Dragontrapper
Homeless Draconis
- Location
- A Tower in the middle of nowhere
I've had a similar thought; honestly surprised none of the fuel depot proposals I've ever seen ever suggested this. Seems obvious.
Per Aspera (Space Agency Plan Quest)
- Thread starter Shadows
- Start date
- Original
I've had a similar thought; honestly surprised none of the fuel depot proposals I've ever seen ever suggested this. Seems obvious.
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Partly lack of need, partly technical conservatism, partly political shenanigans.
NASA was told no depots and to make SLS work, so we haven't had a lot of R&D it the area.
Oh, also power supplies. Doing that much electrolysis in orbit is gonna require either big solar panels or a nuclear reactor. Which are expensive to develop/throw into orbit. NASA wouldn't have the money to throw at the problem.
Hopefully we can do better.
A Cold Day in Hell (Canon)
10ebbor10
DON'T PANIC
- Location
- Present
A Cold Day In Hell
12 December 1951
A slight drizzle of snow falls upon the German countryside, covering the landscape in a thin white blanket. Slowly, a convoy of trucks makes it's way through the unperturbed snow, carefully crossing the neglected and broken roads. Fifty years ago, this had been a quarry. For 3 decades gypsum was carved from the hill leaving behind a monumental network of empty tunnels, oft likened to the lair of a mighty wyrm. When the Holy Roman Empire needed a place to build their war-ending weaponry, a place save from bombardment and save from spies, these were the facilities they chose. Dug underground, invisible, untouchable, and unassailable.
These days, it is one of the last places where the banner of the banner of the HRE still flies, tattered and defaced. Barbed wire, minefields, flags with skulls all remain in place around the hill, too much of an effort to remove, and the hill itself too much of a danger to risk freeing.
Here, sealed beneath concrete and steel lies the Empire's greatest weapon, a massive facility built to orchestrate the end of the world, one which never contributed a single weapon to the war yet killed thousands.
Here, deep within the mountain, rests the Wyrm's heart, the last and largest full-scale graphite reactor mankind ever constructed, and here the Free Workers of the World step into hell as they aim to figure out just what the nuclear enterprise meant.
August 1944
Devastating news reaches Imperial High command. The Americans, it seems, have the bomb. The tactical calculus changes, old plans are discarded, new plans are drafted.
The old strategy, a rush-construction and deployment of 8 nuclear warheads to force simultaneous breakthroughs on every allied front is now rendered unfeasible. American bombs can be crafted at the same or greater rates than those of the Empire, any exchange will just invite a counter-deployment, utterly negating whatever military advantage could be found.
Rather than a weapon of shock, the bomb is re-imagined as the ultimate evolution of strategic bombardment. Small, long-range bombers will deploy them across the enemy home industries, achieving in one attack what a hundred raids can not, and breaking the enemy morale once and for all. To win this exchange requires but two things. More planes than the enemy, and more bombs.
Construction on the Wyrm's Heart, officially known as the Saint George Repeater Factory, commences a week later. Rushed construction, forced labor, and collapsing supply lines will cost the lives of hundreds of prisoners of war and other laborers before it is complete.
May 1945
Construction on the reactor core proceeds apace. The scale of the assembly is hard to comprehend. A massive array of graphite bricks towers over the workers growing by the day. As projections of the war worsen, the planned reactor complex is expanded. More bricks and fuel channels are added to the side, extending the reactor in length, and width and height, excavating more of the tunnels as needed. Instability of the tunnel material prompts minor collapses, but reinforcements prevent any major cave-in. Already now, the site has lost one of it's main goals, if it ever were to be bombarded, the weakened ceiling would surely collapse.
But little attention is directed to such military engineering when the reactor physics are far more troubling. In order to be effectively transmuted into useable weapons material, uranium must first be bred into plutonium. To achieve this, slugs of uranium will be pushed through the fuel channels at a steady rate, falling out of the reactor only when they have been sufficiently transmuted. By operating the reactor in this manner, it can be kept at constant operational power while allowing refueling operations, avoiding troublesome and time-consuming cold refueling operations.
