A Crown of Biosteel (Kancolle)
RavenWolffe77
The Marauder series is the best BattleMech.
- Location
- Deep Periphery, A Long Way From The Inner Sphere
Honestly, a TEG of some kind, probably fed by fusion, seems like a possible fit. The scaling problems mentioned earlier in the thread aren't something intrinsic to TEGs as a technology, just current engineering and the (assumed) use-case of long-duration space missions. A TEG installed on a wet-water bote can have the same convection cooling on an isolated external loop. SubNukes already do that.
There's also solid-state direct heat-to-electricity TEGs that are being developed that convert heat to zappies with no moving parts.
I mean, the powerplant question is really a matter of "what tech-base are B-MINTs built on?" There's all kinds of instant-startup powerplant designs that range from 40s tech to centuries away from now. I mean, for all we know Grace is running on muon-catalyzed cold fusion, or she's just got a really beefy diesel-electric. All we know is the start/warm-up time is negligible and she had enough horsepower to chuck a warship like a hacky sack, so who the fuck knows.
Ace Dreamer
Verified Reality User
- Location
- Between The Unknown & The Known
Dunno... I could see some mileage in the fairies being tele/techno-kinetic tribbles...
Jonen C
F.M.D.G.
- Location
- Lincopense, Ostrogothia, Suecia
Only for shipgirls that get banned from Argo.
Ace Dreamer
Verified Reality User
- Location
- Between The Unknown & The Known
How could anyone ban such obviously cute shipgirls!
Look! Another one just popped into existence!
Maybe there's an Admiral Mudd involved?
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- Location
- poland
Maybe she is like type XVII U-boats with high-test peroxide propulsion system. Or even crazier chemical reactor heat steam generation.
Ace Dreamer
Verified Reality User
- Location
- Between The Unknown & The Known
Maybe she runs on cryogenic-stored FOOF? She could burn anything as fuel, given that, including ice...
I'm sure shipgirl magic would make this perfectly safe!
For her.
ltmauve
"Excuse me?"
- Location
- Earth
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Yes.
But, most of the class criteria are more personality-based, not based on body. Want to be an Iowa? You need to be able to fill up the room. So it's that you get assigned a class based on what you already are as a person.
"Design by committee" was more talking about stuff like what questions are in the aptitude test ("How do you feel about having fluffy hair?" "I like my current hair, thank you very much." "Then you cannot be an escort carrier." "???" (And yes, the line in Chapter 7 about that is already written.)) as opposed to details of new bodies.
Annnnnnd just had a brainwave about this. Brooklyns and other classes with strong "quirks" that fit together are responsible for random quirks that affect the assignment to other classes. If you train a neural network or develop a "systems of equations" so that all your "hit and quit" girls are in the same class, then assign traits you want to other classes without fully defining everything else, you get unusual cases in the regions you didn't define at the design stage. (Also, I have no idea why that'd need to be restricted to a single class but *shrug*)
People making all these crazy speculation on power systems, while I went with a simple, reliable and scalable solution already used in many applications.
Meanwhile the actual propulsion systems... I have no idea how ******* Fleet propulsion actually works, even if I know how to operate it.
Ace Dreamer
Verified Reality User
- Location
- Between The Unknown & The Known
Personally I'd find it quite amusing if B-MINTs ran on cold fusion, somehow making effective use of human food, but no one could figure-out how they did it...
Czlyydwr Llrngwl
"Sell ya a door Learn gull," Czly/Celly for short
- Location
- Where the Beef is
- Pronouns
- Any
They like the really spicy Cajun shrimp!
Sandy River DL
(Verified Destroyer Leader)
- Location
- Lake Michigan
- Pronouns
- Her/She
Fuel cells or some sort of chemo-electric system that bears a resemblance to how cells generate energy.
Jonen C
F.M.D.G.
- Location
- Lincopense, Ostrogothia, Suecia
Well, Grace is basically something between a hydrofoil and an ekranoplan, yes?
And the skywings are jets?
She's jet propelled.
(Maybe a mix of waterjets and actual turbofans?)
