Conventional guns

Yeah, I would definitely like some super small control module that can only be used in combat once due to its short battery life.

That would make payload firing conventional cannon more mass efficient.

What is that guns mass and cost ?

The kkv turret weighs 24.6 tons with 10 cm boron carbide....30 degree/s
MuzzleV 2.9kms. 17.5km 1000m^2 target.




680 kc...most of it boron carbide.

Ammo sold seperately.

The same design can massively speed up a 500g payload to 4.3 kms by extending bore size and doubling propellant charge.....and 1000m2 only goes up to 25 km.....

Brown is boring.

I think even diamond would be better

Well...the problem is that conventional guns arent realistic anyway you cut it.

IRL the breach is reinforced compared to the rest of the barrel.

The chamber is thicker, barrels are often tapered as well. Visually, there does appear to be a thicker "chamber" being modeled on smaller guns. So maybe this is actually being simulated, with barrel thicknesses also determining a separate chamber thickness that we don't actually see.

Another big thing is the geometry of the propellant grains. Depending on the exact geometry, you can cause the burn rate to increase or decrease over time. Right now I think it just models a sphere of a given radius, but this isn't realistic. In most modern applications, the geometry is cylindrical, with small perforations through the long axis.




This geometry increases the burn rate over time. Most modern smokeless powder is Nitrocelluose based as well. Proper grain geometry in the game would translate to Nitrocelluose keeping its same lower initial pressures, while actually burning completely without an absurdly long barrel. Conversely, you could have other geometries that slow down the burn rate, which could allow you to reduce the huge peak pressures you get with Nitroglycerin or TNT.

At present, conventional guns in the game underperform real world stuff built a century ago. Chamber thickness and grain geometry are probably the two biggest things that could resolve that.

The one other flaw, not critical but still kind of obvious, is the kind of basic calculation to determine that a projectile will shatter. Case in point, even .22LR produces a chamber pressure many times higher than Lead's tensile strength. I suspect whatever calculation is being made here (is it literally just "if gun.peakpressure > projectile.tensilestrength"?) is assuming a piece of material that won't move. But obviously the projectile does move.

One other nice to have that would help make conventional guns a bit more competitive:

Different reloading mechanisms. The electric mechanism is great for achieving incredible rates of fire, whether that's pea shooters firing tens of thousands of rounds per minute, or guns on the scale of old naval artillery firing a hundred rounds per minute. But it can consume a lot of electricity. This is less of an issue on capital ships. But what if I just want an adequate rate of fire for no electricity? Setting up a projectile and powder load of comparable dimensions and mass to a .50BMG, it took me almost 50KW to achieve the 1200RPM of an M3 machine gun. So (ignoring that we also can't match the actual performance of an M3 machine gun right now) to have a drone with a level of firepower comparable to a Korean War era F-86 Sabre (6x M3s), you need 300kw of power generation. And yet, using the gun's own recoil or gas expansion to drive a mechanical reloading system can achieve that same rate of fire. Such mechanisms would of course limit the rate of fire possible, but eliminate the electricity requirements. The ability to have drones with significantly smaller power requirements could actually present an application where conventional guns are the best choice, rather than just a choice.