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Engine Bells and Shotgun Shells (hard sci-fi quests)

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I may have overestimated my ability to work with CoaDE because I'm stumped as to how to make this bloody engine work. I've been unable to find any actual documentation on how to make a blackbox engine - copy pasting engine specs into the Design file just gives me a red-error module. Can someone tell me what the code for a blackbox engine should look like?
 

(it does not show it here, but yes, there is a 40-crew module in it. You can squeeze more Δ-v out of it by putting no armor – the one that is present is my ballpark estimate for a Whipple shield. The shuttles weight 231 tons, have a LOX-methane standard rocket engine, a 6-crew cabin, a TTW ratio of 1.1 and 5.05 km/s of Δ-v. For reference, the engine (there's two of them installed on this))
 
Vyslanté said:
(it does not show it here, but yes, there is a 40-crew module in it. You can squeeze more Δ-v out of it by putting no armor – the one that is present is my ballpark estimate for a Whipple shield. The shuttles weight 231 tons, have a LOX-methane standard rocket engine, a 6-crew cabin, a TTW ratio of 1.1 and 5.05 km/s of Δ-v. For reference, the engine (there's two of them installed on this))
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Code?
 
[X] It doesn't gain enough time to be worth the risk.
[X] Power the outpost and conduct experiments, gather data and ensure that the work the Dampier's crew did isn't wasted.
 
Behold, the HMS Vancouver:


You may notice that this thing has a dV of 436km/s. That's because even the measly Timberwind 45 engine is a frakking beast:


I've been assuming a total mass of about 2000000 tonneskilograms, as stated. Here's the code:

BlackBoxEngineModule Gas Core NTR - Timberwind
EngineName Gas Core NTR
ModelFileName
Dimensions 2.13 7
Mass_kg 1500
PrimaryComposition Aluminum
PowerConsumption_W 1
Propellant Hydrogen
ExhaustVelocity_km__s 9810
Thrust_N 4.413e+005
HeatSignature_W 1000
GimbalAngle_degrees 90

ThermoelectricFissionReactorModule 10.6 MW Standard
UsesCustomName true
ReactorCoreDimensions_m 0.1 0.1
NuclearReactor
Coolant Sodium
Moderator Diamond
ModeratorMass_kg 5
Fuel U-233 Dioxide
FuelMass_kg 1
FuelEnrichment_Percent 0.11
ControlRodComposition Boron Nitride
ControlRodMass_kg 1
NeutronReflector Diamond
ReflectorThickness_m 0
AverageNeutronFlux__m2_s 1.9e+020
InnerTurbopump
Composition Amorphous Carbon
PumpRadius_m 0.22
RotationalSpeed_RPM 490
ThermocoupleInnerDimensions_m 0.5 0.66
Thermocouple
PTypeComposition Tungsten
NTypeComposition Tantalum
Length_m 0.001
ThermocoupleExitTemperature_K 2400
OuterCoolant Sodium
OuterTurbopump
Composition Lithium
PumpRadius_m 0.094
RotationalSpeed_RPM 490

RadiationShieldModule 7.80 m Diameter 14.0 cm Radiation Shield
UsesCustomName false
Composition Lithium-6
Dimensions_m 3.9 0.14

RadiatorModule 3x0.1 Amorphous Carbon Radiator
UsesCustomName false
Composition Amorphous Carbon
PanelWidth_m 3.2
Height_m 0.1
Thickness_m 0.001
ArmorThickness_m 0.001
Panels 1
FrontTaper_radians 0
BackTaper_radians 1.39
SurfaceFinish null

RadiatorModule 5x3 Aluminum Radiator
UsesCustomName false
Composition Aluminum
PanelWidth_m 1.5
Height_m 2.5
Thickness_m 0.001
ArmorThickness_m 0.001
Panels 3
FrontTaper_radians 0
BackTaper_radians 0
SurfaceFinish null

