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Post by Enderminion on May 23, 2017 11:29:31 GMT
Nope. I don't even have the game yet. Wouldn't all that mass together infer greater armor and firepower? If I had a ten kilometer ship, that's ten kilometers you gotta chew up before I stop. I'm speaking entirely out of ignorance, mind you, I don't know these things. sure the ship has two meters of composite armor which I have to change to boron from Amourphus carbon, but the turrets don't, repeated high-yield (megatons) nuking and HV-railguns+10Gw doom lasers can scorch the facing side clean and I can pack enough point defense to survive missiles launched from the shielded part of the ship
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Post by thorneel on May 23, 2017 12:09:35 GMT
Remember that unlike with KSP, you can command several ships at the same time, as well as swarms of drones and/or missiles. So smaller is actually more. Theoretically, one of the most efficient designs is a ship carrying swarms of cheap missiles/drones, but performance reasons generally limit 200-strong swarms, let alone 400000 (and no I didn't put too many zeroes by mistake).
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Post by The Genocide God on May 23, 2017 12:14:17 GMT
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Post by The Astronomer on May 23, 2017 12:17:53 GMT
Remember that unlike with KSP, you can command several ships at the same time, as well as swarms of drones and/or missiles. So smaller is actually more. Theoretically, one of the most efficient designs is a ship carrying swarms of cheap missiles/drones, but performance reasons generally limit 200-strong swarms, let alone 400000 (and no I didn't put too many zeroes by mistake). That 400,000 drone warship, I can remember it ._.
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Post by batflag on May 23, 2017 13:00:46 GMT
Speaking as someone how has spent a great deal of time with KSP and a moderate amount of time with COADE, the games are exploring spacecraft design from two different perspectives. KSP give you granular control of how to place, orient, and combine parts and assemblies, but each part has a set function which can not be modified in the stock game. COADE allows you to modify the parameters of each component (armor, weapons, rockets, reactors, radiators, etc) in amazingly complex and detailed ways, although with less freedom in exactly how each part is placed on the ship, and with a smaller pool of types of parts to work with.
The process of learning and exploring in KSP takes place in the overall configuration and combination of parts to increase your ability to reach new locations and accomplish new tasks. The process of learning in COADE is primarily in learning how to explore the capabilities and interactions of the components of the ships to optimize them for specific doctrines and methods for damaging other ships. For example, you learn about material science, choosing what materials are appropriate for what parts of a vessel, and why. You learn how heat must be managed, including what materials radiate best at what temperatures. You learn the relative merits of hydrogen and decane for propellant (among many, many other options). KSP explores those concepts only tangentially, although because of it's simplifications, KSP instead expends effort to explore many more modes of space exploration.
The scope of KSP is more broad, allwoing exploration on the surface of planetary bodies, exploring atmospheric flight, and exploring space. COADE is tightly focused on combat in space. The visual design tends to be more utilitarian (although some have explored the aesthetic limits of the game system to create really intriguing designs - at some cost to effectiveness).
COADE is a sandbox focused on balancing complex variables within a well-defined use case, while KSP is a lego set simulator which is more open. Both games allow you to create designs which are novel and explore concepts and ideas that the game designers would never have been able to anticipate users would produce.
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Post by AdmiralObvious on May 23, 2017 22:27:27 GMT
Here's the link to all of the science articles the dev wrote about pre-release. childrenofadeadearth.wordpress.comI was a "bigger is better" engineer like you till I took a supervelocity boron slug to the nuclear reactor. Now I focus on trying to go as small as possible, where possible (except that one time I built that 200m bus launcher, which was spectacularly unwieldy to use and had better use as an engine than gun). Also, obligatory hail Boron (if you get the game, you'll learn why).
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Post by ash19256 on May 24, 2017 1:45:03 GMT
One thing I've noticed is that if you want to get into making high-quality ships, I can highly recommend concretedonkey 's Stock ships redesign thread, as I've found the ships in there to be very capable even using stock modules, not even getting into modded materials or the Solar System Organization of Standardization thread's many highly-minmaxed modules (mostly reactors and nuclear fission devices, although I might develop some RP-1 NTRs for the thread at some point). I do however recommend modded materials if you are interested in getting a wider variety of choices when making things.
