APM Project #86D: "Praesidium"

[Kiny0]

Docking Bays: Under way

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The docking bay plays an important role in any large scale battle, as this is where snub crafts dock and undock during the battle. These rooms must include facilities required to repair, refuel, and restock the lighter crafts during the heat of a battle. This is why we will require quite a large quantity of Industrial and Robotic Hardware, approximately 10000 of each. We will be relying on the trusty Rheinland designs, that are manufactured on Planet Holstein and on the Wuppertal Refinery.

Now, any docking bay is quite an obvious weak spot in any ship design. Despite the great engineers here at APM, the docking bay the Apex Predator is no exception. To prevent any boarding party, neutron radiation emitters will be installed inside each deck, and will activate if any unwanted ship tries to board through there. These emitters are, to put it simply, pipes that run through the frame of the ship from the 2 Mako reactors to collect their natural emission of radiation and redirect them to the docking bays.

As we do not want the whole ship to be irradiated from the docks, it will be necessary to protect the walls of each deck with a special coating that blocks radiation.
The radiation from the reactors is exclusively neutron-based, and this is a good thing because neutron radiation bears no electrical charge (hence the name). This means that it easily penetrates targets, even shielded ones, unless it uses a positron-based shielding technology. But even then, it will still be lethal to anyone on board.
That also means that we cannot contain the radiation by shielding the walls of the deck.

We had to use the same coating as the one in the engine rooms. I had to do some research regarding absorption of neutron radiation to understand the whole process. Firstly, there are several types of neutrons. "Fast neutrons" have a kinetic energy above 1 MeV (which is a lot), and form the bulk of the radiation. We want to slow down these fast neutrons, and for that we must use light atoms. This is similar to billiard, the neutrons being the cue ball and the other atom being a billiard ball. They both have the same mass, so when the cue ball hits the billiard ball, it nearly loses all its speed. On the other hand, if a ping pong ball is thrown against a bowling ball (neutron vs. heavy atom), the ping pong ball will bounce off with very little change in velocity, only a change in direction. That is why lead or other heavy materials used for other radiations are quite ineffective for blocking neutron radiation.

Now that this fast neutron has been slowed down, all is left is to absorb it. There are some atoms that posses a greater cross-section (the likelihood of the atom absorbing a neutron), and Boron is one of them. The greatest advantage of Boron is that it does not creates a high amount of gamma rays when absorbing a neutron, unlike most of the other atoms that have a large cross-section, so there is no need to accommodate for the gamma rays on top of the neutron radiation.

If my calculations are correct, we will need about 5000 units of both materials to cover every deck.

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