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Fleet Tankers Or Oilers ...

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Re: Fleet Tankers Or Oilers ...
Post by kzt   » Tue May 10, 2016 2:20 pm

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I think you'd get a lot lower thermal signature running a reactor at 500kw all the time than a exawatt reactor for an hour once a week.

There is the whole process of cold-starting a ship. I have no idea how David conceptualizes this in the Honorverse. For example, you lose both reactors a long way from home, one trashed, the other just lost the fuel system. You rebuild the cryo piping and salvage pumps from the other system so it's all fixed. How do you start it up? I'd assume heating up the core to a few million degrees takes a significant amount of power and time.
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Re: Fleet Tankers Or Oilers ...
Post by munroburton   » Tue May 10, 2016 2:31 pm

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With one of those? :roll:
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Re: Fleet Tankers Or Oilers ...
Post by zuluwiz   » Tue May 10, 2016 2:33 pm

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Sooooooo....... the Chief Engineer walks up to you, hands you a box of matches, and says "crawl in there and light the fire, dammit."
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Re: Fleet Tankers Or Oilers ...
Post by Somtaaw   » Tue May 10, 2016 5:00 pm

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Anany length 'trip' in a grav wave most ships shut down their fusion cores and let the wave power their needs, which assists in conserving fuel.

We've also seen light cruisers during the Sanskrit and Cut Worm performing multi-week long missions staying in stealth mode, scouting Havenite systems. While that's a far cry from a month or more, that they could be doing, it still shows that fuel conservation isn't a totally big deal.

Then there's the wormhole exploration cruisers, sufficient reactor mass to travel 6 months without ever touching a grav wave, wasn't it only a light cruiser or was she a refit heavy? If that's achieveable duration for most sub-battlecruiser, just more evidence shutting down entirely even for length 'stays' is almost unnecessary for an all-up fusion powered ship.

Jonathan_S wrote:
Joat42 wrote:I had a thought, why not put a fission reactor in other ship-types other than LAC's? I'm not talking about using it as a primary energy generator, rather more like a backup plant that doesn't need fuel and can be spun up on short notice.

Pros and cons of the idea? Tactical advantages? Surprise factor?
You could on the technical level, but I'm having trouble finding a significant reason to bother.

OTOH a fission reactor can be brought critical using virtually no power, where a fusion reactor appears to need some fairly hefty power to bring up the grav field and kickstart the reaction. So you could shut down all your fusion reactors and then use fission to bring them back online.

But most ship missions don't involve hanging around for ages in fuel conservation mode.


Also, on a starship scale (where you don't have the scaling or whatever issues that make fusion in LACs so shockingly inefficient) fusion fuel is more compact per unit of energy than fission fuel. So if you were in fuel conservation mode you could last longer by using additional hydrogen tanks the size of the fission core.

Actually what you'd probably do if you needed a ship with a truly prolonged low power idle state is run the fusion reactors intermittently. Use it to fully charge every superconductor on the ship, then shut down the fusion plants. Run off the stored power until you got down to restart power + acceptable safety margin; fire up the plant, run it just long enough to top off stored power, and shut it back down. That would let you run the fusion plant at it fuel efficient high level output; but only when needed.

You should be able to last longer than on fission power, yet not need to find room for an otherwise redundant fission plant.


But it's possible there's some scenario I'm missing where you need fairly long endurance medium levels of power on a starship and aren't willing / able to just run the high power level fusion reactors.
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Re: Fleet Tankers Or Oilers ...
Post by Weird Harold   » Tue May 10, 2016 5:13 pm

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Joat42 wrote:I had a thought, why not put a fission reactor in other ship-types other than LAC's? I'm not talking about using it as a primary energy generator, rather more like a backup plant that doesn't need fuel and can be spun up on short notice.

Pros and cons of the idea? Tactical advantages? Surprise factor?


Big drawback: Fission Reactors use HEAVY metals and require HEAVY shielding -- That's a lot of mass tied up in a system you're only going to use rarely.
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Re: Fleet Tankers Or Oilers ...
Post by Jonathan_S   » Tue May 10, 2016 6:16 pm

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Weird Harold wrote:Big drawback: Fission Reactors use HEAVY metals and require HEAVY shielding -- That's a lot of mass tied up in a system you're only going to use rarely.

Well you could probably use whatever "rad shielding" is used to protect ships from energetic particles. (Some kind of projected energy shielding that sits behind the sidewalls, and in front of the hammerhead) Though I'm not sure people would love a reactor design that had to keep active rad shielding emitters operating to avoid cooking the nearby crew :D
A bit more risk that lead shielding failing.

Though you might accept less lead shielding on the theory that it's only for emergencies.
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Re: Fleet Tankers Or Oilers ...
Post by Relax   » Tue May 10, 2016 6:17 pm

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Honorverse has magic beans radiation shielding, so no, it is not "HEAVY"
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Re: Fleet Tankers Or Oilers ...
Post by darrell   » Tue May 10, 2016 6:41 pm

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Joat42 wrote:I had a thought, why not put a fission reactor in other ship-types other than LAC's? I'm not talking about using it as a primary energy generator, rather more like a backup plant that doesn't need fuel and can be spun up on short notice.

Pros and cons of the idea? Tactical advantages? Surprise factor?


Most warships spend lots of time at station keeping. They would need power for grav plates and lights and sometimes (seldom, not always) keeping the impeller nodes warm.

a fission plant would be enough to do all those functions for DD, CL, & CA, so IMO one fission plant as a station keeping or auxiliary generator makes sense in terms of bunkerage saved and mission length.

For a BC, I doubt that a fission plant would be enough to keep the nodes warm, but could run grav plates and everything else if the ship did not need to be in ready state, so might or might not be a good idea, and definitely not a good idea for a SD.

As far as a courier boat, I have always though it a good idea. Since a courier boat does not have sidewalls or a graser, two fission plants would be able to power a 40K ton courier boat (including it's hyper generator) and takes up less space than 1 fusion plant plus bunkerage. The courier boat would have a humungus cruising range, and because it can easily go direct on longer routs rahter than detour to grav waves to save fuel, would actually be faster as well.
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Re: Fleet Tankers Or Oilers ...
Post by Imaginos1892   » Tue May 10, 2016 11:25 pm

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kzt wrote:There is the whole process of cold-starting a ship. I have no idea how David conceptualizes this in the Honorverse. For example, you lose both reactors a long way from home, one trashed, the other just lost the fuel system. You rebuild the cryo piping and salvage pumps from the other system so it's all fixed. How do you start it up? I'd assume heating up the core to a few million degrees takes a significant amount of power and time.

Capture a herd of space hamsters?
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Oh, no. You can't-a fool me. There ain't-a no Sanity Clause!
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Re: Fleet Tankers Or Oilers ...
Post by jchilds   » Wed May 11, 2016 12:41 am

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Imaginos1892 wrote:
kzt wrote:There is the whole process of cold-starting a ship. I have no idea how David conceptualizes this in the Honorverse. For example, you lose both reactors a long way from home, one trashed, the other just lost the fuel system. You rebuild the cryo piping and salvage pumps from the other system so it's all fixed. How do you start it up? I'd assume heating up the core to a few million degrees takes a significant amount of power and time.

Capture a herd of space hamsters?
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Oh, no. You can't-a fool me. There ain't-a no Sanity Clause!


Regular or Miniature Giant Space Hamsters?
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