As you know, for many generations, Zoners were a diverse group of individuals who, for various reasons, decided to live at the boundary of known and charted space, far from the Houses' influence. Limited in resources, we had to adapt for the survival of our kind. But Zoners are no way to be united: our "Phoenix" is just another group of anarchic zoner society if you can call these divided groups a society. However, while lacking the social unity, the Zoners community sometimes share their resources and technologies for respective price.
The Hipparcos is a good example of such exchange. Built by the Zoners of Freeport 6, this ship shows its approach toward technologies in the disposal of Tau Zoners. It lacks heavily reinforced armor, but yet capable to stand significant damage: it is not a juggernaut, capable to survive under heavy fire, but harsh environmental terms are not that dangerous to it. An explorer, long-range carrier ship with decent cargo hold and huge hangar to hold several wings of escort fighters, if we simplify the mean of this ship.
I believe there is no need for a significant refit of the ship, but yet general armor reinforcement is required to meet the more harsh terms of the Omicron environment and a research purpose of the ship itself. After all, there a lot yet to discover in the Omicrons, and perhaps to find a location where the Phoenix could fear no one to come and take what we gained so hard.
While armor enhancement will require rather resources to be delivered to Livadia, the second straight after it is a different reactor. Omicrons is the region where supplies may be cut at any moment, and hence we can't rely on fuel shipments from Sigmas and near Houses but have either develop our own reactor or adopt less efficient but more autonomous reactor from the former days.
Developing a new one from a scratch would be quite troublesome for us and therefore it was decided to adopt one of the outdated but yet decent reactors ever developed by mankind. The one chosen by me for adoption is the Gallic ARC (short for advanced, robust, and compact) Fusion Reactor, used in the early centuries of their colonization expansion. The discontinue of ARC technology had happened in the early 3rd century by the Gallic calendar, allowing them to be installed in mobile conditions such as large spaceships. The nascent of Promethene-fuelled reactors later on rendered ARC reactors atavism of old in light of the high energy output of the new counterparts.
However, unlike Promethene reactors, the ARC reactor (Advanced, robust, and compact) deals with more readily available materials. ARC-reactor is a tokamak-based fusion power generation plant for integrated materials and component irradiation in a D-T neutron field. Compared to many other fusion reactors, ARC is very stable against disruption. This stability is enabled by a high magnitude magnetic field in a compact superconductive fusion chamber, additionally stabilized by a large in proportion to the fusion chamber heat exhaust pipe with additional heat dissipation plates. The design of the reactor can be seen on a schematic below:
This design provides both high energy gain Qe > 1 and simultaneously high plasma yield Qp. An additional advantage of the design is its safety: an extremely high safety margin to break down operational limits is provided at all times of operation, with an edge safety factor, density limit, and normalized below the now established beta limit (pressure limit) at all times.
The ARC reactor design uses a combination of RF power in the "fast-acting" ion cyclotron frequency range (ICRF) and lower hybrid frequency range (LHRF) to heat the plasma and form the q-profile. The ICRF is required for efficient core current driving, while the lower hybrid current drive (LHCD) provides increased efficiency for current driving near the middle radius and beyond. The goal of this combination of current drive methods is to create an "advanced tokamak" (AT) q-profile characterized by a weak reversible magnetic shift. This provides self-consistency with higher constraint and also avoids dangerous instabilities.
The principle of plasma recycling is also different from conventional fusion chambers. Lower hybrid waves triggered from the high field side (HFS) of the tokamak are used to drive the plasma current non-inductively. High-field-side triggering is shown in the simulation to increase current drive efficiency, which is critical for maximizing the gain of the power plant and providing better external control of the radial current profile. Besides, launching with a quieter HFS plasma is expected to reduce launch damage from plasma-material interactions.
The use of YBCO (Yttrium barium copper oxide) superconducting technology in toroidal field coils allows for significantly higher on-axis magnetic fields than standard Nb3Sn superconductors. High magnetic field strengths are required in small reactor designs to achieve the necessary poloidal field/plasma current required for sufficient tightness and resistance to beta (pressure) constraints. Since YBCO tapes allow the use of resistive connections in superconducting coils, the toroidal field coils can be made collapsible, i.e., the coils can be divided into two parts (see below).
The replaceable vacuum vessel is made of corrosion-resistant Inconel 718. The vessel is approximately shaped like an elliptical torus. It is double-walled and contains a channel through which FLiBe flows for cooling and tritium breeding. The vacuum vessel is attached to the blanket tank from above by 18 support columns, which are evenly spaced between the 18 toroidal field coils. All connections needed for in-vessel components (such as waveguides, vacuum ports, etc.) run through these columns, which are also curved to reduce the flux of neutrons streaming through. Thus, the vessel is isolated from the permanent tokamak components, so it can be designed to fail without damaging lifetime reactor components in the worst case of a full, unmitigated plasma disruption.
To permit modular maintenance, the blanket is composed entirely of liquid FLiBe that acts as a neutron moderator, shield, and breeder. The FLiBe is contained in a large low-pressure tank, referred to as the blanket tank, and flows slowly past the vacuum vessel. The blanket tank is a robust lifetime component and serves as the primary nuclear containment boundary, as opposed to the vacuum vessel. Neutrons created by the deuterium-tritium fusion reaction are captured in the FLiBe, transferring their energy and breeding tritium to fuel the reactor. Tritium can then be extracted from the liquid FLiBe after it flows out of the blanket tank.
A neutron shield made of titanium dihydride (TiH2) surrounds the blanket tank. This is to protect the inboard leg of the superconducting toroidal field coil, which is particularly space-constrained and susceptible to neutron radiation damage. Such a design is what allows the relatively compact size of the reactor.
In a conclusion, the ARC modular reactor is a relatively simple, reliable, and easy to maintain solution to energy supply for bigger ships as compared to more energy-output and yet more complicated and difficult to maintain (fusion) reactors.