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[Morwen Lagann]

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[Esna Pitoojee]

SOE:
> Builds a ship capable of repeated FTL flight and mounting multiple high-energy laser turrets.
> Presumably powered by their a hydrogen fusion or antimatter annihilation reactor.
> "Covered solar panels"

[Katrina Oniseki]

SOE:
> Builds a ship capable of repeated FTL flight and mounting multiple high-energy laser turrets.
> Presumably powered by their a hydrogen fusion or antimatter annihilation reactor.
> "Covered solar panels"

Solar panels make a lot of sense for situations where you cannot or don't want to use the extremely powerful reactors. If the ship happens to lose power or 'go dark' during a rescue mission, they can still power the medical bays (which is where those solar panels are located) using solar panels.

The medical bays may also be capable of emergency jettison from the ship itself, acting as huge lifeboats that carry the wounded and surviving crew away from the main ship. In such cases the solar panels would be an essential source of renewable power to continue operating medical equipment, gravity, and life support.

TL;DR

It's backup power for the medical bays.

[Makoto Priano]

You know what I'm suddenly seeing?

Corellian Corvette.

It's sort of awesome-- though I wish the ZG ring was actually a ring, instead of two half-circles broken up by random futziness.

[kalaratiri]

You know what I'm suddenly seeing?

Corellian Corvette.

It's sort of awesome-- though I wish the ZG ring was actually a ring, instead of two half-circles broken up by random futziness.

It's not a complete ring? Are we looking at the same picture?

[Katrina Oniseki]

You know what I'm suddenly seeing?

Corellian Corvette.

It's sort of awesome-- though I wish the ZG ring was actually a ring, instead of two half-circles broken up by random futziness.

It's not a complete ring? Are we looking at the same picture?

I think she means a proper circle, rather than two semicircles joined by straight planes.

[kalaratiri]

Ah, I getcha

[Makoto Priano]

Yes. What Kat said with the words and the things.

And now, MOAR COFFEE.

[Esna Pitoojee]

SOE:
> Builds a ship capable of repeated FTL flight and mounting multiple high-energy laser turrets.
> Presumably powered by their a hydrogen fusion or antimatter annihilation reactor.
> "Covered solar panels"

Solar panels make a lot of sense for situations where you cannot or don't want to use the extremely powerful reactors. If the ship happens to lose power or 'go dark' during a rescue mission, they can still power the medical bays (which is where those solar panels are located) using solar panels.

The medical bays may also be capable of emergency jettison from the ship itself, acting as huge lifeboats that carry the wounded and surviving crew away from the main ship. In such cases the solar panels would be an essential source of renewable power to continue operating medical equipment, gravity, and life support.

TL;DR

It's backup power for the medical bays.

NERD ANALAYSIS TIME!

The turrets depicted appear to be Dual Heavy Beam Lasers, which have a 17m long main axis.

An offhand comparison suggests to me that the 'solar panels' could not be (generously) more than 10m long and 30m wide, for a total area of 300m² on each panel, across 8 panels = 2400m², or around 25833 square feet.

This website suggests that solar panels, on average, produce 8-10 watts per s.f.; going generous, our square footage will provide around 258 kW of energy. Now let's be generous again, and say that through NANITES! the sisters have managed to make solar panels 300% more efficient, giving a total yield of 775 kW.

According to this research, a large modern hospital (900 beds, 1600 occupants/hr) will require on average around 2.4 mW of electricity; this includes food preparation, staff areas, and building AC as well as medical equipment. Considering that the Nestor is a battleship, it will also have major electrical loads such as artificial gravity, air and water recycling, and large-scale internal supply cold storage.

tl;dr - even being incredibly generous with power production and assuming all other shipboard systems are going to be put into cold shutdown, those solar panels aren't going to produce nearly enough energy to power medical bays of any significant size.

[/massive nerdiness]

ohgod why do I do these things

[DeadRow]

dood, its the future.

[orange]

NERD ANALAYSIS TIME!

The turrets depicted appear to be Dual Heavy Beam Lasers, which have a 17m long main axis.

An offhand comparison suggests to me that the 'solar panels' could not be (generously) more than 10m long and 30m wide, for a total area of 300m² on each panel, across 8 panels = 2400m², or around 25833 square feet.

This website suggests that solar panels, on average, produce 8-10 watts per s.f.; going generous, our square footage will provide around 258 kW of energy. Now let's be generous again, and say that through NANITES! the sisters have managed to make solar panels 300% more efficient, giving a total yield of 775 kW.

