I'm looking for some critique on my interplanetary cargo hauler. I made it with the intent to possibly mod it into the game, but I also want to get a much better understanding of hard sci-fi spacecraft design.
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Here are my concerns.
Part order
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The ship has three main sections sandwiched between the engine and the shield: fuel pods, artificial gravity ring, and cargo. My thinking: the ship is like a skyscraper while under acceleration, so it makes sense to put the heaviest bit on the back (the "bottom" of the skyscraper). That could mean either the cargo or the fuel.
* How much concern should be given to high-energy particles and radiation that might penetrate the shield while traveling at high speed? Putting the fuel up front offers more protection at the cost of having to pump it further. Putting the cargo up front does the same but might damage sensitive cargo. Putting the AG ring up front means putting people up front. Is this even something to worry about?
* What's the danger in having the fuel next to the engine? If something goes wrong with the rocket, and tanks are ruptured and cold reactants mix, is there potential for the fuel to ignite and explode, or is this unrealistic?
Radiators
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Too much? Too little? I know it's impossible to tell without knowing how much heat the ship produces, but what's your gut feeling? Also, acknowledging that having radiators face each other by putting them in a skewed X formation is not maximally efficient, is it even worth doing or is it pointless and stupid?
Also, the cab and reactor need to have their own radiators because there's no way to connect them to the coolant circuit on the rest of the ship. I worry that they might be inadequate since that's probably where most of the heat is. Producing heat is basically the reactor's job, and people are incidentally hot.
AG ring
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Using SpinCalc I settled on 70 meters as a reasonable radius. Generating between 3/4 and 1 g gives it a rotation rate of just above 3 rpm, which is not too bad.
Having the plane of rotation parallel to the length of the ship instead of perpendicular was deliberate, but I'm not 100% sure about it. It has the advantage of giving the ship a much smaller profile, meaning less shield and less weight, which is significant... but the weight of the structural support that needs to stretch across the 140 m diameter is not insignificant either. That's also 140 extra meters of wiring and tubing. The ring accounts for more than a third of the length of the current ship (more than the cargo, lol).
Another advantage of the rotation plane is that you can attach ring-related goodies on either end, like magnetic rails that assist in accelerating and halting rotation, reducing stress on the spokes. I guess you could do this with with a perpendicular plane, but you'd have to put them on long nacelles just so they could reach.
It also gives the ship a more unique appearance, which I think does matter a little bit.
Aside from that... with the current setup, the habitat cab is isolated from the rest of the ship while the ring rotates. There is no docking with the non-spinning bit and climbing down a tube to the habitat. It looked really cool in 2001, but I think it's unnecessary, and this circumvents the issue of needing to invent an airtight rotating gasket. Everything needed to control the ship can be put in the cab, and because the ring only needs to be spinning during long travel periods, you don't really need to transfer personnel to any other part of the ship unless there's an emergency, in which case you would probably spin the ring down anyway.
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The lifeboats are docked to the non-rotating section immediately adjacent to the ring, meaning it must be spun down to access them. Attaching them directly to the cab means more weight on the cab, but that only matters during spin-up and -down. I also worry that they could become obstructed if rotation were to unexpectedly halt in an unfavorable position (whereas you could EVA to the unobstructed lifeboats with the current setup if that happened), but that wouldn't be an issue if it rotated perpendicularly since they would always be pointed outwards regardless of where it stopped.
The shield folds. Mostly useless but I guess it seemed like a cool idea when I made it.
I intend to add RCS/maneuvering thrusters later.
The cargo is a bunch of 40-foot shipping containers. Those will definitely be the standard for future interplanetary shipping. Definitely.
What do warp engines look like in the Space Engine universe? Some ships have large rings on the front and back, while others have a set of small concentric rings which I assume have to do with FTL.