September 1945
The reactor reaches criticality for the first time, revealing a host of severe design flaws. Having been expanded several times during the construction phase, the original water cooling system has long since become inadequate for the total reactor power. Further cooling is provided by fans covering the entire tunnel system with a forced draft, while the total thermal load of the reactor is limited by only operating a limited amount of reactor sections at full power at a time. Production is below expectations, and all efforts are made to increase it.
It is in this time too that the first radiation deaths make themselves known. The slugs, which are supposed to fall into a channel filled with water after their journey through the core, often over or undershoot the catchment basin. Workers have to stand guard and quickly push the shattered fragments into the basement using long sticks. Unbeknownst to them, small particles soon suffuse the area of the complex, and cases of radiation sickness slowly make themselves known. Rotating out workers helps somewhat in reducing the number of directly attributable deaths, at the cost of spreading radioactive contamination into the neighboring complexes.
December 1945
With the plant nearing full operational status, and the endless war worsening an already crippling lack of experienced personnel, shifts and staffs at the reactor complex are cut dramatically to free up personnel for refining and warhead assembly. Staffing of the reactor complex reaches historical lows around Christmas time, when a tired worker fails to increase coolant flow in accordance with the power schedule. Section 17 of the reactor operates at full power and minimum cooling for 3 hours before the mistake is rectified. By this point, the uranium slugs have molten, and parts of the assembly are smoldering.
A day later, 7 fuel channels are jammed, and the rods used to push the slugs along are withdrawn with white hot, molten ends. Aiming to retain productivity in the other sections, the decision is made to simply seal the affected fuel channels and let them choke themselves out. No more slugs are injected, entrance and exit holes are sealed with metal plugs, and cooling water supply is redirected to others parts of the reactor to make up for the production shortfall.
The attempt was successful, with the fire dying out over the coming days, though section 17 was judged too damaged to be recovered, and was not used again.
The end of the World, 1946
Located far away from major urban centers, the plant survived the nuclear exchange without any notable damage. In fact, the atmospheric fallout of nearby detonations did not even trigger any of the plant's radiation sensors, which had been calibrated to unusually high levels to avoid "undue" alarm over the contaminated environment within the facility. Of greater consequence was the enactment of the second strike plan. Production at the facility was ordered to be stepped up considerably in attempt to win "the tonnage war", to deploy a greater number of nuclear devices against the USA and it's allies than had been deployed against them.
WIth only months to spare before a predicted second wave of US nuclear projectiles, all available means were thrown into the action. This included the condemned section 17. Many of the tubes were judged to have survived the fire intact, while the damaged tubes were fully sealed and disconnected from the coolant system. Three days after section 17 was returned to full power operation, a thermal anomaly was once again noted. Pyrophoric uranium, formed during the last fire, spontaneously ignited, restarting the fire. Within hours, the weakened graphite channels cracked under the thermal stresses, and water from the cooling circuit made direct contact with the molten uranium. A series of small steam explosions followed, further damaging the containment and filling the reactor chamber with toxic gasses and lethal amount of radiation.
With further intervention impossible, the fire raged out of control, damaging power wiring, control circuitry and finally breaking the main water line providing cooling to the rest of the facility.
With many sections of the reactor lacking cooling, lighting, power and ventilation, many of the workers attempted to flee the plant even in advanced of the official evacuation. Many were left behind or killed in the crush, and the facility itself would not be opened again for 5 years.
The true events of would eventually be deciphered based on physical evidence , diaries and remaining records. Managing personnel at the site either professed complete ignorance, or died in the aftermath of the imperial collapse (execution, suicide, death by bombing, lynched by their own men) ...
Low level personnel could have provided essential information, but by the time an official inquiry was arranged, none of them were still alive.
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A continuous flow breeder is... ah. Something.
- Location
- The great frozen north
The chemical engineer in me recognizes this as vaguely analogous to a plug flow reactor. Somewhat clever, in the same way the worst creations of the Kerbals are clever. And I only got more horrified as I read on about the accidents and misuses that happened. Well done. Man, I hope there is at least one facility somewhat that survived relatively OK that we can salvage tech from without giving people radiation poisoning. Now I wonder what horror stories will be alluded to as we work on our nuclear projects.
Just how many A-bombs were initialted during this war?
Eh, I think there's still some good sections. The first few chapters cover early propellant developments, which are interesting for a historical perspective before it starts getting into the development of hypergols, and after the section on hypergolics there's the exotic propellants, a chapter on cryogenic fuels, monopropellants, Soviet developments, etc.
