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That I think would require a black hole good sir  Mass by the way, is a property of matter, not something tangible you can manipulate. What you propsed could violate physics in more ways than one 

 

Or a Morpher with gravitational compression technology.  B)

 

From the Dev blog https://devblog.dualthegame.com/2015/08/20/dual-universe-part-4/

 

 

I hurry toward a clearing and I make a first attempt at construction. I’m able to form cubes of wood, a triangle, a half-sphere. Enough to make a bench. Not enough to build a shelter for the night. I’ll need to keep going, to find some stone, more wood, for at night, according to the briefing Lia gave me, temperatures sink to -30° C.

I pass through the forest sucking up several trees, and I find a pile of rock that I siphon up also with my morpher. Its gravitational compression capacity is just astonishing. I’ve got the equivalent of four sequoias and six tons of rock in cartridges housed in my belt! The worst part is that I don’t even feel their weight thanks to anti-gravity technology!

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That I think would require a black hole good sir :P Mass by the way, is a property of matter, not something tangible you can manipulate. What you propsed could violate physics in more ways than one :P

 

we transform small amounts of mass to energy and back all the time :P 

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_binding_energy#Mass_defect

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and fission, and chemical burning...

Well, I think fission and chemical burning is a given, but never thought of E=mc^2 in the context of fusion. Now it all makes sense :P What would I do without you Corn, shedding knowledge left and right :P

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That I think would require a black hole good sir :P Mass by the way, is a property of matter, not something tangible you can manipulate. What you propsed could violate physics in more ways than one :P

 

You guys are getting too bogged down in real science here. This is a game. It doesn't have to satisfy real science, otherwise, this game would take place on Earth with current 2016 technologies. The point here is that it's fun and entertaining, not accurate.

 

I know that what I said was physically impossible. Like I said above, if we only go with real science, we get ISS Simulator 2018, and none of the other impossible stuff that the devs have already stated will be in the game.

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I know that what I said was physically impossible. Like I said above, if we only go with real science, we get ISS Simulator 2018, and none of the other impossible stuff that the devs have already stated will be in the game.

Yeah, but we need to keep a semblance of physics tho :P

 

Less we start using the Force to move green midgets around but not to pull moons off oribt :P

 

Although, your concept, according to Cornflake's response, it's essentially a fusion or fission engine. So it is feasible, just more simplified and understood.

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meh, im fine with magic Direct Matter to Energy converters :P

 

id actually like a system thats based on them.

 

basically everything in the game can be used as fuel.

 

feed the material into a "burner" segment of your generator, creating a [technobabble] with a material dependent "spectrum" and total available energy.

then you have to route the [technobabble] then has to be routed through a series of power converters which absorb a part of the spectrum (with varying efficiencies) and convert a part of their absorbed spectrum to usable power and waste the rest as heat.

so the order of absorbers would matter as you'd have to arrange the absorption spectra in a manner that only the converters with the highest efficiency get to absorb the relevant parts of the spectrum.

 

so you could power your devices with anything you find in the world, but its dependent on the material and the reactor if you get much out of it.

 

the total available energy per piece of "stuff" would be highly material dependent with the easiest to aquire materials (rock...) having really low amounts of power per piece (somewhere close to being barely breakeven with the minimally needed energy to mine them and with ideal power conversion).

 

the spectrum of the material would also be dependent on how easy they are to aquire.

rocks would have a relatively annoying to use spectrum to make them hard to use for general purpose energy supply.

"average" materials, which could be the classic fuel resources (hydrogen, uranium, thorium) would have pretty easy to use spectra to provide comfortably to use energy supply for the large masses of players

high energy and power density materials (dunno, dark matter, element zero, [insert favourite scifi energy source material]) would have spectra that are very hard to adapt to and would require pretty large reactors for that but would provide the largest net power output. (for capital ships and other high power applications)

 

 

the whole system can of course be expanded with other parapharnelia, like containment field generators and "plasma" heaters (with total available power being dependent on some highly nonlinear temperature/pressure function), but the basic system is that the player "burns" materials and converts them to energy via some spectrum mechanic.

