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Post by 𝕭𝖔𝖔𝖒𝖈𝖍𝖆𝖈𝖑𝖊 on Mar 24, 2018 5:48:33 GMT
Seems like an interesting challenge. Guns have a few things going for them - they scale down to low power and up to large payloads very gracefully (and you can make some *very* interesting payloads if you can go large) and can easily provide huge volumes of fire. Plus, if you find exit velocity inadequate, you can make up for it with sufficiently aggressive intercept. Sure, guns against highly optimized laser stars would be insanely tough, but against stock designs they should do. What about putting weapons on shells? I reckon that blast launchers or even powered ones are very much in this challenge's spirit, but what about putting turrets on engine-less shells? I have a more or less self-stabilizing PD shell with pistol-sized turrets (and a nuke). Sounds interesting. I would love to see that. I honestly think that the turrets are going to be more effective than the nuke if you get the initial velocity to be high enough.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Mar 24, 2018 20:28:45 GMT
Seems like an interesting challenge. Guns have a few things going for them - they scale down to low power and up to large payloads very gracefully (and you can make some *very* interesting payloads if you can go large) and can easily provide huge volumes of fire. Plus, if you find exit velocity inadequate, you can make up for it with sufficiently aggressive intercept. Sure, guns against highly optimized laser stars would be insanely tough, but against stock designs they should do. What about putting weapons on shells? I reckon that blast launchers or even powered ones are very much in this challenge's spirit, but what about putting turrets on engine-less shells? I have a more or less self-stabilizing PD shell with pistol-sized turrets (and a nuke). Sounds interesting. I would love to see that. I honestly think that the turrets are going to be more effective than the nuke if you get the initial velocity to be high enough. Try putting the turrets (3-4) as far behind the center of mass as possible (without blocking their line of fire) - if the shell approaches the target drone swarm nose first, any torque resulting from asymmetric recoil will cause the turret causing the torque to lose line to target and the turrets on the opposite side to apply torque in the opposite direction. Not the most reliable stabilization, but with tiny, fast tracking turrets it should be more than enough for a lifetime of a cannon fired nuke.
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Post by samchiu2000 on Mar 25, 2018 3:49:44 GMT
𝕭𝖔𝖔𝖒𝖈𝖍𝖆𝖈𝖑𝖊 Can we use modded explosive for this challenge? If yes the challenge would be much more plausible due to the OPness of these modded explosive compare to those stock explosive
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Mar 25, 2018 9:01:48 GMT
𝕭𝖔𝖔𝖒𝖈𝖍𝖆𝖈𝖑𝖊 Can we use modded explosive for this challenge? If yes the challenge would be much more plausible due to the OPness of these modded explosive compare to those stock explosive Eh, you can always pre-accelerate your bullets with your engines if you need more oomph or shorter time to target. You don't need to contend with Mm lasers in campaign and those would be the most problematic here. Admittedly limiting yourself to core modules in Vesta could pose some challenges here - partly due to missile fleets and siloship's engagement range (both because having to shoot down fleets of nukes point-blank with CIWS is scary and because Ms Overkill is an asshole and likes to park any missiles you have missed appointments with in weird orbits, making aggressive intercepts less viable), partly due to sheer amount of lag 60mm produces.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Mar 27, 2018 16:07:01 GMT
Ok, so far I'd even risk saying that you should be able to beat stock design in campaign with combustion guns using only stock modules. I have managed to build a fairly decent gunboat (1kt, 1MW), that, while wimpy by any custom standards - even those with self-imposed limitations like using only stock power generation - (read: can't solo Main Belt Extraction, needs around 3 ships and good intercept to help defocus enemy fire and manage the mission without high risk of attrition or even failure), can handle itself in battle. Maxing out the mass budget (13 ships) seems to allow it to beat Vesta as well, with somewhere around 80% survival rate (with a bit of luck and smart use of scatter 100% survival is possible, although it definitely isn't terribly safe design), without any orbital manoeuvring or trying to run enemies out of deltav (remaining drones hurtling out of intercept are a fair game, though - it's better to leave them be and let them catch back with you if they can, than endure massive 60mm lag). Haven't attempted On The Surface of Giants with it yet, but it has similar enough characteristics to the ship I did use to beat it, that it should have no trouble making it. So far it's going well... Some observations: - Rapid approach is crucial with conventional guns, because they are effectively melee compared to everything else.