👏Space👏Based 👏Nuclear👏Reactors👏
👏Space👏Based 👏Nuclear👏Reactors👏
👏Space👏Based 👏Nuclear👏Reactors👏
👏Space👏Based 👏Nuclear👏Reactors👏
Seriously, having something like Kilopower makes so many things so much easier once you try to move past LEO.
Wouldn't using ullage gas for RCS be far less efficient than if we were to use a monoprop?
Also, isn't the continuous flow breeder basically what Sellafield used? I vaguely recall something about spent fuel bundles being pushed through the core and falling into a trough of water on the far side.
10ebbor10
DON'T PANIC
- Location
- Present
I mixed and matched the worst ideas of early nuclear engineering into a hopefully more or less continuous whole.
I support nuclear reactors and engines in space. We will make the world quake in fear whenever we launch a vehicle into orbit. They'll learn to live with our totally peaceful intentions with high margins of error. 
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Like most things in rocketry, it's a trade-off. There's no such thing as a good rocket - only a differently bad one.
For ulage gas as RCS a lot depends on scale. A larger LV like Starship/Superheavy will typically end up with more ulage pressure than it needs to support it's tank mass on descent, so venting that ulage gas is effectively free RCS. For something smaller like ACES, you combine the two into a hot RCS to get the necessary performance (indeed, you can actually use the exhaust of the piston engine as RCS gas). Doing this way reduces the complexity of the vehicle overall by eliminating the need for helium pressurization and a separate monoprop - and reationalizing your propellants is a really good thing if you're trying depot architectures.
The use of a piston engine for power is actually particularly attractive for us because it means we don't have to lug up heavy ass batteries - which have shit power density at this point in time.
neutronium95
Mad Rocketeer
- Location
- The test site
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I wonder how the power requirements for actively chilling cryogenic propellants stack up against electrolyzing water.
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It's a LOT less. Mostly because you can throw up a sun shade perpendicular to your orbit such that the tank is shielded from both sunlight and Earth glow.
edit: I totally frogot, it's not just the power for electrolysis that's the issue. You also have to cool and compress the hydrogen and oxygen and that requires really huge radiators. I think we'll be better off just shipping LH2 and LOX directly.
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Vote closed
Shadows
Sacred Priestess of the Benevolent Dice Gods
- Location
- USS Civilian, DDG-214
- Pronouns
- She/Her
By the by, have a +15 bonus to whatever you want. Good stuff. I declare it canon.
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I would recommend using the +15 on the Union action to have it complete this turn.
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- She/Her
That won't be enough on its own. Better the 15 to Union and that 5 to Rocket Boxes.
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Ugh. I can't believe I keep forgetting about bonuses.
- Location
- Outside the Box
- Pronouns
- She/Her
[] Construct a 2-Stage Sounding Rocket +42 +3 45/50
[] Construct a Computational Research Facility +19 19/180
[] Engine Cycles (Tech) [MATSCI, CHEM, PROP] 114 +156 +18 +15 +21 +12 336/250
[] Weather Studies (Phase 2) 67 +157 +18 242/150, 92/??
[] There is Power in a Union +89 +10 99/100
[] Rocket Boxes (Phase I) 175 +108 +20 303/200, 103/??
Here's a quick results post. Hopefully these are all correct. Numbers here are before any omake bonuses.
[] Construct a Computational Research Facility +19 19/180
[] Engine Cycles (Tech) [MATSCI, CHEM, PROP] 114 +156 +18 +15 +21 +12 336/250
[] Weather Studies (Phase 2) 67 +157 +18 242/150, 92/??
[] There is Power in a Union +89 +10 99/100
[] Rocket Boxes (Phase I) 175 +108 +20 303/200, 103/??
Here's a quick results post. Hopefully these are all correct. Numbers here are before any omake bonuses.
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That 5 would be lovely in either Union or the Rocket.
Not sure if the GM will be nice and give us Union since it's 1 point off.
Not sure if the GM will be nice and give us Union since it's 1 point off.
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- She/Her
I feel like maybe we need a mechanic to cover those things? Like, if we get within 10 of the total we need, it autocompletes next turn?
