|
Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Aug 3, 2017 20:56:51 GMT
After further optimization, I can now beat three Deep Fryers simultaneously without losing a single drone using a carrier that costs 2.4 Mc and carries 15 of these drones: End of combat screen below. The drones took some damage but that seems to be because their tails are visible behind the armor due to multiple targets. Perhaps a swarm of laser drones on a scatter order would work best against this strategy, since you'd need a wider plate to block lasers coming from a wider angle. The slimmer hull and armor made from PTFE reduce the cost enough that I can add more fuel and make the drones go 19 km/s, giving a generous 41 km/s projectile velocity for the railguns. This is so fast and efficient that I don't think even a high-g ship that dodges constantly would be able to beat it, at least when limited to the same cost bracket. You'd need an acceleration of around 10 Gs to avoid shots fired at 500km, and the drones should be able to survive quite a bit closer than that as well, since you have to sacrifice credits to engines and/or armor. Armor doesn't help much either when laser mirrors would still shatter to the first hit they take.
|
|
|
Post by treptoplax on Aug 3, 2017 23:35:08 GMT
Interesting. Are most of the guns surviving? It would be interesting to set the AI to a mode that will target those first, or put the drones on AI and run the Deep Fryers yourself. And they have a lot of DV, so they could try to avoid the high-speed encounter, but their acceleration isn't that high so maybe not?
That said, I think it looks likely at this point that skinny railgun drones are a hard counter to pure-MPD laserstars. I'm getting similar results; 50Kc of 'Duck' drones will get the kill against one DF AI-on-AI and so far I'm not doing much better operating the laser manually. Which is ridiculous, although those drones have very little dV to spare and modest (1G+) acceleration, so they're a lot more susceptible to countermeasures and would likely require a carrier drone in many situations, which will at least triple the cost (still cheap). MPD Laser drones would do better but I'm not sure they'd be enough better. Dodging might be effective; one thing I noticed in my testing was that the drones would expose their sides while trying to keep intercept with a dodging target, which is of course bad.
Another interesting question is whether there's an easy counter for this class of drone. In my very limited testing they do well against most things.
It may be that the meta ends up being about MPD-drive (or MPD/resistojet hybrid?) drone carriers fighting to arrange/prevent their desired/disliked intercept speeds.
|
|
|
Post by Enderminion on Aug 4, 2017 11:59:18 GMT
Interesting. Are most of the guns surviving? It would be interesting to set the AI to a mode that will target those first, or put the drones on AI and run the Deep Fryers yourself. And they have a lot of DV, so they could try to avoid the high-speed encounter, but their acceleration isn't that high so maybe not? That said, I think it looks likely at this point that skinny railgun drones are a hard counter to pure-MPD laserstars. I'm getting similar results; 50Kc of 'Duck' drones will get the kill against one DF AI-on-AI and so far I'm not doing much better operating the laser manually. Which is ridiculous, although those drones have very little dV to spare and modest (1G+) acceleration, so they're a lot more susceptible to countermeasures and would likely require a carrier drone in many situations, which will at least triple the cost (still cheap). MPD Laser drones would do better but I'm not sure they'd be enough better. Dodging might be effective; one thing I noticed in my testing was that the drones would expose their sides while trying to keep intercept with a dodging target, which is of course bad. Another interesting question is whether there's an easy counter for this class of drone. In my very limited testing they do well against most things. It may be that the meta ends up being about MPD-drive (or MPD/resistojet hybrid?) drone carriers fighting to arrange/prevent their desired/disliked intercept speeds. as one of them veers off, a salvo of sprint type missiles launch onto intercept before you can say vampire
|
|
|
Post by Durandal on Aug 4, 2017 12:52:33 GMT
Interesting. Are most of the guns surviving? It would be interesting to set the AI to a mode that will target those first, or put the drones on AI and run the Deep Fryers yourself. And they have a lot of DV, so they could try to avoid the high-speed encounter, but their acceleration isn't that high so maybe not? That said, I think it looks likely at this point that skinny railgun drones are a hard counter to pure-MPD laserstars. I'm getting similar results; 50Kc of 'Duck' drones will get the kill against one DF AI-on-AI and so far I'm not doing much better operating the laser manually. Which is ridiculous, although those drones have very little dV to spare and modest (1G+) acceleration, so they're a lot more susceptible to countermeasures and would likely require a carrier drone in many situations, which will at least triple the cost (still cheap). MPD Laser drones would do better but I'm not sure they'd be enough better. Dodging might be effective; one thing I noticed in my testing was that the drones would expose their sides while trying to keep intercept with a dodging target, which is of course bad. Another interesting question is whether there's an easy counter for this class of drone. In my very limited testing they do well against most things. It may be that the meta ends up being about MPD-drive (or MPD/resistojet hybrid?) drone carriers fighting to arrange/prevent their desired/disliked intercept speeds. as one of them veers off, a salvo of sprint type missiles launch onto intercept before you can say vampire As a hard counter a few 1MW point defence lasers could just be slapped on.
|
|
|
Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Aug 4, 2017 13:19:39 GMT
as one of them veers off, a salvo of sprint type missiles launch onto intercept before you can say vampire As a hard counter a few 1MW point defence lasers could just be slapped on. I guess you could put some anti-laser armor and a tiny railgun on the missiles to counter the laser?
|
|
|
Post by Durandal on Aug 4, 2017 14:41:38 GMT
As a hard counter a few 1MW point defence lasers could just be slapped on. I guess you could put some anti-laser armor and a tiny railgun on the missiles to counter the laser? Well at the point it wouldn't really be a micromissile would it?
