These forums would be so much better if Reddit didn't exist.
Let's talk ship size, cargo capacity and how incredibly silly this is in Elite: Dangerous.
- Thread starter Martin Schou
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I was all ready to post this if it hadn't been mentioned already. Elite 1984 lifted lots of things from Traveller (the Pulse Laser / Beam Laser is straight out of Traveller for a start), and the old 'one ton cargo cannister' was a likely candidate as well - one 'displacement ton' was a unit of volume.
...What this means for ED is anyone's guess though.
Ahh yes, an heroic computation. Your assessment is very delicious for debate however I found a flaw in your calculations!
Upon further review I see u didn't carry the 3 and forgot to add the 2 at end of Handwavium, effectively making it un-squared? Common mistake tho
Upon further review I see u didn't carry the 3 and forgot to add the 2 at end of Handwavium, effectively making it un-squared? Common mistake tho
I was thinking about the problem with power creation. Annoyingly I can't really figure out the theoretical maximum to get out of hydrogen fusion.Hello OP, I for one commend you for your work -- I've always felt that the figures don't quite add up, but I had no idea it's that bad. I.e. that even with the tightest, heaviest / most massive module packing possible, the big ships come out at 1/6 the density of styrofoam.
(Note that it's quite different for small ships; Eagle and Viper for instance are about the size of a Space Shuttle (orbiter), and actually about twice as massive)
A possible meta-explanation might be that the medium and large ships were originally designed somewhat smaller, then upscaled to make them look bigger, without changing the stats.
For added lulz, calculate the density of a Jumpaconda. =D
Nah it would still remain magic. For that tiny, tiny amount of fusion ash created by those power plants (something like 1-3t/h) to create that kind of thrust that can accelerate (in realspace) a ~1000t-ship at the rates we observe, the drives would have to accelerate these particles to extreme velocities. This opens not one but several cans of worms:
1. the kinetic energy of the exhaust can't be greater than the energy put into them, or we'd be looking at a perpetuum mobile machine of the first kind. Disclaimer: I'm a bit rusty with this kind of calculations, but I'll do my best to get the units right and not mix in too many tenfold errors:
Example: ship mass 750 tons
Acceleration - for simplicity's sake - 1G = 10m/s^2
-> required thrust = 750t = 750.000kg = 7.500.000N
Let's say the ship uses 3.6t of fuel per hour (again, KISS), or 1kg/s straight.
In order to get 7.5MN of thrust out of 1kg of propellant, we'd have to speed the propellant up to 7.500km/s (2.5%c). Now this isn't too grotesque for a far-future SF I guess; well within the theoretical capabilities of fusion drives. But!
In order to squeeze out the propellant at this velocity, we need to charge it up with the appropriate amount of energy.
E_kin = 1/2 m * v_e^2;
plugging in, we get 1/2kg * 7.500.000m^2/s^2 = 28 Terajoules per second, or in other words, 28 TERAwatt.
Compare that to the figures given for the power plants and engines in ED... 28MW here, 8MW there... it doesn't just not add up, it doesn't add up by six orders of magnitude! It's like filling a gallon of petrol into your car and expecting to drive 1000 times around the world with that.
2. Now the apologists might say "So maybe the units are borked, so what", but again, it isn't that easy. ED actually does a good job not entirely ignoring the problem of waste heat. Typical power plants emit something on the order of 1MW of heat for 2MW of electricity (in in-game notation this would be called "0.50 efficiency". If only the "units were borked", the PP and thrusters would have to be a million times more powerful and, you get it, generate a million times as much heat.
Now this would be a huge problem for the ship itself. In the above example, those 28TW of drive power would produce something like 14TJ of heat per second, every second. For comparison, that's one Hiroshima bomb every four seconds. Yes you heard that right, imagine that every four seconds there'd be an atomic bomb exploding inside your ship. You see the problem.
3. And even ignoring that, the figures simply don't match up with the rest of the ship's systems anymore. Everything consumes power (and creates heat) on the order of megawatts, and these figures are probably already a bit on the high end comparing them to real life applications, but close enough. (Let's not think too much about the "docking computer" that draws 750.000 Watts, or probably about 1500x as much as your home computer system's peak draw)
It's just not plausible that we can feed a 28TW thruster no problem, but have to squeeze fractions of megawatts out of our other systems to keep everything running.
