Questions: Making and Repairing Planetoid Ships

[alex_greene]

I don't see power being an issue once you manufacture fusion reactors, or even hook up our variant of solar panelling.

Simple answer, Economics. You still have to buy the means of producing power....

Which pays for itself after a time, and eventually returns far more than the initial investment.

Nobody seems to realise just how much power a working fusion reactor could produce. The biggest, of course, is the local star.

 

[Infojunky]

Nobody seems to realise just how much power a working fusion reactor could produce. The biggest, of course, is the local star.

Yep, kept telling my self that throughout the technical portions of the 2 edition playtest.


But, it is not so much the direct amount of power, but all the ancillary process that follows using that amount of power. Couple that with the cost of the machinery that is needed to transform said power into useable work.

But Power isn't my direct argument it is more about materials. and a desire for uniform results of a industrial process....

 

[Condottiere]

Your operating costs are one thousandth's per annum for the equipment, with no depreciation, fuel, and labour.

Factory overhead, corporation tax, and probably cost of OSHA supervision.

 

[alex_greene]

Your operating costs are one thousandth's per annum for the equipment, with no depreciation, fuel, and labour.

Factory overhead, corporation tax, and probably cost of OSHA supervision.

Ignore that. Nobody talks about extra non-costs like that. It's Traveller. You're not getting the sheer scale of the exercise. It'd be bigger than counting creds.

If you could do it like that, you could churn out whole fleets of ships with hulls that were, in effect, fine grained concrete bullets, possibly identical in dtonnage. A few of them could be iron/nickel, a lot of them might be hybrid - but as long as there was a supply of rocks, you'd have a supply of ships.

 

[Infojunky]

Might I point out the was a long discussion about building ship's hulls by molding them. Casting is problematic above a certain scale in that hull would need considerable post molding work to finish just the hull. I believe that conversation was on this board in fact.

On a slight turn of topic, what would be the advantage of a Ceramic hull?

If it were up to me I would make more resistant energy based damage, i.e. Laser and plasma weapons.

 

[alex_greene]

Might I point out the was a long discussion about building ship's hulls by molding them. Casting is problematic above a certain scale in that hull would need considerable post molding work to finish just the hull. I believe that conversation was on this board in fact.

On a slight turn of topic, what would be the advantage of a Ceramic hull?

If it were up to me I would make more resistant energy based damage, i.e. Laser and plasma weapons.

Larry Niven recommended drilling a shaft into the centre of an asteroid, setting off a nuke or two to hollow it out, and then moving in once the thing had cooled down.

Er, yeah ... okay ...

Hollowing out a rock to make a ship or a space station would require specialised mining equipment to go in and drill out the required cavities, GPR and other sensors to detect internal faults, and then of course there would have to be the installations - Bridge, life support, crew rooms, drives, power plant, all of that.

It would seem to be just as cash-intensive to do all that as to 3D-print an egg-shaped concrete or ceramic hull using finely-ground vacuum-welded silicate/nickel-iron composite over an assembled internal framework. Put all the rooms together, clamp the mould around the framework, then fill the thing with your concrete slurry, let it set in the vacuum of space, and finish off with precast cargo bar hatches and covers.

It sounds just as science fictional as turning a rock into a spaceship or space station. Maybe in your setting, some species actually do that, rather than hollow out internal hulls.

That's the "making" part, and it's really only for the all-out concrete ball-type rock ships. If it's an actual planetoid that was hollowed out, I can still see navies spraying aggregate over the cracks and splits in the hull. It'd look ugly, and it'd look like an obvious patch job forever if the aggregate was of a different composition to the native rock, but it's not exactly as if the ship was pretty in the first place.

The one thing I'd like to note is that these materials tend to be great heat insulators. If something really hot pierced the hull, partially glassed it in a part, that place would be too hot to go near for a long time.

 

[Condottiere]

Construction methods appear to be suspiciously absent.

I've assumed that our planetoid hulls are nickel iron, but if they're going to be concrete, I would guess they'd need rebars.

