Perhaps. The visual size of the radiators depends upon the scale, I was unsure how large the warship was. Without this it is impossible to determine the radiator size.
It also depend upon how much waste energy the power plant makes. This depends upon the efficiency of the plant and how much power it cranks out.
Since these warships use Orion drive, they do not need any radiators for propulsion, just for life support and weapons.
Thank you for your kind words. 
halfgaar :
I advise you to study a whole bunch of movies which show things like spaceships and aircraft, and try to determine what exactly it is that sets them apart from amateur films.
Could any sci-fi fan argue with that ?
BTW, the textures on your planets could use a higher resolution.
Both textures are 4k, Callisto actually looks better when rendered larger as the bumpmap shows up better. If they look blurred, it’s probably due to oversampling.
And, the planets are lit from two sides. You should only be able to see one side, while the other is pitch black. So not like in Star Trek
Ah, you’re right there, only I only notice it at night… my monitor has a very large window shining onto it. I must remember to turn the brightness up. I still need to work on the lighting, I’ll try using area lights for softer shadows (depends on speed). I may opt for nice lighting as opposed to realism, depends how ugly it looks with realistic lighting (which would be almost entirely 1 sun light).
dgebel, thanks !
A magnetic hysterisis field is interesting. Wouldn’t the field have to be immensely strong to have any use though ? Also I was thinking the big coilguns might fire explosive-filled projectiles as well as kinetic energy weapons, the advantage being there’d be less need for propellant so you’d get more explosive per shell. Could you use a field to deflect missiles rather than slow them down ?
Rotating the ship to create artificial gravity, as Rhysy mentioned, is also not feasible during combat - or any other significant maneuvering because the ship would act like a giant gyroscope, the maneuvering rockets would be spinning as they try to fire, etc etc. You would have to “de-spin” before you could change course - not a good idea during a battle.
Yeah, I’m thinking of ditching rotating the ships, just for reasons of complexity to animate. I may show them initally rotating, then stopping as the battle begins. The crew might not be too happy, but I guess they could train for it. I’d have thought computers would be able to anticipate and correct for gyroscopic effects though…
It’s almost impossible to anticipate future developments in technology, escpecially in alternative timelines. Still, it would be very cool if they get fusion working.
nyrathwiz : The hull is 300m long with an 80m diameter pusher plate. The total cooling area is 15,040 square meters. Hopefully this would be enough, given that the bulk of the ship’s weapons are missiles and don’t require much electricity, apart from the coilguns (which also have their own mini-coolers).
Here is a concept of the American ship. It is 200m wide but still with an 80m plate, which is OK as long as the bomb’s plasma is sufficiently directed or the bomb explodes sufficiently close. I’m unsure as to whether bigger bombs require wider pusher plates. Tactically, having a smaller plate than the ship would make it harder to hit. The Soviet ship will have to rely on its missile defences and keeping its front to the enemy, which will be possible since it relies on missiles that can manoeuvre. The US ship will rely (mainly) on lasers, since they’ve done work on these in reality. It also has two counter-rotating tori for the crew to live in, so artifical gravity can be maintained at a more-Earth like level constantly, even during combat, with the bulk of the ship in zero-g and used for storage. Since only the tori house people, they could be more heavily armoured than the rest of the ship. The downside is that the area with gravity is smaller than the Soviet ship, and there’d be a lot of automation and electronics needed. It has much larger cooling fins, which like the Russian ship can be retracted into the hull when necessary.
Thinking about the cooling fins, I wonder if they’d be necessary. It’s pretty cold out at Jupiter, plus fifty years for development, could superconductors be used to improve efficiency ?
Well, actually that turns out not to be the case. I thought that a spun ship or one with a large centrifuge would be difficult to turn because it would precesss all over the place. But I was mistaken.
http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket3u.html
Now, one would think that such a centrifuge would act as a titanic gyroscope, doing its best to prevent the ship from changing its orientation. Aerospace Engineer Bill Kuelbs Jr points out that if the centrifuge is a sufficiently large percentage of the ship’s total mass, it will not prevent turning. What it will do is alter the axis of any turning force by ninety degrees. Rev up a toy gyroscope and try to turn it and you’ll see what I mean.
The solution is fairly simple. The turning thrusters will have to be effectively at ninety degrees to where you’d expect. In reality, this means that when the centrifuge is spinning, the “pitch the nose downward” control button will actually fire the “yaw to the left” thruster. An alternative solutions is to have two centrifuges that are spinning in opposite directions.