And worst of all, Jon's Law rears its ugly head: with that kind of thrust power at our disposal, we're being stupid for even carrying weapons, especially when those weapons have only a millionth the power output of our engine. It's like a Challenger 2 main battle tank whose main gun has been replaced with an air rifle. Yes you can plink away at things with the air rifle, but it'll be a lot more efficient if you just roll over the target with your 65 tons of heavy metal.
Or in the case of a spaceship with a multi-terawatt engine, just point the drive plume at your enemy and watch it evaporate in a puff of plasma.
(IIRC that Expanse show demonstrates a few examples of this)
So, long story short: it IS space magic. Somewhere along the way there's a perpetual motion machine that creates 1 MW worth of thrust power for every 1 W of electrical power we put it, but without any of the side effects such a thrust power would bring with it.
The only "solution" I see is that the realspace / sublight engines work by an entirely different (and in itself magical) principle, maybe similar to Star Trek's "Warp" bubbles that reduce the mass of a body in realspace and thereby make it easier to accelerate. This approach would probably also be easiest to bring inline with the ridiculous speed limits imposed on the ships in realspace, or the fact that they bleed velocity even when all thrusters are off.
--
As insult comes to injury, these maths operate in exactly the opposite direction as the OP's complaints about mass, density and carrying capacity. If we/FD tried to make the mass figures for the ships shown more believable by increasing them, that would mean we'd have to increase the thrust values even more. If we increased the carrying capacity to more believable values, that would move the gameplay effects of owning a Sidewinder vs a Cutter way, way further apart than they already are, and that is most likely not desired by the devs.
The most reasonable approach to bring the numbers to more plausible levels would be to ... make the ships smaller. As they were probably designed at some point in the past (before release). However, that again would make space combat much harder, at least if we were still expected to aim fixed weapons manually at suddenly much smaller targets zipping by with what would be +/- Mach 2 here on Earth.
At 3.6 tons/hour that's 630 x 10^12 watt or 630 TW. Quite a bit more than the 36 MW a class 8A can produce (before engineering), and quite a bit more than the 28 TW you calculated as needed for the thrusters. But an 8A thruster with clean engineering only draws 12.53 MW, which is quite far away from your number. This means that even at 10% efficiency we can still extract 63 TW of useful energy.
There are a LOT of issues with these things, and it bleeds into other parts of the game as well.
Why is bauxite, the mineral used to produce aluminium, more expensive than aluminium? And not by a small amount. The cheapest place to buy aluminium sells it for 20 credits/unit. The cheapest place to buy bauxite sells it for 661 credits/unit. When producing aluminium, your end mass is of aluminium 25% of the starting mass of bauxite. The place that buys aluminium off of you for the highest price pays 2,177 credits/unit. That's great - in order to make 2,177 credits from 1 ton of aluminium we need to buy 2,644 credits worth of bauxite. That makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Maybe bauxite has some interesting other materials? No, it's Al2O3.xH2O - it's oxygen and hydrogen.
Why would anyone ever manufacture aluminium at these prices?
And if we look at Odyssey - the cheapest hand weapon costs 50,000 credits. I can buy TWO class 1 turret beam lasers for 52,000 credits. I can buy 1 unit of battle weapons for a maximum price of less than 9,000 credits.
I'm pretty sure I've seen a video talking about a similar incident..... or the stresses involved can have serious structural consequences:
Oh, the HORROR of people using an informative setting to get information that you don't like. How terrible.
Technically calculating the theoretical maximum is easy -- you just calculate the fraction of mass that is converted into energy, then the energy equivalent of that mass, presto.
And in a scientifically hard setting you could simply multiply that fraction with the speed of light, and you get the theoretical maximum exhaust velocity of your drive. ^^
(Not that it matters in any way for ED)
Also, I want to rationalize that the fusion process in question here can't be the p-p-p-p fusion that takes place inside a star. The Lawson criterion of that reaction is so ridiculously high that the idea of replicating that inside a ship's power plant is somply ridiculous.
