Coilgun optimization....

thanks, im on mobile so i cant test it yet.

Recently I've been doing lots of tweaks on a ship design that uses a coilgun as its primary armament.
So instead of going for pure coilgun efficiency, I also tried to keep the power usage (13MW), weight and size relatively low, so the ship could keep a small cross-section. Low price as well, to afford multiple ships.

Also have a slightly scaled-up variant, with a 10kg shell instead of a 5kg one. The 5kg is more precise, faster and lighter, but the 10kg shell has the neat side effect of being heavy enough to knock enemy ships into a spin. I usually have both types in a fleet since the ships themselves are pretty cheap.


By the way, has anyone experimented with flak payloads for coilguns ? I've done some quick tests, and while they do less internal damage that standard shells, they're very good at destroying exposed weapons and radiators. Ideally, with a big enough spread and burst distance, you could even get a greater chance to hit, but I haven't found the right flak settings to do that.


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I have; and I do like them.



This is the coilgun I'm using on my drones. It fires 100g submunition projectiles (100g shrapnel + a bit of explosive) at over 9km/s. I've had to increase that explosive due to the lack of options on proximity detonation; originally, the idea was to detonate it at about 2 kilometres out.




And that's what an attack looks like. Those shrapnel clouds are rendered for about five kilometres into the distance.



Close-in picture. The marked spacecraft is currently targeted; in the image, three or so projectiles are detonating. This should result in quite a bit of internal damage. The spacecraft to the upper left has already been destroyed.



One destroyed spacecraft in the aftermath. Note the shredded armour in the back. Internally, almost everything from the remaining radiator panel to the rear has been destroyed.
Interestingly, spacecraft (try to) dodge payloads, but not projectiles.

In my experiment, I pitted five drones against four laser frigates at 200m/s. Expending about 500 of their 1000 shots each, all of the frigates were destroyed for no damage to the drones. Same result against four Solar Lances.

(Amusingly, during a test against four Solar Lances with the drones' weapons disabled, their weapons were killed after ten seconds, after which the drones missed the lances, killed their own velocity and resumed homing, missed again, killed their own velocity and resumed homing again, and missed again again. During that time, two of the enemy solar lances were apparently destroyed in a collision putting them into a high-frequency spin, and three of the five drones were disabled.)

At the moment, my main issue - aside from the proximity detonation issue - is to make the weapon as resistant as possible against lasers. Any ideas?

We're supposed to put detonators on those?



This is the payload; it's put onto a design consisting only of this, which is then fired from the gun. That works for me. And yes, that screenshot uses a very large explosive filler; that was part of an experiment to make it useful with the current proximity detonators.

And no, they're significantly less useful against 250km-range laser frigates. At those distances, dodge is an issue (again, with current detonator logic). As is computer slowdown due to the number of projectiles underway. In my test, five drones were able to mission-kill one of the five laser frigates. I'd put more armour on them, but that's just not worth it until the weapons survive for longer.

I did notice the thermal armour thread; my drones are using 1cm of silica aerogel; that's not available for turrets. So instead, they're now mounting 5cm of nitrile rubber (they did use one of the ceramics before, but nitrile rubber seems better) and a 5.6cm armour layer of ferritic steel on the barrel. The nitrile rubber does increase the lifetime of the weapon to about 10 seconds, compared to three seconds using ferritic steel for the turret armour too (both tested just entering the range of four default laser frigates with five drones at 200m/s).

Interesting. I made a payload consisting of a flak bomb and no control module and it never detonated, even on direct impacts.

Meanwhile, a frigate after having been visited by 7.42 Mt of nukes:


This is probably a lot heavier than it ought to be...

Part of an attempt to reduce cost of the ammunition - for my standard drone, about 2/3rds of the cost is ammo. Later, I noticed the ammo cost isn't due to the tungsten I've used before (and am now using again), but due to the magnetic metal glass (originally 230g per bullet; I've reduced it to 75g in my current version).