CargoModule 900 t Cargo Bay
Mass_kg 9e+005
AspectRatio 1

CargoModule 900 t Cargo Bay
Mass_kg 9e+005
AspectRatio 1

CargoModule 100 t Cargo Bay - SSLV
Mass_kg 1e+005
AspectRatio 1

CraftBlueprint Vancouver
Modules
Gas Core NTR - Timberwind 1 0 null 0
100 t Hydrogen Tank 1 0 null 0
10.6 MW Standard 1 -0.5 null 0
7.80 m Diameter 14.0 cm Radiation Shield 1 -0.25 null 0
3x0.1 Amorphous Carbon Radiator 2 8.1265 10.6 MW Standard 0
20 Crew Module 2 36.778 null 0
5x3 Aluminum Radiator 2 54.352 20 Crew Module 0
900 t Cargo Bay 1 18.389 null 0
900 t Cargo Bay 1 42.951 null 0
100 t Cargo Bay - SSLV 2 69.137 null 0
Armor
 
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Vyslanté said:
Also, "gaz core" ? Is this a mod ?
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Yeah, it's a blackbox engine. I replicated the specs that HMS Sophia was apparently working off of.

I face-palmed so hard when I realized that making a backbox engine was a simple as clicking a button in module design. It's been staring me in the face this whole time.

Lailoken said:
Sounds Orkey...
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Considering what's involved... its fits surprisingly well.

Anyway, the design is way un-optimized, but I'm overloaded with work right now, so somebody else is going to have to show the GM the new trajectory.
 
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I realise a week has passed but I'm looking to write this update today. Does anyone have any final votes?
 
Do we launch the shuttle or not?
[X] Write-in Maneuvering plan: Burn nadir to drop our orbit faster than a simple Hoffman transfer, then burn again at periapse to circularize into the lower orbit. If a simple Hoffman gives us 12 minutes of warning, this burn should give us at least 18 minutes because we're going to hit Low orbit in a quarter orbit instead of a half orbit.

How will Wescott spend the last hour or so on planet?
[X] Write in: Move the data from the grounded shuttle to Little Rascal.
 
[X] Write-in Maneuvering plan: Burn nadir to drop our orbit faster than a simple Hoffman transfer, then burn again at periapse to circularize into the lower orbit. If a simple Hoffman gives us 12 minutes of warning, this burn should give us at least 18 minutes because we're going to hit Low orbit in a quarter orbit instead of a half orbit.
[X] Power the outpost and conduct experiments, gather data and ensure that the work the Dampier's crew did isn't wasted.
 
This will be finished in the near future, however at this point I think it will be finished as a complete final chapter when I have the time and energy for it.
Thank you all for your time and attention. I hope you'll come and read the last chapter once it's done. Apologies for going missing in the mean time.
<3
 
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Episode 1 Part 16: Fear the Wind
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    • This is the first part of the final chapter. The rest will be posted as it's completed.

    "LLV-17 to Vancouver actual, flight checks are complete. The boards are green, we're flight ready."

    Midshipman Coleman's voice held a wonderful mixture of excitement and trepidation. It seemed the young woman had realised the importance of her flight and was working herself into a buzzing frenzy. I relaxed into my chair on the bridge, comfortable again after the relatively harsh G forces of the ship's acceleration. The ship was now orbiting just above the cloying fingers of the planet's thin atmosphere, with just two hundred kilometres between ourselves and the surface.

    "Do you have the flight plan, midshipman?" I'd sent my own plan, refined in the few moments between burns, to the shuttle's flight computer while the two person crew were still making sure she hadn't taken any damage in it's motherships maneuvers.

    "Aye, Captain..." She paused, leaving a silence pregnant with something unsaid.

    "Spit it out, midshipman, we don't have time for worrying about hurt feelings." I was perhaps a little more blunt that I could have been but I was in no mood to delay. I'd meant what I said and if she had some sort of clever plan, I'd rather hear it than have her worry about what her Captain might think of her tone.

