Oolite Engine Function Question.

[DaddyHoggy]

lovely explanation.

DH [reading and replying on his Wii. not fun, but doable!]

[Captain Hesperus]

Alternative technobabble:

The Witchspace drive is the only engine fitted in the ship. By accelerating quirium particles in a closed circular particle accelerator – a torus – it manipulates the fabric of spacetime, drawing it in at one end and pushing it out at the other. The faster the quirium spins, the faster the ship goes. No quirium is consumed in the process. Properly maintained, a closed quirium torus could propel a ship indefinitely.

When local spacetime is sufficiently flat, i.e. not distorted by a large mass or by the actions of another nearby Witchdrive, it can propel the ship at around lightspeed. If local spacetime is too distorted, the torus system can only operate at a fraction of capacity: 0.2C, 0.35C, etc. In these distorted conditions, spinning the qurium at "torus drive" speeds would cause it to rapidly break down, bringing the whole engine to a crashing halt in milliseconds. The "Witchdrive fuel injector" system gets round this, by constantly topping up the quirium in the torus from an external tank.

Of course, the ship doesn't actually move at all: it remains stationary, while space itself is hauled in at one end and rammed out at the other. Because of this there is no inertia, hence the non-Newtonian flight characteristics. When the ship appears to "turn", it's actually revolving the entire universe around itself. Because the torus is fitted in the horizontal plane of the ship, it's easy to move the ship (or rather it's easy for the ship to move the universe) up and down vertically, but almost impossible to move it horizontally. However the ship can be spun around its longitudinal axis (or rather, the universe can be spun around ... you get the idea) by rotating the drive assembly. Some progress has been made towards "yawing" by building a smaller torus set at 90° to the main loop, and spinning it either clockwise or anticlockwise. The internal strain on the ship, and on the drive train itself, though, is massive, and personally I think this is just a passing fad with no real advantage.

The "exhaust" is caused by spacetime emerging from the Witchdrive: as this spacetime wake merges back into the normal flow, the particles and antiparticles constantly being produced from the quantum foam are briefly travelling faster than light, and hence give off the distinctive blue-purple glow of Cherenkov radiation. The faster spacetime is moving as it emerges from the engine, the more intense the glow. The conical shape is a three-dimensional section of the four-dimensional wake.

A large enough mass of quirium, spun sufficiently fast, can distort spacetime to such an extent that it can tear open a wormhole. Again, the faster the quirium spins, the longer the wormhole. Accelerated to 99.9999...% of C (constantly topped up from an external tank, as the accelerated quirium breaks down), the wormhole can reach a full 7 light-years. If it was possible to spin the quirium faster than light, then theoretically the wormhole could be even longer – but it's not possible.

sorry, you lost me at Alternative, something, something..... Oh look! Shiny thing!!!

Captain Hesperus

[JameSpal]

Thanks for the replies.

I've been playing around with a 3D model of a CMK1, I wanted to see if the way I was making the engines look was at all appropriate.

It's a work in progress - long way to go.

[Captain Hesperus]

And the eyes go: pop! pop!!

Captain Hesperus

[JensAyton]

The eyes on the cat go pop, pop, pop.
Pop, pop, pop,
Pop, pop, pop.

[Captain Hesperus]

Captain Hesperus

[DaddyHoggy]

Fantastic!

So many people (rightly) worry about the exteriors that it's nice to see somebody thinking about the interiors. Just one question - where does all the cargo go?

[DaddyHoggy]

@JameSpal - when you're happy with this fab work - it would make a stonkingly good article for the Wiki along with much of the technobabble explanations that this thread has created.

Look forward to the finished article.

[Griff]

cor! Amazing stuff!

[Disembodied]

JameSpal – sweet! I see from your plans that I made an elementary error: the (gold-coloured) Witchdrive torus is of course fitted vertically, not horizontally. Foolish of me.

[Commander McLane]

JameSpal – sweet! I see from your plans that I made an elementary error: the (gold-coloured) Witchdrive torus is of course fitted vertically, not horizontally. Foolish of me.

Which makes it a little difficult to explain, though, why pitch is easy, but yaw so difficult. The movement the tori have to make seems just the same in both cases.

[JameSpal]

JameSpal – sweet! I see from your plans that I made an elementary error: the (gold-coloured) Witchdrive torus is of course fitted vertically, not horizontally. Foolish of me.