- Conventional guns, with their paltry exit velocities actually have the best chance of bypassing armour sloping - while they are affected by it at least as badly as everything else, their short effective range forces close flybys, where slower enemy may fail to reorient in time and slow bullet demand greater leading which causes more roboteching if there is any significant perpendicular velocity involved (so nose oriented enemy can still be hit in the flank).
- Stock NTRs are an immense pain to work with - the methane one provides borderline adequate thrust, but is huge and easily damaged, especially when you pack 3 on a 1kt ship while avoiding protective skirt that would balloon your frontal cross-section as if it was nuke wrapped in Scrith. Of course, without skirt, the engines keep getting shot off as the ship waggles them around to manoeuvre while under fire.
- 13 might not be the optimal number for Vesta - I have noticed that, small manoeuvrable ships can often work well solo or in small groups but when sent out in droves they start to die also in droves. OTOH there is this thing with engines falling off like autumn leaves.
- Rad shielding with stock rad shields is hard with 3 big, poorly shielded engines on such a small ship. I have ended up putting CM almost in the nose where it dies too easily without a big propellant tank or some machinery in the way of enemy rounds. Disturbingly, it tends to pop the entire ship apart when bursting - I don't know why.
- My armour still makes better job looking cool than providing the kind of protection I expect from it.
- I actually like playing with stock modules - other than engines and radshields.
- A spinal battery of (in this case) 10x stock 33mm cannons makes an interesting shotgun/rake effect when fired at incoming ships or drones - highly accurate 60mm turret will often run its entire stream of bullets through the exact same spot just off enemy's hull (because they have accelerated in the mean time) or the same bullet hole, between internal modules you actually hoped to pop, and out the same exit hole. A rake of 33mm bullets will usually hit *something*, which makes it good at, for example, thinning out incoming drone swarms before handing them over to 60mm PD (and scattering out of the way of their 33mm bullets - it's basically a ballistic game of chicken).
Edit:Blueprints:
CraftBlueprint [DCA]Assault Gunboat [Core] Modules 1.04 MW Thermoelectric Fission Reactor 1 2.5117 null 0 0 2x20 Titanium Carbide Radiator 4 15.961 1.04 MW Thermoelectric Fission Reactor 0.78 0 40 Crew Module 1 13.191 null 0 0 100 t Methane Tank 1 7.3473 null 0 0 6.19 km/s Methane Gimballed Nuclear Thermal Rocket 3 0.30854 null 1.57 0 10.0 t Methane Tank 8 13.187 null 0 0 8.00 m Diameter Polyethylene Radiation Shield 1 13.189 null 0 0 2.50 t Methane Tank 6 26.75 null 0 1 10.0 t Methane Tank 2 0.75585 null 0 0 2.50 t Methane Drop Tank 2 48.658 null 5.97 0 10.0 t Methane Drop Tank 4 40.277 null 0.78 0 2.50 t Methane Drop Tank 2 48.495 null 0.31 0 6x2 Silicon Dioxide Radiator 2 45.098 40 Crew Module 0 0 6x2 Silicon Dioxide Radiator 3 52.148 40 Crew Module 4.71 0 60mm Turreted Cannon 1 65.323 null 4.25 0 60mm Turreted Cannon 2 14.588 null 1.13 0 10.0 t Methane Tank 1 24.867 null 0 0 100 t Methane Drop Tank 2 35.827 null 0 0 10.0 t Methane Drop Tank 4 31.801 null 0.78 0 2.50 t Methane Drop Tank 2 48.586 null 0 0 2.50 t Methane Tank 18 16.115 null 0 2 2.50 t Methane Tank 8 10.393 null 0 4 2.50 t Methane Tank 12 10.28 null 0 6 2.50 t Methane Tank 12 10.33 null 0.26 7 33mm Internal Cannon 4 67.4 null 0.78 0 33mm Internal Cannon 3 67.53 null 3.14 5 7.00 m Diameter Polyethylene Radiation Shield 1 13.183 null 0 0 33mm Internal Cannon 3 67.536 null 0 3 60mm Turreted Cannon 2 34.045 null 2 0 Armor Shape Hexagonal Concave true ArmorLayers Para-Aramid Fiber 0.01 0 0.1 1 1 0 Boron Filament 0.01 0 0.19 1 1 0 Graphite Aerogel 0.45 0 0.075 1 1 0 Aluminum 0.003 0 0.19 1 1 0 Titanium Nitride 0.001 0 0.18 1 1 0 Diamond 0.001 0.01 0.55 1 1 0 Titanium Dioxide 0.0005 0.01 0.437 0.54 1 0 Graphite Aerogel 0.3 0 0.075 0.2 1 0 Liquid Crystal Polymer Fiber 0.005 0.01 0.075 0.2 1 0
Exterior: Internals:
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Mar 28, 2018 11:30:10 GMT
This design does Surface of Giants easily enough, with similarly restricted (core modules only) modified tanker. The main complication is that tanker has much crappier thrust with stock propulsion which gets in the way of final manoeuvring. Managed two nice runs, the second one was somewhat tricky because I wanted to make the intercept on Neptune's day side which required actual circularization instead of just elliptical swoop (co-planar, retrograde) - ended up leaving the tanker on a trajectory that turned out to intersect the titular surface. On the upside, I managed to fly by just narrowly avoiding the collision, sniped the CM and only the CM along with its radiator and only used up 12.2km/s delta-v. I also took shots:
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Mar 28, 2018 11:44:24 GMT
Vesta: - Stock Modules
- Cannons only
- 100% survival run
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Apr 1, 2018 12:18:19 GMT
Solar Ties required some changes: - large, exposed engine bells plus laser happy opponent with a Cutter and unhealthy nozzle fetish are not a happy mix.