 

 

(i designed that initially for a completely different game with procedural material and component generation, so there wouldnt be a done setup for each material after a week)

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meh, im fine with magic Direct Matter to Energy converters :P

 

id actually like a system thats based on them.

 

basically everything in the game can be used as fuel.

 

feed the material into a "burner" segment of your generator, creating a [technobabble] with a material dependent "spectrum" and total available energy.

then you have to route the [technobabble] then has to be routed through a series of power converters which absorb a part of the spectrum (with varying efficiencies) and convert a part of their absorbed spectrum to usable power and waste the rest as heat.

so the order of absorbers would matter as you'd have to arrange the absorption spectra in a manner that only the converters with the highest efficiency get to absorb the relevant parts of the spectrum.

 

so you could power your devices with anything you find in the world, but its dependent on the material and the reactor if you get much out of it.

 

the total available energy per piece of "stuff" would be highly material dependent with the easiest to aquire materials (rock...) having really low amounts of power per piece (somewhere close to being barely breakeven with the minimally needed energy to mine them and with ideal power conversion).

 

the spectrum of the material would also be dependent on how easy they are to aquire.

rocks would have a relatively annoying to use spectrum to make them hard to use for general purpose energy supply.

"average" materials, which could be the classic fuel resources (hydrogen, uranium, thorium) would have pretty easy to use spectra to provide comfortably to use energy supply for the large masses of players

high energy and power density materials (dunno, dark matter, element zero, [insert favourite scifi energy source material]) would have spectra that are very hard to adapt to and would require pretty large reactors for that but would provide the largest net power output. (for capital ships and other high power applications)

 

 

the whole system can of course be expanded with other parapharnelia, like containment field generators and "plasma" heaters (with total available power being dependent on some highly nonlinear temperature/pressure function), but the basic system is that the player "burns" materials and converts them to energy via some spectrum mechanic.

 

 

(i designed that initially for a completely different game with procedural material and component generation, so there wouldnt be a done setup for each material after a week)

 

Equivalently we could have a gadget that will convert matter into antimatter on the fly.  I would term the device a mass inverter.  Essentially you hook this device up to your plasma rocket's antimatter injector while supplying regular matter directly to the propellant injector.  The same reactor is used for the conversion and you still get all the benefits of the mass-energy equivalence (plus the magic "black box" component is used as a part of a larger process rather than the entire process) but you don't have to deal with the usual issues with long term storage.  Of course if antimatter is supposed to be something that is very difficult to handle then this might be more than a little bit overpowered; even at conversion efficiencies too low to be effective for a spacecraft to use on the fly it still trumps alternate antimatter production/harvesting methods.

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meh, i'd probably let the lore around antimatter completely out of the game tbh.

too many people complaining that it doesnt behave realistically :P

(cause any antimatter engine would be a nuclear death beam of doom)

 

also, when you have that much power available to create antimatter on the spot with those rates, you are better off just using the energy directly to ionise and accelerate any random material with that power.

why bother creating antimatter, shoot a laser with the same power at a piece of rock for reaction mass

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meh, i'd probably let the lore around antimatter completely out of the game tbh.

too many people complaining that it doesnt behave realistically :P

(cause any antimatter engine would be a nuclear death beam of doom)

 

also, when you have that much power available to create antimatter on the spot with those rates, you are better off just using the energy directly to ionise and accelerate any random material with that power.

why bother creating antimatter, shoot a laser with the same power at a piece of rock for reaction mass

For one thing, having your exhaust beam being a death beam is the fun part.  That's also a consequence of having a very high powered rocket in general; any rocket that can give you ridiculously high performance in space is a short range death ray.  If the devs do decide to model thruster damage then that works out fine.  If they don't model thruster damage then it would be just as implausible whether the most powerful rocket motor in the game is a plasma core antimatter rocket or a Star Trek impulse drive.

 

For another thing, the point about the mass inverter is that it is able to convert matter to antimatter with a much lower energy requirement than the particle accelerator method.  I'm not sure whether it would be balanced but it wouldn't be any more or less plausible than a similarly convenient mass-energy converter.  I prefer the inverter approach because it serves as a magic component within a larger system rather than have a magic component contain the entire system, making it easier to define components.

