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That Time I Became A Dictator Of A Small Asian Communist Nation

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7.4 - a little above average. Not even Magoose is exempt from the tyrany of statistics. :p

24.4 in total, a Grand Breakthrough.

For the love of kami and ancestors, HC please run the breakthrough my me or another technical advisor first before we end up with Magic Fuel 2: Nuclear Bugaloo.
 
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VillaininGlasses said:
Hmmm on the one hand more accurate science would be fun. On the other I enjoy styling on the Americans.
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My bother in Marx, at 24.4 final roll we are already styling on the Americans. My conservative estimate is that we've just leapfrogged a tremendous amount of development and have unlocked Molten Salt Reactor development. A more optimistic estimate is that we've developed molten salt reactors and somebody had an Eureka moment about fusion plasma modelling.

Magoose said:
So... We got cold fusion then... in the 1970's?

Um... Luxery Space Comunismn then? We have near infinate power now...

Fuck we could just... end Global energy shortages... Win over the entire world to communism with just one simple trick!
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Small Modular Reactor mass production goes bzzzzzzzz.
 
Hey, remember the Ford Nucleon concept? Nuclear Iron Tigers!

... Which is probably way too silly even for this level of breakthrough. A safer (especially against human error and natural disasters) and/or more efficient power plant would be nice.

Given the size of the Chernobyl exclusion zone, a catastrophic failure would effectively wipe out a concerning percentage of our land. I would like this not to happen lol.
 
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ClosetGoth said:
Hey, remember the Ford Nucleon concept? Nuclear Iron Tigers!

... Which is probably way too silly even for this level of breakthrough. A safer (especially against human error and natural disasters) and/or more efficient power plant would be nice.
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Alas, the Nucleon was designed with certain assumptions about reactor scaling that did not bear out.

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Oh boy. Ohboyohboyohboy. I just realized there's another possible breakthrough that can come out of this nuclear research.

Laser enrichment. The 'goodbye non-proliferation' technology.
 
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ClosetGoth said:
We should do the same, and make a scale model of a nuclear IT concept. Just something to inspire Commiewood scifi writers.
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Actually, a nuclear Mars/Moon walker is a very real possibility! We take a small nuclear reactor, put it on the end of a long boom (the walker's 'tail'), and make a octaped platform that can hold a hab module.

You end up with a mobile home that can move around the unprepared surfaces of other planets and can do way more science than a stationary base!
 
HeroCooky said:
You managed to decide on a doctrine (integrated into normal army and used as an in-between of infantry and tanks) with one division outfitted with them.

(You require 3 Actions to fully Iron-Tiger-ize your Army.)
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They're an IFV. That doesn't carry a lot of dudes but is super-mobile. I mean, that's definitely a direction.

It was funny looking at the goose dice like "the 4 and 8 cancel, the 2 and 11 cancel, the 3 and 10 cancel, which leaves us with a 12 and a 6, which decidedly don't cancel and leaves us a nudge ahead."
 
I did a little math on orbital mirrors for Siberian agriculture, and I figured I'd share:

At a very back of envelope calculation, Znamya 2 was 40 kg and 20 meters in diameter, for a mass/surface area of 0.0637 kg/m^2.

The proposed final Znamya mirror would be 200 m in diameter, and we can thus estimate a mass of about 2000 kg per mirror. This would allow lighting an area of 10 square miles with light about 100 times brighter than moonlight. A good first start. Now let's say we weren't happy with that, let's say we want to light an area with the same intensity as sunlight.

Well sunlight is about 400 000 times the intensity of moonlight, so our Znamya mirror will need to grow by an order of 4000:

Our new mirror would be 8 000 000 kg, or 8000 tonnes. No way we can throw that up with just MLVs, no we need fully reusable SHLVs. But even so, the requirements are quite modest! With a 100 tonne launch capability, we'd only need about 80 launches! With a launch tempo of one every 4 days we could do it in under a year! Starship is estimating a cost of 10 million / launch - but this is Space X, so I'm going to arbitrarily double it to get a more accurate estimate. (All costs are in modern USD)

That works out to 1600 million for launching one Znamya-Sol mirror. The cost of three and a half Space Shuttle missions.

But does it make sense to do this?

Assuming a yield of 4 tonnes of wheat per hectare per year, and 2590 hectares illuminated (ten square miles), that's 10360 tonnes of wheat per year. Now, the price of wheat fluctuates. A lot. So I'm just gonna pick 270$/tonne (source). That means our wildly unoptimized Znamya-Sol mirror can generate about 2.8 million in revenue per year, for a payoff period of 571 years. Not ideal, to say the least.

So what would it take to make it more enticing? Well, let's aim for a 10 year payback period. That would require a cost reduction of 57.1 times, or 28 million in total. How could we go about this?

Well, one way is to reduce the number of launches. If we use a 150 tonne SHLV, that's only 53 launches - 1067 million. Well, that's not nearly enough.