According to this research, a large modern hospital (900 beds, 1600 occupants/hr) will require on average around 2.4 mW of electricity; this includes food preparation, staff areas, and building AC as well as medical equipment. Considering that the Nestor is a battleship, it will also have major electrical loads such as artificial gravity, air and water recycling, and large-scale internal supply cold storage.

tl;dr - even being incredibly generous with power production and assuming all other shipboard systems are going to be put into cold shutdown, those solar panels aren't going to produce nearly enough energy to power medical bays of any significant size.

[/massive nerdiness]

ohgod why do I do these things

Additional nerd analysis.

Your solar energy calculator likely assumes commercially available solar panels available from some where like Home Depot.  These are marketed as producing 390-Watts.  They have an area of ~1.625 m2.  This gives them ~240 W/m2.

The solar constant at 1 AU from a G2V class star (ie the Sun) is ~1362 W/m2.  With the atmosphere and using the Standard Testing Conditionswe will assume 1000 W/m2.

This tells us that the Home Depot panel, ignoring atmospheric absorption, has an efficiency of 17.6%-24%.

So, the 300% increase gets us to ~53-72% efficiency.  The lower bound is very near the current state of the art cell efficiency - 44.4%.

Accepting your 2400 m2 approximation of the solar panel area and assuming a single layer of cells*, 80% solar cell efficiency (less than 2x the current SOA), at 1 AU from a G2V class star (~1362 W/m2), incidence angle is 0 (as in straight on and optimal), we get...

2,615,040 W or 2.6 MW

*This assumption is crucial as there is currently research ongoing utilizing layered solar cells with will absorb more light at a wider spectrum.

There are however important assumptions I made, like the distance from the star, the type of star, and the panel incidence angle to the star light.  Solar power suffers from the inverse-square law, which means even in the Sol system it is useful out to Mars and the inner Main Asteroid Belt.  A red dwarf for example has at the top end only 10% the luminosity of Sol and therefore Solar power is effectively useless.  Lastly incidence angle changes how much solar energy is collected, this however could potentially be resolved with nanites.

Thus outside of specific star systems and ranges, there may simply not be enough solar flux (W/m2 of light) to provide the power.

My education & job revolves around spacecraft engineering.

[Morwen Lagann]

I'll fix the link above, since dropbox is shit and CCP was too lazy to, I dunno, use their own fucking CDN or something like imgur.

Also, I dunno if anyone else noticed, but it actually says "Drone Bay (retrofitted med bay)". I don't think a bunch of combat drones and sick/injured patients really make good cohabitants.

You also forgot something else in your math regarding solar panels, Esna: by that point, it's not unreasonable that advancements in energy usage would also have been made. Odds are you'd be looking at not only more efficient solar panels, but far more efficient devices that use the power coming from them.

[Katrina Oniseki]

NERD CLARIFICATION TIME

I'm shocked orange hasn't already pointed this out.

Esna, do your calculations take into account the probably folded up and covered state of the solar panels? The image clearly mentions that they are covered at the moment by a protective shroud. How do you know how big they are when fully extended and deployed ala modern solar panels on the ISS, Mir, and Skylab? Those panels in real life weren't fully extended on launch.

The shroud blister is clearly thick enough to contain some serious panel folding inside it, and that's not even including the possibility that there would be even more layers folded and tucked deeper into the hull behind the blister. For all you know they could extend hundreds of meters out with both sides providing power and rotating to face the nearest light source. Then you can also imagine they are far more efficient than today's solar panels.

[Korsavius]

ADDITIONAL NERD COMMENTARY TIME

...oh wait, I don't know what more to say. :c


Oh, I know! So if the ring is zero-gravity technology, that would imply that either it is reserved for emergency purposes to provide gravity for the entire ship, OR that the forward capsule thingy that looks like it can detach really can detach. And (being that this capsule thingy is likely not where the ship's main power core is) this ring can provide gravity for this section of the ship so other power generators can focus on things like life support, shield, engines(?), etc.

Nerd commentary aside (and those weird ship bonuses aside), I can see quite a few good RP-related purposes of owning this ship. Even if it is not ideally geared towards full-on PvP. I like the aesthetics of the ship myself, although I see no reason for Kor to own one IC. He is not a spacenun after all, or a wormhole pioneer. Now the Stratios...he might be interested in owning one of those as it can make use of technology that serves to his benefit in using. :-)

[Katrina Oniseki]

Kor, it's not zero-gravity technology. Zero-G is a Caldari corporation that designed the Sisters' new external warp rings.