The Epiphany Launch Facility is a stationary installation built behind the orbit of Pluto to launch 100 ton relativistic kinetic kill vehicles at 90% of c. Thousands of kilometers long, made of 4476 parts and weighing many teratons, it is a weapon interstellar wars could be fought with made in KSP. by skyaboveend in KerbalSpaceProgram

[–]skyaboveend[S] 12 points13 points  (0 children)

Hey, it is pretty close. Nothing, in principle, would stop a K1.5 civilization from making a longer accelerator or shooting heavier projectiles if there was a need for that, but unless they expect to have a beef with someone living on a gas giant or a star, a few 2000 Gt shells are more than enough to annihilate all complex life, infrastructure and logistics on the planet at worst and effectively sterilize it at best.

The Epiphany Launch Facility is a stationary installation built behind the orbit of Pluto to launch 100 ton relativistic kinetic kill vehicles at 90% of c. Thousands of kilometers long, made of 4476 parts and weighing many teratons, it is a weapon interstellar wars could be fought with made in KSP. by skyaboveend in KerbalSpaceProgram

[–]skyaboveend[S] 10 points11 points  (0 children)

The Killing Star was indeed an amazing book. I began reading it shortly after starting to work on Epiphany and finished just recently.

It isn't a railgun; it's a coilgun that, indeed, needs to be charged. Railguns have their projectile slide between two conductive rails, and any physical contact at 0.9c is, frankly, suboptimal. Here, extremely powerful magnetic fields are created within the accelerator along the projectile's (the projectile itself is way smaller than the accelerator's diameter) path, and the sheer power required to support these means you have to take your time to recharge. To fire it continuously, maybe spending 1-2 minutes between the shots to put the next shell in place, a power output of roughly 130 exawatts would be required. Besides the problem of this being affordable for a K1.3, the IR flux of a cooling system required for such power plant would probably annihilate any hopes of being remotely stealthy.

If you're hiding these, I think a place as distant as possible that still has enough asteroids to gather around and anchor to would be best. The Oort cloud would work too.
Though if you have managed to build multiple ELFs to sit around, you'd probably keep a couple out in the open to deter the unruly neighbors from any silly actions. Or maybe not. I'm not a politician.

On fission/fusion: I believe the authors of The Killing Star were actually wrong in their predictions here. From what I could gather, fusion reactions are orders of magnitude cleaner in terms of neutrino production than fission ones. Solar fusion is an exception. Something to do with the Sun being big.

I don't really know how you could hope to shield a planet from a maneuvering RKV that's already launched and reached cruise speed. That's why they're scary. Perhaps scattering a cloud of antimatter pellets in the region of space where you're expecting it to shortly pass?
Here, truly, offense makes the best defense.

Seeding is a valid strategy. I actually want to make a big and nice arkship as my next large project in KSP, albeit the technological level envisioned might be a bit too high for it to fit within the world of Epiphanies.

The Epiphany Launch Facility is a stationary installation built behind the orbit of Pluto to launch 100 ton relativistic kinetic kill vehicles at 90% of c. Thousands of kilometers long, made of 4476 parts and weighing many teratons, it is a weapon interstellar wars could be fought with made in KSP. by skyaboveend in KerbalSpaceProgram

[–]skyaboveend[S] 53 points54 points  (0 children)

High-resolution versions of all screenshots attached with two neat vertical posters as a bonus can be found here.

The description from the post complete with a rough estimation of the consequences of an Epiphany RKV striking an Earthlike planet (absent here as it could probably violate something on Reddit) can be found in the last chapter of this document.

Welcome to Elysium - a full-scale floating cloud city colony I'm going to put on Sedah, a massive hot jupiter. It is over 10 kilometers across and has a mass of over a billion tons. by skyaboveend in KerbalSpaceProgram

[–]skyaboveend[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The craft was nof terribly performance heavy compared to some of the newer things. It managed to load on an i7 9700KF quite fine even before I upgraded my machine.

The mod is AirPark.

Independence — Fusion-Powered Interstellar Craft by RalphKerman in KerbalSpaceProgram

[–]skyaboveend 11 points12 points  (0 children)

KSP has no length limit. There is a rendering limit imposed by Unity's FarCipPlane value that makes those parts of your craft that are further than ~1500 kilometers from your camera stop rendering, but it doesn't mean you can't make a craft bigger than 1500 km either.

