Devlog 02 Tranga Rocket Engine

What I’ve Done So Far

So since the last devlog I’ve done a few things, first I 3d printed the Injection plate and tested the screw fits which worked. Then I went in and did some final fixing up before modeling the combustion chamber and nozzle component.

My Thoughts On A Future Component

One of the next section I need to design in the parts that will intake fuel and oxidizer from the flow lines and inject them into the injection plate, I’m quite concerned about how air tight this component will be and I’ve thought of two main options.

1. I have a ring shaped pipe that has in input for 1/4 inch pipe and little outflows feeding into each injection hole, where this piece meets the injection ports we’ll have tiny rubber O-rings to seal. I’m a bit concerned about the extra machining involved in this part in terms of cost, and I feel that the fuel may flow through some section of the injection plate more than others.
2. We have tiny feed lines the screw into ports on the injection plate and all meet at 1/4 inch pipe junction, with this approach I feel like I might be able to find an off the shelf part but if I can’t this piece would require far too much machining to be worth it.

A bit of crowd sourcing

If anyone knows where I can get solenoid valves and a pressure sensor rated to handle air at 1mpa that would be a big help, I’m new to working with hydraulics or pneumatics or whatever you would call it so I don’t really know what A good price is, I have to pick out the parts during the design phase so that I can design the engine around them. If anyone knows any good options that would be a big help.

Devlog 01 Tranga Rocket Engine

This is my first devlog for my Tranga rocket engine. I’ve called it Tranga based off my choice of propellants, pressurized air as the oxidizer and methylated spirits as the fuel, which is the same as a Tranga outdoor cooking set. Most people would probably make a solid propellant rocket motor first but solid propellants are illegal here in Ireland so we’re jumping straight to pressure-fed.

Basic Design

So the basic design, we’ll have our methylated spirits and pressurized air in aluminium water bottles and the pressurized air will also double as ullage gas to push the methylated spirits into the system. This design will take a lot of evaluation in the design phase, such as ensuring the safety of using the oxidizer for ullage.

Injector plate Design

So far the injector plate has six holes for M6 screws to tightly secure it to the combustion chamber, with 16 2mm holes for fuel and 6 0.2 mm holes for oxidizer, this creates a 7:1 fuel rich mix ratio, I’ll likely modify this down the line but this reduces the temperatures experienced internally. Once the engine is done I have a plan to add regenerative cooling to increase burn time and change the mix ratio.

More Detailed AI Disclosure

The core purpose for which I used Claude is that it seems to have some internal access to NASA Computational Fluid Dynamics tools for responding to requests, It would be a complicated process for me to gain access to these tools and learn to use them, using Claude to run these simulations will most likely result in reduced accuracy and lower performance but I’ve decided it’s acceptable for a minimum viable product. So Claude generated the sizing for the injector plate, combustion chamber, and nozzle but I’ll be modelling them myself based off of these measurements.

Safety Disclosure

Obviously in designing this safety has to be a massive consideration, I’ll explain my methodology deeper in future Devlogs but I feel it’s important to notes that I have the privilege of being able to test the engine where it will be far from people. I also only intend to do short burns as this engine most likely won’t be much more than an over-engineered flame thrower.
I couldn’t find anything on the stardance website about what hardware projects are and aren’t allowed but I would completely understand if this is considered too dangerous.

V1.0 ON MY CIVILIZATION SIMULATOR!

It’s been a while since I posted a devlog on this project. I’ve been working on getting this to a minimum viable product for release so that’s bug fixing, core features and packaging.

Features

• More complex civilisation behaviour
• Improved settings screen
• Full screen

Notes

Honestly my heart was never really in this project, I was mainly trying to build the courage to work on hardware which I think I’ve secured (You can hopefully expect some rocketry based stuff from me in future) but I have done my best to build something I can be proud of.

V0.6 on my Civilization Simulator

On the latest release we now have a settings menu that allows you to adjust the factors affecting the simulation.

New Features

• A settings menu that launches on startup and allows you to adjust the simulation.
• A text file that stores the variables for easy editing

Planned Features

• Implement more behaviors for civilizations encountering one another based off of more varied factors such as benevolence, malevolence and desperation
• Clean up UI and add a setting menu to tweak the factors of the simulation
• Add dialogue elements to easier understand what is going on
• Package into an exe application

One step closer to first ship!

V0.5 on my Civilization Simulator

In this latest version we now have civilizations that are spawned randomly based on the variables for the Drake equation

• The average rate of star formation in our galaxy
• The fraction of those stars that have planets
• The average number of planets that could support life that actually develop life at some point.
• The fraction of planets that develop life that go on the develop intelligent life
• The fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into space
• The length of time for which such civilizations release detectable signal into space.

In this implementation we don’t use the rate of star formation as we already decide seperatly how many stars we will include in our simulation.

Current Features

• We can create a randomly generated star map in a window
• We can create civilizations in some of those stars based off of the drake equation
• We can have those civilizations expand at a factor of the speed of light accelerating and related to their level of technology
• We can have those civilizations interact in a way that is loosely based on dark forest theory

Planned Features

• Implement more behaviours for civilizations encountering one another based off of more varied factors such as benevolance, malevolance and desperation
• Clean up UI and add a setting menu to tweak the factors of the simulation
• Add dialogue elements to easier understand what is going on
• Package into an exe application

I reprogrammed the rendering to go from tkinter to pygame, this will be a better basis for future functionality.

The plan currently is to keep it simple so, when generating a star we’ll run odds for whether there’s a civilization there based off your options for the drake equation. From there we’ll spawn a sprite that expands at some factor of the speed of light, when it collides with another sprite we’ll run a random chance at first we’ll base this fully off dark forest theory so they’ll always destroy each other, which destroys the other will depend on age and a randomly determined factor called desperation.

Once I have the basic system working I want to add more complex behaviors where civilizations can merge or co-exist✨

First version of my universe sim, so far it just build out the 2d star field that the rest will be built on top of.