Well, lessee…
http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket3e.html#radiator
∂Q/∂t = Re * (5.67x10e-8) * Ra * Rt^4
where
∂Q/∂t = amount of waste heat to get rid of (watts)
5.67x10e-8 = Stefan’s Constant
Re = emissivity of radiator (theoretical maximum is 1.0)
Ra = area of radiator (m^2)
Rt = temperature of radiator (degrees K)
does the 15,040 square meters include both sides of the radiators?
For the lack of a better idea, I’ll arbitrarily set Re to 0.75, you can play that figure. Ra = 15,040 and a liquid sodium or lithium radiator has Rt of about 1600K.
My slide rule says this radiator set up can dissipate about 4190 megawatts.
Make up a figure for how efficient the power plant is and you can figure how much electricity the ship has to play with. For instance, if plant is 90% efficient, the radiators handle a plant that generates 4190MW / (1.0 - .9) = about 42 gigawatts. Plenty of power. But if the plant is only 60% efficient, it can only be about 11 gigawatts.
On a warship, the lion share of the radiator area is for the propulsion system. But an Orion drive needs no radiators.
The rest is mostly for waste heat from weapons. But missiles require no radiators. So this energy can mostly be used for the coilguns. Less a few kilowatts of radiator reserve for life support (human bodies produce heat), and the power needed to run the radar, computers, and other ship systems (maybe one megawatt or so).
Divide the remaining power by the maximum number of coilguns you figure will be firing simultaneously at a given time and you have the power budget for each coilgun. Make up a figure for the coilgun efficiency and you can use the equations here to decide upon the mass and speed of the coilgun rounds.
http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket3x.html#kinetic
Now for the American ship, unfortunately lasers are power hogs (Ken Burnside describes weapon lasers as blast furnaces that produce coherent light as a byproduct. Rick Robinson describes them as an observatory telescope with a jet engine at the eyepiece). It is possible to save on radiator area by using open-cycle cooling for the lasers, but this limits the number of barrages to the supply of coolant.
http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket3x.html#laser
The solution is fairly simple. The turning thrusters will have to be effectively at ninety degrees to where you’d expect. In reality, this means that when the centrifuge is spinning, the “pitch the nose downward” control button will actually fire the “yaw to the left” thruster.
Curses ! Now I need some other excuse not to spin the ship during combat… err… problems with targeting, even though the missiles will have to be largely self-guiding… yeah, that’ll do ! :o
I think Re can probably be close to 1.0, but I can’t find anything for the reactor efficiency. A quick Google search finds “47% thermal efficiency”, I don’t know what that means, but call it 50%. Typical coilgun efficiency seems to be about 3%, but that seems to be what people builing them as a hobby generally get. Being conservative and assuming 3%, with all 4 firing at once, that means 82MW of power goes into kinetic energy of each projectile. But that’s the net power available, not the actual energy of the projectile. It could be stored up in capacitors (or probably something better, like a battery), so the energy would be higher than 82 megajoules (which would be equivalent to a 1 tonne projectile at 400m/s, not much use there). Or maybe you couldn’t store it, in which case the energy would be much less (although I can’t see why that would be). Any way to estimate how much energy the projectile actually gets ?
I’ll include some cooling vents as well, just incase anything should happen to the fins.
About the radiators: 1) I forgot they were supposed to be an Orion n-drive ships - the Russian, er, Soviet ship looked more like a conventional liquid fuel reaction-drive ship. 2) Looking at the Soviet ship - it’s long enough that you could put the radiators horizontally instead of vertically for a warship. While this would be less efficient (ie bigger fins required), I think it would be 1) easier to strenghten 2) less strain during maneuvers (hot=softer!) 3) harder for missles to take out the entire length at once. (Vertical fins = 1 hit and off they snap!) Current ships use it since more efficient by being further away and heat should naturally get pulled out even faster with less pumping.
Huh. So whaddya know. I stand corrected! 
I knew you could counter-rotate, but that wasn’t in the design. Although you could use a smaller, heavier ring around the main hull I suppose.
Ya it was the precession that I was really worried about as well, but I’ve forgotten how to try and explain that coherently. Much less spell it!
Strong field - ya, that’s the problem I was skirting around, re: shielding the crew themselves. Not to mention the power issue. However, since we’re talking about projectiles that are entirely unlikely to be going at any appreciable proportion of c, we can assume that its radar-triggered - if the shield is going to do any good, it would have a high chance of being detectable by radar. Or potentially a ladar I suppose. Have to rotate the scanner frequency if they get into stealthing the things!