    "The atmospheric flight is the safest plan, but it's also the longest." She said, apparently aiming for a conciliatory tone, "A suborbital hop will have us over the outpost's horizon in less than half the time.

    She wanted to drop into the atmosphere, reorient and then fire the shuttle's main engines to put them on a ballistic trajectory out of the atmosphere. This could bring them high enough off the planet's surface that the shuttle's communication systems would be able to reach the outposts, even through the potentially tempestuous ionosphere.

    The midshipman was, of course, quite correct. None of them were untrained in the arts of rocketry by the time they held a berth aboard a ship. However the manoeuvre would also burn a large portion of the oxidiser that the shuttle would need to make it back into orbit to re-rendezvous with the Vancouver after it had made its transmission, oxidiser that it wouldn't have to make use of if it was able to open it's cavernous intakes and gulp down oxygen from the atmosphere it was flying through.

    "I considered it. It's not an option." I wasn't saving one group of my crew at the expense of stranding another, either in irrecoverably in orbit or after they'd been forced to land on the surface due to being short of the fuel needed to reattain orbit.

    "Aldridge did the maths, Captain," Aldridge, the thick-eyebrowed mouse of a man who was surely sitting next to her in the shuttle's pilot couch, gesticulating wildly. I'd seen him do it to someone else, at a meeting in her office. It was an unnerving habit. "We should still have enough fuel to make orbit. It'd be tight, and we might need recovery, but we'd manage it." There was the slightest touch of nerves in the tone of her voice. Given the woman was offering to potentially sacrifice herself and her co-pilot, that was perhaps less than surprising.

    "It's not just the fuel use, Midshipman, but the more dangerous flight profile as well." Suborbital flights were high-G manoeuvres. The airframe was designed for it, but a poorly planned flight could put immense strain on the flight crew.

    "I'm sorry for speaking plainly, Captain, but it's also the only flight plan that might have us in contact a meaningful length of time before the Vancouver comes around again."

    I sighed. She was right, of course. The surface team would need tens of minutes, not a handful, especially if they were in the middle of any sort of serious work. For all I knew about Lieutenant Wescott, I was sure he wouldn't be letting any of his team slack, impending storm or no. A four minute warning to a group committed to a task was nothing, but half an hour? Half an hour was enough to make it off the surface with drives filled with data.

    "I don't believe I see any other course of action then. The risk is yours to take, Midshipman."

    "Aye Captain. Thank you, Captain." She said in response. The comm-line was immediately filled with chatter between aldridge and the seemingly persuasive midshipman. I closed it off and pulled a vid-screen from a side panel on my command couch. A few button presses and I had a perfect view of the well lit shuttle bay mounted some thirty feet and several thick bulkheads below us.

    One of the external walls slid out and up, disappearing out of sight. Clamps released which had until that moment pinned the shuttle in place and it drifted gently upwards. A series of pale thrusters blasts fired out of the shuttles flank and sent it sailing slowly, gracefully, out into the blackness of space.

    Switching to an external camera, I watched the shuttle rotate end over end until it was oriented in reverse relative to the much more massive Vancouver it hung silently beside. It's aft quarters lit in a sudden blast of its powerful rocket motors and it seemed to shoot backwards away from the ship. In reality it had just decelerated enough that it would drop rapidly into the atmosphere of the planet below.

    They were on their way. I was to be returned to waiting, once more.

    - - -​

    "Did you get it working?" I asked once we'd returned to the main outpost. Kottindour was by the outposts main door, sitting on a pile of equipment and looking up into the sky.

    "Huh?" She turned, wide-eyed. "Oh, ell-tee, hey. Do you think the sky looks darker?"

    I shaded my eyes out of habit and looked up, studying it. The fading light had never tinged it slightly orange-brown, or given it a fuzzy quality that it now held.

    "Maybe? I'm no weather expert."

    "Meteorologist." She corrected. "It's a little early for the storm's leading edge to roll in, isn't' it?"

