Cyborg's anti-kinetic armor research thread

I have a spreadsheet on google docs link, uploaded onto my edgy 'evetzthenightamrehunter' account I made in middle school that I now use for stuff like this. But will continue to copy important information onto the forums.

Awhile Back I posted a thread asking how to test armor; and finally got around to doing some tests.

I'm calling these preliminary tests and want to retest these. I tested various armor configurations against 5 crossbow railguns. (You can find them on my ships on the steam workshop. 2.5g round at 15km/sec every 77.7ms.) I also plan to change the configuration to a single gun in the future. The quality of the armor configuration is determined by timing the amount of time between recieving the 'enemy armor is being damaged' notification and the 'enemies are no longer a threat' notification. The testing configuration has the enemy nose-forward and targets an MPD on the back of their ship. The enemy becomes disabled when the armor fails and the shots destroy the unprotected crew compartment and reactor directly behind it. The armor was sloped into a cone at 45deg. I want to retest with flat-on armor.

The default armor configuration I worked with was an 8cm Amorphous Carbon layer with a 5cm Aluminum Whipple shield spaced at 1m. I intended to start with the armor configuration of the stock gunship, as it is one of the more durable stock ships. Though I used amorphous carbon when the gunship uses reinforced carbon carbon. At some point I tested the RCC and found it didn't survive as long as the Amorph Carbon.

Number of Whipple shields and survival time:

Wow, more layers of armor keeps you alive longer, what a groundbreaking discovery . with each whip buying you an extra second or two. Weirdly it drops off at 9, and also weirdly the single whipple design barely preformed better than the no-whipple design. Though these are preliminary tests and I want to retest under different circumstances. Because the single whipple design preformed only margially better than the naked design, I preformed subsequent tests with three whipple shields.

Here I experimented with Whipple shield composition and survival time. All configurations are backed by an 8cm Amorphous Carbon layer, the three Whipple shields are spaced 1m and are 5mm thick. The only thing that was changed was the material the whips were made out of.


Now this was where results get interesting. I expected something on the list of materials that I tested to outperform aluminum, at least in terms of survival time. But aluminum actually holds up really well. I want to rerun this test in the new configuration soon. Diamond and Beta Titanium work just as well; well enough that the slow reflexes on my iphone stopwatch app might be to blame. Though aluminum seems like an obvious choice being less dense and expensive than the competitors.

At some point I got curious about Whipple shield thickness, though I only averaged and recorded survival times on paper, then later copied them down and don't have the values for each test. If people want it, I'll make a google doc for my armor tests so in the future you can see the values for each test. I actually retested the naked 8cm amorph carbon and the baseline configuration (x3 5mm aluminum whipples) in this test, and used those survival times.


It looks like there's some weirdness going on here with 5mm outpreforming both 4 and 6mm. Maybe that's a sweet spot in where the shield breaks up the projectile but doesn't break into plasma and destroy the layers below it. I'm not sure of the guts of how the armor simulation works. Even weirder is the very thin whips negatively impacting the survival time of the spacecraft. It looks like there might be a sweet spot in there around 3mm in where you could have a relatively thin whip that gets you good results. Of course that may only be the case with this particular kinetic projectile. I will be investigating different guns in the future.

Now all of these tests have gone up against five guns firing simultaneously. I wanted to change that for future tests and got curious and only have a single gun. That probably means I will use a thinner layer to get reasonable times. I don't want the tests to be too short, as I won't be able to time them accurately, or too long as I have a life outside of nerdy space games and can't be bothered to sit and wait for 5 minutes on each test while a gun chews through armor.


So survival time is ~90sec/number of guns in this setup. Well I don't know what I expected.

Anyways, I'll test more when I have time.

Edit: Oops; some of my tables don't have borders. Oh well.