Spaceship Design

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Spaceship Design

More ship design info is here

I see now that I need a strong vision about what it all looks like to share with everyone. So far I have been looking at the tech side but that is wrong as far as sharing with artists goes.

Basics are that we have high class passenger ships that are large and QEII like. Then we have private ships that are basically like Lear jets. Then we have military ships. These are high G ships, 70Gs short burst and 2 G constant, the crew are in tanks where they breath liquid to withstand the Gs of combat. The rest of the time they are normal ship people walking around and wasting time. There are pipes and works out where they can be fixed with ease on a mill ship but civilian ships they are all hidden behind access pannels.

Then there are the transport ships. They are long spindles with cargo pods hanging all along them. Sort of like a tree look with nothing but metal webbing between. The insides of commercial ships are more like war ships but with more luxury and more space for long term habitation. Then there are rotating space stations that are at a minimum 1800 meters across. The insides of the space stations are very lived in but have a look that is a lot like the commercial ships. The insides of the space stations are very lived in but have a look that is a lot like the commercial ships. People only live and work on the inside of the outside ring. The rest is just framework but with central docking station and some warehouse space there also.

There are also some science ships that tend to look like little private ships but the insides are full of equipment.

Command centers will be VR goggle based. I always thought that the argument about needing real buttons to push for feedback was valid. I see the control room as looking like a bunch of seats that are good for high G maneuvers with each person sitting in one and having lots of buttons and panels in front of them. The VR would project what is needed as needed. The advantage of the goggles being the level of 3d interaction that can be had.

For example, if one needed, one could be outside looking down on the ship to see damage or they could be in a 360 sphere looking at the battle or they could move to be outside the sphere view and get that perspective or they could be more just in the room with the other people looking at your control panels with info projected there. Just more versatile and not having it. You can also plug in from anywhere in the ship and take a look at what is happening by having the view you need patched in to you from control central.

Technology Year

Thing built in different years have different technologies to do the same thing. New tech tends to be small, lighter, more powerful and cheaper.
First you must determine the building planet, and it's technology year. This will effect all other design details.

Hull

All ships have a hull. The hull is made up of enclosed areas and girder like open areas.
Closed areas have a volume and a shape. The basic shapes and the math to calculate the volumes and surface area follows.

Hull Cost = Volume * Tech Year * cost modifier.

If you want to built at plus one Tech Year then the price is 3 times more.
If you want to build at minus one Tech Year then the price is .5
You may not build more that plus one or minus one Tech Year.

If you must enter the atmosphere then the price is 4 times more. For water landings it becomes 5 times more. It becomes 6 times more to land on a 1g world. Ships larger that what the ground and landing gear can support must land in water and must be designed for that.

4,000,000 kilos max weight for ground landings with a rock surface. (Saturn V rocked was about that big.)

If you have battle hardening then the price is 10 times more and does not include extra armor. The costs go towards making it less massive per volume and making it stronger to take very high Gs.

You may make hull shapes of different types and stick them together. For example a long Rectangular Prism with cargo pod hooks and an engine with a Cylinder on top for the people.

All price mods are cumulative.

Volume Formulas. If these are not clear please surf the net. There are lots of good pages for this math.
Side1 means length of side one; same for radius.

Surface Area Formulas:
l = length, w= width, h = height

Cost of ships to operate

For that reason and because operating costs for giant vessels can run $20,000 to $30,000 a day,

Hard Points and other external components

Hard points are places in the hull that have the electronics and structure to support weapons. The amount of hard points is based on the surface area of the ship. Each hard point takes about 2x2 square meters and internally take up 3x3x3 cubed meters. Note that weapons systems may take up an additional volume and also make take more than one hard point combined. They costs X per point.

A ship must have doors. These take up area also. All ships must have door that will let people escape in any case that the ship may encounter. These doors are airlocks and take up 2x3 meters of surface area and 3x4x5 meters of internal volume. These cost X per door.

Star Hopping AKA Jump Drive or Hyper Drive or Warp Drive

All ships that go between stars much have a jump drive.
For more info about jumping look here.

Some ideas

System failure design to limit cascading failures. This includes
redundancy of components, partitioning, and identification (and
removal) of unintentional single points of failure. This might be
nicely abstracted as a value that costs mass and credits to improve
and results in reducing the chance of cascading damage. On civilian
ships this will largely partition life support from everything
else but not limit cascading effects on fire control, jump, stealth,
AI, EW, etc.

Basically I'd model this by making the damage model "exploding" in
some fashion: a hit does X damage with p chance of doing another X
damage, with each X damage similarly having p chance of more damage.
The ship's safety design (resilience?) would reduce p or limit the
number of times p can occur (those might actually reflect two totally
different strategies for implementing resilience).
Brad Murray (halfjack)

Space Engines

Current ion drives goe up to about 10,000 Isp. The (still prototype) VASIMIR looks to get 30,000.

Power Plant

Power plant make power for every system of the ship including Jump Engines. These engines run from the fission, fusion or antimatter depending on the tech level.

