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Lasers
Oct 4, 2016 5:49:38 GMT
Post by concretedonkey on Oct 4, 2016 5:49:38 GMT
Guys , the most frustrating thing I tried to design in this game are lasers... my attempts in this were... pathetic...
Yesterday I experimented a bit with micro drones, quite unoptimized for the moment but really tiny... could be a perfect platform for a tiny laser, but the smallest stock one is 6 times its weight...
So how do you approach this?
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Lasers
Oct 4, 2016 11:22:05 GMT
Post by pokington on Oct 4, 2016 11:22:05 GMT
I've spent some time trying to optimize the stock lasers. There's not much you can do to shrink them while maintaining power level, as far as I can tell. The best you can do is the following: drop the aperture size and increase the power level until you are uncomfortable with generating that much power on a drone, then shrink the turret inner radius until it can't be made any smaller.
The laser's effect on target is directly proportional to aperture radius, which also means it's directly proportional to the turret inner radius. What this means is that, unfortunately for drones, is that bigger, heavier lasers are (almost? please prove me wrong) always significantly more powerful for the same construction materials and power level.
tl;dr I made a 500kW laser that's a few cm smaller in all directions when compared to the stock 400kW laser with slightly improved intensity, but it's only maybe 30kg lighter, so probably not applicable for your drones.
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Lasers
Oct 4, 2016 11:44:19 GMT
Post by concretedonkey on Oct 4, 2016 11:44:19 GMT
I don't expect wonders and burning turrets on capital ships... the purpose of those drones was to be able to mount an effective defense against enemy drone waves on relatively small ships... I wanted to try to mitigate the power problem by using 20 40 of them at the same time. with 50 60 kg per drone you can mount them on just about anything... I had a normal sized drone that carried 5 of them without any problems + a decent additional weapon.
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Post by pokington on Oct 4, 2016 12:10:09 GMT
I guess what I'm saying is that you can't have your cake and eat it too. You can have either low power consumption and large size or high power consumption and small size, but you can't have both. If you try both, it won't be much more than a glorified flashlight, and it won't even burn through a cm of Reinforced C-C without you looking at your watch.
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Lasers
Oct 4, 2016 12:22:53 GMT
Post by concretedonkey on Oct 4, 2016 12:22:53 GMT
The whole idea is probably quite unpractical . I'll do some tests with stock ones to see if a large number of less powerful lasers are doing the same thing as a single large one. Probably not but... if it does I'll bang my head a bit more.
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aiyel
Junior Member
Posts: 83
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Lasers
Oct 4, 2016 12:43:21 GMT
Post by aiyel on Oct 4, 2016 12:43:21 GMT
you could use your microdrones as a big composite aperture superlaser. it doesn't matter if each individual laser is 50kw of you have a thousand of them.
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acatalepsy
Junior Member
Not Currently In Space
Posts: 97
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Post by acatalepsy on Oct 4, 2016 15:15:21 GMT
Alternatively, get over to the reactor thread and start mounting Dhan's pokington's nuclear minifridge. If the problem is that you don't have enough power to melt your enemies from two hundred kilometers away...get more power!
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Post by nivik on Oct 4, 2016 15:32:02 GMT
I've spent some time trying to optimize the stock lasers. There's not much you can do to shrink them while maintaining power level, as far as I can tell. The best you can do is the following: drop the aperture size and increase the power level until you are uncomfortable with generating that much power on a drone, then shrink the turret inner radius until it can't be made any smaller. The laser's effect on target is directly proportional to aperture radius, which also means it's directly proportional to the turret inner radius. What this means is that, unfortunately for drones, is that bigger, heavier lasers are (almost? please prove me wrong) always significantly more powerful for the same construction materials and power level. tl;dr I made a 500kW laser that's a few cm smaller in all directions when compared to the stock 400kW laser with slightly improved intensity, but it's only maybe 30kg lighter, so probably not applicable for your drones. Frequency is also a major factor. Higher frequencies mean less divergence, which means more irradiance at range. In my experimenting, I haven't found a single reason not to go for the highest frequency possible.
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Lasers
Oct 4, 2016 16:55:55 GMT
Post by concretedonkey on Oct 4, 2016 16:55:55 GMT
Holly%*&^#(*%#& what a reactor ... oook so I'll go the other way around , I'll start with the powerplant and that will give me the power budget and the minimal size of the drone. Thank you all , I'll keep you posted!
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Post by Dhan on Oct 4, 2016 17:08:39 GMT
Alternatively, get over to the reactor thread and start mounting Dhan's nuclear minifridge. If the problem is that you don't have enough power to melt your enemies from two hundred kilometers away...get more power! That's pokington's reactor design, not mine.
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acatalepsy
Junior Member
Not Currently In Space
Posts: 97
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Lasers
Oct 4, 2016 17:24:25 GMT
via mobile
Post by acatalepsy on Oct 4, 2016 17:24:25 GMT
That's pokington's reactor design, not mine. Whoops! Fixed.
