Yes it can. We haul hundred of tonnes of diamonds, but we can't buy one graphite pencil.
Cargo size and shape
- Thread starter Soron Silin
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Yet which Engineer uses so much as a single diamond?
I was thinking about this some more and it occurred to me that the temperature required for the reaction is largely irrelevant in terms of heating the ship, the total energy required would be the only real limiting factor and fusing heavier elements actually produces less net energy and thus less heat than fusing lighter elements. Even if the total energy required to produce enough heavier elements, in the time it takes to scoop fuel, would overwhelm the ship's cooling, the reaction could be done outside the ship, in the magnetic 'scoop' itself.
Also, the hydrogen fuel I was referring to has no oxygen in it; it's lithium borohydride (LiBH4). Boron is only atomic number five and would be far easier to produce via fusion than oxygen.
There are metal oxide CO2 scrubbers, but the whole reason they are used is because they are regenerable and don't need to be constantly supplied with materials. The in-game depiction of this is very different.
I also looked up the possibility of the forced fissioning of light nuclei and it is indeed a thing. Oxygen could could be produced by some of these processes.
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No, because that chemical reaction liberates oxygen from sodium chlorate by buring iron, resulting in O2, salt, and rust.
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As usual, when this topic comes up, I'll point out that if anything defines the physical sizes of modules, it's probably passenger cabins.
As an absolute bare-minimum, a person is going to take up ~2m³ of space so passenger cabin sizes will be multiples of 2m³ per person.
This works out fairly well because it does coincide with the size of a comparable cargo rack - although, obviously, it's going to be pretty cramped for your passengers.
In terms of pysical proportions of modules, you'd have to wonder if it'd be viable to have cuboid passenger cabins.
A 6E passenger cabin, for example, holds 32 people so it needs to be (at least) 64m³ but you probably wouldn't want it to be a cube of 4m x 4m x 4m cos that'd mean passengers would have to clamber up ladders to their bunks, where they'd slot in like sardines in a can.
Probably better to assume a "single storey" bulkhead height of 2m and then scale the horizontal area of modules to accomodate whatever capacity is required.
As an absolute bare-minimum, a person is going to take up ~2m³ of space so passenger cabin sizes will be multiples of 2m³ per person.
This works out fairly well because it does coincide with the size of a comparable cargo rack - although, obviously, it's going to be pretty cramped for your passengers.
In terms of pysical proportions of modules, you'd have to wonder if it'd be viable to have cuboid passenger cabins.
A 6E passenger cabin, for example, holds 32 people so it needs to be (at least) 64m³ but you probably wouldn't want it to be a cube of 4m x 4m x 4m cos that'd mean passengers would have to clamber up ladders to their bunks, where they'd slot in like sardines in a can.
Probably better to assume a "single storey" bulkhead height of 2m and then scale the horizontal area of modules to accomodate whatever capacity is required.
The real issue isn't the temperatures required, but the amount of energy released by the fusion itself. Fusing hydrogen even to simply helium causes a loss of about 0.7% of its mass, or 7 kilograms per tonne, which translates to about 600 petajoules of energy or about 150 megatonnes of TNT equivalent per tonne of helium produced. Even if done externally and completely ignoring further fusion beyond the helium stage, a Cutter with an 8A scoop would be effectively detonating more than 4 Tsar Bombas every second that it is scooping once you factor in how the majority of the actual mass in hydrogen storage compounds isn't actually hydrogen. Fusing heavier elements, unless you are going beyond iron, requires less energy every step but still requires the intermediate elements to be synthesised first; fusing lithium to beryllium might release less energy per mass than fusing hydrogen to helium, but you need to make helium anyway on the way towards beryllium.
The difference between fusing to lithium compared to fusing to oxygen would be largely irrelevant as either way we are still releasing energy equivalent to a significant proportion of Earth's current nuclear arsenal every second of scooping.
If a simple and commonly available module could project strong enough magnetic fields to fuse lighter elements by the tonne at long enough ranges, then it's a wonder why it hasn't been weaponised. Forget the effectiveness of rupturing half a dozen hydrogen canisters in a CZ, a Cutter could descend down to an atmospheric planet and vaporise entire continents in seconds with just a fuel scoop by fusing any lighter elements in the atmosphere. Even a cheaply available 1E fuel scoop would be a veritable death ray with an atmosphere, although it would "only" be capable of unleashing about 1% of the Cutter's power. Obviously, this atmospheric fusion death ray would suffer reduced effectiveness as it would probably struggle to fuse many atmospheric elements, but any planet with a hydrogen-rich atmosphere such as ammonia, methane or even just water vapour would be a fusion incident waiting to happen.
Unless that is the reason why we don't do atmospheric planetside stuff, every combat engagement is finished in half a second as our ship is literally vaporised within a second alongside everything else within 10s of km.
It would also create quite a funny galnet article: "pyromaniac in T9 attempts to explode Jupiter with 8A fuel scoop".
Catalyst based CO2 scrubbers tend to be cobalt based as it provides a much more controlled reaction, iron based ones tend not to last particularly long and are extremely high maintenance as they produce a vast variety of different byproducts with the extracted carbon. It's quite possible that our actual LS systems use a proper catalyst that lasts for weeks, months or even years without issue, while the synthesis method involves a jury-rigged solution that is good for a few minutes before it gets gunged up.
Must be a metric butt-load of those burning around here.
All good points, but there are still properties of liquid hydrogen that are impossible to reconcile with canisters of "hydrogen fuel" and barely so with ship fuel tanks.
Then again, if we assume every internal module as to be able to hold a volume of liquid hydrogen equal to the mass capacity of the fuel tank or cargo rack that could be slotted, then they really could be just about any shape and almost any piece of actual equipment could fit.
Oh, I think it's very rational to assume that synthesis would use commonly available materials as a temporary substitute catalyst, I'm just not sure how nickel and iron could separate CO2 out of air while leaving O2 or separate O2 from CO2 while being the only consumables of note.
The economy cabins can house half as many passengers as the equivalent size cargo rack can fit canisters. Looking at the graphic in the outfitting screen, economy cabins don't seem to consist of much beyond some person-sized cylinders (acceleration couches? stasis tubes?) and a little access space around them. So that seems to fit.