Another advantage of the fully external engine is that when shit hits the fan, you can blow some explosive bolts and detach the engine pod and have the problem be not attached to your ship anymore.
@@LexYeen This is why you have more than one pair of such engines. And the ability to dial back your thrust in case you have to balance your ship on an uneven number of unevenly placed engines.
This reminds me of a scenario that has been on my mind in the setting for a sci-fi RPG I have been working on. Ships can have a variety of engine types. But the most common are reaction thrust rockets and ion engines. I imagined the difference being... "Prep for go! _Lines fully pressurized!_ *Starter ignited and hot!* Everybody, starting fuel flow...BRACE-BRACE-BRACE!" There is a sigh of relief as the crew hears a whooph of safe ignition, followed by a skull-cracking pressure as the ship charges forward. Pressing everybody down with it's enormous thrust. After a few minutes of agonizing tension, the engines kick out and all G's stop. Leaving our crew hurtling into the void at alarming speed. "Prep for go. _Ok captain._ " The crewman flips the light switch, kicking on the engines. Then goes back to lunch. Leaving our crew, not even moving yet. Since it will take hours before the ship noticeably goes anywhere."
When I was finishing my undergrad years, a friend and I were in a competition to design a mission to Jupiter circa 2010-2020. We soon realized that the Hohmann transfer orbit equations were designed for chemical burns, where (as is illustrated above) the deltaV thrust is all generated at the start, but we were using an argon ion engine powered by nuclear reactors. We therefore had my friend's desktop (the flower of 1988 computing technology) run overnight to calculate the actual orbital start, turnover and stop dates.
Great video. I think one thing you misser was the orientation of thr engines themselves. In hard sci-fi you don't onlybuave to speed up, you have to slow down. If you only have 1 set of internal engines, only way you can do this is by flipping end over end to face your engines into the direction you're travelling to brake with thrust. You can avoid this by having separate engines facing forwards or having external engines that can rotate to vector that thrust where it is needed. Delta V is always your best friend and worst enemy when designing a starship.
The problem with that is that, unless you have inertial dampeners and artificial gravity, you flip your gravity direction half way through transit. The advantage of flipping the SHIP is that you can burn at 1G accelerating halfway there, then flip in 0 G over the course of an hour or less (depending on ship size), then burn at the same 1G in the same orientation, but decelerating for the second half of the trip. Obviously for things like fighter craft this is less impactful.
That's a really interesting way of categorising different types of rockets, the state of the matter that is ejected. Normally I'm used to seeing it categorised by the origin of the energy that drives the ship, in which case it would be something like: chemical, nuclear, solar (electric or thermal), antimatter, black holes if you're feeling spicy, etc. But that way does tend to confuse a lot of people that are new to the subject because they are given the impression that they're all somehow distinct, not to mention all the different hybrids of nuclear-thermal and nuclear-electric that blur the lines. And technically a half-open fusion reaction *is* an ion drive. huh.
Points for the SE reference (though I think your h2 builds are very different from mine if they last you that long), points lost for forgetting nuclear-propulsion (Fusion-Torch Rockets for hysterically dangerous engine exhaust, and Orion-Drives for something even worse)...
The Orion Drive: When it absolutely, positively has to get into orbit, especially when you are opposing the conquest of your planet (see Footfall and King David's Spaceship) and there's no time to waste.
Since nuclear denotations engines have never been tested due to 1963 Test ban treaty really not worth mentioning since we not sure if the proposed vehicle will survive.
In a world I run as a TTRPG I used engine pods due to an issue I had in the system. I wanted to make the rules I had work for a scout-size ship but I also needed that ship to be faster than larger ships with more powerful and many more engines. Instead of giving the ship drive engines of its own, I gave it 2 hardpoint clamps. I then built the 2 unmanned ships that were nothing but a control computer, armor, weapon hardpoints, ram scoops, a docking clamp, and drive engines. The main ship provides power and primary reaction mass while the engine pods give thrust. I could have hand-waved the rules but I already had other ships made with those rules and I wanted consistency.
Hard Sci-fi tech tends to be much more interesting to me for the very virtue of having to work with and around the laws of physics. It allows for more wacky and creative ideas than you would expect.
For large distances, you could look at something like a Bussard Ramjet that picks up intersteller gases as a propellant and then ejects it after. This becomes both the shield and the engine.