    "As I said, I wouldn't know." The level of informality between the enlisted and I was starting to verge on the annoying, though I could abide it more from the women than I could the men. "Did you get the power working? You said we only had half an hour."

    Kottindour nodded silently, her suit's helmet bobbing gently. Finally she turned from the strange sky and led the way into the outpost.

    "I've stripped back non-essential systems and run a pair of power cables from the shuttle. We're not getting much more than basic communications and lighting, but it'll keep for as long as the shuttle's power cells do."

    "Longer than we're ever going to need then." The shuttle's power cells, even without the set we had left at the wreck of the Dampier, would last several weeks just powering the outposts basic systems, and several more if they had the time or need to run the engines occasionally to recharge them. However, with the approaching storm, they would only need enough power for a few hours. "What about the researchers computers?"

    "I took them all off of the central grid to save power while I was fitting the cables. Shouldn't I have?"

    "I'd like to spend some time looking through their research."

    "I'll hook them back up again, ell-tee, no problem." She turned so I could see through her faceplate and gave me a wide grin. "It's not like the shuttle can't handle a little more of a drain."

    She set off with a bounce in her step, though I couldn't tell whether it was from happiness or the low gravity. Most of us had managed to accidentally take a step a little too hard and bounced a few inches off the ground. Most of us had, however, managed to get past the urge to urge to take a full step a few days after landed. Perhaps Kottindour hadn't quite managed it yet.

    I checked my wrist chrono, and the countdown. It had taken forty minutes and then some to deal with the comm-silent shuttle team and get them back on task, and another ten to set Kottindour to work. We barely had an hour left on the surface before we had to dodge the storm, and if she took much longer with the computers I'd have almost no time with whatever was left in their systems. We could always pull the data drives, as we had with the ship, but I wanted a chance to see what they had, on site.

    There was something wistful in that, of course, and perhaps a little risky given the severe weather that was racing in on us. Maybe I was being a romantic to the point of endangerment. But scientists had died here, scientists who had come out into the unknown to learn secrets that no human had ever even experienced before. It was right and proper that what they had found was viewed in the context of their discovery.

    Maybe I was talking nonsense. Maybe the time we'd spent down here had got to me and I was going a little doolally. But I was going to spend as long as I could afford to digging into those files just as soon as the power was up.

    I looked out of the open airlock and sighed, smiling at the slightest mist which spread across the lowest part of my faceplate. Switching off my comm link I took a moment to experience the view. We were in the last hours of what might be our last day on this alien world and we had barely had a handful of snatched moments to appreciate it. This was part of the reason I'd joined the service, to have moments like this. A new landscape, a new horizon which might look like something from Earth but it wasn't. Nothing could change the fact that we'd spent a handful of days exploring something that no person other than the crew of the ill-fated Dampier had ever explored before.

    We might even have our names put down in the annals of some obscure and niche history book. Not that that was the point, of course. I wasn't in the service for fame or recognition, but the noble purpose of furthering the human experience, and yet to have that to look back on would certainly be something.

    Brushing some of the omnipresent dust off of a stool I dragged it over to watch the sun tick it's way slowly across the sky, a sky that was slowly dimming. Sunset was still a long way distant. It could only be the increasing quantity of dust in the air that signalled the oncoming storm that Kottindour had suggested. For it to have been carried so far in advance of the still two-hour away storm was, at least as far as I understood these things, highly unusual. But then, alien worlds often had remarkable weather compared to the more terrestrial cousins they may have shared so much in common with.

    I rubbed some of the fine grit between the padded fingers of my suit, still amazed that I could feel the roughness through the thick material of the protective gauntlets that were locked so tightly to my wrists. I wondered, not for the first time, how much of it was a property of the glove and how much the dust. It certainly didn't seem like the particulates were large enough to trigger the force feedback pads that lined the insides, but I was neither a uit engineer nor a feedback specialist.

    Perhaps they were just really rough grains. Perhaps I had one of those tardigrade-alike creatures in my hand, frozen in its time capsule shell.