Fission

small low power bad waste but it can be dumped into a sun. Finding the fuel can be very difficult and expensive.
power outputs are in the range of
mass is
volume is

Fusion

This is just a matter of taking to hydrogen atoms and pushing them together to make helium. The fuel is easy to find as water or gas. It can be had on planets, comets or gas giants but raw like this will be a lot of processing to get it to fuel grade. The plants tend to be rather large but also have high outputs.
power outputs are in the range of
mass is
volume is
More details about Fusion

Antimatter

Making antimatter takes a high technology level and is expensive. It is also a very dangerous substance to have on board ship. If it breaks out of containment the ship is doomed. The power plants are small, light and have very high outputs.
power outputs are in the range of
mass is
volume is

Fuel Tanks

Computers and Controls

All systems are controlled by on board and central computer systems and coordinated by a central (usually redundant) computer. Each system's controller typically has its own interface for use by local crew members. The bridge has stations for controlling all the various systems and providing diagnostics. Connecting the various systems are electrical or fiber optic wiring running throughout the ship inside the exterior hull. The precise nature of the control runs, controllers and computers are dependent on tech year, but basically require (insert percentage here) of the hull devoted to this infrastructure (perhaps a higher percentage as tech gets lower).

The number of crew required to operate a ship is heavily dependent on the sophistication (read cost) of the control system installed. The likelihood of a system being damaged is based more on the redundancy of the system (read volume consumed). The number of crew required to maintain such systems is a function of volume.

Workstations for individual crew may be more or less capable depending on tech year and cost. Military vessels tend to have more capable workstations, and more of them, while commercial vessels have fewer complicated workstations serving more functions, but sacrificing some of the "information overload" protections of more sophisticated military controls. Commercial vessels tend to have fewer crew for the same tonnage but are less capable in an emergency.

[Peter Brenton, pbrenton@mit.edu]

Windows

Spaceships do not have windows. Windows would allow lights that are to bright or lasers to enter the ship. They also make for weak points in the hull. For seeing outside the ship all people on board have 3d viewers that they can use. These views give better views that you could get from any window. THe computer can stitch together a view from any point in any direction and can also do it at any wavelength the ship is equipped to sense. It can also in most cases provide magnification or reduction of the viewing field. Pictures may also be taken with this system.

Crew quarters

Crew quarters are simple and small, much like you might find in the captains quarters of a submarine. They include a bed, simple urination device, and storage closets, and a chair. All computer interactions are done with a simple helmet and glove device. The crew can with the help of the computer see any area inside or outside the ship unless it is restricted to them. All views are 3d.

Passengers

Cargo

Cargo space is done like most spaces but can be separate and have it's own systems. These systems might include, cooling, heating, light, atmosphere, or even a spinning ship section to simulate high G or low G as needed. At 1 G this section would be large, about 900 meter in radius for a happy human but then there would still be acceleration to mess that up.

The ship can be fitted to take standard cargo pods also. Normal pots must use 10% of their volume for structure in a normal 1G ship, more for extras. A standard cargo pod is, 12 meters x 2.4 x 2.6 for historical reasons. High tech pods can navigate and reenter by themselves, under computer control, when in communication with ground flight controllers. They have very limited thrusters that are only good for one reentry before needing a recharge. More low tech or fragile cargo must be taken down with a tug or other spaceship. Some freight is beamed down but the costs for this are very high.

Pod Ships Capacity is measured in 12m equivalent unit (TEU), the number of standard 12-meter containers measuring 12.2 × 2.4 × 2.6 meters (40 × 8.0 × 8.5 feet) a vessel can carry.
The busiest port on the Earth ships 27,932,000/2 TEUs a year. The biggest Earth based water ship holds 15,200/2 TEUs. The top 30 ports in 2007 ship 1,33,449,000 TEUs a year giving us some idea of the amount shipped from a planet.

TEU is two times bigger than the one used in the year 2009 on the planet Earth in the system Sol.

Warfare

Ships have 10 basic systems for fighting.

  1. Propulsion to maneuver quickly. Most ships have a constant one G acceleration to simulate gravity but warships can pull up to 100gs in emergency situations. 100gs might kill half the crew but if the computer sees it will save the ship and part of the crew then it is programmed to do the emergency maneuver. Normal warfare involves many accelerations in the 25-30G range when all personnel are in their liquid bath G suits, breathing perfluorocarbon liquid and chairs that support this with the feet pointed towards the engines. For longer time periods, like a week, the warships will pull a max of 2gs.

  2. Armor to absorb radiation and kinetic damage.

  3. Point defense weapons to shoot down incoming weapons. All point defense weapons are short range and are made with the idea of blowing up or stopping incoming weapons.

    3.1 Lasers. These are high speed targeting lasers linked to computer that are in turn liked to sensors. They seek to shoot down incoming missiles.

    3.1.1 non xray 160 Mj laser an extreme range of only 516 KILOMETERS according to the formulas in TNE FF&S. non xray 160 Mj laser has an extreme range of only 10,320 Kilometers.

    3.1.2 *max* range is fairly easy to figure. Once distance a ship can change it's position by (from what it'd have if it cut power) at max accelerate during the speed of light lag from last known position to arrival of weapons fire exceeds the maximum"radius" of the ship by a significant amount, it can't be hit with a light speed weapon except by sheer luck.

