
Thrust is a question of conservation of momentum, and that has the form m*v, which is constant for the ship and it's fuel while no outside force is acting on it.
you can get more thrust with same mass if you use a higher velocity and as you approach c the higher velocity will be harder to archieve but it includes more mass due to relativity. You double the power you double the acceleration you get (well not quite, but it works as a rough guideline for most of the time).
Note can and would want to are two different things. You don't ussually care just how much fuel you are using unless you are running low or need to do real long distance stuff. Yes you get a little more efficiency when you add more power, but your powerplant is probably getting less efficient and since both use hydrogen fuel...
However if you would want to you could get more thrust just by reving up the powerplants to their redlines, or rerouting power from other systems, or giving the engines more fuel to play with.
Or you could go the otherway and conserve fuel by maximizing efficiency (or shutting off and just waiting till momentum gets you where you want to go).
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