![]() The accelerations are so poor that orbital evasion maneuvers are impossible to execute against high-g missiles or anything else really. In range of weapons fire, enemy projectile range is limited primarily by the target’s areal cross section, and its acceleration. With combat spacecraft, it only got worse. It doesn’t matter that you have tons of delta-v, if it takes you years or decades to use it all. NTRs and chemical propulsion turned out to be far superior. Getting between planets, for instance, might require a longer burn time than the actual period of the planets themselves, years, or even decades! Getting cargo anywhere in the solar system was prohibitively slow. Low accelerations not only prevent you from using standard orbital maneuvers like Hohmann Transfers or Orbit Phasing, they vastly increase burn time and ultimately travel time. ![]() Thrust, and by extension, acceleration, is not simply important for dodging in combat. I built a few thrusters in the megawatt range, tried them out on a few missions, and their limitations became immediately apparent. Counterintuitively, trying to get around mediocre acceleration is actually far more difficult.Īfter implementing the Nuclear Thermal Rocket, I looked into ion thrusters, and settled on the Magnetoplasmadynamic (MPD) Thruster, because it had some of the highest thrust out of all of them, and thrust is quite nice for dodging in combat. You can work with a mediocre exhaust velocity with a greater mass ratio (though this maxes out too, this will be discussed in future posts) and staging. So isn’t exhaust velocity the most important attribute of an engine? If you stick two identical engines together, your thrust doubles, but your exhaust velocity stays constant. You can also scale up the thrust of a rocket, but not the exhaust velocity. ![]() Hey look, those Magnetoplasmadynamic Thrusters have great exhaust velocities. Or if you go for laser propulsion, or fission sails, or many more options, you can achieve orders of magnitude better exhaust velocity. Well designed Solid Core Nuclear Thermal Rockets achieve 4 – 9 km/s, better than chemical propulsion, but mediocre in comparison, for instance, to ion thrusters, which can achieve 100 km/s or more. And due to the rocket equation, the easiest way to get more delta-v is to get a better drive with a better exhaust velocity. ![]() From my perspective, only exploring what a technology can do without keeping tabs on what it can’t is no better than inventing fictitious technologies altogether.īut anyways, why is the Nuclear Thermal Rocket (NTR) the go to drive in use? If you’ve been following the blog, you’ll find that it’s constantly brought up that delta-v is the limiting factor on just about everything. Implementing the basic equations for a technology’s abilities, without fully implementing the mechanical and thermal stresses of that technology, would be disingenuous towards the end goal of the game. Many futuristic and experimental technologies were not included because a full treatment of these technology’s limitations has been published in scientific literature. The primary drive of Children of a Dead Earth is the Solid Core Nuclear Thermal Rocket, though a number of other technologies are supported. Design for a Nuclear Thermal Rocket, which is more or less a nuclear reactor jammed into the thrust chamber of a thermal rocket engine. As you’ll see soon enough, thrust ends up being a heavily limiting factor for space travel. Zero-propellant drives such as solar sails, laser sails, electromagnetic tethers, and the like, are not explored by Children of a Dead Earth due to certain limitations, particularly thrust. Reaction engines are the cornerstone of any exploration of space warfare. ![]() We’re long overdue for a post about the rocketry of the game itself, so here it is finally. ![]()
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