It also won't be the fusion process we are currently developing here (or have been using in fusion bombs), D-T fusion, because that releases some 80% of the energy in form of neutrons, which are less than useless onboard a spaceship; they are absolutely deadly ionizing radiation that can't be used to propel our ship in any direction.
So if I try to make some sense of the power generation in ED, it might make the most sense to assume that the main reaction is D-3He fusion. Both deuterium and He-3 should be reasonably abundant in the atmospheres of main sequence stars. Especially if we accept the given PP performance ratings as correct. Then you'd basically scoop a ton of gas - mostly regular hydrogen - to filter our the D and 3He on the fly, even it's just a few grams, and feed those into your fusion core. This process has a theoretical maximum yield of 353 TJ/kg - so even if the usable isotopes only make up 0.1% of the scooped gas (1kg per ton), one ton of scooped gas should still be easily enough to feed the absolute worst case of a PP, let's see:
That would be an 8E Overcharged-G5 Monstered, with 35.3MW_e and 44.1MW_th, producing a total yield of 80MJ/s.
353TJ spread out over 1h (3600s) equals 98GJ/s
So we really only need to succeed in fusing 1 gram of the required isotopes per hour - means the actual concentration of them in the star's atmosphere doesn't really matter -- even 1ppm is enough.
Ofc this interpretation would invite a lot of other questions, such as "Why do we have to carry 16 tons of fuel when we really only need 16 grams of it?" -- keep in mind the "we need the rest of the mass as propellant" argument doesn't hold up, bc if our drives were Newtonian reaction engines they'd have to be multi-terawatt drives, as I demonstrated previously.
Yes it's "just a game" -- but I would enjoy it so much more if all these Science-Fictional aspects of it were properly thought out and fitted together instead of just being dumped into a giant pool of Handwavium.
This would work better for sure, high priced but low availabilty items that don't take up much space could be premium tickets to earn credits in a small ship but the bulk carrying power of the larger ships should bring in more profit overall.
I agree with OP, our ships should have enough capacity so that for some items we should be able to buy up all stock to sell elsewhere, to the point where we would be looking at other commodities to fill the extra cargo space and maximize profit.
And replies like this just reinforce my opinion. How about just keep the Reddit on Reddit.
I'm just gonna throw my 2 cents in. Math is not my strong point and I would be lying if I said I really understand the difference between mass and weight; but the carrying capacity of these ships is off. Look at the python. It's roughly the same length and width as the type 7 but it's flat as pancake! How on earth does it hold more cargo? I mean just look at the two side by side. Even a quick glace at the two of them together and you can see the type 7 should easily cary 2 or 3 times the cargo of the python but it doesn't.
To me the silliest thing about cargo is that it magically is attached to your back and travels with you whatever you do.
Why can't I switch from fully loaded T-9 to Diamonback with no cargo?
Why does the cargo not stay put in T-9? Why does some invisible team of station workers insist to move all my cargo when I leave one ship and board another?
Why can't I switch from fully loaded T-9 to Diamonback with no cargo?
Why does the cargo not stay put in T-9? Why does some invisible team of station workers insist to move all my cargo when I leave one ship and board another?
Is there really any space simulation game out there more realistic with as much gameplay as Elite dangerous? I would genuinely like to know.
it’s funny reading a post that raises the same questions as mine used to back during the initial alpha phase when the game features was still being finalized. Not re the carriers, but re the Anaconda and other ships.
The anaconda’s hull mass is only twice the Hindenburg’s.
of course I got shot down by the FDEV simps who said “BuT You’Re CoMpaRing a FicTioNaL sPacE gaMe to rEal Life…”
So I just pointed out that an Anaconda is 1.7 Vulture masses and showed an amusing graphic of a vukture sitting on an anaconda’s turret.
as a physicist, I find this game is intensely frustrating at times. Trying to use physics some of the time and having certain sim-like elements makes the magic, hand-wavy bits stick out all the more.
80T for an A grade power plant generates 36MW but a 1T power plant can make 9MW. Why not just use 4 small power plants? (Figures pulled from my own rear, but the point stands)
5 minutes of life support equipment can weigh a hundred tonnes.
flying 1Ls from a 700K brown dwarf barely bigger than Jupiter overheats you as much as flying through the corona of a blue-white class O hypergiant.
practically fly THROUGH a black hole and not experience gravity.
take off fully loaded from a 6G world but only have a ship capable of 0.1G of vertical acceleration… when unencumbered.
the list goes on and on.
