EVE Fiction

Amarr ships use Antimatter reactors.
Gallente ships use Fusion reactors.
Caldari ships use Graviton reactors (whatever those are).
Minmatar ships use Nuclear reactors (unclear if fission or fusion, assumed by some to be fission).

Source: Ship construction components ingame.

Fuel is not accounted for ingame because it is an unnecessary mechanic. I imagine our ships are equipped with enough fuel for days, if not weeks duration anyhow - and almost nobody in the game goes by for weeks without visiting a station, POS, friendly hauler, or some other means of refueling.

Minmatar are fission, their technology is largely what we have now plus a few items scrapped together from the more advanced Ammarians. Those wingy bits on Minmatar ships are radiators, presumably they use steam turbines inside to generate power.

So basically those wings are the heat dispersers that keep the ship from melting
More interesting stuff about "Minmatar pray their ships hold together"


Got to hear this myself today...

If you have heard amarr stories about half naked sweating tribals on board of minmatar ships, yup... thats what happens when we lose the wingy bits.

How should I put it, I mean that the Minmatar used an evolved version of our current technology and physics, ingeniously deployed to compete with the more advanced powers. A steam turbine today powered by nuclear fission is only a refined version of the ones powering the Industrial revolution. I suppose it's possible they use liquid salt as their convector though.

I also remember reading that one of the Ore's found in Minmatar space are ideal for nuclear fission, can't cite but I remember it.

Nuc, here.

The thermal efficiency of a fission reactor is abysmal. It's only defense is that it's far more efficient than many of the other available sources of high-density energy. That said, the greater the difference between the 'hot side' and the 'cold side' of a heat engine, the more efficient it becomes. Radiators exposed to shadows in space could drop the 'cold side' very low indeed. This would require some fairly exotic working fluids, or multiple heat exhanges between working fluids.

Liquid bismuth, for instance, is a good 'hot side' fluid, but would brick-up in the cold cycle pretty badly if you're going straight to space temperatures. Hydrogen would work on the cold end, but gets very hard to handle on the hot end. Multiple-stage heat exchangers would solve some of that, but only at the cost of decreased efficiency.

Also, those radiator panels? They're goodf for gaining heat too - if directly impinged by solar radiation. Clearly, some exotic materials and sophisticated engineering are involved, even if using a 'recognizable' fission reactor at the base. Fortunately, there are means other than steam for drawing energy from a heat source.

The Seebeck Effect comes to our rescue - electricity from heat, no moving parts. They're horribly inefficient, but sophisticated engineering could alleviate some of that. Suppose, just for a second, those radiator pannels aren't there primarily to cool the reactor's working fluids, but to provide a thermal differential to power huge banks of Seebeck generators? That would eplain their size and placement, remove the need for really exotic working fluids, and simplify design immesnely. And you can still have your lithium-steam turbo-generators, as well.

Is that why they suck?

/me runs for cover.

I'm a layman but it seems to me that the wing bits are probably not radiators (or, at the very least, are not radiators for a nuclear reactor). Since space is a vacuum conduction and convection won't work and so heat can only be released through thermal radiation. The External Active Thermal Control System used on the ISS shows that even a modest amount of heat (the output of the solar panels for the US section is 32.8 kW and the Russian side is probably equivalent which would mean the whole station runs on around 70 kW or 90 horsepower) requires a very large array to dissipate. Now I'd take the ingame numbers with a grain of salt but even an Eve frigate has a powergrid output of 20 MW (which, as an aside, would only require a fairly small nuclear reactor). A great deal more heat is going to result and require a much more extensive array of radiators in order to maintain a safe internal temperature.

The obvious flaw in my argument is to point out that they could just be using radiators that are somehow much more efficient than modern technology. I won't pretend to know enough science to recognize whether the real upper limit is dictated by technology or the possibility that rules of nature might be more responsible for creating a hard limit of exactly how much heat can be dissipated into a vacuum with a radiator system of x size. However, even if was the case that they had radiators of staggering efficiency I still doubt that this method would be utilized because it creates a very dangerous weak point on any ship. Destruction of the array (which is exposed and more fragile than other critical ship systems) would disable a ship and make it inhospitable very quickly. The militarily acceptable heat situation would be dealt with by some internal method of heat storage which is released in station or, if the heat could be focused into some replaceable medium, simply released into space as needed.

From the Tech 2 ship blueprints:
Nuclear Reactor Unit - minmatar
Antimatter Reactor Unit - amarr
Fusion Reactor Unit - gallente
Graviton Reactor Unit - caldari

But you'll notice that all the races also use low mass isotopes in their jump drives (min-Hydrogen 2, amarr-Helium 3, gal-Oxygen 16, cald-Nitrogen 14). Which are typically involved in fusion reactions.

Futhermore, you've got PoS Fuel Blocks which use both a fusion isotope and a fission isotope:
Caldari Fuel Block Blueprint:
Heavy Water 150 (<-- neutron mitigator in fission... or a source of H2 in fusion)
Liquid Ozone 150
Nitrogen Isotopes 400 (<-- fusion fuel... or some unknown process)
Oxygen 20
Coolant 8
Enriched Uranium 4 (<-- fission fuel)
Mechanical Parts 4
Robotics 1

So, I'd dare say that it's quite possible ships have more than one type of reactor/power-source aboard.

What I meant by that is the fact fission energy would be not enough to power a whole ship capable of FTL speed. Fusion I can see but fission no. However I can see that : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fusion-fission_hybrid

After all, they only mentioned that Minmatar use ''nuclear'' reactors. No precision regarding if the reactors ONLY work on fission principle. So Minmatar using nuclear fusion-fission hybrid reactors seems realistic.