As for nooks, crannies and faults, I've assigned five percent of natural volume to cover that, from the twenty or thirty five percent waste.

Ceramics should be part of a composite armour layered approach.

The real attraction of planetoids is their incredible cheapness compared to an actual hull, ten percent of an equivalent manufactured hull, plus free factor two armour plating.

 

[Reynard]

I see a race of obsessive-compulsives who think completely breaking down asteroids then rebuilding it as a ship rather than merely boring it out for less time, energy and resources. Then again, it would be interesting to see fleets of concrete buildings. I have to assume these would lose the built in armor since you're no longer have the natural thickness of the original asteroid.

 

[Condottiere]

Get some German engineers.

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

Might I point out the was a long discussion about building ship's hulls by molding them. Casting is problematic above a certain scale in that hull would need considerable post molding work to finish just the hull. I believe that conversation was on this board in fact.

On a slight turn of topic, what would be the advantage of a Ceramic hull?

If it were up to me I would make more resistant energy based damage, i.e. Laser and plasma weapons.

Larry Niven recommended drilling a shaft into the centre of an asteroid, setting off a nuke or two to hollow it out, and then moving in once the thing had cooled down.

Er, yeah ... okay ...

Hollowing out a rock to make a ship or a space station would require specialised mining equipment to go in and drill out the required cavities, GPR and other sensors to detect internal faults, and then of course there would have to be the installations - Bridge, life support, crew rooms, drives, power plant, all of that.

It would seem to be just as cash-intensive to do all that as to 3D-print an egg-shaped concrete or ceramic hull using finely-ground vacuum-welded silicate/nickel-iron composite over an assembled internal framework. Put all the rooms together, clamp the mould around the framework, then fill the thing with your concrete slurry, let it set in the vacuum of space, and finish off with precast cargo bar hatches and covers.

It sounds just as science fictional as turning a rock into a spaceship or space station. Maybe in your setting, some species actually do that, rather than hollow out internal hulls.

That's the "making" part, and it's really only for the all-out concrete ball-type rock ships. If it's an actual planetoid that was hollowed out, I can still see navies spraying aggregate over the cracks and splits in the hull. It'd look ugly, and it'd look like an obvious patch job forever if the aggregate was of a different composition to the native rock, but it's not exactly as if the ship was pretty in the first place.

The one thing I'd like to note is that these materials tend to be great heat insulators. If something really hot pierced the hull, partially glassed it in a part, that place would be too hot to go near for a long time.

This is the one I usually think of when I think of an asteroid ship:

It appears to be quite big. Here's another one:

Now for something smaller:

 

[Reynard]

Tom's illustrations say to me what Traveller planetoid ships are not, hollow. You're dealing with eggshells while boring passages and rooms within the rock is what gives an asteroid vessel it's inherent resilience and toughness. A lot harder to try to go through walls acting as bulkheads when it's possibly a couple/few meters thick.

 

[Ol'Weedy]

Continuing my trend of reviving old threads!
One question I had in relation to planetoid hulls, is integral power usage (i.e. the 20% of hull power requirements).
Since this power use is for grav plating and internal systems, it only makes sense that the 20% use on a planetoid hull applies solely to the usable portion.
I don't see any actual mention of it in the construction rules, however after checking the only 2nd edition ship design I'm aware of (Planetoid Monitor from HG), that is the way it was done (20% of 32500 for a 50000 ton ship.
Small savings on a small ship, but it amounts to 350 tons of reactor space freed up on a 50000 ton hull at TL 8-11.
The surprising thing about the sample monitor, was the way they did the armor. It was also calculated on usable volume only, but they fudged it a bit. They show it having Molecular Bonded armor at LVL15, though only 11 is actually added armor, the other 4 points being intrinsic.
After about 2 minutes of trying to visualize a way to resolve multiple armor types on a single target, I fully support said fudging.

 

[Condottiere]

I think you'll find an example of that in the latest High Guard update, Planetoid Monitor.