There are video on Isaac Arthur(or Artur, can't precisely remember) where are he count and describe a shitloads of hard sci-fi propulsion methods and how it work on paper.
Star Trek ships are very notorious for not having their sub-light engine oriented along the center of mass. Look at the Original Enterprise, the impulse engine is placed only on the rear of the saucer and they are tiny relative to the overall size of the vessel. Other ships have their engines located very close to their halls which should heat up and melt due to the heat from the engine's exhaust.
I hope we will eventually see nuclear salt water rocket engine, it's the most mental and feasible way to obtain substantial fraction of C in the most me(n)tal way possible
4:51 For whoever wondered where that is from: that is a ship from the Nintendo DS Game Infinite Space. Go play it, if you can get your hands on it. It's great
22:46 How do big radiators work in space? There is no atmoshphere to utilize for convection, so the coolant remains hot after it was heated by the engines. You'd need to expell the coolant once it was heated (if using water then prolly after it became steam) so what you need more is vents, not surface area.
Wrong. The more surface area you have for a radiator the more thermal energy it can radiate out into space in any given time. If your ship as 500sq meters surface area for a radiator while mine has 1,000sq meters surface area for a radiator I'll dissipate more thermal energy than you in an hour than you. But I'll have to produce enough waste heat to keep my coolant hot enough that it can come back before it freezes in the pipes. Unless of course I can reduce the distance, the coolant has to travel, effectively using a bypass and cut-off valve. But I don't know if that idea would work in the real world. This is from wikipedia. Radiators Excess waste heat created on the spacecraft is rejected to space by the use of radiators. Radiators come in several different forms, such as spacecraft structural panels, flat-plate radiators mounted to the side of the spacecraft, and panels deployed after the spacecraft is on orbit. Whatever the configuration, all radiators reject heat by infrared (IR) radiation from their surfaces.
@@Dr._Deaths Read further my dude, space radiators are different than atmospheric (which was shown in the video), as they don't do convection, but instead radiate SMALL AMOUNTS of heat away via emitting infrared light. They are incredibly shit at their job and the only reason they are used because of the otherwise low heat generation of satellites, probes, and the ISS. Radiating the heat away from an active engine working with 48 MW (enough to push a relative small 1000 tonne craft with 1 G acceleration) with current technology would need at least 137.4k m^2 surface area, which is more than 5 times the surface area of the largest supercarrier's flight deck. With 1 cm thick steel panels that shit would weigh 10.96k tons, ten times the engine can handle. Even if we handwave shit and declare that future tech is 100 times better (quite bullshit imo), the radiator surface area would still be more than a thousand square meter, and it would take up 11% of the entire ship's weight.
@@kovi567 A key point you missed is the effectiveness of a radiator varies massively with temperature. How much IR light a square meter of material radiates increases with the forth power of temperature (Stefan-Boltzmann law). Increase temperature 10 fold, you increase the light emitted 10,000 fold. Plugging the values you quoted (48 MW and 137,400 meters squared) into a radiator power calculator shows that the reason you got such an absurdly large area is because the radiator you based those figures on was working at the miserably low temperature of 7 degrees C. Steel radiators can easily get much hotter than that. At 1000 degrees C, still well below steels melting temperature, we are over 4.5 times hotter than before (1273.2 Kelvin vs 280 Kelvin) and so are radiating 426.6 times more effectively. At 1000 C you can shed 48 megawatts with just 322.2 square meters of surface area and a few dozen tons of mass. Increase the temp even higher with graphite or molten droplet radiators and the power density of radiators can get quite extreme.
@@kovi567 The reason the radiators on the ISS and satellites radiate so little is because they are dealing with low temperature heat from human bodies and science equipment, and radiators have to be cooler than the thing they are cooling. But if your cooling thousand degree fission or fusion engines the radiator can be much hotter and more effective.
@@kovi567 They still weigh quite a bit, the huge radiators needed to shed the megawatts, gigawatts, or even terawatts of waste heat a fusion torch would put out is part of the reason why multi gee fusion ships like the expanse are not very realistic. Near term fusion rockets design are lucky to get a hundredth of a gee. But compared to the amount of mass you would need if you relied on expelling coolant instead it’s not even close. Dumping coolant is never a long term solution, because if you're dealing with megawatts of power even high heat capacity materials like water would require dumping overboard multiple tons of coolant per *minute* . You might do that for brief moments to handle sudden spikes in power during a fight, but for regular operations for day or weeks on end you *need* a closed coolant loop, and radiators are the only way of providing that in space.