Actually, I made those before you posted the torus drive explanation. Those were intended to be manifolds for the witchspace fuel injectors. The rest of the in-system engines are supposed to be more like Ion engines - pulling the ionic Quirium vapors from the storage tanks and using electric fields to excelerate the vapor particles up to speed to push the ship along.

Here is a view up the exhaust ports. The black nipples sticking into ports are the other end of the gold tori.



I suppose an alternate theory for how these engines operate could be just as valid, I'm just not good with the technobabble part of it.

I kinda don't like the way that the oval exhaust with the round elements inside look like eyes - and not especially snakey eyes either. Those might become round once all the other details in the back are worked out.

The cargo is a problem. At full size, 10 ton canisters would not fit inside the hull no matter how you wedged them in there. Well you might get them all in, but there would be no space left for anything else.

Stacked neatly between the engines, 1/2 scale canisters will fit in between the engines. I will make some sort of rack for them all to fit on that will lift them out through doors on the top of the hull - as seen on the Cobbie MK1 pictured on the Wiki page.

The big heat sinks on either side of the cockpit are for cooling the equipment inside the fuelscoops that converts the suns coronal gasses to fuel. I envisioned the gases being sucked by some sort of field into those ports on either side of the fuel scoop and converted and passed through the bulkheads into the fuel tanks. The cargo, because it is more massive than the gas and has more inertia will continue straight through the fuel scoop, unaffected by the field, through the rectangular port and into the cargo bay - between the engines.

The heat shielding that is required to safely sunskim for fuel will actually be a piece that goes inside the scoop, below the cabin. It doesn't shield the entire ship, just the cabin. This is why furry stowaways inside the cargo bay don't get on so well when you sunskim.

The fuel scoop sides are hinged and the sides slide in such a way that the entire unit closes up flush with the bottom of the hull when not in use.

I'll definitely figure out a way to present it once it's done - if it turns out wiki worthy. I was thinking something writen along the lines of those glossy brochures that car dealers hand out with information on new models and big cutaway shots. Nothing too in depth on how everything works exactly, just a lot of sales pitch

The powerful dual 16 chamber drive engines deliver smooth, reliable, efficient power. The dual injection system - an industry first - gives you the extra dose of oomph when you need it most.

That kind of stuff.

[Disembodied]

JameSpal – sweet! I see from your plans that I made an elementary error: the (gold-coloured) Witchdrive torus is of course fitted vertically, not horizontally. Foolish of me.

Which makes it a little difficult to explain, though, why pitch is easy, but yaw so difficult. The movement the tori have to make seems just the same in both cases.

Aha. Right enough. OK, I was right the first time – the thing is fitted horizontally – and the big gold doughnuts aren't the torus part of the torus jumpdrive.

Actually, I made those before you posted the torus drive explanation. Those were intended to be manifolds for the witchspace fuel injectors. The rest of the in-system engines are supposed to be more like Ion engines - pulling the ionic Quirium vapors from the storage tanks and using electric fields to excelerate the vapor particles up to speed to push the ship along.

Fair enough! The only problem I have, from a technobabble point of view, with the ion drive theory is that it's still a reaction engine. If we've got ion drives that produce big flaming jets out the back, why don't we see big flaming jets out the front when we decelerate? We don't have to flip the ship around as per Frontier, and there are no retro rockets ... on the observable evidence it has to be something completely non-Newtonian.

[JameSpal]

I've also wondered how the ship slows down or steers without retro engines.

Perhaps the horizontal tori are actually inside those tanks that are outward from the engines and the engines as they appear so far are just exhaust housings that provide some sort of post-processing for the radiation given off during the Quirium reaction inside the main tori. Perhaps this radiation processing is what provides the power for recharging the energy units.

I'm not really happy with the tanks as they are anyway. They're really just place holders at this point. They could just be housings to contain the radiation from the Quirium with smaller containment tanks and the drive tori inside.

I also need space to put the energy units, shield generators, and other hardware, so the fuel storage tanks are going to need some modification anyway.

[Cmdr Wyvern]

I'll have to disagree with the jar o' grey matter on the usefulness of yaw.

I find it very useful; most of my combat maneuvers involve a puke-inducing yaw/pitch/roll combo that pirates find difficult if not impossible to keep a bead on. And tail and side lasers would be a royal PITA to aim without it.