Energy Technology

[Mecron]

no suicide ships

[Gwenio]

He repeatedly said that there would be no new power tier above AM... but several new techs about how that power was used.

I was just thinking about an idea about what could be a possible refinement to antimatter... and don't you think that a "gas station" around a black hole would be a cool idea? (though it might fit better in a RPG setting...)

Eh, unless we have to worry about fuel production capabilities that is not really useful.

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I wonder if there will be techs to make the generators less prone to blowing up your ship on critical hits... As there has been mention of armoured capacitors in SotS II, it would seem likely.

[Azrael Ultima]

I wonder why people always think reactors blow up. Even fission reactors don't blow up, they melt. Fusion reactors would just stop working as they can't sustain the fusion process anymore(the only natural fusion processes happen in gigantic flaming balls for a reason).

The only one that could conceivably explode would be an AM reactor, and even then, a properly designed and constructed one shouldn't have more AM inside it than is neccessary to keep running. Which is obviously an amount unfit to just utterly destroy it.


I'd be more worried about the fuel tanks getting hit... reactor hit should just make the ship a sitting, unarmed duck.

[Ringsead]

I wonder why people always think reactors blow up. Even fission reactors don't blow up, they melt. Fusion reactors would just stop working as they can't sustain the fusion process anymore(the only natural fusion processes happen in gigantic flaming balls for a reason).

The only one that could conceivably explode would be an AM reactor, and even then, a properly designed and constructed one shouldn't have more AM inside it than is neccessary to keep running. Which is obviously an amount unfit to just utterly destroy it.


I'd be more worried about the fuel tanks getting hit... reactor hit should just make the ship a sitting, unarmed duck.

Very very true... its just a convenient way of getting rid of clutter that would bog down systems I think.

[LaDoncella]

I guess you never heard of Chernobyl then.

[Azrael Ultima]

If you want to tell your crew to turn of all safeties on the reactor and run it in ridiculously dangerous ways(for extended periods of time), go ahead. Other than that, Chernobyl was an exception, not the rule, brought into existence by a whole wagonload of people being idiots.

[nickersonm]

I guess you never heard of Chernobyl then.

That was only a steam explosion, though, not the fuel material exploding.

[Gwenio]

I wonder why people always think reactors blow up. Even fission reactors don't blow up, they melt. Fusion reactors would just stop working as they can't sustain the fusion process anymore(the only natural fusion processes happen in gigantic flaming balls for a reason).

The only one that could conceivably explode would be an AM reactor, and even then, a properly designed and constructed one shouldn't have more AM inside it than is neccessary to keep running. Which is obviously an amount unfit to just utterly destroy it.


I'd be more worried about the fuel tanks getting hit... reactor hit should just make the ship a sitting, unarmed duck.

Engines and fuel tank (except with ships that have fuel tank dedicated sections like ERs and tankers) are likely in the same place, so what is the difference? (for the purpose of them taking a hit)

[Setokaiva]

Hello? there are still pockets of radiation around the area. Chernobyl was the worst nuclear power plant disaster to ever occur in the world to this day. Read it here.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster

[mattosika]

Hello? there are still pockets of radiation around the area. Chernobyl was the worst nuclear power plant disaster to ever occur in the world to this day. Read it here.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster

No one said it wasn't. Only that the cause of Chernobyl's reactor explosion was caused by human error. I really don't even see how people get 'explosion' out of 'meltdown'. The word for the disaster clearly spells out what happens. The reactor melts down.

As far as I know not a single ship in the nuclear powered portion of the US Navy has never exploded spontaneously, or been mishandled so badly that it caused the reactor to melt down.

Heck I'm surprised they can pick Chernobyl's background radiation out of the rest of the radiation from the bombs we and the Soviets test burst in the air during the Cold War.

[LaDoncella]

If you want to tell your crew to turn of all safeties on the reactor and run it in ridiculously dangerous ways(for extended periods of time), go ahead. Other than that, Chernobyl was an exception, not the rule, brought into existence by a whole wagonload of people being idiots.

I bet that Fukishima incident is also the exception..
"Hello mister alien, could you stop shoting at us? We have a fission reactor here and even with all of our safety protocols it may blow up if you damage it, and would make us look bad. Thank you."
I mean its very unlikely that a military spaceship equiped with a fission reactor is gonna be shoot by angry aliens.

I guess you never heard of Chernobyl then.

That was only a steam explosion, though, not the fuel material exploding.

The result, overall, is the same. Radiation for the people, party time!
Also I bet that an internal explosion capable of "tearing off and lifting the 2,000-ton upper plate, " in a spaceship is pretty much the death for it, or at least that compartment .

[mattosika]

I guess you never heard of Chernobyl then.

That was only a steam explosion, though, not the fuel material exploding.

The result, overall, is the same. Radiation for the people, party time!
Also I bet that an internal explosion capable of "tearing off and lifting the 2,000-ton upper plate, " in a spaceship is pretty much the death for it, or at least that compartment .

Because, logically, any race that that achieves FTL capabilities still relies on water's reaction to heat to generate power.

[LaDoncella]

Because, logically, any race that that achieves FTL capabilities still relies on water's reaction to heat to generate power.

space monkeys certainly do

[kdonovan]

Because, logically, any race that that achieves FTL capabilities still relies on water's reaction to heat to generate power.

Well they're going to be relying on something and that something may be subject to damage.

[Whether the system would be designed to minimize mass or maximize safety in the event of battle damage is an open question - moving mass in space at relativistic + speeds has to be an enormous expense - and perhaps the most important consideration with ship design is to keep this to a minimum and accept risks due to battle damage.]

While I agree the idea of the fuel exploding is unlikely, and that the reactor may not explode, a seriously damaged reactor, whose shielding has been breached, is likely to produce enough radiation to kill or incapacitate the crew. If a reactors cooling system is damaged it might also produce enough heat to do serious damage to the ship or crew - though perhaps the most likely mechanism is by melting any reactor shielding and then flooding the whole ship with lethal levels of radiation.

Whether heat or radiation, it seems unlikely others ships would be close enough to suffer much from this though - however SotS ships do seem to operate quite close to one another given how vast space is and the speeds they are operating at.

[Zalzidrax]

If you're crew compartment can't survive a small steam explosion and a bit of radiation, it has no business being in space combat anyway. Yeah, yeah that's glib oversimplification, but still. You would need a fair bit of radiation shielding just to keep the crew from getting cancer from being in open space.

Though antimatter explodes on contact with any normal matter so I'm having a hard time seeing how you'd make that "safe"... exotic matter cladding or something very weird? Still that only makes it not explode if you lose power, it wouldn't solve the problem of an actual hole in the antimatter storage.