The bigger an engine is the more energetic an engine is. So maybe smaller engines are easier to keep from self-destructing. You missed plasma engines which are sort of in between and move plasma instead of individual particles in an ion engine style setup to get more thrust at the cost of reaction-mass/run-time. Existing designs like VASIMR let you tune that thrust-efficiency tradeoff. Also there was the old idea of thermal-rockets powered by some sort of nuclear reactor. I haven't seen that idea floated in a while and I kinda wonder if it means that ion and plasma engines are just that much more efficient.
You forgot one form of propulsion and its name is Anti-matter matter engines/thrusters. But that's significantly more advanced and isn't used that often, so understandable for you to forget about it.
Queue everyone saying having rockets on the side of the ship unarmored is stupid and needs to be in the center as they can snap off and not realize why it was set to be as such for the reasons they are needed to be there.
Their another advantage of having a tractor configuration if your cargo/crew is hanging very far away from you rocket. If the reactor that generator power(not the exhaust its self) is highly radioactive then you can by design get as nice and far away from it as possible.Rather then having the massive support structure need to keep a crew capsule 1km away from you mini supernova reactor your dangling on a 1km long cable with all the cargo eating up spare rads in front of you. And should you hit a partial of dust then you have bother the reactor engine and cargo in front of your crew to act as a shield(assuming that like our world the pay out for dead workers is much more then filing insurance claims on cargo and equipment).
Tractor configuration isn't as stable as you make it out to be. Due to harmonics in the cables, you create standing wave patterns that can add up and make the whole craft wobble. So you need tuneable mass dampers to combat that. Because normal Space craft are far more rigid, you don't have that harmonics problem nearly as much.
Don't forget the nuclear engines for near future Sci Fi - riding on a uncontained, often continuous, nuclear explosion is fun! Or more tame: use a nuclear light bulb to get you moving :)
That is why ships explode in a blinding flash when you destroy them. Basicly you puncture the built in anti matter tanks and cause a massive matter- anti matter explosion.
@@southcoastinventors6583 antimatter production is one of those things that scales up pretty fast once you have absurd amounts of power but yeah it takes currently a lot of energy.
No mention of the very distant external fission engines of the Discovery from _2001_ ? Ah, well. Also, some mention of the Kzinti Lesson from the Known Space stories ("A reaction engine's effectiveness as a weapon is directly proportional to its efficiency as a drive") might have fit in here.
Here's that video I showed. Check it out from Plasma channel, a demonstrably better creator than me. th-cam.com/video/nrEBoPYS4ns/w-d-xo.html&ab_channel=PlasmaChannel
Small thing that I noticed for the chemical engines: The reason most real life rockets needed shit tons of fuel was mostly for just escaping Earth's atmosphere. Most of the Saturn V was just to get into orbit, once it was there it used the left over fuel in the S-IVB to push it to the moon. Once you get into space you its just easier to push things around
And IIRC, Trek ships are shaped the way they are for space magic warp drive efficiency reasons. Not that warp drive efficiency seem to have any effect on the show since everything moves at the Speed of Plot and the only ship to ever deal with fuel issues is Voyager who was stuck 70 years away from the nearest Star Fleet approved gas station.
the point about "space magic engines" honestly is something that would be (obviously) pointless to talk about from realism or "hardness". it should ideally have a defined enough set of capabilities, restrictions and the logistics of operating it, and that would perfectly make whatever science behind it irrelevant as long we know what it does and does not do. and dismissing them as just "le space magic" would be a boring answer
What about the Gunstar? From "The Last Starfighter" movie! That design is awesome for engine placement! Heck that ship could have it's own short video! (Cause there is surprisingly little about it that I can find...)
Nutron, IRL rocket Labs upcoming medium lift rocket uses tension for the upper stage attachment to lower it's mass since composites are much much stronger in tension.
Could you, or have you, covered the topic of the need or lack of need for fighter planes in space? I know in Galactica fighters were heavily used as Galactica was a carrier and the FTL mechanics necessitated it, then you have the Expanse where fighters would be useless. Star Trek sorta kinda has fighters but they're rarely used in supplanted by shuttlecraft; but when the ship is in a battle you never see them deploy shuttlecraft as a fighter-like escort. Would be an interesting topic to cover.