|
|
|
Post by jtyot on Aug 4, 2017 21:50:55 GMT
Interesting. Are most of the guns surviving? It would be interesting to set the AI to a mode that will target those first, or put the drones on AI and run the Deep Fryers yourself. And they have a lot of DV, so they could try to avoid the high-speed encounter, but their acceleration isn't that high so maybe not? I only lost 6 guns out of 45 in that run. They have 4cm diamond armor so they can survive a good deal of lasering. I'm not sure if you would have any success burning them off. The best plan might be to target the engines, as focusing the lasers on a single point should drill through the armor faster. As for dodging, you can reduce its effectiveness by disabling the drone's engines during combat. That way the drones won't turn while trying to reintercept the target. Avoiding combat isn't too easy either since the drones' acceleration jumps to 30g after the drop tanks are spent, so after the first ~10 km/s dv. I think a good counter against my drones would be a capital ship with enough armor to survive the low-power railguns and some accurate guns that can punch through the PTFE plate. It might be hard to get it to stay cheap enough though.
|
|
|
Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Aug 8, 2017 19:11:25 GMT
Turns out making a capital that can survive the railguns with equal cost is pretty hard. However, since the drones don't have any side armor, they're very vulnerable to nukes. I was able to create a cheap nuclear PD missile that can reliably take down the railgun drones with far less cost. The drones can avoid some missiles with their higher thrust, but since the missiles are so cheap, the drones would need to avoid three or four salvos of PD missiles, any of which can fully destroy a single drone swarm. Since the dv difference between the drones and missiles isn't that big, the missiles should be able to beat the railgun drones every time before they reach the launcher ship. All of this points toward the fact that no single design is able to beat every other design. It does seem to me that all overly specialized designs have a cheaper hard counter that will beat them every time. Therefore the notion of a single dominant meta seems to be completely debunked. Instead the most efficient designs would likely be either single generalist capital ships or fleets of several specialized capitals that can each counter some specialized strategy. Missile design: Launcher ship: Youtube video showing the railgun drones getting rekted. Note that I had to do a stupidly slow intercept since the AI is too retarded to intercept anything moving faster than 500 m/s properly.
|
|
|
Post by cyborgleopard on Aug 8, 2017 22:13:29 GMT
steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1104745356Just today, I made this. I don't have access to any of Apo's designs to test it against, and the guidance needs some tuning in the terminal phase, but it shows promise that it or a similar design could probably beat out laserstars.
|
|
|
Post by bigbombr on Aug 9, 2017 7:17:38 GMT
steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1104745356Just today, I made this. I don't have access to any of Apo's designs to test it against, and the guidance needs some tuning in the terminal phase, but it shows promise that it or a similar design could probably beat out laserstars. Thanks to the cap on laser ablation, and lack of pulsed lasers.
|
|
|
Post by apophys on Aug 9, 2017 13:12:43 GMT
Thanks to the cap on laser ablation, and lack of pulsed lasers. And, probably most importantly, sensor inaccuracy that cannot be improved.
|
|
|
Post by bigbombr on Aug 9, 2017 14:48:25 GMT
Thanks to the cap on laser ablation, and lack of pulsed lasers. And, probably most importantly, sensor inaccuracy that cannot be improved. More accurate radiator mechanics (heat gradient, coolant pressure, structural integrity, ...) would probably nerf lasers. Mirror drones and free electron lasers might buff them again. I don't think we can currently really tell what the real life meta would be. Missiles have similar issues: vulnerable (and possibly heavy) sensors aren't modeled, but 1 kg of remote control might be excessive (separating it into transmission, battery and logic modules would be nice). Orbit-to-orbit 'bombardement' by kinetics isn't implemented, but neither is barrel lifetime (which might cripple many of our favorite railgun sandblasters IRL). This game is very impressive, but I get a feeling it's only scratching at the surface. I very much look forward to future updates.
|
|
|
Post by treptoplax on Aug 9, 2017 15:54:59 GMT
steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1104745356Just today, I made this. I don't have access to any of Apo's designs to test it against, and the guidance needs some tuning in the terminal phase, but it shows promise that it or a similar design could probably beat out laserstars. Apophys tournament laserstar
He's noted before that for manual use drones are superior, but the AI doesn't handle large number of laser drones well. If you want the gold standard (as of a month ago, anyway!) in cheap glass-cannon laserstars, that's it.
|
|
|
Post by cyborgleopard on Aug 10, 2017 12:41:03 GMT
Hahaha Yes. I managed to eliminate the 2.5Mc Laser Jellyfish with about 700kc of starkiller missiles. (Fleet of 50.) And could probably do it with a lot less. Edit: Works with 20. (about 280kc or almost down to 1/10th the cost of a deep fryer. Of course this is to say nothing of my missile barge that is designed more traditionally with armor, weapons and the likes, and costs 10Mc. If I wanted to make it bare-bones,I could.) I'll also give apo the beneifit of saying that it probably also helps those microflak railguns don't start firing until about 75km. I would have them ignore range for the added challenge but they lag my computer really bad as it is. (Maybe I switch them to just fire standard slugs)... Though it also balances out on my end. I could easily improve the missiles to have drop tanks, increasing the intercept velocity. This would only minimally impact the cost (Methane and VCS tanks are cheap) and only bring up the mass of the missiles. Adding a missile bus could also be a way to go, but I'm honestly not a fan of juggling missile busses. Also the guidance needs fine tuning on these and I cannot wrap my head around missile guidance for the life of me.
|
|
|
Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Aug 10, 2017 17:45:10 GMT
Hahaha Yes. I managed to eliminate the 2.5Mc Laser Jellyfish with about 700kc of starkiller missiles. What kind of armor layout did you use? The drones I used were far faster than yours and they'd usually die before getting under 100km.
|
|