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Post by leerooooooy on Oct 7, 2016 18:46:51 GMT
Gyrojets are also a pretty good counter to laser sniping because the approaching missiles will kick the lasers into point-defense mode, which means they are no longer targeting your ships. As long as the cannons can spit out micro-missiles faster than the lasers can pop them, the enemy will be unable to target you and the missiles will eventually kill them. The missiles home in on the radiator section though, so it doesn't change the fact that the only armor laser turrets need is a thin layer of basalt fiber (because they can't use silica aerogel) to delay enemy lasers. That's why targeting modules is important. First you snipe the gyrojep spitting modules, then the long range guns, then the mid range guns, then when the gyros are within 50 Km your laser intensity is 16x what it was at 200, you target them for cleanup, they die in a few seconds. Wait a minute... 1.01 GW and 71 MW? Those must be my reactors! Glad they're seeing use. Your 100 MW design is a fantastic improvement, but this one might have a few flaws. The mass breakdown is 50% boron armour, 45% lead reaction wheels, 5% other stuff, and the cost breakdown is 70% boron 20% lead. Cutting down on armour allows a switch to lithium reaction wheels, which are stupidly cheap and lightweight. Using lithium and keeping the armour results in minuscule rotation speed (2-3 degrees per second) which might be acceptable considering the range this thing should work at, and basically halves the weight. I am going to try 4mm of amorphous carbon and 100rpm lithium, let's hope it fares well My thought process justifying it is as follows. You can swap boron to UHMWPE and wheels to cadmium fairly easily; this results in a bit over 30t weight. But the cost skyrockets due to 3cm of UHMWPE (may or may not be worth it, but I'm stingy). Lighter reaction wheels while leaving the armor alone require far higher power to sustain at this targeting speed. Your preferred power balance may differ, and you may accept a lower speed. I'm uncomfortable lowering the armor on the turret further than this, since it represents a pretty sizable investment on the ship (1GW of reactor, plus assorted radiators for both reactor and laser, plus ship armor wrapping the reactor, plus dV to move all this). The weight is already 50% lighter than an equivalent 10 of my 100MW lasers, while having more power and higher intensity than such a collective. Yeah your reactor is nice for compact laser designs for sure. My low armour, lithium wheels edit is 4.57 t and 48.3 kc, so I just placed 5 and upped the reactors a bit. It works ok against low intensity nuking and stray flak, but any serious hit will take it out. Any idea for the radiators? Diamond, carbon and graphite all seem great all around materials, but probably there's more to it.
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Post by leerooooooy on Oct 7, 2016 19:12:59 GMT
One thing that you need to keep in mind with lasers is that they are childishly easy to protect against. If you just have some aerogel or basalt fiber outer coat for your armor lasers just stop being useful. And if you provide your turrets with a thin coat of basalt fiber or heck a thick coat it'll be fairly lightweight and nearly impervious to all lasers. And it turns out spamming flack warheads or nuke warheads from a coil gun is really effective along with missiles. And it is easy to protect projectiles and missiles from lasers with the same type of armor. Lasers scale quadratically as distance goes down, and here we are talking about putting out 20-30 times more intensity than what stock designs seem to expect. Unless you pull off 8-10 km/s intercepts not even nukes will get close enough to do any damage, if you pack too much armour you will need tons of fuel to get decent dV, and a cheap nuke missile will take yours out for 1/10th of the price. Also, I tested basalt fiber and guess what it only delays the inevitable, once you are within 20 Km you will need a good 0.5m to make it any closer
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Lasers
Oct 7, 2016 19:20:28 GMT
Post by captinjoehenry on Oct 7, 2016 19:20:28 GMT
Um I do not know what you are doing wrong but if you do not kill the ship with kinetics before you hit 20km or heck even 50km for big ships you need to redesign your kinetic weapons. Because it turns out firing a 30kg coil gun at less than 10km/s at many rounds per second will annihilate all but the toughest ships. I can post a design of one such weapon if you like. And if you can launch multiple flack rounds from a coil gun which are protected by just a single cm of areogel will really screw with your lasers as they try to intercept them when they are coming in at around 10/s from each gun.