    I brushed my hands together, enjoying the tingle of the last traces of dust falling away. The landscape was changing in the fading light, rock formations glowing eerily while the most distant of them lost their sharply defined outline in the gathering dust. It was more noticeable now than it had been even a few minutes earlier. That was more than a little worrying.

    The stool slid back under one of the work counters with only a little scraping on the dust covered deck plate. The outpost's floor was covered in boot-prints and scuff marks from the team's progress throughout, the only marks left in the dust which coated everything after the storms ruined this outpost. I wondered, briefly, if we might have destroyed the last traces of the lost crew of the Dampier or if the storm had long since done that for us. We weren't here to document, but to discover, but I would have preferred to save those last footprints even so, had they ever existed at all.

    I touched the toggle that switched on my suits internal comm, linking it back into the outposts comm system and tying me to the rest of the team. While a few moments of peace was well worth it, there was a certain danger in staying offline for too long.

    An icon flashed up on my faceplates unobtrusive heads up display that made me fear that danger had come real. Another moment's attention had me wondering exactly how the Vancouver had put herself overhead so much earlier than we'd expected. She was supposed to be at least an hour away from our horizon, not within communications range.

    Another button push connected me, the icon of an urgent message pending replaced with a live link.

    "-Outpost, LLV-17 calling Outpost, come in please Outpost… LLV-17 calling Outpost, LLV-17-"

    A woman's voice. Midshipman Coleman, I guess, but what was she doing aboard a shuttle somewhere above the horizon.

    "Outpost here, Seventeen. You're more than a little unexpected, I've got to say."

    "Lieutenant, is that you?" Her voice sounded almost excited, or maybe relieved? I wasn't sure.
    "We weren't getting through, we thought maybe…"

    She trailed off, the line hissing and popping with static.

    "Maybe what?" I walked out into the courtyard, trying to get a better connection. I thought perhaps the open air would improve things, but if it was dust in the upper atmosphere causing the interference then there was little I could do from here. "Where exactly are you, Seventeen?"

    "On a suborbital hop, Lieutenant!" She said brightly. "About three hundred klicks off the surface due East of you, give or take a few degrees. See, we needed to make contact, and the Vanc wasn't going to make it until too late, so the Captain suggested an atmospheric flight but then we thought, hey, these shuttle's are just about rated for something like this, and it's going to be a damn sight faster so why not-"

    "You're babbling, Seventeen, get it together please." While apparently I had all the time in the world for the people on my team down here on the surface, the first sign of unprofessionalism from any of the rest of the Vancouver's crew was enough to put me on edge. This woman, who I was still only assuming was midshipman coleman, and her mumbling was raising my blood pressure faster than anything else had in the last week and more.

    "Oh… Sorry, Lieutenant."

    "Would you like to explain why you needed to make contact so urgently? I don't have much more than an hour before that storm hits and we have to leave." Perhaps if I could make her focus then I'd actually learn something from this most unexpected conversation.

    "That's just it, Lieutenant. Everything we've got says the storms accelerating. The Captain thinks you're going to be lucky to even get an hour."

    If the sudden appearance of comm signal had put a chill in my veins, now there were filled with ice. An overestimation of a few minutes could have put the team in danger, but an hour or more? That might have spelled our doom if it really was the storm that had sealed the fate of the Dampier's crew.

    I looked up at the sky to the East, the direction of the shuttle high overhead, the same direction that the storm was rolling in from. Was the sky darker still than since Kottindour had mentioned it or was I now projecting the ominous feelings settling in the pit of my stomach onto the horizon.

    "Message received, Seventeen." I said slowly, carefully, prying my tongue away from the roof of my suddenly dry mouth. "Any further traffic?" I had to get moving, get my team moving, get the shuttle off the surface but my mind was blank of anything but form and process.

    "Uh, no, Lieutenant. We'll be up here for a while yet, if you need anything…"

    "Do you have contact with the Vancouver?"