Ace Dreamer
Verified Reality User
- Location
- Between The Unknown & The Known
Cells generate energy ultimately via a glucose-oxygen reaction (yeah, there's the anaerobic lactose bit, but...). I'm pretty sure there's no chemistry that would directly 'throw' ship-mass equivalents around based on apparent shipgirl metabolic needs. So, there must be a 'shadow' magical metabolism that draws on some other energy source, and dumps waste heat in some magical sink, or, flat-out ignores thermodynamics (or, something weirder).
This suggest shipgirl's metabolisms are symbolic, so, they're whatever suits the symbolism. So, for all we know B-MINTs are 'burning' something weird like ammonia???
Of course, it's quite possible I'm completely misunderstanding things here...
I back her being an ekranoplan.
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ltmauve
"Excuse me?"
- Location
- Earth
- Pronouns
- She/Her
They skywings are not jets in the sense of having turbofans or turbojet engines.
The actual propulsive device present here is the tail. Hence Grace having four of them.
There is the advantage of native thrust vectoring, though. Pretty sure Grace can have her skywings pull off some extreme maneuvers.
RavenWolffe77
The Marauder series is the best BattleMech.
- Location
- Deep Periphery, A Long Way From The Inner Sphere
No props, but also no jets... Hmmm.
Can't be ornithopters, as they don't have the proper wing area/shape for it, plus "thrust vectoring" wouldn't apply.
Could be but probably isn't gravity drives, as they don't have VTOL. And again, "thrust vectoring."
Rockets? That still leaves a wide time window in terms of techbase. WW2 rocket interceptors or X-Planes don't seem practical for CAP duties, and would be worthless as naval strike aircraft. Nuclear rockets maybe? Using biotech NTRs or Fusion Torch drives in-atmo sounds sufficiently batshit insane for a B-MINT.
...Waitaminute.
You specified turbofans/turbojets specifically. So they could be early jet engines from the 40s and 50s, but giving thrust vectoring to engines with less TWR than a radial prop sounds like a bad idea.
They could also be nuclear thermal jets, which again sounds sufficiently batshit.
I suppose that would technically make her a paddleboat
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Steakthedog
Verified Pedant
They could be Motor Jets, less good than a proper jet engine, but they'd be an option. Another would be some weird Pulse Jet contraption.
Spectrum
Tell me a secret~
- Location
- Behind you~
:thinks: But they didn't make an underwater repair ship...
Ace Dreamer
Verified Reality User
- Location
- Between The Unknown & The Known
Might be interesting to consider how one might operate?
"We're sinking! Send help!"
"Arrrgggghh! We're being pulled underwater! What is this life?"
"... We're not dead. That's the surface up there. Why are all those engineers standing around grinning at us???"
Maybe Grace at least, and maybe her manta, are using some sort of air lubrication trick? Then steering by manipulating this to give differential drag? Obviously they'd need something to get the air moving, but if those tails produce some sort of field effect around them...
Would that be weird enough?
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- Location
- Somewhere between here and there
Y'all speculating on how Grace's planes fly, meanwhile the stock Abyssal aircraft looks like something from a deranged sci-fi movie, while the "elite" planes deployed by high-end Abyssals look like a demonic version of Pac-Man. Have fun figuring those out.
Jonen C
F.M.D.G.
- Location
- Lincopense, Ostrogothia, Suecia
I mean:
Vought V-173 - Wikipedia
Avro Canada VZ-9 Avrocar - Wikipedia
Focke-Wulf Triebflügel - Wikipedia
Heinkel Lerche - Wikipedia
Focke Rochen - Wikipedia
Stipa-Caproni - Wikipedia
Some aircraft concepts of that era got Weird.
Ace Dreamer
Verified Reality User
- Location
- Between The Unknown & The Known
Maybe they use literal 'nightmare fuel'?
Not being a computer-game player I was looking-over with interest the Kantai Collection Wikipedia page...
And, for some reason, was wondering what a Supercar (1960 tv series) shipgirl might be like - unarmed, of course... Possibly wearing the Mercury winged sandals? Quite good for scouting or rescue work?
Some might object to considering this media, but it is Gerry Anderson...
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- Location
- Somewhere between here and there
Rescue work maybe, but with 60-70% of the Earth's surface being hostile territory you definitely don't send out a scout unarmed.