Don't forget the Champions Fuel source, Degenerate neutron matter, cleaner than antimatter and easier to use than fusion. Stop by the Quantum Engineering showroom to see if a Neutronium reactor is right for you!
Well for sci-fi like Star Trek impulse engines are forward only( unless designed otherwise there are a few). Ships in Star Trek maneuver mainly with thrusters. 21:41 did you mistaken the warp nacelles for thrust engines? Star trek mainly loves integrated or semi integrated engines. The warp drive systems are mainly detached ftl drive placement.
Another advantage of the fully external engine is that when shit hits the fan, you can blow some explosive bolts and detach the engine pod and have the problem be not attached to your ship anymore.
This becomes a problem when said engine is the only way to get back to your point of origin, and makes for an excellent tool in dramatic writing.
@@LexYeen This is why you have more than one pair of such engines. And the ability to dial back your thrust in case you have to balance your ship on an uneven number of unevenly placed engines.
Wasn't a problem for Spike
It would probably make maintenance/replacement of them easier too.
Naturally, your problem then becomes 'not having an engine', but this is addressable, unlike being atomized.
This reminds me of a scenario that has been on my mind in the setting for a sci-fi RPG I have been working on. Ships can have a variety of engine types. But the most common are reaction thrust rockets and ion engines. I imagined the difference being...
"Prep for go! _Lines fully pressurized!_ *Starter ignited and hot!* Everybody, starting fuel flow...BRACE-BRACE-BRACE!" There is a sigh of relief as the crew hears a whooph of safe ignition, followed by a skull-cracking pressure as the ship charges forward. Pressing everybody down with it's enormous thrust. After a few minutes of agonizing tension, the engines kick out and all G's stop. Leaving our crew hurtling into the void at alarming speed.
"Prep for go. _Ok captain._ " The crewman flips the light switch, kicking on the engines. Then goes back to lunch. Leaving our crew, not even moving yet. Since it will take hours before the ship noticeably goes anywhere."
When I was finishing my undergrad years, a friend and I were in a competition to design a mission to Jupiter circa 2010-2020. We soon realized that the Hohmann transfer orbit equations were designed for chemical burns, where (as is illustrated above) the deltaV thrust is all generated at the start, but we were using an argon ion engine powered by nuclear reactors. We therefore had my friend's desktop (the flower of 1988 computing technology) run overnight to calculate the actual orbital start, turnover and stop dates.
@@stuartwald2395 That's so cool!
"Your in-universe explaination of what you think looks cool" is a banger line
Tractor Engines are like TP Hanging off the Rear End while racing out of the Lue .
Great video. I think one thing you misser was the orientation of thr engines themselves. In hard sci-fi you don't onlybuave to speed up, you have to slow down. If you only have 1 set of internal engines, only way you can do this is by flipping end over end to face your engines into the direction you're travelling to brake with thrust. You can avoid this by having separate engines facing forwards or having external engines that can rotate to vector that thrust where it is needed. Delta V is always your best friend and worst enemy when designing a starship.
The problem with that is that, unless you have inertial dampeners and artificial gravity, you flip your gravity direction half way through transit. The advantage of flipping the SHIP is that you can burn at 1G accelerating halfway there, then flip in 0 G over the course of an hour or less (depending on ship size), then burn at the same 1G in the same orientation, but decelerating for the second half of the trip.
Obviously for things like fighter craft this is less impactful.
That's a really interesting way of categorising different types of rockets, the state of the matter that is ejected. Normally I'm used to seeing it categorised by the origin of the energy that drives the ship, in which case it would be something like: chemical, nuclear, solar (electric or thermal), antimatter, black holes if you're feeling spicy, etc.
But that way does tend to confuse a lot of people that are new to the subject because they are given the impression that they're all somehow distinct, not to mention all the different hybrids of nuclear-thermal and nuclear-electric that blur the lines.
And technically a half-open fusion reaction *is* an ion drive. huh.
Video suggestion: types of sci fi power sources.
Points for the SE reference (though I think your h2 builds are very different from mine if they last you that long), points lost for forgetting nuclear-propulsion (Fusion-Torch Rockets for hysterically dangerous engine exhaust, and Orion-Drives for something even worse)...