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regardless of how efficient the AM generator will be, unless its producing more energy in antimatter form than you put in (E=mc²) it will be more efficient to drop the energy directly on some reaction mass.

Instead of going through the hassle of creating antimatter, keeping it from annihilating your generator, funneling it into the thruster and let it annihilatr there.

 

Take a high powered laser, feed it with the power you'd otherwise feed into the AM generation and let it shoot on some rock or water as reaction mass.

 

You skip the two M/AM conversion steps and dont have hard radiation to deal with.

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In addition, AM should only be created from hydrogen, which you would get from mining. You would also get oxygen too. This works great if a survival mechanic is included because then you get precious oxygen in addition to your fuel.

 

 

regardless of how efficient the AM generator will be, unless its producing more energy in antimatter form than you put in (E=mc²) it will be more efficient to drop the energy directly on some reaction mass.
Instead of going through the hassle of creating antimatter, keeping it from annihilating your generator, funneling it into the thruster and let it annihilatr there.

Take a high powered laser, feed it with the power you'd otherwise feed into the AM generation and let it shoot on some rock or water as reaction mass.

You skip the two M/AM conversion steps and dont have hard radiation to deal with.

 

Perhaps we don't actually have that much energy since the mass inverter actually uses a quantum state syncronizer, which will convert your matter at a fraction of the cost!

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Equivalently we could have a gadget that will convert matter into antimatter on the fly.  I would term the device a mass inverter.  Essentially you hook this device up to your plasma rocket's antimatter injector while supplying regular matter directly to the propellant injector.  The same reactor is used for the conversion and you still get all the benefits of the mass-energy equivalence (plus the magic "black box" component is used as a part of a larger process rather than the entire process) but you don't have to deal with the usual issues with long term storage.  Of course if antimatter is supposed to be something that is very difficult to handle then this might be more than a little bit overpowered; even at conversion efficiencies too low to be effective for a spacecraft to use on the fly it still trumps alternate antimatter production/harvesting methods.

Yeah, but it has to be balanced, or else people will be popping Nova Bombs, left right and center. :P And the amount of griefers is already skyrocketing in pirate attacks, do we really want nova scale bombs to be easily accessible? :P

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There can be different sources of energy: solar panels, generators using fuel, RTGs, nuclear reactors, antimatter reactors, darkmatter reactors, or something using energy of vacuum. For sure, there must be a lot of ways to power your ships in space! Hope we will see various energy sources in DUAL.

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There can be different sources of energy: solar panels, generators using fuel, RTGs, nuclear reactors, antimatter reactors, darkmatter reactors, or something using energy of vacuum. For sure, there must be a lot of ways to power your ships in space! Hope we will see various energy sources in DUAL.

The thing is that all those forms of energy you mentioned work for different applications good sir.

 

Solar Panels = planets and space stations, possibly by reducing how fast the Nuclear reactors deplete their fuel.

 

Nuclear Reactors = powering cities, and ships but in a smaller scale.

 

Antimatter reactors = they could work, but more in a way of power bursts, like nitrogen to a car's engine, snce antimatter is most probably going to be antihydrogen, so it could work if you were to imject anti-hydrogen in a fusion reactor to give it a short boost.

 

Dark Matter is quite impossible to do anything with it, unless it can be used to somehow get dark energy that can cause Warp Speed to happen.

 

And if by energy of vaccum you mean something like an EM-Drive (Resonant Cavity Propulsion) then I'm afraid it could be impossible to pull that off, as experiments have been unproductive.

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Antimatter reactors = they could work, but more in a way of power bursts, like nitrogen to a car's engine, snce antimatter is most probably going to be antihydrogen, so it could work if you were to imject anti-hydrogen in a fusion reactor to give it a short boost.

 

I disagree. I dont think that antimatter can be used like that. When antimatter connected with matter they destroy each others and transform in clear energy. Even several grams of antimatter can power ship for months! Antimatter reactors should be realy advanced technology! Antimatter can also be used as extremely powerful weapon. But I dont think that this kind of weapon can be good for balance in DUAL. Because it will be able to destroy anyrything.