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Lasers
Oct 5, 2016 4:14:27 GMT
Post by concretedonkey on Oct 5, 2016 4:14:27 GMT
So the results were good and bad at the same time. First I did a very dirty test for the whole concept. Used a copy of the stock 13MW laser, decreased the power to 10 and compared the results of 10 of those against a single 100MW one. It looked like it was killing drones faster than the single large one, but it was close. Then I copied the design of the minifrige and decreased the cooling to squeeze more power. FIrst attempt was at around 600kW. Radiators turned out way too large. Decresased power untill around 200kW and radiator size was descent. Reactor shrank to about 10 kg. Then copied the stock 400kW laser, decreased power to 200 and managed to decrease weight to around 100kg. Range suffered badly. Cavity was still around 67x68 cm so when I mounted it on the drone it was protruding from the sides of the bow. Quite ugly . The resulting drone was between 500kg and a ton depending on the desired delta V , still small enough for me to sqeeze 500 of them on a descent sized ship. It was driven first by a descently effective decane NTR with around 600 700 TWR which was taken from a sprint missile. Turned out to be a bad idea , drones were burning the delta V for less then a second and dying fast. Decreased the engine to 100 200 TWR. Tested it in wings of 5 to 100 drones. Turned out the range was the weakest point. Drone was working fine enough in the final form it just wasn't efectively killing anything fast enough to save the mother ship from being blown to bits. I'll go the other way around again. Try to find the smallest practical laser that is still efective then do a drone to carry it. I have a strong feeling however that the drone will not fit the micro definition however. Edit: Turns out blothorn actually worked in the same direction . His hailstorm drone looks quite a lot like my tests but with a gun instead of a small laser. Size is similar , mine were a little fatter with the pathetic laser instead of a gun. He managed to get the laser one to 4 tons and a 2.5 MW laser.
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Post by pokington on Oct 5, 2016 10:34:47 GMT
So the results were good and bad at the same time. First I did a very dirty test for the whole concept. Used a copy of the stock 13MW laser, decreased the power to 10 and compared the results of 10 of those against a single 100MW one. It looked like it was killing drones faster than the single large one, but it was close. Then I copied the design of the minifrige and decreased the cooling to squeeze more power. FIrst attempt was at around 600kW. Radiators turned out way too large. Decresased power untill around 200kW and radiator size was descent. Reactor shrank to about 10 kg. Then copied the stock 400kW laser, decreased power to 200 and managed to decrease weight to around 100kg. Range suffered badly. Cavity was still around 67x68 cm so when I mounted it on the drone it was protruding from the sides of the bow. Quite ugly . The resulting drone was between 500kg and a ton depending on the desired delta V , still small enough for me to sqeeze 500 of them on a descent sized ship. It was driven first by a descently effective decane NTR with around 600 700 TWR which was taken from a sprint missile. Turned out to be a bad idea , drones were burning the delta V for less then a second and dying fast. Decreased the engine to 100 200 TWR. Tested it in wings of 5 to 100 drones. Turned out the range was the weakest point. Drone was working fine enough in the final form it just wasn't efectively killing anything fast enough to save the mother ship from being blown to bits. I'll go the other way around again. Try to find the smallest practical laser that is still efective then do a drone to carry it. I have a strong feeling however that the drone will not fit the micro definition however. Edit: Turns out blothorn actually worked in the same direction . His hailstorm drone looks quite a lot like my tests but with a gun instead of a small laser. Size is similar , mine were a little fatter with the pathetic laser instead of a gun. He managed to get the laser one to 4 tons and a 2.5 MW laser. You're better off leaving the coolant temperature where it is. Your radiators already weigh more than the reactor, and by decreasing the outlet temp you're adding a lot of radiator. The mini fridge already makes 234(?) kW anyway, so by dropping outlet temp to that point you just added a bunch of mass for no gain in power. And yeah, you're going to have to compromise a lot of the laser, since they are pretty fat to fit their apertures.
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Lasers
Oct 5, 2016 11:00:12 GMT
Post by concretedonkey on Oct 5, 2016 11:00:12 GMT
Already did that even dropped it more - to 200 and managed to get it almost below 10 kg, it was just a test at 600... anyway, its dead Jim. I'll have to think for a lot more power, probably more than 1 MW, it will be a different bird... not a micro drone.
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Lasers
Oct 5, 2016 13:21:41 GMT
Post by elouda on Oct 5, 2016 13:21:41 GMT
My own attempt at the 'mini laser drone concept'. They work alright defensively, but don't really have the dV to stay on target offensively: RDL StarlightThis, of course, let to a larger version: RDL PolarisThese are actually really useful for stripping weapons like the 286mms and engines from craft before contact. A 4kt 'minicarrier' holds 20 plus a solid kinetic loadout, along with refuelling capability.
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