- when practising orthodox Dakkaism, big swarms of small ships (and small ships only make sense when you only have small stock guns that don't need much power and need to intercept aggressively because of awful exit velocity) quickly become more dangerous to themselves than any incoming enemy fire - there is just too much BRRRAPPP! flying everywhere. I needed something heavier in my mix.
Addressing the first was simple enough - a bit of rearrangement yielded design with only slightly worse characteristics and larger cross-section, but with a roughly conical bulge hiding engines from the front (angular armour is more efficient at hiding components behind blisters) - strictly worse against swarms of lower velocity kinetics and typical combustion gun drones, but better against lasers and light hypervelocity impacts. The latter was addressed by taking this (more or less Gunship equivalent tracking its ancestry to a heavily modified Laser Frigate) and performing a hasty hatchet job (I actually did it earlier in the interest of pure ludicrousness - it has 58 spinal 33mm cannons making the nose look like giant shower-head and somewhat unhealthy number of 60mm turrets). Against all expectations, the resulting Gunship-size space shotgun turned out to be quite interesting - still significantly overpowered due to taking geometric considerations first when reducing reactor power and radiator mass (I wanted to avoid redoing the entire stack + radials arrangement at all cost and stock 13MW is almost exactly half of of stock 60MW length - may pay off when I experiment with customized variant or try to turn the entire thing into my first carrier), it ended up with a lot of delta-v (shedding a lot of dry mass compared to the original), good manoeuvrability (retaining original's MethLOX RCS and boosters) and ability to project an equivalent of huge, non-dispersing, continuously detonating flak. Bad against drone swarms (big and only able to project single deathshower), but scary against capships (surprisingly managed to beat MBE with it with no subsystem loss and only clipped radiator). This kind of battery fire also has much longer effective range than single cannon so it can be fired quite effectively with ignore range (creating even more lag). In the end I made a beeline for the NP main fleet as I didn't have patience for their lancer drone shenanigans (not that they could do anything to stop me from dictating terms of intercept, as Hiveship is almost mobility killed by default), and beat the collection of NP's Hobart's Funnies without much fuss apart from horrible lag (I didn't even see Hiveship's inevitable explosion - seriously, has anyone found any use for this thing or stock nuke cannon in general? Other than very respectable 33 and 60mm stock cannons are terribad) and accidentally losing one small ship to friendly fire (I disabled RCS and boosters on the big ship to conserve oxidizer, making it lag behind on just NTRs (roughly Gunship's acceleration instead of around 1.5G), allowing one of the small gunboats to run in front of the showerhead and get hosed in the reactor). Having plenty of delta-v I then chased down remaining drone swarms. As usual, pictures:
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Apr 1, 2018 14:03:22 GMT
The demonstration of the reason why I decided to do it with stock components only - Vesta, only custom cannons (not even payload firing ones), engines and tankage (all hail the mighty VCS!): Basically, set to broadside, ignore range, and break out the popcorn (ok, set priority targets, sometimes launch flares and occasionally exit encounter instead of flailing futilely at rapidly receding drones, but no micro or orbital manoeuvring - just go with the flow. And I believe most of the damage here including pretty much everything serious, like subsystem loss was the result of friendly fire or bumping into decoys while in formation - the most of the rest was small holes in the aft section where the cutter tried to get at the decoy launchers. I am still dithering between 2 and 3 engine version (acceleration VS delta-v, endurance and better safety margins against accidentally mushing the crew), but either way this thing flies like a fighter, can be deployed in droves and turns stock designs into Swiss cheese: (compilation from more than one run - excuse the naming chaos, I'm trying to work on a good naming scheme) Around giants or even terrestrial planets the high accelerations needed for effective orbital manoeuvring, high orbital velocities, high mass projectiles and low power requirements (small reactors with small radiators mean small ships or large mass ratios) all conspire to make conventional gun more powerful.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on May 20, 2018 0:07:00 GMT
