They do have to lug around those anti-protons for their main drives personally, you know. It's the same as fuel, so yeah, all military ships do carry anti-matter.
They cannot make anti-matter on the fly.
Shepard Quest Mk V, Base of Operations (ME/MCU)
- Thread starter Esbilon
- Start date
They do have to lug around those anti-protons for their main drives personally, you know. It's the same as fuel, so yeah, all military ships do carry anti-matter.
They cannot make anti-matter on the fly.
That's not what I meant I meant that its not a "small" store, Its like 25-33% of their fuel tanks (or more). Any ship that can manufacture antimatter as it travels would have a very nasty particle accelerator as well (and be like km long). And thus is not a thing in ME.
Miscommunication on the internet? Who would have guessed.
Edit: Now D+3He -> 4He + p+ so it wouldn't be unreasonable to use the resultants of a fusion reaction in the antiproton drive, but the wiki text does indicate that the antiproton drive is independent of a fusion system, which is important as some ships do use non fusion power plants.
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The bolded bit implies that the use of anti matter propulsion in warships tends to be exclusive to combat operations, which further implies that under non-combat conditions military vessels use the much cheaper fusion torch propulsion systems instead.
This increases the range and endurance of the ship without sacrificing much, if any, combat capabilities.
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No offense but that's a double "implied" and they are quite weak "implied"s. The first quote allows for both the following interpretations:
1) Fusion isn't good enough for combat so they use a better base drive (antiproton drive).
2) Fusion isn't good enough in combat so they have a booster system (antiproton boosed fusion drive) to get more power.
The second bit of text I qouted clearly indicates that antiprotons are not used exclusively in combat as the benefits its talking about are for the between systems FTL transit (the text is from the SR-2's fuel upgrade). And thus why I find that interpretation two invalid. Esp as the first quote indicates that an antiproton drive just fires antiproton into a mass of hydrogen and thus I would conclude uses that to excite the unreacted hydrogen and uses the unreacted hydrogen as re-mass.
It maybe possible that a system using both together maybe better (though having to install both a fusion drive and the antiproton system maybe an issue), but the text given doesn't say that's what happens, it never says antiproton enhanced/boosted/etc fusion drive, it several times says that antiproton drives are the military standard.
Edit: Also the fusion drive text is unedited, it first says that it vents reactor plasma (isn't that rather dangerous and going to degrade the fusion reaction?). Then it says that it reacts the 3He and D and use that to excite the remass hydrogen. So a are you using the fusion plasma as remass or are you using hydrogen? Seriously codex, I like a lot of your stuff, but that's just
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Amberion
Mighty #9
Traffic control would be on top of that to make sure people aren't on collision courses.
It maybe possible that a system using both together maybe better (though having to install both a fusion drive and the antiproton system maybe an issue), but the text given doesn't say that's what happens, it never says antiproton enhanced/boosted/etc fusion drive, it several times says that antiproton drives are the military standard.
Edit: Also the fusion drive text is unedited, it first says that it vents reactor plasma (isn't that rather dangerous and going to degrade the fusion reaction?). Then it says that it reacts the 3He and D and use that to excite the remass hydrogen. So a are you using the fusion plasma as remass or are you using hydrogen? Seriously codex, I like a lot of your stuff, but that's just
You need to put the depleted reaction mass somewhere and keeping a chunk of mass with that level of energy around is just plain unhealthy, nevermind the problem that is keeping it contained when you lose power because the reactor stopped working. Might as well toss it out of the nearest and most convenient hole in that case.
And the amount of fusion mass you dump doesn't even need to be that much.
There's also safety systems build right into the ME drives themselves that prevent ships from accelerating while there's an obstacle in the way.
Those only work if the actual FTL course plotter can pick up the object. At FTL the ship in question is pretty much blind.
I was mainly talking about being in STL and being 'near' to another ship going at FTL speeds...I definately don't want to be anywhere near those, the amount of radiation given off due to up-shifting...
