Gateworld Virtual Fleet 4.0 - Discussion thread

[thekillman]

smaller ships would be more expensive. i think 1km civil supercarriers will eventually be phased in.


most of them would be "skeleton" ships. consider them likes Spines, with a structural back and support "ribs". nose filled with sensor arrays, back filled with reactors (actually i consider a hypercapacitor more likely), an engine array and a big, big and powerful "industrial" hyperdrive. i doubt those speeds would be even NEAR goauld speeds. first and foremost, the Military would not disclose such tech without severe considerations. and secondly, it's about cost effectiveness. i don't think the sheer energy costs and production costs weigh up against the add in speed. anything that needs to be done speedy would probably be done by either Gate or by a special "runner" freighter.


(and it's unlikely our super-freighters would be able to match Jaffa "independent" freight runners) [people with Tel'tak]

[Crazy Tom]

Sure, they would be relatively more expensive, but if you want something dropped off on some planet, say like a bunch of scientists with research equipment, or some piece of industrial equipment, you're not going to redirect a multi-million cubic meter freighter.

The ship above doesn't even have artificial gravity, it's drives are basic plasma with water injection for high Isp maneuvers, and it's hyperdrive and reactor are galactic market standard.

Frankly, there's a niche for these sorts of ships, depending on hyperdrive costs actually, a hyperdrive ferry might work, where you have a big government sanctioned Asgard hyperdrive platform that can carry sublight craft to their destination.

[Princess Awinita]

there's no standard freighter, but i think it would not be much different from modern ones. except there would be even less hull. most likely 90% superstructure filled with containers and the rest is a powersource, hyperdrive, fuel and engines.

*is remined of the Rebel Frighters in Empire Strikes Back*They were practically just that, an engine unit, small cab, a hyperdrive, and a zillion feet of cargo space inside a shell of some sort. No shields.

[thekillman]

Sure, they would be relatively more expensive, but if you want something dropped off on some planet, say like a bunch of scientists with research equipment, or some piece of industrial equipment, you're not going to redirect a multi-million cubic meter freighter.

true. the expenses per kilogram would get higher however.

Frankly, there's a niche for these sorts of ships, depending on hyperdrive costs actually, a hyperdrive ferry might work, where you have a big government sanctioned Asgard hyperdrive platform that can carry sublight craft to their destination.

i think that realistically, if we can call it that, we'd be pushing the cost limits of Stargate stuff. in a reality, or even a semi-reality, the pain of producing an Asgard hyperdrive would be...astronomical.


in fact i thought the Asgard built the stuff FOR us. after all, we knew that they had "regular" visits and at some point only "dropped by to say hello", and they gave us their core with production tech. personally, i thought the core could do that because otherwise we'd be unable to produce more 304's the way we do.

*is remined of the Rebel Frighters in Empire Strikes Back*They were practically just that, an engine unit, small cab, a hyperdrive, and a zillion feet of cargo space inside a shell of some sort. No shields.

the cargo carrier i'm talking about HAS no shell. it might have some cheap low-energy shield to keep the cargo properly in place. probably modified sea containers with micro ion thrusters.


tel'tak and al'kesh would be notoriously inefficient transport methods. however they would be the express couriers of the galaxy, being notably faster. plus they're likely used for LA naquahdah and naquahdriah transport runs

[Crazy Tom]

While the tie might com for it, I think right now Killman it would be less expensive to keep all the cargo, even containers, in a environmentally controlled space. Something near room temperature and pressure so any semi-sensitive cargo won't be damaged. Certainly cheaper than insisting everyone start shipping in sealed containers.

edit: I think we're grossly overestimating the cost of a hyperdrive. The Seberus was privately owned, so on developed words, it mustn't outside the reach of a fairly wealthy individual or successful company.

[Lt. Col. Mcoy]

Note that the Seberus's hyperdrive was also vastly inferior to any others we've seen, though.

