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Post by cyborgleopard on Aug 10, 2017 17:55:40 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. 1.50mm Aramid -> 2.50mm rubber -> 1mm titanium carbide (inner to outer). The titanium carbide is really there to try and ricochet kinetics and act as a nuke flash layer but it seems to hold up really well vs lasers too. There is also an aramid 'radiation shield' in the nose. Though I don't think the armor plays into the effectiveness as much when its not sloped to a needle point. Having the missile be pencil thin also means sensor wobble is an issue for the enemy at long distances. The missile is up on my steam workshop (link in a previous post), if you want to take a closer look at it. Actually I'm curious now? How well do these hold up with just the titanium carbide... Edit: Not great it would seem. But swapping out the 1.50mm Aramid and increasing the rubber to 4mm gives you similar stats in the DV department and halves the cost (presumably slightly worse laser defense). I was still able to take out a Deep Fryer with 10 of these missiles, but that seems to be the lower limit. Still beating a 2.5Mc ship with only 60kc of missiles is an accomplishment. I will probably update the workshop version to use that armor configuration.
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Aug 10, 2017 21:40:11 GMT
I had a go with a slim design as well. I made a 14cm wide drone that has a 14mm conventional gun on it. That way they should be useful against more than just laser stars. The drones have 6 km/s dv, and are carried by a drone bus with 14 km/s, for a total of 20. Both designs have a ridiculous amount of acceleration as well. The bus can go from 0 to 14 km/s in 7 seconds, and the drones take 20 seconds after that to reach their cruising speed. This means that against targets other than laser stars, you can do a low-velocity intercept that doesn't break the game and accelerate at the start of combat. This high relative velocity to the target means that the guns can shred through pretty much anything, not just unarmored laser stars. They have enough ammo for a 20-second burst, so no reasonable amount of armor should be able to survive against them. drone: linkdrone bus: linkStart of combat against a single deep fryer dl.dropbox.com/s/rwqg77196xus7bf/20170810235919_1.jpg?dl=0Opening fire at ~500 km. I fired just a few round per drone to save on lag, but they could go on for a good while. dl.dropbox.com/s/si2l5wkosnpaohj/20170810235949_1.jpg?dl=0At ~50 km, the deep fryer is dead. Still a couple of functioning guns and a lot more operational drones left. dl.dropbox.com/s/hwwjkkxbroz1ied/20170811000022_1.jpg?dl=0After beating the deep fryer with roughly matched credit cost, I tested the design against my standard hard target with a 20 cm VCS plate, a spall liner and a whipple shield. It lost power within the first second of shots hitting it, and by the end of the salvo there was very little armor left on the ship. First rounds hitting, and I think one drone hit it as well. dl.dropbox.com/s/wv7amh5gl8mhtpc/20170811001304_1.jpg?dl=0Lots of tracers. dl.dropbox.com/s/zrhrfgn2uljp99b/20170811001532_1.jpg?dl=0After the salvo, armor isn't looking too good. dl.dropbox.com/s/25es7b6wq8t5kcw/20170811001634_1.jpg?dl=0Even the back side is riddled with exit holes. 40cm of VCS gone at this point. dl.dropbox.com/s/nms0yhr4g4geigt/20170811001631_1.jpg?dl=0
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Post by cyborgleopard on Aug 14, 2017 21:45:13 GMT
Generally armor doesn't stand up agianst direct hits, I find. Missiles, kinetic spam, sandblasters will all chew up even the toughest armor schemes armor pretty quick. Armor is really only good for deflecting the stray shots that hit, or the occasional flak sprays. Anything that gets hit by 5-10 missiles or is caught in the spray of a decent railgun for a few seconds is gonna be destroyed or at least crippled.
I've tried time and again to make ships that are true damage sponges, and devoted an entire thread to anti-kinetic armor research. Armor is really just there to buy you a few seconds.