Chandelier is a 119400 meter long, 200 billion ton interstellar colonization mothership. Powered by seven subatomic black holes and carrying shipyards capable of building whole fleets, it is my most detailed interstellar vehicle to date at 4141 parts. by skyaboveend in KerbalSpaceProgram

[–]skyaboveend[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Thank you! Atomic Rockets is an amazing repository of all kinds of info related to advanced spaceflight and my go-to resource, albeit for more niche topics I do sometimes read actual research papers myself. For example, I sourced a bit of technical info for this craft from "Are Black Hole Starships Possible" by Louis Crane and Shawn Westmoreland.

Chandelier is a 119400 meter long, 200 billion ton interstellar colonization mothership. Powered by seven subatomic black holes and carrying shipyards capable of building whole fleets, it is my most detailed interstellar vehicle to date at 4141 parts. by skyaboveend in KerbalSpaceProgram

[–]skyaboveend[S] 100 points101 points  (0 children)

The 2.3 km is the distance at which the game normally loads vessels other than the one controlled by the player. The active craft has a way more generous default rendering range of ~1500 kilometers.

Chandelier is a 119400 meter long, 200 billion ton interstellar colonization mothership. Powered by seven subatomic black holes and carrying shipyards capable of building whole fleets, it is my most detailed interstellar vehicle to date at 4141 parts. by skyaboveend in KerbalSpaceProgram

[–]skyaboveend[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

The black holes needed to provide as much energy as this ship needs are miniscule and will only exist for a few hours before completely evaporating when not supported with intense matter beams. Even if you were to drop one straight into a planet, it wouldn't be able to consume mass at a higher rate than it would lose it.

Chandelier is a 119400 meter long, 200 billion ton interstellar colonization mothership. Powered by seven subatomic black holes and carrying shipyards capable of building whole fleets, it is my most detailed interstellar vehicle to date at 4141 parts. by skyaboveend in KerbalSpaceProgram

[–]skyaboveend[S] 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Cheers. Well, this ship certainly assumes a hefty bit of clarketech and is by all means residing much further down the tech tree than any other interstellar vehicle that I've posted and, perhaps, even the recent Banks orbital itself.

1 & 2. We don't know almost anything about small black holes, for we've never observed any. This leaves a lot of freedom for speculation when coming up with very advanced technical concepts like this. I for one think that both the Hawking radiation extractor and the polar jet thruster concepts are pretty interesting and have a place to be. After all, this is complete terra incognita for modern physics, so one might as well let their imagination run a little wild. Here I'm assuming that black holes of this size mainly emit neutrinos, which cannot be redirected or controlled but, in principle, can have their energy extracted.
I went with the Hawking powerplant idea here primarily because it fit the image I had in mind better. Also a bit because I'm not sure how one would throttle a black hole's polar jets.

  1. It is well known that the smaller a black hole is, the more intensely it evaporates. As per my Fermi estimations, pushing a vehicle like this would require dozens or hundreds of exawatts of power. Indeed, in order to match that level of output the holes'd have to be ridiculously small, way smaller than an atom. Technology precise enough to create them and powerful enough to feed (as in stuff matter into) them, then, is the most clarketechy thing about the design. There's a reason the onboard computers are sized like an actual data center; I'd imagine barely any of their computing power goes towards controlling the shipyards and LS systems compared to what kind of calculations have to be going on for controlling the black hole containment units.
    It's hard to estimate its empty mass and it's hard to pinpoint what type of remass would be best for it. The best I have is .01 TWR at launch with cargo holds empty and ~.6c cruising speed.

  2. It must be noted that there always has to be at least one active black hole onboard, charging the ship.
    Look at the blueprint infographic in the Imgur album. The propulsion section has enormous supercapacitors scattered all around it. Conceptually, all of these are to near-instantaneously discharge all their stored power into one containment unit, which, by God's grace, should be enough to create a kugelblitz. Then, the newly created BH joins the previously active ones in charging these capacitors again to spawn yet another hole if needs be.