If you only crank up the field to “shield” level to actually intercept the projectile at the most efficient point - nyrathwiz get out your calculator! - that would save power. It might even be more efficient, not sure, sort of a magnetic impact on the projectile; since the field would be in “relative motion” as it is expanding, it might generate a higher inducted current/magnetic field. I can barely remember E=IR anymore though and I did a little a/c electrical. I remember RMS (?) factor is .717 though
Rather than an intermittent field, superconducting would really help with achieving a fiercely high-level magnetic field, and reduce the power requirements to keep it up. Once again you have the heat issue, both for cooling the superconductor, and inductive heating when its “working”. “Cap’n, the shields canna take it! She’s gonna blow!” Or slightly less Trek… “Temperature rising - 2 minutes to overload and superconduction failure. If they fire at us again, the shields will go down!”
One other point - the shield could also act as a detector. Any magnetic material entering the field at a calculatable relative-velocity and distance would put a measureable strain on the magnetic field and be detectable. If an on-demand field was used, it would allow you to detect an incoming without radar (just at lightspeed, I’m pretty sure, unless there is a pseudo-FTL effect). Then you could “raise shields” to defang it. You could also do “long range sensor sweeps” by intermittently running the field potential up and down. Site note: radar wouldn’t be affected or detected by a magnetic field, so unless “you” have your own hysteresis field, your radar wouldn’t be able to say why your projectiles were suddenly slowing to a halt just before they hit your target. Depending on frequencies invovled, the projectiles might suddenly become better radar targets or even emitting themselves due to induction, if the magnetic field was an alternating one. Induction heating could also weaken explosive-filled shells, so it might be worthwhile even if it doesn’t slow it much.
The biggest worry would be the potential of non-conductive projectiles. Is something like depleted-U ferro-magnetic? Or even some kind of armour-piercing composite-ceramic, maybe with iron rings for the accelerator to work with. But your gauss cannon would need to be correspondingly more powerful, due to the lower magnetic content of the projectile of course.
Deflecting would be even better than slowing of course, but I’m pretty sure harder to achieve (still talking about a field effect here).
Remember - the induced magnetic field is directly opposite in polarity. Also, since these are high-relative velocity projectiles, not missles, the deflection would have to be a) earlier or b) greater angle of deflection to miss your ship. Easier to slow them down to reduce the (ahem) impact.
Hmm. The filled-projectiles is a good idea for a bigger punch, but that will make them more expensive, heavier and larger and thus take a larger coilgun. The whole point of a rail gun is that a) projectiles are simple and dirt cheap 2) potentially completely reusable if no propellant is required. I assume you mean as in projectile propellant (works like a cannon) or more likely plasma-fuel to drive the “gauss canon” (love that name). I would think that big superconducting coils would be possible soon. Maybe not as big a kick but… hmm… inductive kick.
Maybe superconducting coils AREN’T a good idea, unless you can turn the superconducting off easily (?). You would want the coil’s inductive kick to add its boost to the linear accelerator - if that’s possible. I’m physics-friendly, but not overly math-compatible. That’s what computers are for :rolleyes:
Actually… the combination would be potentially useful, narratively speaking. A hysteresis field to slow down the filled-artillary, giving the anti-missle systems time to work (guns or lasers methods)
Or just use non-magnetic plain old artillary shells. I suppose in you need the rail-gun velocity in space - there wouldn’t be enough relative velocity due to the distances involved otherwise. You could easily see the incoming shells and dodge. Unless there’s a LOT of them of course, but anti-shell systems would be standard and have lots of time to work. Oh well, nyrathwiz has probably covered all these points already - I just haven’t had time to read it all. This is long enough already again. I’d better go read that page now!
Dang it… you’ve really got me going on this! Almost steam-punk style. Would make a fantastic “story-verse” with just a bit of plotting… 
nyrathwiz’s weapon page points a nice wrinkle in the hysteresis shield situation… a nuke in/near a big magnetic field would create… an EMP! NEMP to be specific. “Is the in-coming a nuke? Conventional? Pure kinetic? Missle? Do we put up the shield or not?”
That works. If the entire ship is spinning like a top, targeting will be an issue. And as dgebel pointed out, it will also complicate the job of the attitude jets. The crew does not need any steenk-king gravity in combat anyway.
I know of nothing that would prevent one from incorporating capacitors in the coilgun. Indeed, given the basic design of a coilgun, capacitors are probably mandatory. So the size and speed of the projectile can be arbitrarily large, it only increases the re-charge time and reduces the rate-of-fire.
However, as I mentioned before, the bigger the coilgun gets, the more it acts like an auxiliary propulsion system. The recoil from these monsters will nudge the ship off course, and their mounting brackets had better be sturdy.
As far as estimating how much energy gets into the projectile, your guess is as good as mine. I cannot seem to find any accurate figures. Which probably means they are proprietary or classified. This means you can pull a figure out of the air and get away with it.
