Warship Design Atomic Rockets

Yeah, I know ya all want yer freaking-huge testosterone-soaked genital-amplifying Omega-Death-Dreadnaught-of-Doom with Kill-O-Zap Destructo-rays and ten metric tons of truck-nuts dangling off the rear. But if your knowledge of space warfare is limited to Star Trek, yer gonna embarrass yourself. You gotta do your homework! Warship spacecraft are not boats, one person ships are not fighter planes, and they ain't gonna name the ship types after the ones in Battle of Jutland. In the section Ship Design Analysis we will examine what spacecraft warships will need, what they won't need, and what sort of tasks they will likely be required to perform. In the section Ship Types we will examine the thorny issue of the terminiology of the various types of spacecraft.

The placement of weapon mounts on the warship is discussed here. In the current "wet" Navy, a "Fleet" is more of an organizational fiction rather than an actual entity. A group of ships belong to a fleet. But what is generally encountered at sea is a "Task Force." A few ships from a fleet are "detached" to form a task force charged with performing a specific mission. When the mission is completed, the ships of the task force are dissolved back into the fleet. Going off of a very rough historical comparison to WW1 and earlier naval organizations try:

These are realistic larger warships. For smaller fighter-scale warships go here. var name="burch_a@";document.write("<a href=\"mailto:"+name+"hotmail.com\">Adam Burch's</a>");Adam Burch's stunning images can be found on SciFi Meshes. He has studied this website while designing his ship. The Cerberus Class Frigate was designed as an Air Force operated, armed multi- purpose deep space vehicle. Ships operate as part of the Deep Space Command network and carry out scientific, military, law-enforcement, transport and errand-of-mercy missions throughout the solar system.

The ship consists of a forward sensor module, crew module, a variable number of fuel modules and a reactor and propulsion module. The name "Cerberus" denotes both the multi-mission capability of the spacecraft, as well as the physical resemblance of the mythical three headed dog formed by the forward radome, railgun and forward operations module protruding... Project Orion was a study conducted in the 1950s and 1960s by the United States Air Force, DARPA,[1] and NASA into the viability of a nuclear pulse spaceship that would be directly propelled by... Early versions of the vehicle were designed for ground launch, but later versions were intended for use only in space. The design effort took place at General Atomics in San Diego,[5] and supporters included Wernher von Braun,[8] who issued a white paper advocating the idea.[2][9] NASA also created a Mars mission profile based on... Physicists Ted Taylor and Freeman Dyson led the project, and Taylor has been described as the "driving force behind Orion".[6] In 1979, General Dynamics donated a 26-inch-tall (66 cm) wooden model of the craft...

Udvar-Hazy Center in Fairfax County, Virginia.[10] Physicist Stanislaw Ulam proposed the general idea of nuclear pulse propulsion in 1946,[4] and preliminary calculations were made by Frederick Reines and Ulam in a Los Alamos memorandum dated 1947.[4][3][11] In August 1955, Ulam... In July 1958, ARPA agreed to sponsor Orion at an initial level of $1 million per year, at which point the project received its name and formally began.[6][7] The agency granted a study of... Air Force agreed to support Orion if a military use was found for the project, and the NASA Office of Manned Spaceflight also contributed funding.[5] The concept investigated by the government used a blast... Feel free to ask about the numbers or design choices made. If you'd like, I could put together some 2d representations of these if I have time on Saturday.

I offer some of this work below as examples of other spacecraft ideas (and evidence I can actually draw).http://gs78.deviantart.com/art/Velocitor-re-working-521019884http://gs78.deviantart.com/art/Swarm-Reiver-515351972http://gs78.deviantart.com/art/Last-Angel-Concept-513669312 I don't doubt your skill. I especially like how you pulled off the 2D curves for cylinders on the Velocitor. Feel free to use these designs as you wish. I applaud your worked example. I start from a different set of assumptions based on Rocketpunk Manifesto's discussions, so any worked examples I come up with will be different, but I think I can import some ideas.If the Terran...

They can either boost large nuclear bombs well ahead of the fleet to detonate ahead of the constellation and illuminate the area with a massive pulse of radiation in all wavelengths (from X-ray to... If that is not advisable for tactical or treaty related reasons, then one of the laserstars will be using a "wide" beam to illuminate the enemy Hill sphere from a light hour to a... This can be thought of as using an active sonar.I also see a fully developed constellation assuming a formation one light second in diameter, seeded with thousands of sensor drones to provide a highly... This also allows the laserstars to attack from multiple angles (since I assume a Ravening Beam of Death [RBoD] laserstar, this can happen from a light second away , with scorching attacks coming from... Just quickly reposting Francisdrakex's Scod illustration here. http://francisdrakex.deviantart.com/art/The-Soda-Can-of-Death-424421427

For some good general notes on designing spacecraft in general, read Rick Robinson's Rocketpunk Manifesto essay on Spaceship Design 101. Also worth reading are Rick's essays on constructing things in space and the price of a spaceship. For some good general notes on making a fusion powered spacecraft, you might want to read Application of Recommended Design Practices for Conceptual Nuclear Fusion Space Propulsion Systems. There are also some nice examples on the Realistic Designs page. For less scientifically accurate spacecraft design the Constant Variantions blog has a nice article on historical trends in science fiction spacecraft design. Like any other living system, the internal operations of a spacecraft can be analyzed with Living Systems Theory, to discover sources of interesting plot complications.