[thekillman]

edit: I think we're grossly overestimating the cost of a hyperdrive. The Seberus was privately owned, so on developed words, it mustn't outside the reach of a fairly wealthy individual or successful company.

it depends. Asgard hyperdrives would be far more expensive than a cheap, barely-running goauld knockoff we built. private Hebridan hyperdrives are inferior to the military asgard hyperdrives we have. vastly.

[fugiman]

I guess my question is why is it so expensive to make hyperdrives?

[blackluster]

I guess my question is why is it so expensive to make hyperdrives?

My guess is that there is a high level of precision engineering that is required to manufacture it. Usually in expensive engineering projects that haven't reached the mass production stage, the cost goes into creating parts that have to fit very precise specs like: temperature tolerances, micron accurate dimensions, stress tolerance etc. Often the systems that have to be incorporated to maintain these specs are what can drive the cost up.

For example: there is a project currently underway called the square kilometer array. It is basically a massive radio telescope. Because it sits on the surface of the earth, it has to be super sensitive since the earth's atmosphere attenuates so much of the energy coming from space (telescopes in space don't have this problem). The signals it has to detect are so small, that even temperature induced noise in the Low Noise Amplifier of the telescope can overpower the signals from space. The result is that engineers have had to design something like a cryo-cooling system especially for the low noise amplifier in order to make sure that its temperature doesn't rise above a few Kelvin and ruin the signal from space. That is a very expensive subsystem, but it is needed to keep the component within spec.

Coming back to hyperdrives, I foresee major manufacturing costs for manufacturing custom parts like wave guides to channel out the window generator's output, or special emitters to properly project energy to create the hyperspace window, or some kind of sensitive charge pumping system to build and maintain the correct energy levels inside the drive and possibly even custom conductors and cooling to manage the massive energy flow from the reactor to the drive. This is besides the materials that would need to be synthesized to even make the drive components.

[thekillman]

My guess is that there is a high level of precision engineering that is required to manufacture it. Usually in expensive engineering projects that haven't reached the mass production stage, the cost goes into creating parts that have to fit very precise specs like: temperature tolerances, micron accurate dimensions, stress tolerance etc. Often the systems that have to be incorporated to maintain these specs are what can drive the cost up.

true.

the rule of thumb is this: the more precise, the more expensive. the mirrors in sattelites like Planck are hyper-expensive because the dimension tolerance is only a few microns. that is, a thousandth of a millimeter. those things often have a surface tolerance of a few microns across several meters. the extreme precision requires immensely complex and hyper-calibrated, hyper-sensitive technology.


the more precise the more expensive. it comes in the precision of the production, but also in the precision of the machines used and the precision of calibration.

Coming back to hyperdrives, I foresee major manufacturing costs for manufacturing custom parts like wave guides to channel out the window generator's output, or special emitters to properly project energy to create the hyperspace window, or some kind of sensitive charge pumping system to build and maintain the correct energy levels inside the drive and possibly even custom conductors and cooling to manage the massive energy flow from the reactor to the drive. This is besides the materials that would need to be synthesized to even make the drive components.

yes. Hyperdrives have the dual problem of being precise yet high energy. besides that, the sheer amount of tech that has to be developed just to MAKE a hyperdrive based upon alien materials is massive.

[fugiman]

But at this point wouldn't years of building hyperdrives reduce the price as well as the fact that earth now has it's own colonies along with off world trading partners reduce the cost of alien materials needed to make the hyperdrive?

I'm not saying we can crank them out I just don't think it should limit us to much.

In fact maybe the governments of Earth are still the only ones who build them and then sell them to the highest bidder for private use. That way the Gov's keep the secrets, make money and allow private companies to build just the "shell" of a ship and a few other vital systems then insert hyperdrive and it's good to go.

[thekillman]

I'm not saying we can crank them out I just don't think it should limit us to much.

it depends. simple rules of thumb say, the less powerful the drive, the cheaper it gets.


so goauld-grade (which i'd consider pretty high grade, at least, Anubis-grade) hyperdrives would be expensive, hebridan commercial ones would be much cheaper and less powerful, and Asgard- hyperdrives would be absolute top notch and with a fitting (read: super-expensive) price tag.


i believe we put the asgard hyperdrive on a few billion dollars.


anyway, what companies will use will be, most likely, either hypercapacitor systems, or some kind of fusion core, linked to an appropriate hyperdrive.

