Project Interplanetary Carrier - WIP

[jedidia]

Ok, been trying to figure out just how I'm going to push this thing around.

If you are planning to make this monster capable of landing on planets, don't even bother with research, just magic something up. Short of Orion, there's nothing we know of that could do the job (and Orion powering a monster like this would mean turning the launch site into a nuclear wasteland. On the plus side, you can probably sell tickets to fallout LARPers...)

For orbit to orbit transfer, you'll have to decide how realistic you want to make it. If you want to go realistic, you'll end up with veeeery low thrust (we're talking a few mili-Gs at best). While that would'nt be a problem in and of itself, we only have the Orbiter Navigator that can handle the job, and unfortunately it's not being developed anymore (but it's still great in the state it's in currently).

If you want higher thrust, you'll either have to reduce exhaust velocity, which means you're going to need lots and lots of propellant, or you magic up some gimmick that can deal with a gigawatt of waste heat... :shifty:

If you want to stick with nuclear-electric, VASIMR is the only way to go. Ion thrusters and hall effect thrusters don't scale up too well...

Modern Nuclear power generator can produce about 2GW

You know that even with very optimistic assumptions, such a reactor would come in at about 2000 tons (that's 1 kg/kw). Then again, cheating when it comes to mass is probably the most forgiving way of cheating.

 

[icedown]

I'm trying to go for a more realistic propulsion. I've been thinking about using conventional liquid fueled rockets for orbital maneuvering, then switching to a more efficient system, like the VASMIR, for interplanetary burns. As far as the heat issue, I was planning on making a large portion of the bottom of this thing as a radiator, deploying sections of it as needed. This part being mostly automated.

As far as the ability to land on planets, no. Well, at least not in one piece. That's the reason it's built to carry this many vessels. The XR-5s do the heavy lifting while the XR-2 ferry the people. I'm possibly even going to use the front of it as a bay to carry station building blocks.