I’ve just decided to try and ignore it and engage suspension of belief.
Too bad my belief’s hands get tired from time to time and slip off the beam sending me into a nerd-frenzy.
Things like Kerbal Space Program or Orbiter have much more realistic handling of propulsion, gravity, fuel, energy, etc.
(Still incredibly simplified, of course)
I've had a lot of fun with KSP - but I never think "you know what Elite needs? realistic fuel consumption and rocket equations"
Comparing the input and output of a Power Distributor is even sillier
Why use Power Plants at all - why not just chain Power Distributors together with a little crank handle to start the first one off.Worse, flying past a brown dwarf that's cooler than you are still overheats your ship, while hanging around on the surface of a 1000K planet doesn't.
How about "no"? I am not a fan of gatekeeping and elitism, and your post reeks of both.
It took a long time for FDev to point out why it can't, and it's because it's too tall for the medium pad hangar. It's an INSANE oversight by the Lakon engineers who designed it, and hopefully they were quickly fired for the oversight.
The Type-7 is 25.40 meters tall and the Python is only 18.00 meters tall, and the medium hanger ceiling is lower than that.
Comparing the input and output of a Power Distributor is even sillier
I think there is a bit of sense to that - the PD has a capacitor that can exceed the standard power drain of the power distributor. E.g. an unengineered PD uses 0.89 MW but stores 61/41/41 MJ for systems, weapons and engines that can be dumped in 10 seconds (maximum drain of 6.1/4.1/4.1 MW on the capacitors). But then it gets weird with how those systems are powered. I'm sure someone, somewhere has drawn up a diagram to explain how it works.
The maximum drain on the power distributor is fine - boosting will dump energy way faster than you've quoted there, for example.
It's how quickly it recharges after it's drained that breaks conservation of energy.
Likewise the energy output of a laser weapon is considerably greater than its combined draw from the Plant and Distributor.
(And lets not go too deeply into how limpet synthesis breaks conservation of mass, or at least conservation of pockets)
Just pointless intellectual peacocking then. What's the point of this thread anyway? You acknowledged it will never change, and would disrupt too much if it did. FD are not going to redo ship balance because of some "well ackshully".
Basically. Ships are not empty chassis that just wait to be filled up with cargo. There are major differences in functional and non-functional space consuming parts.
Let's take a look at the federal ship family for example. The assault ship is very chonky, large and could potentionally fit lots of cargo in it. However, it being a combat oriented ship, a lot of space is used for weapons, engines, bulkheads, powerplant and so on. Trade ships usually don't have large weapons or the biggest engines, thus offering more internal space for cargo racks.
Then we also need to consider that previous mentioned modules are not simply modular "place them somewhere here" kinda parts. Each of them need to be wired up to the distributor, powerplant and the backend technology will probably use up some space as well.
Having a large multicannon mounted means it probably takes some wires, ammo containers and maintaince hatches, which can not be used for cargo capacity.
And then we also need to consider that ships need space for access, speaking of hallways, sleep cabins, coffee machines and a toilet would also be benificial for them explorers among us.
And last but not least: perhaps the internal ship design wasn't optimal and thus, wasting space in the internal geometry, possibly because some hallway blocks a small section at the side of the ship which now is unreachable for functional parts and thus gets used for decorational purposes.
If you've ever played space engineers, you know what I'm talking about.
Do you guys know this channel?
Have a look at Krait MK III.
This tells you very plastic how things might be. It even fits the visible ship doors at the rear and so on. Now, convert this to a T9 and there you have it.
Go on and ask him to make Conda and T9.
Source: https://youtu.be/lxmwEjBKlEY
Have a look at Krait MK III.
This tells you very plastic how things might be. It even fits the visible ship doors at the rear and so on. Now, convert this to a T9 and there you have it.
Go on and ask him to make Conda and T9.
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Yes - whining about reddit and pretending that you're too intellectually superior to any peons who would stoop to using it certainly does sound like peacocking.