[immhotep]

smaller ships would be more expensive. i think 1km civil supercarriers will eventually be phased in.

I think there would be a market for a variety of civilian carriers. Just as there is in freight today. There will be the high level supercarriers as you say, and I think the basic concept of a small basic ship with variable componants with essentially a superstructure tacked on for cargo would be the format. This format could be scaled to any scale. If you start of with a small basic ship with a Alkesh/Promethius level hyperdrive, basic shield, conventional engines and inertial dampening and small crew.
These ships can be sold off to the private sector, who can then "tow" freight on other superstructures based upon thier requirements. If these small pods are mass produced then they can be hooked together to provide a freight train in space, able to tow any amount of material as they just add another pod when the limit is reached. This is for personal to mid level firms. Another type, much much larger might be required for government or large scale mining opperations, where we are transporting massive multimillion tons of ore and just cant justify pod after pod.

[thekillman]

I think there would be a market for a variety of civilian carriers.

oh yes.

These ships can be sold off to the private sector, who can then "tow" freight on other superstructures based upon thier requirements. If these small pods are mass produced then they can be hooked together to provide a freight train in space, able to tow any amount of material as they just add another pod when the limit is reached. This is for personal to mid level firms. Another type, much much larger might be required for government or large scale mining opperations, where we are transporting massive multimillion tons of ore and just cant justify pod after pod.

pod after pod after pod would only work for so long. eventually the sheer amount of computing required to make all pods operate in unison would be too much.


but yea, the smaller ones would be "freight trains" with a "nose" and a back and inbetween a variable amount of cargo pods.

the bigger ones would mainly be superstructures with either thousands of large "sea containers", or carry vast amounts of stuff like Ore, hydrocarbons, fusion-grade hydrogen, etc in a forcefield.

[immhotep]

pod after pod after pod would only work for so long. eventually the sheer amount of computing required to make all pods operate in unison would be too much.

Oh I agree there would be a limit, which is why i put the caveat of small-med firms. But we should look more at the 'train in space' model initially because it is easier to convert many of our existing technologies and infrastructure to suit. I have always been a fan of the gate train idea, and I think that offworld there is certainly a good option for this. Perhaps not from Earth as our politics and multiple uses of the gate would cause too many issues. But if you have say a factory complex offworld, a refinery planet, and a network of mines on worlds with a stargate. Then our production mindset from Earth could be simply exported with the stargate simply reducing the transport times between locations. We could easily have conventional freight trains from Earth taken offworld, tracks lain between all the various componants and simply use the gate as we would a road, or indeed hyperspace as our medium of transport for raw materials.
There are so many advantages of this model over the space based freight that i think it would be adopted. Firstly is just the cost, we dont need to spend fortunes of spaceships. Secondly is security, the gate is SO much safer and we have enough knowledge of the gates to control access, block of addresses, impliment numerous safety modifications to keep only our network of production gates in the network. We could create a tauri gate network for our production planets. Using gates from the oniel database rather than the cartouche its unlikely anyone would know the address's and we could filter contact out. Thirdly we could use our existing trains, tracks, factories, production systems, manufacturing processes that could be shipped offworld initially but once done, then we just convert say all our coal mining factories, refineries, and transport infrastructure to the new mines and upgrade or retrofit to suit the new need. Why build something new when we can recycle it from Earth? The gate also removes a cost, as we dont power the gate, we get free transport for our goods curtosy of the ancients, we can opperate 24/7 (minus a few minutes between the windows) and well we can then export via gate as well.
That is my model of how we will produce things offworld, a network of mining, refinery, construction, distribution, depots, and trade centres (only these are public centres) all connected by gate, with tracks, rather than roads connecting up the gates and facilities around each gate on the respective planets. As long as the carriages of the trains fit through the gate they can be as long as you like (up to 38 minutes long/speed of travel ) and therefore amounts of cargo are infinately scalable. More so than ship based.