After beating Dusk Over Triton with my carrier (souped up non-stock version of "Leviathan" carrying, among other things, refined variants of my Hellfire and Stinger replacements, lots of missiles and so on) by actually not bothering to intercept Triton prograde, but instead splitting off 10 my "Thunderbolts" (for the enemy group without Solar Lance - 8 survived) and a bunch of missiles (for the group with Solar Lance), then botching the latter and actually running into enemy fleet with the carrier, small escort skiff and a tanker (at Neptunian retrograde velocity, no less), resulting in only 66.7% ships unscathed, I decided to try it with stock modules, cannon only vessels (basically the same ships I used before, apart from naming and some armour tweaks). The fleet consisted of 7 such vessels and 2 10kt tankers and this time I decided to do it properly by injecting around Triton, instead of playing chicken with entire moon and divebombing both fleets with crap. Of course I was still going to intercept retrograde - because with conventional guns against lasers and railguns prograde is kinda suicidal - only just around Triton. Intercept of the first fleet - Gunship and Corvette - went quite well, 7 volley firing batteries of 10x33mm cannons each turn out to not be something stock designs are prepared to counter, unfortunately one of my tankers got first mobility killed, then lost its reactors and ended up a picturesque wreck. The Solar Lance and Siloship proved slightly more troublesome. Siloship did the usual Siloship thing (albeit only after getting gently prodded in the missile bays) but the Solar Lance survived the encounter with just a few small holes in one of the radiators, while managing to turn one of the ships into a station (the remaining tanker became a station on its own initiative before by transferring every last drop of delta-v to the combat fleet). What happened next was the Solar Lance repeatedly trolling the 6 still mobile ships by dodging intercepts. Eventually an intercept succeeded and Solar Lance got Swissed, although it managed to de-engine further one or two ships. Final result: 7 combat craft, 2 tankers, all but one of the tankers surviving, albeit with some immobilized in orbit around Triton. Pichurz:
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Jun 2, 2018 22:31:08 GMT
Turns out Jovian Lunar Tour doesn't allow customization, so I'll need to beat it the hard way and outside of scope of this thread.
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Post by 𝕭𝖔𝖔𝖒𝖈𝖍𝖆𝖈𝖑𝖊 on Jun 5, 2018 3:57:49 GMT
Turns out Jovian Lunar Tour doesn't allow customization, so I'll need to beat it the hard way and outside of scope of this thread. that's a hard mode lol, but as I said, "No railguns, coilguns, missiles, or drones... except on missions where it forces you to have their ships."
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Jun 5, 2018 16:53:58 GMT
Turns out Jovian Lunar Tour doesn't allow customization, so I'll need to beat it the hard way and outside of scope of this thread. that's a hard mode lol, but as I said, "No railguns, coilguns, missiles, or drones... except on missions where it forces you to have their ships." It's rather symptomatic when playing the game in default way is actually much harder (those Marauders with their 60MW coilguns are downright nasty when your ship can't really dodge and has only 2 fragile crew radiators - raining flaks on them should work, but this time I will have to watch Jupiter's gravitational influence closer - gah) than rather restrictive self-imposed challenge (I have so far used only conventional guns *and* only stock modules for this challenge and still found it rather easy).
Stock ships could really use some improvements.
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siskinedge
New Member
Working on a All conventional guns single ship campaign run
Posts: 18
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Post by siskinedge on Jun 17, 2018 20:15:05 GMT
Any chance we can use unguided rockets, I want to use some dumbfire interceptors on one of my designs.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Jun 18, 2018 5:02:07 GMT
Any chance we can use unguided rockets, I want to use some dumbfire interceptors on one of my designs. How successful are you at aiming those things? I found aiming blast launched unpowered payloads more than painful enough.
Anyway, you can always try combustion guns only AND stock components only for extra fun. (Tested, extra fun confirmed - the game could use more variety, though - currently before the last mission).
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