The Orion Drive: When it absolutely, positively has to get into orbit, especially when you are opposing the conquest of your planet (see Footfall and King David's Spaceship) and there's no time to waste.
Since nuclear denotations engines have never been tested due to 1963 Test ban treaty really not worth mentioning since we not sure if the proposed vehicle will survive.
These are sci-fi drive-systems, actual successful real life full scale proof of concept testing is not required @@southcoastinventors6583
Ah space engineers, where the slow zone from the expanse is just a game mechanic.
It's awesome that this came around right as I was puzzling through my own sci-fi universe and how their space engines worked.
Thank you for the vid on Engines.. It helped me see a new perspective on some things.. very informative and enjoyable!
In a world I run as a TTRPG I used engine pods due to an issue I had in the system. I wanted to make the rules I had work for a scout-size ship but I also needed that ship to be faster than larger ships with more powerful and many more engines. Instead of giving the ship drive engines of its own, I gave it 2 hardpoint clamps. I then built the 2 unmanned ships that were nothing but a control computer, armor, weapon hardpoints, ram scoops, a docking clamp, and drive engines. The main ship provides power and primary reaction mass while the engine pods give thrust. I could have hand-waved the rules but I already had other ships made with those rules and I wanted consistency.
I'm really enjoying this channel. Thanks for putting it together. Helps that you seem happier about the content.
Hard Sci-fi tech tends to be much more interesting to me for the very virtue of having to work with and around the laws of physics. It allows for more wacky and creative ideas than you would expect.
You FORGOT a type of thristers; nuclear pulse propulsion. Literal actual nuclear explosions propelling your ship, i think its great.
For large distances, you could look at something like a Bussard Ramjet that picks up intersteller gases as a propellant and then ejects it after. This becomes both the shield and the engine.
There are video on Isaac Arthur(or Artur, can't precisely remember) where are he count and describe a shitloads of hard sci-fi propulsion methods and how it work on paper.
The isv Venture star from Avatar for is a Great Example for a Tracktor Engine Driven spacecraft
need more Tractor position ships in scifi
Star Trek ships are very notorious for not having their sub-light engine oriented along the center of mass.
Look at the Original Enterprise, the impulse engine is placed only on the rear of the saucer and they are tiny relative to the overall size of the vessel. Other ships have their engines located very close to their halls which should heat up and melt due to the heat from the engine's exhaust.
I hope we will eventually see nuclear salt water rocket engine, it's the most mental and feasible way to obtain substantial fraction of C in the most me(n)tal way possible
4:51
For whoever wondered where that is from: that is a ship from the Nintendo DS Game Infinite Space. Go play it, if you can get your hands on it. It's great
Talk about nuclear rocket too
What happened to Steve? Been missing the last few vids.
Why didn't you mention other hard sci-fi propulsion concepts like light sails or the Orion drive?
Huh the beeping wasn't there at the start like normal.
And yes I am fully aware this will trigger some OCD now. (Cackles in OCD)
How many hydrogen tanks are you putting on your SE ships? A small Corvette I made has one 3x3x3 fuel tank, and thats it.
So are we considering matter/antimatter engines to be "chemical"?
What about impulse engines? Magnetically driven and contained plasma engines that are omnidirectional
22:46 How do big radiators work in space?
There is no atmoshphere to utilize for convection, so the coolant remains hot after it was heated by the engines. You'd need to expell the coolant once it was heated (if using water then prolly after it became steam) so what you need more is vents, not surface area.
Wrong. The more surface area you have for a radiator the more thermal energy it can radiate out into space in any given time.
If your ship as 500sq meters surface area for a radiator while mine has 1,000sq meters surface area for a radiator I'll dissipate more thermal energy than you in an hour than you. But I'll have to produce enough waste heat to keep my coolant hot enough that it can come back before it freezes in the pipes. Unless of course I can reduce the distance, the coolant has to travel, effectively using a bypass and cut-off valve. But I don't know if that idea would work in the real world.
This is from wikipedia.
Radiators
Excess waste heat created on the spacecraft is rejected to space by the use of radiators. Radiators come in several different forms, such as spacecraft structural panels, flat-plate radiators mounted to the side of the spacecraft, and panels deployed after the spacecraft is on orbit. Whatever the configuration, all radiators reject heat by infrared (IR) radiation from their surfaces.