Even worse, one can make an “e-bomb” which is optimized to make such an EMP. And the explosive charge can be non-nuclear.
http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket3x.html#ebomb
Other random notes:
Since the coilguns are going to have huge electrical charges stored in capacitors, if a gun is hit by enemy weapons fire there will probably be a cinematic display of artificial lightning. It will arc all over the place like one of Nikolai Tesla’s toys.
The pusher plate of the Orion drive is already designed to withstand the shock of a nuclear blast. In a battle the ship might want to use it as an impromptu shield, trying to aim it at (the predicted location of) enemy nuclear warhead detonations.
Remember the “spurt bombs” from Niven and Pournelle’s FOOTFALL. These were Excalibur style bomb pumped x-ray lasers. The point is that they can be pumped by the nuclear pulse charges used by the Orion drive. IIRC in FOOTFALL these were stacked in tower-like racks on the upper part of the pusher plate. They would be dispensed much like cans of soda from the bottom, right before the next pusher pulse.
Just looked at your Soviet ‘animation’ picture… that is so excellent! Forget my radiator comments, it looks good as is.
Sigh. I’m gonna have to finally get ahold of Footfall. Read plenty of Niven & Pournelle, but never that one.
Good grief Winchell, how long have you been working on that site?! I still haven’t finished reading the rocketx page, and you’ve got chemical EMP references on there too?! That’s entirely a new one to me - I had just gotten to that part of the page and was only skimming because I figured I already knew that part.
BTW, I’m pretty First Contact with Kzinti was NOT in Sol system though. I think it was near A.Centauri, or maybe on the way there?
One suggestion - you might want change the dedication to in Bob’s memory - I was going to say Sir Arthur’s memory too, but apparently he’s still with us - 89 this year!
Uh… back on topic… 
If you haven’t seen nyrathwiz’s reference link to the Footfall Reference Design http://www.up-ship.com/apr/michael.htm (I’m calling it, since he claims apparently Larry was involved is something to look at for inspiration.
Main thing that I see about the your U.S. concept ship is that size of the shock absorber struts look small to me for the size of the pad. I assume you’ve looked at the original designs fairly closely (plastic coated nukes! 
), have you looked at the revisited design? There’s a link with some interesting comments and links at http://www.thespacereview.com/article/309/1 although he’s rather cavalier about the environmental dangers. The mag-lev’d (shock-absorbing) passenger compartment is intriguing. Iffy for a warship though.
Thinking about this slightly, I’m wondering about a couple of “environmental” features and improvements likely made by 2050, especially since after awhile the nuclear dangers became more obvious to everyone, there would be the protests, etc. again of course. Killing the other side is one thing, but killing your own is another entirely :rolleyes:
Why the spherical shape - your Orion’s continuity? I’ve seen some other short Orion graphics, but for an alternate (the original?) design, see http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/O/OrionProj.html
I suspect you’d want a sharper nose, just in case you ram into something. If you want counter-rotating rings, I’d suggest they not be right next to each other… just in case. Put the “fuel”, generators, etc in between the rings maybe?
Ah - there’s your justification for de-spin!
Oooo… there’s a scene - a spun ship gets hit via a surprise attack and pieces go flying off…
Are you working on a full back story or just the animation plot? If you are interested, a hard-sf capable friend of mine might be able to help.
Quite a long time, actually.
The top of the site is here: http://www.projectrho.com/
The original page was on making 3-D starmaps: http://www.projectrho.com/starmap.html
A section on the lost (and obsolete) art of making Nomograms: http://www.projectrho.com/nomogram/index.html
Some of my Blender work: http://www.projectrho.com/warpwar/index.html
http://www.projectrho.com/SSC/leifGallery/index.html
Some artwork I did back in 1976: http://www.projectrho.com/ogre.html
And a page about a plastic model from the late 1960’s: http://www.projectrho.com/SSC/index.html
I was trying to avoid mentioning the link to the artist conception of the Footfall Orion drive warship. Often when an artist is designing something, they need to avoid seeing others artwork on the same subject. This is to avoid subconsciously using elements of others artwork, and to have plausible deniabilty if they are accused of plagerizing.
a few notes on your project. if you are going for realism, your radiators are grossly inefficient. The heat transmission needed to make them efficient, the only heat emitted from them would be radiation, when it seems like it would be more logical for someone to carry some gas/liquid thing into space, transfer all the heat to it, then just eject it into space to get the full benefit of radiation, convection, and conduction. It would be even better still to just transfer that heat into another form of useful energy, which in 50 years would be entirely possible, Especially with the ammounts of energy needed to run a ship like that.
sorry if this was already said, but a lot of the posts are crazy long, and I didn’t want to read them all (I did read most)
Well, according to Tony Valle’s equations, heat radiators are at maximum efficency when the cold side of the heat engine is at 75% of the temperature of the hot side. The radiator effectiveness goes up at the fourth power of the heat of the radiator, which is why I used an example of a 1600K liquid sodium radiator .