The improvised space warcraft are the type that seems to hold the most story potential. These would, as mentioned, likely be built by colonies that are in conflict. As they do not have to operate in an atmosphere, and are built by relatively poor colonies, they are likely to be rather crude. The basic components required are structure, propulsion, weapons, life support, power, sensors, control, and communications, and each will be briefly discussed in turn. Nuclear propulsion includes a wide variety of propulsion methods that use some form of nuclear reaction as their primary power source.[1] Many aircraft carriers and submarines currently use uranium fueled nuclear reactors that can... There are also applications in the space sector with nuclear thermal and nuclear electric engines which could be more efficient than conventional rocket engines.

The idea of using nuclear material for propulsion dates back to the beginning of the 20th century. In 1903 it was hypothesized that radioactive material, radium, might be a suitable fuel for engines to propel cars, planes, and boats.[2] H. G. Wells picked up this idea in his 1914 fiction work The World Set Free.[3] Nuclear-powered vessels are mainly military submarines, and aircraft carriers.[1] Russia is the only country that currently has nuclear-powered civilian surface ships, mainly icebreakers. The US Navy currently (as of 2022) has 11 aircraft carriers and 70 submarines in service, that are all powered by nuclear reactors.

For more detailed articles see: Russia's Channel One Television news broadcast a picture and details of a nuclear-powered torpedo called Status-6 on about 12 November 2015. The torpedo was stated as having a range of up to 10,000 km, a cruising speed of 100 knots, and an operational depth of up to 1000 metres below the surface. The torpedo carried a 100-megaton nuclear warhead.[4] One of the suggestions emerging in the summer of 1958 from the first meeting of the scientific advisory group that became JASON was for "a nuclear-powered torpedo that could roam the seas almost indefinitely".[5] The previous section had just the bare basics of spacecraft design.

This section has some of the fine details, as well as a few far-out science fictional concepts. (ed note: this is science fiction, but some of the principles are sound. The most glaring fiction is the "traction drive" which is some kind of handwaving reactionless thruster forbidden by the laws of physics. It is described as "non-Newtonian", which is a dead giveaway that it is bogus science. Anyway that is why the described ship has no propellant tanks, which in a real spacecraft would dominate the design. In the story, Starling and her parents owns the largest momentum tether in space, and make a good living at slinging cargo all over the solar system.

Unfortunately the advent of traction drive ships is going to put them out of business. So Starling's foster father Gampy wants to invest in an unconventional new type of spacecraft as a business move.) “So, kiddo,” Gampy poked again. “Is a spaceship cost-effective?” “Yes and no. I mean, a traction drive isn’t that hard to fabricate.

We could even print a couple dozen ourselves. There’s enough open-source matrices on the web, we’d only have to choose one, maybe adapt it for our needs, so it’s mostly a problem of raw materials and energy. And we wouldn’t have any problem fabbing new solar panels, three or four racks and probably a dozen new capacitor farms, so it’s only a problem of raw materials and we can cannibalize most... I’m guessing we could do it in 24 months or less. Worst-case scenario is 48 months. If we double up on the fabbers, I bet we could cut the production time to 16 months.”

This website is dedicated to Robert A. Heinlein and Sir Arthur C. Clarke.And for planting the seed, Jerry Pournelle and his "A Step Farther Out: Those Pesky Belters and Their Torchships" Your imagination has been captured by the roaring rockets from Heinlein's SPACE CADET or the Polaris from TOM CORBETT, SPACE CADET. But are such rockets possible? How does one go about defining the performance of these atomic-powered cruisers?

This document gives some hints and equations that will allow back-of-the-envelope calculations on such matters. Though horribly simplistic, they are far better than just making up your figures. This site was mainly intended for science fiction authors who wanted a little scientific accuracy so they can write SF "the way God and Heinlein intended" (Arlan Andrews's Law). The technical term is Hard Science Fiction. But anybody who is interested can play with the toys contained within, designing their own Planet Rangers Rocketships. It is assumed that the reader has enough knowledge to know the difference between a star and a planet, high school mathematics, and enough skill to use a pocket calculator.

Computer spreadsheet and computer programming skills are a plus, spreadsheets in particular will make your life much easier. If you are stuck using pathetically weak chemical rockets and but gotta have big honking slabs of delta-V, the only thing you can do is cower back to the drawing board and try to... The trouble is that a mass ratio of 15 is freaking difficult and 20 is impossible. You will wind up with a ship made of foil and soap bubbles, but still falling short of delta V. If yer short-sighted boss won't letcha use atomic engines, your only hope is Staging. This is where your ship throws away huge expensive parts of itself when the tanks run dry.

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