@@Dr._Deaths Read further my dude, space radiators are different than atmospheric (which was shown in the video), as they don't do convection, but instead radiate SMALL AMOUNTS of heat away via emitting infrared light.
They are incredibly shit at their job and the only reason they are used because of the otherwise low heat generation of satellites, probes, and the ISS.
Radiating the heat away from an active engine working with 48 MW (enough to push a relative small 1000 tonne craft with 1 G acceleration) with current technology would need at least 137.4k m^2 surface area, which is more than 5 times the surface area of the largest supercarrier's flight deck.
With 1 cm thick steel panels that shit would weigh 10.96k tons, ten times the engine can handle.
Even if we handwave shit and declare that future tech is 100 times better (quite bullshit imo), the radiator surface area would still be more than a thousand square meter, and it would take up 11% of the entire ship's weight.
@@kovi567 A key point you missed is the effectiveness of a radiator varies massively with temperature. How much IR light a square meter of material radiates increases with the forth power of temperature (Stefan-Boltzmann law). Increase temperature 10 fold, you increase the light emitted 10,000 fold. Plugging the values you quoted (48 MW and 137,400 meters squared) into a radiator power calculator shows that the reason you got such an absurdly large area is because the radiator you based those figures on was working at the miserably low temperature of 7 degrees C. Steel radiators can easily get much hotter than that. At 1000 degrees C, still well below steels melting temperature, we are over 4.5 times hotter than before (1273.2 Kelvin vs 280 Kelvin) and so are radiating 426.6 times more effectively. At 1000 C you can shed 48 megawatts with just 322.2 square meters of surface area and a few dozen tons of mass. Increase the temp even higher with graphite or molten droplet radiators and the power density of radiators can get quite extreme.
@@kovi567 The reason the radiators on the ISS and satellites radiate so little is because they are dealing with low temperature heat from human bodies and science equipment, and radiators have to be cooler than the thing they are cooling. But if your cooling thousand degree fission or fusion engines the radiator can be much hotter and more effective.
@@kovi567 They still weigh quite a bit, the huge radiators needed to shed the megawatts, gigawatts, or even terawatts of waste heat a fusion torch would put out is part of the reason why multi gee fusion ships like the expanse are not very realistic. Near term fusion rockets design are lucky to get a hundredth of a gee. But compared to the amount of mass you would need if you relied on expelling coolant instead it’s not even close. Dumping coolant is never a long term solution, because if you're dealing with megawatts of power even high heat capacity materials like water would require dumping overboard multiple tons of coolant per *minute* . You might do that for brief moments to handle sudden spikes in power during a fight, but for regular operations for day or weeks on end you *need* a closed coolant loop, and radiators are the only way of providing that in space.
The bigger an engine is the more energetic an engine is. So maybe smaller engines are easier to keep from self-destructing.
You missed plasma engines which are sort of in between and move plasma instead of individual particles in an ion engine style setup to get more thrust at the cost of reaction-mass/run-time. Existing designs like VASIMR let you tune that thrust-efficiency tradeoff.
Also there was the old idea of thermal-rockets powered by some sort of nuclear reactor. I haven't seen that idea floated in a while and I kinda wonder if it means that ion and plasma engines are just that much more efficient.
Or it was just forgotten. Which unfortunately does happen alot.
You forgot one form of propulsion and its name is Anti-matter matter engines/thrusters. But that's significantly more advanced and isn't used that often, so understandable for you to forget about it.
Queue everyone saying having rockets on the side of the ship unarmored is stupid and needs to be in the center as they can snap off and not realize why it was set to be as such for the reasons they are needed to be there.
Their another advantage of having a tractor configuration if your cargo/crew is hanging very far away from you rocket. If the reactor that generator power(not the exhaust its self) is highly radioactive then you can by design get as nice and far away from it as possible.Rather then having the massive support structure need to keep a crew capsule 1km away from you mini supernova reactor your dangling on a 1km long cable with all the cargo eating up spare rads in front of you. And should you hit a partial of dust then you have bother the reactor engine and cargo in front of your crew to act as a shield(assuming that like our world the pay out for dead workers is much more then filing insurance claims on cargo and equipment).
The fastest engine I have read in books is the Xeelee drive system, 10k lightyears per second
Tractor configuration isn't as stable as you make it out to be. Due to harmonics in the cables, you create standing wave patterns that can add up and make the whole craft wobble. So you need tuneable mass dampers to combat that.
