Genuine question - how hard sci fi the techs are?

[BladeofSharpness]

Genuine question here, I'm a backer but I'm waiting for the final polish before indulging myself into this great game.

How are the techs, realism wise? I have a veneer in astronomy and physic science, but I would not know if they bullsheeted me on some advanced techs or if they are realistic within 50 years on Earth. Fusion reactors miniaturized enough to fit on a ship would be hard before 2070 (give or take) but I guess alien techs stealing could do the trick. Now, there are no stupid stuff like teleporters, instant com and FTL right? No energy shield either, please re-assure me on that :-)

[cswiger]

The radiator handling cooling for the crew compartment will be running around 300 Kelvin, which is deep infrared. The radiator handling a 2500 K reactor will be ~2500 K as well, and be an orange-white color, about the same as a "soft white" lightbulb.

There aren't a lot of materials which don't melt at such a high temperature, but at least the efficiency of a radiator increases with temperature, so really hot radiators can be smaller.

[ulzgoroth]

Originally posted by Hellfire:

Hard? Very little. It tries, it struggles, it utterly fails.
I mean: cobalt dust radiators.
-radiation in space is a nightmare, almost non-existant.
-dust is infinitely inferior to any liquid.
-metal in void WELDS instantly. As soon as you expose the cobalt dust to the void it clumps forever.
-even denying this happens, creating such electromagnetic field to have the dust flow through would be the primary function of the ship itself and produce who knows how much heat.
There's plenty of crap like this.

I blame the 90% unnecessary, superfluous, instantly obsolete researches. Once they used all the possible, probable, plausible discoveries, they went after the wildest ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ theories.

After all, the premises are "ubiquitous, instantly teleporting space resources". The game thinks to be realistic, dreams to be, but it isn't.

That's pretty much a serious proposal. Not too hard to research, though I can't access article in Proceedings of a Symposium Advanced Compact Reactor Systems that supposedly discusses it.

The claim that radiation doesn't work in space indicates that, frankly, you have not the faintest idea what you're talking about.

I'll readily say I'm not sure why one would use solid-phase dust instead of liquid-phase droplets, which seem to be much more commonly discussed, though I'm pretty convinced somebody did write a paper on that premise.

I could believe vacuum welding of the dust being a concern, but...I'm pretty sure that's not how vacuum welding works.


The space resource distribution is a lazy abstraction. But your actual technical complaint is grossly ill-informed.

[ulzgoroth]

Originally posted by cswiger:

The radiator handling cooling for the crew compartment will be running around 300 Kelvin, which is deep infrared. The radiator handling a 2500 K reactor will be ~2500 K as well, and be an orange-white color, about the same as a "soft white" lightbulb.

The first is likely, but not entirely necessary - you can spend energy to pump the low-temperature waste heat up to higher temperature radiators. Though you probably will use solidly IR-range radiators, not the much hotter ones you use for reactor heat.

The second, probably not if you're using thermoelectric power generation. For that to work, your cold sink (the radiator) must be colder than your hot sink (the reactor core) - the temperature differential is how you're able to recover power.


In the game, it seems that only reactor heat is monitored. (This is a kind of big error actually - under the stats the game uses firing weapons would generate a lot of heat and that heat is also lower-temperature and thus harder to deal with than reactor heat). And the radiators are assumed to run at a constant temperature per type (probably the maximum they can support) which is unlikely in some fringe cases (most obviously but unimportantly, fuel cells).

[Morti]

research speed is just too fast for credibility : usable fusion before 2050 ? optimist people are talking about 2060, here you can have it near 2030

[Mistfox]

Originally posted by Morti:

research speed is just too fast for credibility : usable fusion before 2050 ? optimist people are talking about 2060, here you can have it near 2030

Yeah that was what I meant earlier that the pacing of development is a bit too fast. It's also bad in that it makes a lot of older tech like rockets obsolete too fast so you don't get a chance to use them, making them useless.