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Post by apophys on May 24, 2017 1:45:36 GMT
"Bigger is better" is still relevant to lasers if you plan ahead for future patches. Currently, lasers are only functional to a 10 Mm maximum range, even with limit editing (1 Mm is the vanilla limit). But you can extrapolate from the intensity data how far your laser would be effective if the game drew beams that far. Like with my terawatt laserstar (which is an extreme example).
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Post by Argopeilacos on May 24, 2017 6:52:47 GMT
Congrats, third link to the blog in this thread
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Post by Rocket Witch on May 24, 2017 18:29:15 GMT
Ahaha, whackjob; I am familiar. Welcome!
The game has limits primarily for the reasons that the math for calculations breaks down at extremes, or crushes your PC, but I figure the latter won't deter you. Expect crashes from trying stuff like 1000gs of acceleration; though fortunately the game is diligent about logging errors. As it happens, you arrived at a good time, since the last update made min & max module design limits modifiable in a text file found at ...\Children of a Dead Earth\Resources\Data\Limits.txt.
A limit that I believe can't be changed is the maximum of 20 modules in a parallel cluster, and there's no engine clipping, but you should be able to make NTRs that are a few hundred meters long and produce tens or hundreds of giganewtons of thrust.
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Post by newageofpower on May 24, 2017 22:06:44 GMT
Well, bigger IS better in some cases; electric drives, for example, scale better the bigger they get, and the bigger the laser mirror, the farther out you can reach and still maintain critical intensity.
But overall, miniaturization is better.
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Post by treptoplax on May 26, 2017 16:19:39 GMT
So, off top of my head, some differences from KSP:
Construction is single-stack. Weapons,engines, and drop-tanks can be radially mounted or front/rear; structural and other components are in groups along 'spine'; nothing can be radially mounted on a radially mounted bit. You can have empty space (spacers) or blocks of random materials ("radiation shields") in the structure. Armor, if any, is then stretched over all this as a skin; it can be restricted radially or front to back and include gaps ("layer three is 10 cm of vanadium-chromium steel covering 25-50%/90-270degress, one side of middle half of ship). With some finagling you can get shapes that are saucers or wedges rather than grain silos...
Individual components are quite complex ("modules"), but a design can have a lot of really big modules without much issue. Lag death tends to come from launching hundreds of drones/missiles or having thousands of slugs in-flight from a battery of machine-guns rather than designs (but having seen your KSP work, I'm sure you could manage).
Scaling is interesting. Small ship efficiency is limited by minimum crew size (which is quite large). Large ships are much more efficient to armor, but slower, so may be sitting ducks (if I just straight-up double a design, it has 8x mass and marginally higher delta-V but only 4x the thrust because of square/cube issues). Radiators are often gigantic and the most vulnerable part on many designs. The stock modules can be improved on significantly in almost all cases.
There are a lot of parameters in module design. For crew quarters it's just crew held, aspect ratio, wall material, wall thickness (hint: when in doubt, crystalline boron is bizarrely strong and cheap). For a nuclear reactor there are, I dunno, 30 parameters you can tweak (how big is the inner turbo pump? Do you want to use ethane for that coolant loop? Sodium? Water? Mercury?). The "Solar System standard of organization" thread here has a bunch of well-optimized modules.
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Post by Pttg on May 26, 2017 22:08:11 GMT
Crews are slightly more disposable than in KSP.
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Post by apophys on May 26, 2017 22:48:14 GMT
Crews are slightly more disposable than in KSP. I would argue otherwise. Multiple campaign missions count the portion of capital ships you lose or have undamaged, implying they are valuable whereas missiles and drones are not.
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Post by David367th on May 27, 2017 1:41:38 GMT
Crews are slightly more disposable than in KSP. I would argue otherwise. Multiple campaign missions count the portion of capital ships you lose or have undamaged, implying they are valuable whereas missiles and drones are not. But we don't see their names or their faces, therefore we don't care about them all part of the plan
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