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I disagree. I dont think that antimatter can be used like that. When antimatter connected with matter they destroy each others and transform in clear energy. Even several grams of antimatter can power ship for months! Antimatter reactors should be realy advanced technology! Antimatter can also be used as extremely powerful weapon. But I dont think that this kind of weapon can be good for balance in DUAL. Because it will be able to destroy anyrything.

Yes, but anti-matter is like normal matter, it comes into anti-atoms, so, if a fusion engine runs on hydrogen fusion, you can inject anti-hydrogen, which by most accounts is the easier to manufacture, so, injecting it in the fusion process would help a ship keeping up its shields in times f need, or get an extra bosst on its thrusters, like nitrogen oxide to a car's engine. And keeping such anti-matter into a container, would require a a certain way of keeping it from touching such a container from fear of exploding the ship itself, requiring a possible limited time of it flowing into an egine.

 

There is a reason people say a few gramms of anti-matter can get you to space, because once those rockets are on, there's no turning off, the fuel wll be consumed until the shuttle is in orbit. That could be a problem for a starship, as there's no way you could regulate the power surge, burning fuel at 100% all the time with an anti-matter engine, not to mention costs, as producing anti-matter will be expensive as of the dangers involved producing it in the first place.

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 insert stack of quotes here

 

That's not necessarily true.  A plasma-core antimatter rocket functions by injecting small amounts of antimatter fuel into a stream of matter propellant.  Only a small portion of the propellant is annihilated; this reaction heats up the remaining propellant.  If you have a way to store antimatter long-term and you can route it through some sort of pipe relatively safely (likely with lots and lots of electromagnets) then there's no reason you couldn't regulate or shut off the antimatter flow at any time by manipulating those magnets.  A pure antimatter system doesn't have to operate in short bursts.  If you can't store and route antimatter then you probably can't build a working antimatter drive in the first place.

 

You are right about using antimatter in a fusion rocket.  There is one concept generally known as an antiproton-catalyzed fusion rocket where a few antiprotons are used to kick start a fusion reaction.  The name is slightly misleading since a catalyst, by definition, can cause a reaction by its presence but is not consumed in the process, but oh well.  This could make the reactor assembly cheaper than a pure-fusion design since you don't need quite so much compression or startup energy to get the reaction running.  This could be a sort of entry-level use of antimatter, allowing an organization with small scale antimatter production capabilities to build their fusion drives cheaper at the expense of requiring a little bit of antimatter in addition to the fusion fuel.

 

On a more general note there is a lot of wiggle room in these propulsion systems for the sake of ingame balance while still keeping the system itself relatively plausible.  Sure, you can talk about predicted performance values of these things, but all we have to go on without a working model are theoretical upper limits.  Without a working model we can make whatever assumptions we want about the efficiency of a given propulsion system, antimatter storage capabilities, production efficiency, etc. and tune these values with respect to game balance.  If a theoretical max antimatter drive is overpowered then set it to 50% efficient, assume that this is the best efficiency the engineers in DU were able to come up with and check the balance again.

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One thing to remember with solar power is the inverse square law -- the amount of light you get falls very fast with distance. Jupiter is about 1/8th the distance between the sun and pluto and the amount of mid 2000s solar tech needed to power Juno is massive.

 

It could lend itself to an in universe tech level. At launch we are planet bound. After a few months we're in orbit (or the orbit area) and solar power is still the most accessible for most people. This limits exploration/exploitation/colonization to the inner system as most people don't have the tech or infrastructure for powering their ships for the outer system. Eventually the outer system is conquered, and then the stars!

 

Don't forget about heat management too!

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Fusion Reactors

They require the abundant gas of helium to produce immense levels of heat and power. The reactors need some degree of scale to work and are more effective the larger they are. All of this is true with the ITER reactor project currently underway though we are still decades away from harnessing this energy effectively.

 

Antimatter

Has been suggested elsewhere. This could be collected from a planets magnetic field as radiation passes through. Expensive and delicate reactors would mean they only to be used on stationary structures and super carriers.

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