Due to the way D+3He->4He+p+, works you are pulling out the resultants of the reaction to harvest their power, about 80% of the power is in the proton you get out and the other 20% is in the 4He. Direct conversion (check out the section on the ICC) is applied to the particles and they lose their energy and create power for the ship in the process. The the mass doesn't need to be discarded as it's energy should be mostly collected. (Though you don't need it any more, so meh, just don't expect it to get you any where fast, might be a charge imbalance issue 'thou).
Now instead of collecting the power you could fire off the material I suppose. What I can find online suggests heating hydrogen into a plasma and using that to propel the ship, this doesn't directly need a fusion system, it'd work just fine with any high power energy source (eg fission). Using fusion one would dump plasma from the reactor into the hydrogen turning that into a plasma and using that to propel the ship, for some reason RL designs use this, it supposedly increases the thrust. It also matches the Codex's explanation so I can live with it.
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I was basing it off the implication of the "in combat" since the idea of using a rare fuel source 24/7 for flying around when it's only really needed in combat is pretty stupid.
The Helios thruster bit does seem to imply that anti-matter thrusters are used constantly but depending on your reading of temporarily, whether they mean seconds/minutes or hours/days, I could see it been used in a combat sense.
In my mind military thrusters dump fusion material into a reaction chamber filled with hydrogen to super-heat it. This is then directed out the thruster using magnetic fields providing thrust. In combat situations they either inject anti-matter into this mix for an extra boost or just switch to just injecting anti-matter instead.
As stupidly wasteful as it seems if Esbilon wants to go with all anti-matter all the time for warships then I'll just have to deal with it. Although if that is the case then the ability to use two 40TW Arc Reactors to produce ~1.4kg of anti-matter a day would be revolutionary.
Especially since they go be put anywhere, rather then requiring highly energetic suns, meaning they won't be as easy targets.
Going by Atomic Rockets most warships are only going to be needing a couple grams of anti-matter. So lets say each ship requires on average 1 gram of anti-matter per day.
One 80TW production plant in Arcturus could provide enough Anti-matter for ~1,400 ships. If we assume that each Alliance Fleet is based around a Dreadnaught and that going by the numbers for Shanxi is about 100 ships strong then even at full Reaper War capacity (9 Dreadnaughts = ~900 to 1000 ships) that could supply all the anti-matter required for the Alliance Navy.
Because it provides more thrust one would have every reason to use it for FTL if one wanted top speed, and as the main limit is how long one can be at FTL higher speed is better, its also important for military ships as the ship often need to get to the system asap.
But meh w/e the QM wants
But we have freaking repulsors, screw antiproton drive and its crappy fuel issues. all you need is an arc-reactor and some palladium (or Starkium for MkII and better). Do recall that Arc-reactors need semi-regular palladium core replacements (once every few years?), well in the movies anyway.
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Van Ropen
Angry, angry about elves.
I think there are more than 100 ships per fleet - especially if we go by the production numbers in the finances doc. There should be around 1000 cruisers by then (though this admittedly doesn't account for combat losses and retired ship classes) and double that many frigates for 8 dreadnoughts and 24 carriers, assuming no new shipyards are built. So each fleet (given the 8 of them named and assuming 20% lost/retired cruisers and frigates) would be something like 1 dreadnought, 3 carriers, 100 cruisers, and 200 frigates.
Of course, those numbers are really a measure of the maximum number of ships the Alliance could produce given that many shipyards and consistent funding.
Not really. Everything needed for a fusion torch is literally already on every military spaceship.
Hydrogen - Propellent
Fusion Reactor - Power Source
Reaction Chamber - Needed for anti-matter anyway.
Its as simple as having pipes connecting the reactor to the reaction chamber.
Well I was always intending for Paragon Industries to own the station. We'd just put it somewhere really safe like Arcturus because it's such a high value target.