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Aug 15, 2017 17:54:04 GMT
I'd say my space train is a pretty good damage sponge. It took me a good few minutes to kill an AI-controlled one with another one of the same design. Even though the heavy railgun can punch pretty much straight through the armor, anything targetable is placed on top of empty space, meaning it won't disable the ship. It only died once the untargeted fire was able to drill through to the crew modules, which means that pretty much all of the armor on the ship was shredded to bits. You could still disable crew modules with a lucky hit from a KKV type of weapon, but the crew is split into two places on different sides of the ship, meaning you'd still have to spend a ridiculous amount of missiles to reliably disable the ship. Here's a youtube video showing the battle and an updated design schematic. Design link
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Aug 18, 2017 23:22:15 GMT
So I started thinking that there's no reason the same train design shouldn't do well against laserstars as well. I stripped most of the useless things like missile launchers and swapped out the guns for apophys's 50 km/s flak ones since they're pretty small and should be good enough against the unarmored laser boats. This brought down my train's price to 26 Mc, meaning I'd have to kill 11 laser boats to match price. And that's what I did. Ship design: Enemy fleet: Start of combat Shots are halfway through. No significant damage yet, just a few small holes in the hull. Almost there. A little bit of ship has come off but that never hurt anybody. And the lasers have kicked the bucket. And the train is (nearly) undamaged! What a champ! First time I was able to kill fryers using a warship instead of drones. This also points toward laser drone swarms being beatable, since that's what 11 deep fryers essentially are.
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Post by RiftandRend on Aug 19, 2017 19:11:17 GMT
So I started thinking that there's no reason the same train design shouldn't do well against laserstars as well. I stripped most of the useless things like missile launchers and swapped out the guns for apophys's 50 km/s flak ones since they're pretty small and should be good enough against the unarmored laser boats. This brought down my train's price to 26 Mc, meaning I'd have to kill 11 laser boats to match price. And that's what I did. Ship design: Enemy fleet: Start of combat Shots are halfway through. No significant damage yet, just a few small holes in the hull. Almost there. A little bit of ship has come off but that never hurt anybody. And the lasers have kicked the bucket. And the train is (nearly) undamaged! What a champ! First time I was able to kill fryers using a warship instead of drones. This also points toward laser drone swarms being beatable, since that's what 11 deep fryers essentially are. Please put those high res images in spoilers. My internet is garbage and I can't view that many at once with any speed.
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Aug 20, 2017 1:19:36 GMT
I did some testing with laser drones. I modified the AE 100MW laser from deep fryers to be a bit lighter and smaller, and dropping intensity down to 6 MW/m². The lighter laser allows for a very agile drone when you put some NTRs behind it. At 3.6g acceleration, the drones can easily beat even the 50 km/s railgun build I posted previously. In the few tests I ran, the railgun train wasn't able to land a single hit before it died. The drone isn't probably the best efficiency you can do credit for credit, but that doesn't matter much since my counter costs pennies compared to just the laser turret on the drone. Drone design here: linkThis points towards close-range weapons being the only viable counter against laser drones, at least ones that are this agile. Since they can dodge anything at longer ranges, you have to close the distance to be able to hit. You could probably do it with gun drones, but I feel like I've done them to death, so I went for the nuclear missile approach. I designed a dirt-cheap missile that comes with a 103t nuclear warhead and has a ~10 km/s dv. It's so cheap that you could put out around 1500 of them for every laser drone, but I went with 200 against 15 since that seems to be plenty. The missiles have a lightweight anti-laser armor cap, which allows them to survive lasering for a good while, so huge amounts of the missiles should be pretty much unstoppable for lasers at this price. I also made a booster stage for the missiles that accelerates up to 10 km/s and then fires a bunch of the nukes from a 3 km/s muzzle velocity blast launcher, giving the missiles a starting velocity of 13 km/s. Adding ~7km/s to that, we get a cruise velocity of 20 km/s for the missiles. This means the lasers have about a minute to shoot at the missiles, and then they die in nuclear fire. Missile design: linkMissile bus: linkMy test case was 15 laser drones versus one missile bus, with the lasers being worth roughly 2 Mc, whereas the nuke bus costs only 1.22 Mc. In this latter test I got a faulty intercept velocity of 22 km/s but the nukes worked fine on an earlier test with the more usual 10 km/s speed as well. Only about 40 missiles died before reaching the drones so it's not that relevant. You could easily just add in more missiles if it looks like they're not getting through. Start of combat screen: linkMissiles getting closer. 20 down so far: linkMissiles hit, killing all laser drones pretty quickly: linkI'm pretty sure missiles like this are a hard counter against most laser designs. You'd have to invest a lot of credits to the laser drone's agility to be able to dodge these missiles, and there's no way lasers could take down this many missiles. You could field around 27,000 missiles against a single Deep Fryer and still come a bit lower on the price tag. Heavy armor might work against these, but I haven't really paid much attention to nuke damage before so I'm not sure how doable that would be. Either way, heavy armor can always be countered with KKVs or heavy cannons if nukes don't cut it, so that's not a final solution to the problem either.