    "Negative on that. They're over our horizon as well."

    "Copy that. Lieutenant Wescott out."

    I faced the outpost entrance again as Murphy and Kottindour appeared. They must have been listening in on the open channel, something I should have considered before accepting the contact. Stupid, really, to let information like that spread throughout the team before I even had time to think. But then, did they not have a right to the information, information which concerned their safety as much as it did mine and the missions?

    I imagined that behind their visors, which had turned a beautiful silvery white to shield their skin from the sun's dim radiation, they looked just as fearful of what the next few hours would hold as I must have done.

    - - -​

    Drumming my fingers on the armrest of my command chair I glanced at the clock in the top corner of my readout display for the thousandth time since the shuttle had undocked and begun its rapid descent into the planet's atmosphere. The displays had barely changed in all that time, other than the inexorable ticking of that infernal clock which spelled either salvation or disaster for Lieutenant Wescott and his band of explorers. If he managed to get himself killed, I'd have to find a way to go down there and ring his neck for a second time myself.

    However much I assured myself that I would be angry at him for insisting on spending more time down there, or frustrated that we couldn't do more to bring them back more quickly - oh what I would do for some of the technology that had forever remained the domain of science fiction - I knew that I only had myself to blame. At every step I had made the decisions, given the orders or agreed to the plans that had led six of the men and women who served about my precious little ship to face their potential deaths. This entire operation ever since we had arrived in this system had been entirely at my command, and I couldn't change that no matter how much I damned him, Murphy and the rest of the sorry lot.

    Nor, of course, would a court martial ever be convinced otherwise. One would be convened, of course. Statistically significant losses in the line of duty were always considered worthy of investigation and the best way of ensuring an effective investigation was to bring together a court. It was an interesting difference between the Science Service and my own Navy of which it was a subset, in that what constituted a significant loss was considered dramatically different. In the Navy, where was was considered an additional duty and combat no more hazardous than any other day should be, a significant loss was only ever thought to be the loss of a starship. Captain's could, and had, wrecked entire complements of shuttle's without anyone paying them too much attention. But to the scientists, for whom hazard pay was expected whenever anyone set foot on a planet that could be considered anything but a garden world, a significant loss could be argued to be any loss of life that wasn't immediately declared as accidental or self-instigated.

    Thus, should I return to port without a portion of my crew and at least one but potentially either of my shuttles, I would have no choice but to face a court of my fellow officers. I would love nothing more to be able to state categorically that my interest in the Lieutenants survival was entirely born out of compassion and camaraderie but I truly did not want to face that fate. Juniper Base had created enough problems for my career, another round of professional inquisition would surely doom it to the doldrums. I had been born to command warships, not supply cutter's in the outer belts.

    The shuttle must have been making contact by the midshipman's rushed flight plan, I realised. There was no way we could talk to either the outpost or the shuttle, as our orbit had taken us around to the opposite side of the planet, but they must have been within range of each other by this point. Hopefully LLV-17 would deliver their news to their compatriots on the ground and by the time we came around again, both would be in orbit.

    Of course, if we were right about the accelerating storm - and I had come to trust my crew on these sorts of niche scientific matters - then we might not know whether the ground team had escaped or not for several orbits. We would simply see a storm-stricken space where the outpost once was, dust-filled skies with glowing edges where the sand like grit would reflect the dark light of this systems sun. It would take the presence of a shuttle, either shuttle, in orbit with us to confirm anyone's survival. Of course, if they placed themselves in the same orbit as the Vancouver, we'd never catch them. I planned to take the ship up to a high altitude if there were no signs for several hours, but that would still leave the crew and I waiting nervously for the time being.

    There was nothing I hated more than being left without options. But I would have to wait and place my trust in the Lieutenant for a little longer.

    Squashing the urge to fidget, I tapped a few buttons on my console and brought up a plain text copy of Dubrosky's Conflict and Champions. If I couldn't do anything useful, then I could at least make use of the time productively.
     
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