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Torchships - Atomic Rockets

🕑 Added 2015-02-13 23:27:45 +0000 UTC

Comments

Nyrath

Ouch! That would be hot! But it is good that FTL:2448 did things right. I remember in 1982 when I got my first edition of FTL:2448, I was very impressed that it had a reasonably accurate 3D star map. There were only about four games that had that.

John

I remember when we were working on a revamping of FTL:2448, coming to the realization that multiple drive cones on ships is not viable. (At least with the pusher design) We worked out that our torch drives would get hot enough to melt the other drive cones, and that to prevent that, you'd have to put in tungsten shields between the fusion points and then actively cool the the shields as they were getting heated from two sides at once. Of course we forgot about the X-Rays, so that a flat tungsten shield wouldn't work very well. So the only solution, besides using a tractor/puller design, is to put them far enough apart that the heat and radiation is only a quarter of the intensity. That made long narrow ships, very wide at the drive section. And since each drive had to have a separate drive shield, a lot more heavier. Just imagine how much heat there is at the rear end of Darth Vader's Executor...