Mind you I could just be wrong as I have not tested these designs.
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Post by leerooooooy on Oct 7, 2016 19:57:29 GMT
Um I do not know what you are doing wrong but if you do not kill the ship with kinetics before you hit 20km or heck even 50km for big ships you need to redesign your kinetic weapons. Because it turns out firing a 30kg coil gun at less than 10km/s at many rounds per second will annihilate all but the toughest ships. I can post a design of one such weapon if you like. And if you can launch multiple flack rounds from a coil gun which are protected by just a single cm of areogel will really screw with your lasers as they try to intercept them when they are coming in at around 10/s from each gun. Mind you I could just be wrong as I have not tested these designs. First, that was a lasers only test to see how good a ludicrous amount of the best armor was. The answer is clearly "not good enough". Silica Aerogel is a lot better for the same weight but is weak vs everything else. Second, the coilgun you are describing is bugged. Almost all coilguns and railguns are bugged, the stock 286mm one is especially noticeable with over 1000% efficiency, and several designs can break the 1000km/s barrier. Third, you are not supposed to leave your lasers tickling the armour when the enemy is 200 km away. You use them to wipe out weaponry, radiators, everything that can be damaged before moving on to the tough targets. How much basalt fiber can your turrets (those that can use it, laser turrets can't for one) afford? 2 cm? Post a turret design and I'll test it
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Post by apophys on Oct 7, 2016 20:18:35 GMT
Any idea for the radiators? Diamond, carbon and graphite all seem great all around materials, but probably there's more to it. I'm thinking relatively thin amorphous carbon with a diamond finish. Amorphous carbon is light, strong, has great specific heat, and is tested to be acceptably resistant to lasers on its own (much more so than solid diamond, for the weight). A diamond surface should help shatter/ricochet projectiles (extreme shear modulus) and spread nuke/laser heat across the radiator (excellent thermal conductivity). Graphite is a bit more laser-resistant due to its lower thermal conductivity, but this also makes it a worse radiating material, so it has to be even thinner (or else it faces efficiency losses). The lower melting point & strength, and higher density, don't help. With laser radiators at 1234K, boron is a valid option for cheapness and strength. It hits efficiency losses pretty quickly, though, so it has to be really thin. I see multiple people using diamond radiators (for reactors, not lasers), and that's probably because you can get them really thick without losing efficiency. The weight associated with that tactic makes me think it isn't really worth it. I have not tested any radiator scheme, though.
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Lasers
Oct 7, 2016 20:33:22 GMT
Post by leerooooooy on Oct 7, 2016 20:33:22 GMT
Any idea for the radiators? Diamond, carbon and graphite all seem great all around materials, but probably there's more to it. I'm thinking relatively thin amorphous carbon with a diamond finish. Amorphous carbon is light, strong, has great specific heat, and is tested to be acceptably resistant to lasers on its own (much more so than solid diamond, for the weight). A diamond surface should help shatter/ricochet projectiles (extreme shear modulus) and spread nuke/laser heat across the radiator (excellent thermal conductivity). Graphite is a bit more laser-resistant due to its lower thermal conductivity, but this also makes it a worse radiating material, so it has to be even thinner (or else it faces efficiency losses). The lower melting point & strength, and higher density, don't help. With laser radiators at 1234K, boron is a valid option for cheapness and strength. It hits efficiency losses pretty quickly, though, so it has to be really thin. I see multiple people using diamond radiators (for reactors, not lasers), and that's probably because you can get them really thick without losing efficiency. The weight associated with that tactic makes me think it isn't really worth it. I have not tested any radiator scheme, though. I just noticed I've been using paper thin diamond radiators to save weight when I could have used amorphous carbon with its lower density... it's like a 35% save too well then
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Lasers
Oct 11, 2016 18:09:45 GMT
Post by concretedonkey on Oct 11, 2016 18:09:45 GMT
And this is what I plan to mount on my bigger defensive drones... This particular design relies on a big aperature and sacrifices turning angle. I've yet to test it properly, but the MWs its pumping at a distance seem quite impressive for the moment.