The trouble with venting into space is that you eventually run out of coolant. And at nuclear reactor power levels you will run out of coolant in a matter of minutes. You will note that the radiators on NASA’s Apollo Service Module, the Space Shuttle, and the International Space Station do not vent gas to try and use convection or conduction, they just use radiation like Rhysy.
And I’m afraid that transforming the heat into some form of useful energy run afoul of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Otherwise you’d have a perpetual motion machine, which are impossible.
Wow, where to start !
dgebel : OK, I’m sold on the hysterisis field. I think I’ll assume a field that’s activated by the proximity of incoming missiles, perhaps with a low-level field that’s on all the time during combat to detect them. I particularly like the idea of using it to slow down filled shells for other systems to destroy them, that’s pretty ingenious.
Or just use non-magnetic plain old artillary shells. I suppose in you need the rail-gun velocity in space - there wouldn’t be enough relative velocity due to the distances involved otherwise. You could easily see the incoming shells and dodge.
The more detailed wargaming can wait until everything’s actually modelled, but it will be necessary to have the ships fairly close together. This will be advantageous to both sides, in a sense, as they could use the closer proximity for more accurate targetting without worrying about the defensive systems so much… but let’s leave that for now (they WILL initally be far apart though, in order to use high-strength weapons, i.e. megaton nukes and so on). More importantly, if the ships are too widely separated there’s little or no scope for narrative. There’s not much point to my mind in going to all the trouble of realism if you go so far that the audience hasn’t got a clue what’s going on.
nyrathwiz :
However, as I mentioned before, the bigger the coilgun gets, the more it acts like an auxiliary propulsion system. The recoil from these monsters will nudge the ship off course, and their mounting brackets had better be sturdy.
As far as estimating how much energy gets into the projectile, your guess is as good as mine. I cannot seem to find any accurate figures. Which probably means they are proprietary or classified. This means you can pull a figure out of the air and get away with it.
Well, from your luminosity equations for the radiatiors I know the available power supply, so I can estimate the availble KE from the charging time, and for any given projectile mass its momemntum, and therefore there coil velocity of the ship. Sticking with a 1 tonne projectile (a nice round number), 5 seconds of charging corresponds to a projectile velocity of 0.9km/s, with a recoil velocity of the ship (let’s say it has a mass of 1 million tonnes) of 0.4 cm/s. As long as the mounts efficiently deliver the recoil to the rest of the ship, it shouldn’t be a problem.
Since the coilguns are going to have huge electrical charges stored in capacitors, if a gun is hit by enemy weapons fire there will probably be a cinematic display of artificial lightning. It will arc all over the place like one of Nikolai Tesla’s toys.
Awesome ! I was going to ask if there was any excuse for something like that. From what little I know of EMP, I’m not sure if it would be a problem from “e-bombs” in space. There’d be the compton scattering of the gamma/x-rays on the hull of the ship, but would this be significant ?
The pusher plate of the Orion drive is already designed to withstand the shock of a nuclear blast. In a battle the ship might want to use it as an impromptu shield, trying to aim it at (the predicted location of) enemy nuclear warhead detonations.
But the pusher plate is designed to handle a specified yield with a specified mass exploding at a specified distance from the plate. You could (or rather, would definately) build in a safety margin, but the enemy won’t be so obliging as to account for your tolerances. What’s to stop their nuke from actually hitting the plate ?
dgebel : Here we go again… this is becoming more of an essay in warship design than a typical post…
One suggestion - you might want change the dedication to in Bob’s memory - I was going to say Sir Arthur’s memory too, but apparently he’s still with us - 89 this year!
And still writing books with Stephen Baxter - good ones too, not like the other times he’s written with a co-author.
I haven’t read Footfall either, but I’ll see if my library has a copy next week. I’ve seen that graphic though (sorry nyrathwiz, too late !), it looks very aesthetic but I don’t think much of it form a design pont of view. The hemispherical pusher would be subject to huge sideways forces as would the curiously-angled shock absorbers. The whole design is very spiky, I would expect evrything to be rather smooth so it could absorb impact shocks better. It has an amoured shield, but it only protects the ship from head-on attacks. What does it do if there’s more than one enemy ship ? I could be wrong, but the guns don’t look like they can rotate in more than one plane to me.
