Well-Known Member
Intent: To sub a miniaturized reactor for future submissions and role-playing.
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PRODUCTION INFORMATION
Manufacturer: Visanj T’shkali / Vrotoa Industries
Affiliation: Closed-Market
Model: Heartsblood Reactor
Modularity: None
Production: Mass-Production
Material(s): Doonium, Dolovite, Reactor Components, Segroth Shocksteel Casing, radiation coating.
SPECIAL FEATURES:
- Simple design features stabilized core and ‘plug-and-play’ design, making routine maintenance and repair easy and quick.
- Uses Isotope-5, allowing greater fuel efficiency and drastically lowering fuel storage space needed.
- Miniaturized design lowers necessary allotted space aboard, allowing for 86.95% reduction in footprint.
- Radiation-sealed casing protects against accidental contamination from within and EMP/Ion disruption from without.
- Easy maintenance design allows for parts to be quickly found or fabricated and for routine upkeep to be fast and simple.
- Stabilized core is resistant against outside damage and accidents.
- Power flow distribution increases efficiency and allows redistribution of power on demand, shifting from one set of systems to another and back again easily and quickly.
- Miniaturized design is one-tenth the size of standard ship reactors, and uses excessively low fuel requirements, but is proportionately equal in output and far superior in longevity to hypermatter annihilator reactor cores found on large capital ships.
- Its ‘plug-and-play’ design allows it to be placed aboard most any ship configuration or design both quickly and easily.
- Single fuel type only (i.e. Isotope-5) means that alternative fuels are not compatible with this design.
- Significant damage to the casing may result in radiation leak(s) that if not properly and promptly responded to can cause serious risk to the ship and crew.
- Due to its simplified design and easy workability, it is incredible vulnerable to an onboard saboteur to easily disable or tamper with this system.
- Despite its incredible output and exceptional longevity, this reactor still has limitations and placing a variant too powerful aboard a ship may overload systems catastrophically. (Example: A Heartsblood designed to power a 3000m ship but placed aboard a 1500m ship will likely rapidly overload that ship’s systems creating shipwide malfunctions and problems unless that ship is using enough high-demand systems to require such a powerful reactor). This mistake has caused many an enthusiastic boffin to install a larger-than-needed reactor onboard a ship, thinking it would mean ‘surplus power’ only to discover that she’s burned out and overloaded 80-90% of the ship’s systems. Extreme calculation of need versus supply is required when considering the variant size to install aboard a ship.
For centuries, the galaxy has seen many innovations in starship design. As much as any, the issues of power production, fuel storage, space availability, and power management have been hotly debated, and always the struggle to provide enough power to advanced systems and massive starships was balanced against space available and questions of repair-ability and fuel needs. For most, this meant sacrificing space onboard to fuel supplies and complex power plants large enough to adequately supply ships and their systems or else scaling back on those to allow for smaller, less powerful reactors that were easier to maintain and cheaper to operate. At Vrotoa Industries, enough was quite enough, and the idea of a compromise would not be tolerated further.
Years before, Zenva Vrotoa had created a brilliant step forward in power supply management: The Clan Heart Reactor. Eliminating moving parts and simplifying design enabled this device to be quickly and easily maintained by crew members while under way, without requiring specialized technicians and dedicated service facilities. Further, its innovative design eschewed the common large reactor chamber in favor of several smaller ones, akin to the humanoid heart, each working independently but in unison with the rest to provide efficient power distribution throughout the entire ship, eliminating issues of unused power to one system and insufficient power to another. By using hyper-efficient power couplings and relays, power loop capacitors, and other components designed to maximize efficiency, the Clan Heart Reactor was in most every way a superior design to most others found on the market.
With this in mind, Visanj T’shkali thought to expand on this model. By using Isotope-5 she reckoned the fuel consumption rate and storage requirements could be drastically lowered, extending the lifespan of a fully fueled ship by decades, perhaps even centuries, and using only a tenth (or less) of the previously required fuel storage space onboard. Going forward still, T’shkali realized that a miniaturized reactor could be constructed, using this fuel source, and operating on the design principles of the simple but efficient Clan Heart design. Work began immediately, and the end result was the Heartsblood Reactor.
The new reactor was just under 15% the size of comparable reactor systems, freeing up almost 85% of space previously lost to larger reactor systems. Coupled with the minimized fuel needs brought about by using Isotope-5, this meant starship designers could allocate this space to other systems or facilities aboard their ships, or, by placing two aboard, could still save almost 70% space and provide sufficient energy to power vastly larger systems, such as more powerful shields, weapons, or propulsion systems. In essence then, a 3000m ship, for example, could conceivably have the firepower available to it normally found in a ship twice its size! This would revolutionize starship design, and the entire project became one of the most closely and jealously guarded secrets within Vrotoa Industries!
The Heartsblood Reactor was easy to maintain and repair, offering significantly improved efficiency and output to power management, making it an ideal choice for ships with numerous advanced systems aboard, the kinds of which often placed hefty burdens on more conventional reactors. Still, certain vulnerabilities and cautionary realities emerged. For example, due to the simple design, a saboteur aboard with basic skills could easily disable the reactor, causing it to overload and result in cascading failures throughout the ship. Or, an over-zealous technician might surmise that while a Heartsblood rated for a 3000m ship would create ‘surplus power’ for a standard 1500m ship, in fact, it would almost instantly overpower those systems and result in similar catastrophic ends. A Heartsblood rated for a ship size needed to be restricted to that ship size, unless and only if the smaller ship boasted the sheer number of advanced systems to require such a significant power source, and exacting calculations were needed to ensure this was the case before installing the unit aboard to avoid overpowering and damaging or disabling the ship. Still another risk was present, that should the radiation containment casing become compromised, the potent radioactivity of Isotope-5 would quickly pose risks of spreading contamination throughout the ship and endangering the crew. Radiation-sealed rooms, constant monitoring, and shielding were needed, and while the reactor core was incredibly stable, significant damage or intentional compromise meant that if swift and effective response wasn’t made, a ship and its crew would be in serious danger for their lives very quickly. A reactor core could be jettisoned, however, without sufficient back up the ship would be left adrift and unpowered in space, and if not jettisoned in time, radiation contamination of some or all of the ship would still be an issue.
