The ideal coolant here is going to be something with a high heat capacity (absorbs more energy per degree of temperature change), a wide temperature range in which it's liquid, a low viscosity, a high emissivity, a finally a high thermal conductivity.
So black lithium? I mean all that lithium fails at in that list are conductivity (only ~84.8W/(m*ΔK), which is still okay) and emissivity.
While senors are something I'd consider rather variable in some designs... the cost is so minor I don't think it matters much
Playing with those I get:
FTL Drive = 53% (This is a number I calculated for a reason, the cost of a 135m ships core needs to be over 60 billion)
Weapons = 12%
Spinal = 9%
Secondaries 1.8%
GARDIAN = 1.2%
Shields = 11.5%
Engines = 8%
Reactor = 8.5%
Armor = 5%
Hull = 1%
Misc = 1%
Some messing around in Excel reveals that the pricing follows a relatively simply formula:
46,233 * x^3where x is the length of the ship.
10,000,000 * x
3/216 is the formula I use.
If we got with 1 90m MAC and 2 60m MACs then the weapons breakdown for a 100m Frigate is:
Way to long of secondary weapons...
Codex/Ships and Vehicles
Very last entry "Weapons: Mass Accelerators"
A broadside gun is 40% of a the hull's width. In the lazy ship model the width is 20% of the length. On the Kilimanjaro-class, there are 26 guns in a deck with three decks and two sides for a total of 156 guns. Doing math the guns cost a little over 10.9% of the spinal gun cost. Of course there is no reason that a smaller ship should use the same pattern of weapons, but lazyness recommends scaling from there. I've been using 20% of the spinal cost to account for missiles and other weapons (?), but that's debatable my estimat my be high. There's also the apparent double spinal pattern that Alliance cruisers and dreadnoughts use, which makes things complicated.
My calculations I'm playing with say that at the same relative cost a ship with a 90m gun could have two ~34.18m guns, and some missiles.
So all that is left is working out figures for the three main subsections of weapons. Now earlier
@Hoyr mentioned using the formula:
700*(X/0.6)
3where x is length for the price of MACs.
Heh, yeah first pass estimate... not the best.
The in-front multiplier needs to change as the weapon percentage changes for the base calculations. I've been trying 7625 * x
3.
A problem becomes apparent. GARDIANs are suddenly fifteen times more expensive. Which is pretty hard to justify since the surface area the cover has only gone up by 6.25x at most (assumes the ship scales up simultaneously in all three dimensions). So instead of leaving GARDIANs simply be the left over I think it needs a fixed formula:
412.5*(X/0.1)^2where X is the ship's length.
Now this does mean that 225m MAC + 2x 150m MAC + GARDIANs does not equal 12.5% of a 250m Frigate's cost. But that just means that it either has longer secondary MACs or more of them.
Yeah this is a bit of non-sense... I agree. However, your solution trivializes GARDIAN cost at large scales. I was really trying to avoid any instance of non-cubic scaling just for that reason, is cubic GARDIAN scaling that offensive? It's not just turrets and coverage its also the laser engine/core and the rate that beams that can be spat out. Yes that means that larger ships have superior GARDIAN performance, but that's true of shields and armor too. In short a larger ship may have quadratically scaled area to cover and thus needs quadratically scaled turrets. But the increased laser generation would mean they can fire more or more of them can be used at once, or more turrets. W/E
Not the these percentages are not requirements, if you only wanted the same GARDIAN effect as a lighter ship you can just quadratically scale the GARDIANS.
That strikes me as quite insane. I think that was done without really considering just how obscene the costs of starships are.
No it wasn't. Time to do math!
I mean think about it Warp Barriers are literally an alteration to Kinetic Barrier code and some additional sensors. I mean you could argue a notable cost increase by saying the emitters and sensors are being made sufficiently rugged to survive the additional stresses, a problem with canon CBTs, but that doesn't justify a literal doubling in cost.
It also requires increasing the number of projectors, to project interfering fields. Also needs a different projector design.
Similarly Arcane Blur is just a material slapped atop normal armor. There is nothing to suggest that it should be anywhere near 11.5 billion credits. Hell we only paid 150 million credits to buy the technology.
The cost of it was more "because points", not because of the realities of what it should cost.
Look at it this way Salaris armor is "prohibitively expensive" on things larger than fighters. Think about that for the price scaling we're doing,
frigates with super armor cost to much for it to be standard. As it stands AB armor is x5 time normal and Warp barriers are between x2 to x3 times.
I propose that Arcane Blur be Armor x1.75, Warp Barriers be Shields x1.50 and CBT be x1.15
Thoughts?
Standing multipliers can stay for Fighters and Tanks and smaller, I guess.
All that's left is working out figures for our Gigawatt Lasers. They are probably the hardest of PIs products to place because there is just so little to go on here. The problem is that they just don't fit the paradigm used for scaling other gear. A 5GW laser is going to cost the same and be just as effect no matter if it's on a 100m Frigate or a 1,000m Dreadnought. The only thing that matters is frequency and power output, both of which are limited by our research not by size.
So instead I'm going to say that secondary (and tertiary) Lasers come in 10m turreted blocks. So a 60m Secondary weapon can fit six separate laser turrets providing either increased ROF or increased endurance depending upon the ship's needs. Each Low-Gigawatt block would cost slightly more then a GARDIAN system at 500,000,000cr, and each step up in either power or frequency doubles the price.
Actually size is a limiting factor on power. Higher power lasers were going to be saved for the larger ships, for my own sanity.
How about 1GW/5 meters/100 million Credits? It matches the patterns I'm been thinking of.
Frequency upgrades doubling prices is fine, I think. Radio>
IR>Violet>UV>X-ray>Gamma ray, was about what you were thinking? IR being the starting point.
Power upgrades were going to show up from miniaturized energy weapons so would be more one-off ish.