Main thing that I see about the your U.S. concept ship is that size of the shock absorber struts look small to me for the size of the pad. I assume you’ve looked at the original designs fairly closely (plastic coated nukes!
Agree on the shocks. Plastic-coating isn’t as amusing as the… err… fecal-coating proposed for the starship versions though…
I think I’ve read that link before. There’s a lot of reasons for thinking an Orion could be made environmentally-friendly (or friendlier, at any rate). My last version had it boosted above the atmosphere on shuttle-style SRBs. But that won’t be a concern here, as ships this big would be assembled in space, possibly from asteriod-mined metals and whatnot. Apparently you could launch 8 million tonne Orions from the ground… but I wouldn’t want to.
Spherical shape wasn’t for any particular reason, although head-on it would allow all weapons to be fired. Making the nose pointy is probably a good idea. I’ll definately move the rings apart, good point.
Story - I’m thinking of doing some fairly easy supporting scenes to explain why the battle takes place, but that can wait. At this rate I’ll spend more time writing than actually modelling anything…
Hmm, I wonder if I could use some of those real life starmaps for extra super-realism. Blender stars always give ugly results when animated.
way2lazy2ca : I think nyrathwiz has already given a comprehensive answer to that.
Here are some alternative concepts… now I’m off to finalize it and get on with the modelling. Think I’ll go with the rounder one, just for a different sort of design. It could have a big laser on the top to shoot away anything about to collide with it.
Cool! But like I said - I can’t speak to the actual plausibility, I’ve only seen it used in tales & maybe mentioned in a speculative model. If your a physics grad, you should be able to calculate that I thought about doing that, but my calculus skill wasn’t up to, and every physics grad I know has ended up doing programming, so I took the shorter and easier route.:rolleyes:
There’s not much point to my mind in going to all the trouble of realism if you go so far that the audience hasn’t got a clue what’s going on.
good reason to wait!
But the pusher plate is designed to handle a specified yield with a specified mass exploding at a specified distance from the plate. You could (or rather, would definately) build in a safety margin, but the enemy won’t be so obliging as to account for your tolerances. What’s to stop their nuke from actually hitting the plate ?
Very true. Actually, if its that close, you can also always dump a… fuelet (?) to set it off early, which would also give you a boost - wheather you want it or not. A missle on your tail and a laser beam just in front of you…
dgebel : Here we go again… this is becoming more of an essay in warship design than a typical post…
Ya - is that a problem?
And still writing books with Stephen Baxter - good ones too, not like the other times he’s written with a co-author.
Baxter? Cool! Have to keep an eye out!
looks very aesthetic but I don’t think much of it form a design pont of view. The hemispherical pusher would be subject to huge sideways forces as would the curiously-angled shock absorbers. The whole design is very spiky, I would expect evrything to be rather smooth so it could absorb impact shocks better. It has an amoured shield, but it only protects the ship from head-on attacks. What does it do if there’s more than one enemy ship?
Excellent points. And as pointed out in his Ogre post - a spherical is actually the strongest, etc.
Plastic-coating isn’t as amusing as the… err… fecal-coating proposed for the starship versions though…
Ooooer, hadn’t read that far. Ahem.
My last version had it boosted above the atmosphere on shuttle-style SRBs.
Finally got to view your lovely anim this morning! But only once so far. Very good idea to use SRBs.
But that won’t be a concern here, as ships this big would be assembled in space, possibly from asteriod-mined metals and whatnot. Apparently you could launch 8 million tonne Orions from the ground… but I wouldn’t want to.
Shudder. No. A cursory reading sounded like they wanted to do that in an “uninhabited” area though. What was Winchell saying about “respecting the radiation…”?
What/where are your ship scales again?
Story - I’m thinking of doing some fairly easy supporting scenes to explain why the battle takes place, but that can wait. At this rate I’ll spend more time writing than actually modelling anything…
:o
Ah, asteroid mining! Forgot about that, was thinking they would be Earth-based, but if they’ve been active in space for a century, Jovian orbit would be perfect. Maybe the Powers have bases on different Trojans, and make raids on the inner belt mines as the enemy passes by. But they need control of the Jupiter system for volitiles and the gravity well; Saturn system is easier to mine but too much further out to be strategic.
Hmm, I wonder if I could use some of those real life starmaps for extra super-realism. Blender stars always give ugly results when animated.
The only problem is getting them clear enough/big enough bitmap. Somewhere around (on here probably) I remember a post about how to get good results from the builtin stars.
with the modelling. Think I’ll go with the rounder one, just for a different sort of design. It could have a big laser on the top to shoot away anything about to collide with it.