[Veniczar B. Fontana]

Originally posted by Morti:

research speed is just too fast for credibility : usable fusion before 2050 ? optimist people are talking about 2060, here you can have it near 2030

War time tends to make everything much much quicker. Nobody expected nuclear weapons this early and yet...

What seems more strange to me is the industrialization of these techs. Building one or two prototypes seems fair. Deploying massive 70k tons battleships in space in a year or two with no know-how seems pretty optimistic. But once again it's a game, meant to be fun and as of now it is already far too slow for most people...

[Brakiros]

Originally posted by Hellfire:

After all, the premises are "ubiquitous, instantly teleporting space resources". The game thinks to be realistic, dreams to be, but it isn't.

Like tin droplet radiators that exist in a closed system of liquified tin particles that somehow don't randomly float out into space despite being a radiator and being exposed to the void.

[Atelier Morgan]

nasa developed liquid droplet radiator designs (suggesting aluminum, gallium or in fact tin because you need a low vapor pressure coolant to avoid evaporation) in 1987

its as hard scifi as the orion drives are

[andrei haiducul]

Originally posted by Atelier Morgan:

nasa developed liquid droplet radiator designs (suggesting aluminum, gallium or in fact tin because you need a low vapor pressure coolant to avoid evaporation) in 1987

its as hard scifi as the orion drives are

This[www.projectrho.com] is a liquid droplet radiator IRL. It doesn't work if the ship is accelerating.

[corisai]

Originally posted by andrei haiducul:

This is a liquid droplet radiator IRL. It doesn't work if the ship is accelerating.

It will work if it will be fixed to sides of spaceship (using something like a retractable truss).

[andrei haiducul]

Originally posted by corisai:

It will work if it will be fixed to sides of spaceship (using something like a retractable truss).

Even if you're accelerating in a straight line in deep space, you're reducing the fall time of the liquid droplets and thus reducing this radiators cooling performance. If you also maneuver, you lose the droplets.

[corisai]

Originally posted by andrei haiducul:

Even if you're accelerating in a straight line in deep space, you're reducing the fall time of the liquid droplets and thus reducing this radiators cooling performance.

True, but reduced performance =//= doesn't work, like you'd written.

Originally posted by andrei haiducul:

If you also maneuver, you lose the droplets.

True. Of course some losses are anticipated so cooling system will have some reserves but that will be more like an emergency mode.

[ulzgoroth]

Originally posted by andrei haiducul:

Originally posted by corisai:

It will work if it will be fixed to sides of spaceship (using something like a retractable truss).

Even if you're accelerating in a straight line in deep space, you're reducing the fall time of the liquid droplets and thus reducing this radiators cooling performance. If you also maneuver, you lose the droplets.

You could mitigate this somewhat by building a shorter radiator span with a wider receiver, I believe...but yeah, it's certainly a legitimate issue. And the mitigation would reduce the efficiency significantly.

Really even more rigid deployable radiators are mostly unlikely to stand up to the kind of accelerations our ships perform. Huge cantilevered aluminium vanes aren't all that sturdy.


(AV:T rules are that ships cannot engage combat thrust with radiators deployed, for a point of reference.)

[Emperor of The Great Unknown]

Children of a Dead Earth is a game that has Hard sci-fi space combat using only proven technologies. Problem with a lot of technologies in Terra Invictia is they require advancements in materials science that might never come.

The modern world doesn't have inventors that stumble on new materials or laws of physics anymore. Today there are institutions that throw billions of dollars on innovation in tech and explore the given problem exhaustively and run into brick walls all the time. We are likely at the beginning of a technological plateau. Most new 'tech' companies that promise quick innovation are just grifters capitalists trying to steal your money with false promises (Theranos is the big example).

So most of the late game tech in this game will probably never happen anytime soon.

[corisai]

Originally posted by Emperor of The Great Unknown:

The modern world doesn't have inventors that stumble on new materials or laws of physics anymore.

Hypersonic air-to-surface missiles are in use now - so some techs from middle of TI research tree already here :)