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Post by princesskibble on Aug 20, 2017 1:29:48 GMT
Omigosh your amazing and missiles rule! Why did you choose a nuclear warhead instead of flak warhead?
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Aug 20, 2017 1:39:03 GMT
I'm pretty sure nukes are more efficient kilo for kilo. It's enough to get the missile close enough instead of a direct hit you'd need with a flak warhead.
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Post by apophys on Aug 20, 2017 3:04:55 GMT
I'm pretty sure missiles like this are a hard counter against most laser designs. How do those missiles fare against railgun point defense? From the limited testing I'm aware of, flak railguns do excellently at taking out large numbers of approaching missiles when ignoring range. This is why I always pair lasers with supporting railguns.
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Aug 26, 2017 1:06:30 GMT
After a long frustration with lots of secondary issues preventing missiles from working, I reverted back to gun drones for killing the railgunned laser drones. Missile AI goes retarded when faced with a large number of enemies already, and once you add railguns on the drones they suddenly take up dodging, which means I would only get around 2-3 hits out of a salvo of 150 missiles, when before it would've been plenty enough to kill the drones. I did manage to take one salvo of 15 drones but that was after the orbital mechanics kicked the bucket and I ended up with a 65 km/s intercept on the drones. With that much velocity, my KE missiles managed to take down almost all laser drones in one salvo. Exploiting the acceleration bug in orbit view is a bit non-constructive though so I thought I would have to do better. Therefore I slapped some 17mm guns on my RCS-steered missile design and shot down some laser drones. Drone design: dl.dropbox.com/s/mczgdzc9wdojol9/20170826035226_1.jpg?dl=0dl.dropbox.com/s/aktojfaf1qbxjrm/20170826032647_1.jpg?dl=0Start of combat. I used an expensive 20-kt ship as a launch platform that could give the drones a 20 km/s headstart, but that just caused more problems than it solved. High-velocity intercepts are tedious to plot and regularly glitch out forcing me to restart the mission over and over again, just to find some flaw in my design that makes it non-functional. So in the end I just waited for the AI drones to intercept my launch ship with drones predeployed. dl.dropbox.com/s/8cnagzum2rbkyk4/20170826032823_1.jpg?dl=0Getting closer, with a few drones down. FPS is a strong 1 at this point, still very enjoyable. dl.dropbox.com/s/z5pcnurfsj118nq/20170826033008_1.jpg?dl=0Both sides opening fire at 100 km. FPS drops like a rock after this. dl.dropbox.com/s/cjvmajc7fc21f54/20170826033831_1.jpg?dl=0It's not looking promising for the lasers. The railguns only shot down 6 drones despite them exploiting payload mechanics for a far lighter weight than they should have. The game was running at a steady 2 minutes per frame at this point. Aren't drones just fun!! dl.dropbox.com/s/1jv12pj0yvc2m70/20170826033924_1.jpg?dl=0First salvo takes down 11 drones, 4 still left. Second wave of drones opens fire at this point. dl.dropbox.com/s/4pxufwdr18ad24u/20170826033946_1.jpg?dl=0And they're all dead. ~1.1Mc of drones versus 5.2 Mc of laser drones. All lasers dead, only 30% of gun drones dead. Looks like laser drones with railguns aren't all that unbeatable either. Now that that's cleared up maybe I can go back to more fun designs. All these bugs and frame rates are driving me mad.
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