Because normal Space craft are far more rigid, you don't have that harmonics problem nearly as much.
Would have loved to hear you talking about nuclear thermal rockets
Don't forget the nuclear engines for near future Sci Fi - riding on a uncontained, often continuous, nuclear explosion is fun! Or more tame: use a nuclear light bulb to get you moving :)
Starsector has the best fuel, Anti-matter in roughly man sized WW2 bomb shaped red gas tanks that are hint hint really easy to drop from orbit.
Anti-matter is still science fantasy since there is currently no way to manufacture in sufficient scale let alone proper confinement. Space magic
That is why ships explode in a blinding flash when you destroy them. Basicly you puncture the built in anti matter tanks and cause a massive matter- anti matter explosion.
@@southcoastinventors6583 antimatter production is one of those things that scales up pretty fast once you have absurd amounts of power but yeah it takes currently a lot of energy.
The Nacelles in startrek are the warp engines, but not the slower movement. The red sections on the back of the hulls are the impulse drive!
No mention of the very distant external fission engines of the Discovery from _2001_ ? Ah, well.
Also, some mention of the Kzinti Lesson from the Known Space stories ("A reaction engine's effectiveness as a weapon is directly proportional to its efficiency as a drive") might have fit in here.
Here's that video I showed. Check it out from Plasma channel, a demonstrably better creator than me.
th-cam.com/video/nrEBoPYS4ns/w-d-xo.html&ab_channel=PlasmaChannel
10,000 words about 1 thing? damn
Small thing that I noticed for the chemical engines:
The reason most real life rockets needed shit tons of fuel was mostly for just escaping Earth's atmosphere. Most of the Saturn V was just to get into orbit, once it was there it used the left over fuel in the S-IVB to push it to the moon. Once you get into space you its just easier to push things around
And IIRC, Trek ships are shaped the way they are for space magic warp drive efficiency reasons. Not that warp drive efficiency seem to have any effect on the show since everything moves at the Speed of Plot and the only ship to ever deal with fuel issues is Voyager who was stuck 70 years away from the nearest Star Fleet approved gas station.
Ye if I'm remembering correctly about 90% of the fuel in a rocket is used in getting through the thickest part of the atmosphere
the point about "space magic engines" honestly is something that would be (obviously) pointless to talk about from realism or "hardness". it should ideally have a defined enough set of capabilities, restrictions and the logistics of operating it, and that would perfectly make whatever science behind it irrelevant as long we know what it does and does not do. and dismissing them as just "le space magic" would be a boring answer
I mean, radiators are cool
What about the Gunstar? From "The Last Starfighter" movie! That design is awesome for engine placement! Heck that ship could have it's own short video! (Cause there is surprisingly little about it that I can find...)
Nutron, IRL rocket Labs upcoming medium lift rocket uses tension for the upper stage attachment to lower it's mass since composites are much much stronger in tension.
tractor engines = pendulum effect. never will work around a large gravity well. deep space, mmmaaayyybbbbeeee
Another casualty of TH-cam shenanigans. They unchecked the bell for me? This has happened with several channels over the last 6 years or so.
Hope in the future they look at the placement of weapons
Could you, or have you, covered the topic of the need or lack of need for fighter planes in space? I know in Galactica fighters were heavily used as Galactica was a carrier and the FTL mechanics necessitated it, then you have the Expanse where fighters would be useless. Star Trek sorta kinda has fighters but they're rarely used in supplanted by shuttlecraft; but when the ship is in a battle you never see them deploy shuttlecraft as a fighter-like escort. Would be an interesting topic to cover.
Current IRL Tech:
Chem rockets give the most FORCE / Energy drives give the most EFFICIENCY
Don't forget the Champions Fuel source,
Degenerate neutron matter, cleaner than antimatter and easier to use than fusion.
Stop by the Quantum Engineering showroom to see if a Neutronium reactor is right for you!
15:31 Bold claim. I accept the challenge.
Well for sci-fi like Star Trek impulse engines are forward only( unless designed otherwise there are a few). Ships in Star Trek maneuver mainly with thrusters. 21:41 did you mistaken the warp nacelles for thrust engines? Star trek mainly loves integrated or semi integrated engines. The warp drive systems are mainly detached ftl drive placement.
13:10 Space Engineer Hydrogen engines are electrothermal thrusters, like the VASIMIR.