Let's focus on the mirrors now. The Znamya was a small scale demonstrator, and it had a very high mass of ancillary equipment compared to the surface of the mirror. A aluminum covered mylar sheet like the one used for the Inflatable Antenna Experiment, we can get densities of 7 grams / m^2. Ho ho ho, now i have a machiengunsolar concentrator.

At this density, our Znamya-Sol mirror weighs only 879 648 kg. Call it an even 880 tonnes. That's only 6 launches on our 150 tonne SHLV, or about 120 million! A sizable improvement, but unfortunately the payback period is about 43 years - a hard sell, given the the inevitable technical issues with developing this system in the first place.

The search for a good source of high tempo SHLV launches continues.
 
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White Star's Last Gleaming
  • Sidestory
    • White Star's Last Gleaming​
    Thud

    I keyed at the controls of Rainbow Convection, flipping my display to infrared for a brief second. A nervous habit, but one that stilled my heart enough to keep the tremors out of my hands. Of course, there was nothing to see.

    Thud

    Well, there was Swan, ten or so paces ahead in the Silver Spade, but that was obvious even in the floodlights, despite the depth. He never gave me any grief for the tic, everyone said it was terrifying as all hell down here. In truth, I found the creaking and reverberations soothing, our footfalls a grounding pattern.

    Thud

    It wasn't the proximity to crush depth that scared me, nor the reality that the USS Belinda was six and a half minutes of full-ascent away, assuming I even made it to the tether. It was how alone I was. Or rather, how my brain bombarded me with phantom AT nests and mines around every corner.

    Thud

    A soft crackle pulled me back to reality. "Panda, Swan, over."

    Thud

    "Go ahead Swan, over."

    "Panda (thud), the sonar is picking up a probable match (thud) to our eight o'clock, two hundred meters, read back, over."

    Thud

    "I read back: Probable match to our eight, two hundred meters, (Thud) designate as Probable Six. We'll head there after Three (thud), if we have the oxygen, over."

    "Wilco Panda, over."

    Thud

    "Roger, out."

    Thud

    The next eight minutes passed in relative silence, the brief chatter centering me. This wasn't Korea (the second time, I'm not that old). The only signs of life were plant matter, fish keeping well away from the two hulking man-shaped piles of steel. No need to keep quiet, not at minus twelve thousand feet. Not when the Loach variant wasn't built to hide from sonar or listeners. Far cheaper than the M7 Pollux, it shed armor and used seawater to cool the reactor, being dedicated to underwater operations.

    Sure, I missed my old walking artillery piece, but ironically, I was happy to say farewell to No More Goodbyes. Ahead of me, Silver Spade came to a sudden halt. Trying desperately not to get my hopes up again, I keyed our channel on. "Swan, Panda, what's the damage, over."

    And through my headset came the words that I never thought I'd hear. "Well Lyla, I think you owe me that date, over."

    "Winslow, if you call me that in front of the President, I will have your balls nailed to the bow of the Belinda, with or without you attached."

    "Well then change my callsign to Castrati," and I could hear the smug grin this time, "because we just found Prop Two!"

    My hands were shaking again, I realized, as I moved to unroll the retrieval harness and release the signal buoy. Rainbow Convection followed my motions regardless, stepping forward to reveal, as promised, the Titanic's missing central propeller.

    My hands were shaking, but the three-bladed mass of bronze was intact. Half-sunken in the silt and obscured by light coral growth, it would be a beautiful and sorrowful display. A propaganda victory, to remind the Sinosphere that we conquered not just the moon, but the ocean floor too.

    My hands were shaking, but not from fear.

    My hands were shaking, but.

    But this time, it was excitement.

    ================================================

    AN: I was inspired by thinking about how atomic-powered ITs could be used for refloating our lost fleet. I went with an American perspective because it's what I'm more familiar with. Pilot and mech names are cribbed from my Lancer TTRPG group: My character is Tarsilyle "Panda" Panderosa, and my partner plays Winslow "Castrati" (formerly "Swan") Parris. Their mechs are as named here. The title is a reference to White Star Line, the Titanic's operators. Also, this is the first piece of creative writing I've ever managed to write down, let alone post!
     
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  • Sidestory
    • This piece was predicated on Korean tensions escalating to the point that it goes hot again, and the US of Middle-North A eventually manages to field their own mechs. Not great ones at first, but enough to contest the forests and mountains where ITs gave them a real shock. In this story, Panda was a tanker and medic (hence her sappy mech name), and among the first wave of American mech pilots. Reeling from being caught with their pants down a second time by Guangchou (because regardless of how the war goes, capitalist propaganda predicates itself heavily on maintaining public belief in their technological superiority over communists), America tries to refocus public attention with feel-good projects. Panda and Swan get awarded a medal by the President in a heavily played-up ceremony, and Winslow gets that date.

    [X] +2 to One Iron Tiger Module/Frame Design

    HeroCooky said:
    Also, just looked at the LANCER mechs, and if you need me, I am going down a rabbit-hole, cya!!!
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    FWIW, Lancer!Panda's mech, Rainbow Convection, is from the Intercorp homebrew set. It's one of the more fleshed-out and balanced homebrews, complete with art!
     
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