Due to issues with external spam filters, QQ is currently unable to send any mail to Microsoft E-mail addresses. This includes any account at live.com, hotmail.com or msn.com.
Signing up to the forum with one of these addresses will result in your verification E-mail never arriving. For best results, please use a different E-mail provider for your QQ address.
For prospective new members, a word of warning: don't use common names like Dennis, Simon, or Kenny if you decide to create an account. Spammers have used them all before you and gotten those names flagged in the anti-spam databases. Your account registration will be rejected because of it.
Since it has happened MULTIPLE times now, I want to be very clear about this. You do not get to abandon an account and create a new one. You do not get to pass an account to someone else and create a new one. If you do so anyway, you will be banned for creating sockpuppets.
If you wish to change your username, please ask via conversation to tehelgee instead of asking via my profile. I'd like to not clutter it up with such requests.
Regarding Nuclear Aircraft, Project Pluto was projected to have endurance of 6 months+. Granted, that level of technology is probably beyond the scope of this game.
Airships, however, require far less energy than a hypersonic cruise missile/drone bomber...
That technology is massively more advanced, and even it wasn't intended to go for years. Importantly it also wasn't going to be manned. Anything you intend to have manned has a whole lot of new problems to deal with when you change the duration of mission from hours to days to months.
True. Overall though, weeks airborne shouldn't be a problem (they already make flights lasting days) and a few months seems plausible because unrealistic steampunk automation is a thing here.
Anyways, is anyone else ticked off by Sirroco going full SJW Social Engineering on us?
Weeks airborne instead of days means you need things like exercise facilities to prevent muscle atrophy, more sophisticated plumbing, and a magnitude more water and food storage. You also likely have to do a lot more maintenance while things are running instead of while they're shut off.
I wouldn't say Sirrocco is going SJW, but the sudden demand for a wife when the benefits are nebulous at best is pretty annoying.
He's definitely plotting radical social engineering. I don't disagree there. I just don't think he's going SJW about it. I mean he's still planning on female roles being connected to housework and child rearing more, just changing how they go about it.
That post that I linked has an undertone of culturally normalizing prostitution (reasonable) and paternal uncertainty (what) and communal childcare as well as his earlier posts telling us to find a hot-babe-supergenius-feminist...
Blech. Onto more interesting things - because airships can be operated at neutral buoyancy, shutting off the machinery for maintenance isn't the biggest issue.
Steampunk automation could shrink the crew rosters, meaning the same amount of food & water holds much longer. Hell, you could build a bigger airship with multiple sets of machinery, so you could run on one engine while the other is maintained or something.
I actually like the idea of normalizing prostitution and communal childcare. I don't see paternal uncertainty or a flying pig wife as very reasonable though.
Airships operating at neutral buoyancy is eh. While the goal is neutral buoyancy in practice you never actually hit perfectly neutral buoyancy.
Multiple sets of machinery mean you could have afforded to build multiple smaller airships at that cost that could be doing a wider range of jobs. Multiple smaller units gives you more flexibility.
Days not weeks and certainly not months. Every bit of space and weight you add to endurance means less on cargo as well. Those can still be serviced when they return to base.
The fact an aircraft can remain airborne that long with hydrocarbons undercuts the value of a nuclear aircraft.
Plus you're forgetting that nuclear reactors are usually quite huge. So space and weight savings aren't always there until you're doing ridiculous long missions.
That was with airborne refuelling, which is a logistical demand we cannot meet.
Airborne nuclear engines have been built at similar scale to conventional aircraft engines, and in this universe you already have nuclear engines small enough to power mecha. Also, an airship requires power/weight ratios closer to waterborne ships than jet aircraft.
Yet you'll find that nuclear and oil powered waterborne ships and submarines have fairly comparable performance until you are getting 8,000+ kilometers range. Because the nuclear reactors are pretty enormous. An airship doesn't need range to go that far really because we're unlikely to be connected to anyone so far away.
Airborne refueling is less a problem because with airships they can land to move fuel from a tanker wherever there's a patch of flat ground, no need for a runway. Plus there's not going to be a whole lot of people left around to make an issue of you landing on their lawn.
What? You'll find there are far less fuel depots after the apocalypse. Most naval reactors are bulky because of conservative design; aircraft nuclear powerplants (ala Pluto) and Soviet metal cooled reactors were orders of magnitude more compact.
Nuclear innovation has been stifled due to anti-nuclear sentiment, laws and regulations, not because of fundamental problems with nuclear technology (which exist, mind you, just they don't hinder reactor scaling)
You can still run a tanker airship. Just fill its cargo hold with fuel.
Project Pluto produced a more compact reactor because it had no radiation shielding at all. They designed the cruise missile to withstand being constantly irradiated. That's a problem if you want to build an airship to transport crew and cargo you intend to use later.
Project Pluto required a massive energy throughput to ram the airframe through the atmosphere at ludicrous velocities for extreme durations.
That's completely unnecessary on an airship that probably never passes propeller aircraft in top speed, so a higher amount of rad shielding combined with a smaller engine (again, in a universe where nuclear mecha already exist) seems feasible.
Nuclear mecha exist, but so do coal fired mecha. Mecha to all appearances don't really require much in the way of power here. For that matter the Russians analyzed his nuclear mecha and deemed them uneconomical. I wouldn't be surprised if the nuclear reactor in the mecha takes up more space than the coal power plant in a normal one given that.
Plus nuclear reactors don't scale linearly to power output, so you can't get 1/10th the size and 1/10th the power. Increasing size increases power output more than linearly, but this also means they don't shrink nearly as effectively for smaller output.
While true, its not like an airship requires stupid amounts of power as well. Anyways, we've been arguing in circles and restating the same point; the only thing I've managed to push across was that aircraft have already managed to stay airborne (IRL) for over two months.
Comments on Profile Post by Persimmon