Agreed, the round does have better design contrast and a top laser could be very useful too. I saw a post on one of Winchell’s links about the airborne COIL laser project needing a shutter to protect it from impacts and low-probability of a direct enemy laser shot up the barrel. Also, the tactics were to simply fry the electronics on incoming rather than “detonate” anything per se. A ball shaped laser turret on top would add some nice detail.
BTW, you know what piece of music you have to use, don’t you? Holst’s Mars is the only possible one. Long, slow, building of tension with a couple of close approaches, then the drawn ending as burst after burst detonates in the finale! Be nice if you could get permission for maybe a university’s actual symphonic recoding, or you could electronically do it yourself I guess. What was the music you used for Orion?
Jupiter would have been nice, but totally wrong feel of course. Unless you wanted to do a non-battle scene story at some point.
Would have been nice to have this for the SIGRAPH!
Say, have you submitted Orion for the DVD?
If your a physics grad, you should be able to calculate that
Ah well, astrophysics… where we’re repeatedly told that magnetic fields make life complicated so we ignore them…
Ya - is that a problem?
Nope - just means I spend longer writing than actually using Blender…
Shudder. No. A cursory reading sounded like they wanted to do that in an “uninhabited” area though.
I think the super-Orion ground launches were more of a theoretical upper limit rather than a serious proposal. Maybe with fusion and rocket boosting the fallout wouldn’t be too catastrophic, but I think it would be much easier overall to build the damn things in space.
What/where are your ship scales again?
See the schematic in the main gallery : http://rhysy.plexersoft.com/Deep%20Space%20Force%20Gallery/
BTW, you know what piece of music you have to use, don’t you? Holst’s Mars is the only possible one. Long, slow, building of tension with a couple of close approaches, then the drawn ending as burst after burst detonates in the finale! Be nice if you could get permission for maybe a university’s actual symphonic recoding, or you could electronically do it yourself I guess. What was the music you used for Orion?
Mars would work, but it’s such a cliché. For the last one I nicked Hans Zimmer’s score to the recent King Arthur movie. Next time, Star Wars, or maybe Sibelius. Or something.
Jupiter would have been nice, but totally wrong feel of course. Unless you wanted to do a non-battle scene story at some point.
Should I ever do yet another Orion animation - in which case, I’d be dangerously obsessed - it would be for something more peacful, like diverting an asteroid.
Would have been nice to have this for the SIGRAPH!
Say, have you submitted Orion for the DVD?
Didn’t think there’d be any point with things like Elephant’s Dream around… and it isn’t nearly so interesting without the legally dubious music, never mind that half the scenes were mostly Terragen. But thanks for the compliment anyway !
EDIT : All this typing, I forgot to actually post the update… here’s the concept fleshed out a bit more. Since it will have many more laser weapons, I gave it far larger cooling fins (again retractable during close combat). There are too many in the left-hand pic though, but easily fixed. I thought perhaps the top laser could be a Death Star style superlaser for long range, one hit kills striked, but with a roof for closer combat. It looks like a hamburger collided with a UFO… should improve when details are added.
I remember a mention of something like this in John W. Cambell’s THE MIGHTIEST MACHINE (1934). He called it a “magnetic atmosphere”, because it defended the ship against metallic meteors in the same way Earth’s atmosphere defends Earth.
However, his included an utterly impossible science-fictional feature. He managed to make the magnetic lines of force lie down around the ship instead of sticking up like the hairs on an angry cat. You can’t do that, Mr. Campbell. 
You’re welome. I thought you’d like that.
Now, re: EMP. There are two sources here that we are talking about.
The first type occurs when x-rays from a nuclear detonation undergo Compton scattering on a planetary atmosphere. It probably will not happen with x-rays hitting a spacecraft.
The second type comes from an e-Bomb. These are generally not nuclear. An armature subsitutes for the atmosphere, the energy from the explosive charge induces the EMP.
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/archive/1543
http://science.howstuffworks.com/e-bomb.htm
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/report/1996/apjemp.htm
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/defense/1281421.html
True, using the pusher plate as a shield probably won’t work very well. But it is better than nothing.
I wish I could find that article. Back in the 1970’s I was near a library that had an encyclopedia, I think it was the McGraw-Hill encyclopedia of science and technology. In the article on Orion drive, it mentioned a study on a pusher plate that was flat, one that was shaped like a cone, and one that was a titanic sphere with a huge nozzle in the back. My faulty memory said the cone shaped one had some sort of advantage, but don’t depend on my memory.