That's only relevant for the rapid response fleet. From what I got a lot of Alliance ships just spend their days patrolling space which is a waste of good anti-matter.
Pretty much.
Well I already mentioned we can solve the fuel issues but I'll fully on board with Repulsors Fuck Yeah!
I was mostly basing it off:
200 ships in 2 fleets = 100 ships per fleet.
Although we apparently do have some numbers, although given it's been a year or two they are likely a bit out of date:
4x Dreadnaughts = 0.26%
12x Carriers = 0.79%
56x Heavy Cruisers = 3.66%
448x Light Cruisers = 29.32%
1008x Frigates = 65.97%
Total = 1,528
So 95.29% of Alliance ships are either Frigates or Light Cruisers. And at those numbers we could basically supply all the Light Cruisers and Frigates with AM. At least until we get the Alliance to replace them all with Paragon Industries Frigates and Cruisers.
They make their own antimatter, that's military grade stuff. Anyone who doesn't already have the infrastructure to make their own is someone we shouldn't be selling WMDs to.
I actually have an in game source that strongly suggests military vessels, or at least the SR-2, use fusion torches while out of combat!
Fuel Depots!
Most the fuel depots are located in systems with gas giants that mention Helium-3 mining. There is no mention of anti-mater anywhere and IIRC none of the systems have anything resembling an anti-matter production system.
So unless various nations are just willing to sell anti-matter to any ship that shows up at one of their depots, especially considering that in ME2 the SR-2 is flying a Cerberus flag, then it doesn't work.
Of course this is really just a case of gameplay/story segregation. Either way I'll probably end up assuming they use anti-matter engines anyway since that's less crazy.
Fuel Depots!
Most the fuel depots are located in systems with gas giants that mention Helium-3 mining. There is no mention of anti-mater anywhere and IIRC none of the systems have anything resembling an anti-matter production system.
So unless various nations are just willing to sell anti-matter to any ship that shows up at one of their depots, especially considering that in ME2 the SR-2 is flying a Cerberus flag, then it doesn't work.
Of course this is really just a case of gameplay/story segregation. Either way I'll probably end up assuming they use anti-matter engines anyway since that's less crazy.
Van Ropen
Angry, angry about elves.
God, that was so fucking stupid.
That might be possible, actually. We know that nukes at least are so unregulated that neither alliance nor the council even thought of tracing the ones almost used on Eden Prime back to their owner (and no, they couldn't have been geth-constructed, or Shepard wouldn't have been able to disarm them). And while yes, nukes are far less dangerous than antimatter, the same principle applies.
Van Ropen
Angry, angry about elves.
Well, do we know that? That could just be a gameplay limitation, for all we know they tried and failed because "haha! Spectre covering his tracks"
Remember, there are plenty of states out in the Terminus more than capable of producing nukes.
Building a nuke isn't that hard. The only really challenging bit is getting weapons grade Uranium and I really doubt that given asteroid mining and advanced technology that it would be difficult to make it yourself in ME.
Anti-matter meanwhile requires massive billion to trillion credit accelerators orbiting highly energetic stars with presumably high levels of autonomous operation and Telepresence.
I would be really surprised if the Council's top Specter couldn't get his hands on some untraceable nukes if he needed to. Plausible deniability and all that. He might be legally untouchable, but the Council would still have to answer to public opinion if the masses found out their agent had nuked a colony or something, so they would have to make sure it can't be traced back to anyone. And just off the top of my head: the chance of something like a rachni infestation could absolutely justify giving trusted Specters access to WMDs. Or a lab working on cloning Krogans. If something like that was in the middle of a civilian colony do you really think the reaction would be anything but "For fucks sake, don't get caught."
Virmire is in the ass end of nowhere. It's unlikely that anyone who wasn't on site even noticed that a nuke went off. Still, subtlety doesn't necessarily mean "stop nuking things". They seemed to think it was an acceptable level of force. They just disagreed with how obvious Shepard made it.
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