# We need moar booasters!

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StarDate 197701.96

So, it turns out our robots have an inbuilt understanding of how the world works, which is quite handy. We can’t understand how they understand all of this as it seems to be encrypted, but never the less it may be useful.

Not that we’ve got the whole Bol-TZ-mann statistics thingy figured out it’s time to have a look at how we can apply this to getting away from this dusty rock. Our robots are luckily able to perform tedious calculations quickly with pencil and paper, so’ve got a decent tool to try running some simulations of rocket engines.

A rocket engine is, from the perspective of a single particle of fuel gas, very massive. According to what literature we’ve found in our library, we could simplify our model by simulating very small rocket engines as simple boxes, with particles bouncing around. We’ll be using a simplified model for all of our fuel molecules, amongst which is saying they will all contain the same amount of particles and maintain a constant pressure. After all of this, we’ll just have to figure out how large of an engine is required by testing how many of these boxes are required to get of the planet.

While testing the simulations for these boxes, it’s important to make sure the numbers we're running make sense. We therefore have our robots doing a lot of stuff other than just simulating the particles when we’re running it. They’re calculating the pressure from the particles hitting the walls, on each of the walls to test that it checks out with what we get from the Bol-TZ-mann statistics ($$P = \frac{Nk_{B}T}{V}$$) we’ve been working on, as well as testing how many would escape through a nozzle, here simulated simply as an opening in one of the walls of our box. We’re also having the robots count how many particles escape to tell us how much push we get from our box, both as momentum and force, and how much fuel each box uses. This is how we’ll be finding out how many of these boxes would constitute a full on rocket engine, not just something that could push a dust particle in to a low orbit on a good day.

In the end our target became a rocket Red-S-Tone that we found in our archives which produced a total force of 350 kN. Since our payload is going to be a lot lighter than what this mythical Red-S-Tone carried, we ended up settling for around 260 kN instead. This resulted using $$5 \times 10^{14}$$of the boxes we simulated. This gave us force enough by quite a margin to launch, and a fuel consumption that made it feasible to launch without a pit stop for a refueling and a twix along the way.

After we’ve got ourselves a reasonably powerful rocket engine simulated, it’s time to build a corresponding engine using our fabrication equipment. We’ve also got to run a launch with our robots before sending our newly built engine into the abyss. We’ve not got an unlimited amount of resources, so let’s try not to use too much of our stuff for space litter. Also, once we’ve got a simulation of a launch running, we can start to simulate where we’d like to travel, how we’d get there, and even how much fuel we’ll need before sending it up. You know, keep the whole “space as a trash can” thing to a minimum as mentioned before.

Oh and we just realised we forgot to show you how our rocket plans look! At the top we have our satellite, with all it's fancy measuring devices and other equipment. In the middle we have a big ol' tank'o H2, which hopefully will not explode, below that we have our combustion chamber which we have simulated with our tiny cubes and then scaled up. Below that again we have our (hopefully) controlled explosion.

We’re hoping to have all simulations of the engine and launch done shortly and be ready to send a probe into space. A vital first step in getting home.

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Fig 1 is sourced from: Baek, Nakhoon & Lim, Choong-Gyoo & Yang, Kwang-Ho & Shin, Youngsul. (2007). An adaptive control scheme for multi-threaded graphics programs. 498-503.
Av Jarl-Robin B. Evensen, Iver Oknes
Publisert 16. sep. 2020 14:21 - Sist endret 16. sep. 2020 14:21