I think you have this article already, but others may be interested (assuming the equations don’t send them screaming in terror):
http://img259.imageshack.us/img259/9953/orionisp23tw.jpg
http://img259.imageshack.us/img259/4156/orionisp18ba.jpg
Yes, Wayne Smith maintains that the big argument against ground launches of Orion spacecraft is the fallout. This is basically vaporized dirt. Mr. Smith says that by using a metal launch pad the fallout can be avoided.
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/nuclearspace-03h.html
The thing is, the job an Orion drive does best is lofting huge payloads from the surface. It has lots of thrust but there are plenty of other drives that have better specific impulse in a deep space environment.
My sense of the scale of a typical interplanetary battle tells me that collisions will only be by mutual consent, or with a target with crippled propulsion.
If you can collide, a laser isn’t going to help. It can poke holes in the incoming ship, but it’s still going to hit you. If you don’t believe me, do some back of the envelope calculations on how much energy will be required to totally vaporize a hostile warship.
Hmmm, this looks interesting:
http://www.u.arizona.edu/~tuvas/
A study of EMP and fallout damage from an Orion Drive spacecraft.
Tsk. He should have known that magnetism has to combined with an electric field in order to get transverse vibration beam weapon! (lasers, for those who don’t know) Actually, I find it pretty interesting how that works - (simplisticly speaking) 2 freely uh… omni? polar? radiating fields (e & m), in effect, bind together to create discrete wavicles that can be directed. They still radiate outward, but directionally, they vibrate at cross angles, but can only expand to a much more limited extent (I presume a photon with the same total energy as a given magnetic field would have a correspondingly large cross-section/wavelength. and vice-versa, etc. But hey, ignoring limits is how we got to where we are, and it was an intriguing potential at the time!
Say… I’m pretty sure I remember that encyclopedia! Not more than the name though, I was pretty young back then.
I presume you are talking about a conical cross-section cone not a straight-edged cone? In standard rocket exhaust design, the conical design is most efficient. Since we’re talking about a pumped, external plasma drive, if it was detonated close enough, ie (mostly?) inside the cone, it sounds reasonable that more delta-v would be imparted - or impacted to be more accurate.
Heh, “in any technical writing, you should still be able to get the basic understanding by ignoring any terms you don’t understand”
You know, in that case (man, lot of ‘stickiness’ on that site!:rolleyes: ), I’m wondering if a couple of other simple techniques would help as well. A (rather large) “silencer” might be a good idea rather than just a flat slab of metal. Or have the ship suspended over a deep cavern, or both even. You could even have a few lift-off bursts to get off the ground and thereafter ignite the SRBs as 2nd stage for most of the atomspheric travel.
Say! For that matter, a nuclear 0th stage could be ground-based, a la Jules Verne Why not have a maybe half-dozen even smaller fuelets that are ground based, ejected from the ground, so that the ship gets a boost up without any weight penalty before the SRBs kick in? Or wait… that’s the whole point of this thing isn’t it - the weight penalty is virtually eliminated.
And this is getting so far off-topic it isn’t helping your animation, is it. :o
Most probably. But ‘trade-routes’ will cause more frequent close approaches, which would lead to more potential conflicts of course.
Remembering that detonating the enemy magazine and/or fuel tank is going to be your best bet for vaporizing them.
As I recall, the pusher plate had a straight conical exterior, but the inside chamber was a hollow parabolic cone. The detonation point was at the center of the open mouth of the cone. The spherical design, of course, had the detonation at the center of the sphere. Rhysy is using the tried-and-true Dyson flat plate design. It uses nuclear “shaped charges” where most of the blast is directed upwards within a 22.5 cone. At the detonation range this angle is within the area of the pusher plate. If a non-shaped charge is used, more than ninety percent of the nuke’s energy is wasted.
Ah, that turns out not the be the case. First off, a “close approach” means several times the separation between the Earth and Luna.
Secondly, planets are not stationary, they move in their orbits. And at different rates. This means there are no “trade-routes” as such, the route changes from minute to minute. And the actual trajectory depends upon the delta-V expended by the spacecraft. If two ships leave Earth simultaneously but one burns more delta-V than the other, they will gradually separate and will eventually be millions of miles apart. They also will arrive at the destination at different times, from days to months apart.
This is easy if the target’s propulsion system is a Nuclear Salt Water Rocket (with fuel composed of hideosly high critical masses of uranium tetrabromide solutions) or some species of antimatter-fueled rocket. Otherwise it ain’t gonna happen.
A Orion drive uses nuclear charges.
John Schilling says that nuclear weapons are rather complex and fragile devices, and it doesn’t take much to put them out of action. And they do not undergo sympathetic detonation, i.e., they don’t go boom just because you hit them real hard.