    3.2 Lead bullet guns. In some cases lasers can not do the job and then these guns then do the job. They shoot around 1,000,000 rounds a minute for most of these. They use rail guns or chemical propellants. Some also have terminal guidance packages and are almost missiles. They are very effective against a large range of targets but are costly to fire. Bullets also have the advantage of infinite range and a no reduction of damage with range. Of course targeting becomes a big problem at great ranges especially if the target is changing it's vector or knows the shot is coming.

    3.3 High Tech Smoke screen. This just casting particles into the space around the ship to confuse or stop enemy weapons. It has limited use because if the ship's vector changes then new smoke must be released.

  4. Offensive weapons to destroy or disable the attacker. These weapons are high power and long range.

    4.1 Lasers. Lasers have a max range of X because at ranges longer that that you can't predict the place the enemy will be because of limit with the speed of light, also light spreads with distance lowering power of the shot. Higher power, faster cycling lasers mean more shots per second with more power in each shot and longer ranges. This means you can spread out the shots in a sort of shotgun blast thus giving you a greater chance of hitting the enemy ship.

    4.2 Missiles have almost unlimited range on coast but have big problems with getting through point defenses. They also can carry massive destruction in one shot. Missiles overcome point defenses ether by not being detected or else having massive numbers of dummy clones or hitting at such a high speed that they can survive the point defenses.

    4.3 Projectile weapons. These have unlimited range and maintain full damage at any range. The down side is that they are slow and easy to avoid at range. Projectile weapons are also used to hit things planet side with great effect. These weapons are mostly chemically projected or else the use rail guns. The mass of a projectile is almost unlimited as is the speed but each is limited by the gun design. Many guns can fire at very high rates to cover a large area with rounds. This can be very effective at cutting out an approach vector but has a high cost in terms of the price of the bullets and storage area for them. Large amounts can also make ships mass become extream. This can be seen in the class of ships that area made to screen fleets.

  5. Stealth Technology to prevent detection. Although this covers the full spectrum from heat to high energy particles, it is most easy to understand by thinking of it as simple light.

    5.1 Absorb, these are materials on the ship or sprayed from the ship that absorb light. The obvious problem is that it will make a black spot in space with no stars or it will not absorb all frequencies. This leads to a war of detectors VS absorbers. Sometimes a ship can have a projector on the surface to make it look like there are stars there but it is hard to do this at all frequencies.

    5.2 Redirect; this works best for active systems like radar. The radar bonces off the target but does not get back to the receiver and thus is not detected. It can be overcome by having receivers in places that signal is reflected to.

    5.3 Hide behind; You can hide behind a comet or meteor or a planet or even a sun. You might be able to make a small cloud to hide behind but most systems will monitor all of space and thus will know something is different.

    5.4 Make it flow over you. These coatings can take the radiation around them and bend it so that it flows around the ship as if it were not there at all. This would be prefect except that a perfect coating has not been found. Some are very good though at high tech levels.

  6. Detection equipment to see the enemy. These are just sensors set to see in different spectrum. The computer takes images from each sensor and attempts to create a complete picture of what is happening around the ship. Sensors can be blinded or fooled, or fail to receive any signal at all depending on the enemies counter measures.

  7. Computer AI to out smart the enemy. Smarter computers have better tactics and can coordinate more ships and weapons at the same time. Mostly this is relavant only when one starts to become damaged or else one Tech level is much higher than another. Bigger computers cost more but can do more.

  8. Electronic warfare devices to confound the enemies equipment. These devices come online when everyone has seen everyone else. These devices attempt to fill the spectrum with noise, overload enemy sensors or else lie to them about what is coming or who owns it.

  9. Communications and coordination equipment.

  10. Damage Control, Redundancy and Repair.

Things to think about later

Fuel scoops.
Fuel purifiers (if installed)
Supplemental tankage

Spinning Wheel Space Stations

Space stations are meant to be used for long term space habitation with a large need for movement. They can be moved but only slowly unless designed for travel. They often only have what is needed in terms or motors to maintain orbit. Moving is often done with a Space Tug.

Because humans and most of other animals prefer to have gravity. Space Stations are made to simulate gravity with centrifugal force. Space ships use constant acceleration at one G.
The minimum radius of a space station is 900m because this prevents motion sickness you would get from having your head spin faster than your feet.

Mulder's constant is the perception threshold for angular acceleration.
At first thought to be two degrees per second in man (acceleration x
duration of acceleration), it has been shown to vary by up to fifty percent
depending on the axis of rotation (3 for roll, 2.6 for pitch and 1 for yaw).

The threshold for detection is 0.001G-0.03G.
After five seconds of stimulation some adaptation occurs, but the disjoint
between vestibular and visual cues can still cause significant motion
sickness. This is minimized by good space station design.

The centrifugal acceleration is proportional to (the rate of spin)^2 and the
distance from the axis of spin.

Acceleration on a cylinder (space colony, etc.) of radius r and
rotation period t:

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