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Lasers
Oct 11, 2016 18:17:33 GMT
Post by captinjoehenry on Oct 11, 2016 18:17:33 GMT
Along the line of simply insane lasers I present two 1GW lasers! The first one (I'm in class so I don't have the game and power at 240km I recall being over 2000mw/m^2): The second one is the biggest one I could mount two of on my super ship. It has 21,500mw/m^2 at 240km: Both of these things have 100cm of basalt fiber so if you remove it and save a huge amount they'll be faster turning and FAR FAR cheaper. I have also made a much more useful 130mw laser but I don't have a screen shot of it right now.
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Lasers
Oct 11, 2016 19:56:35 GMT
Post by normalitybytes on Oct 11, 2016 19:56:35 GMT
concretedonkey, I think we have roughly the same idea. Here's the design I plan to use on my 36MW beam drone. I think at scale your 20MW design might be better. Let me know when you have a ship design - I'd love to test them against each other. Is there any way to add full-size screenshots without uploading them to some third-party host?
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Lasers
Oct 11, 2016 20:23:38 GMT
Post by concretedonkey on Oct 11, 2016 20:23:38 GMT
I have a version of the ship but for the moment I'm not really happy with it... its 80 tons and costs 1mc. I'll work a bit more on it and I'll call.
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Lasers
Oct 11, 2016 23:24:17 GMT
Post by redparadize on Oct 11, 2016 23:24:17 GMT
Its sad, Laser are just too expensive to be cost effective. Basicly, my drone cost about 20kc each, and 5 of them can garantee a kill. Right now, a 100kc laser won't be eable to stop them before the damage is done. Even a much more expensive laser can't garantee a survival.
I am awaire that RL laser are insanely expensive, but in the future, with them being more common than now, their price should go down. That 1/3 of the price would still be at the limit of cost effectiveness. That would balance it, that or boosting the price of engines.
Edit:
Humm, concretedonkey laser might be eable to do it, it not expensive too. I will test it!
Edit 2:
Nope
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Lasers
Oct 12, 2016 5:42:37 GMT
Post by concretedonkey on Oct 12, 2016 5:42:37 GMT
Yeah the problem seems not to be the laser , when I look at the price its fairly evenly distributed to all components... so kind of mounting a relatively big laser on a drone led to fairly large and expensive radiators , power plant and so on... kind of escalated the whole drone. The laser was quite effective though. I'm pondering if I'll just make it a small capital ship with several of those , or just escalate further miniaturizing it to make a smaller and cheaper drone out of it.
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Lasers
Oct 12, 2016 6:44:43 GMT
Post by dragonkid11 on Oct 12, 2016 6:44:43 GMT
How does one actually armor drones against laser?
I tried to armor my drone in cms of silicon aerogel and boron but they melted away pretty fast.
...Or maybe it's because my drones are going up against 100 megawatt laser.
Either way, still needs to improve them.
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Lasers
Oct 12, 2016 11:04:14 GMT
Post by cuddlefish on Oct 12, 2016 11:04:14 GMT
To be fair re: laser expense and efficiency, the deck is a bit stacked against them, in that both electromagnetic and nuclear weapons have some serious shenanigans in their performance ATM.
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Lasers
Oct 12, 2016 13:55:23 GMT
Post by redparadize on Oct 12, 2016 13:55:23 GMT
After further testing, its still a pretty good laser. I don't think I have anyting that strong for that mass and cost. I can stop quite effectively my 28kg missiles. Even when spammed at a closing speed of 15ks/s. Its a good thing since they carry 10kt nuke. So I will use them!
Edit: But my drone only use conventional guns, So even without Electric gun bug fixed laser would still be noncompetitive. The solution could be to raise cost for tanks and engine, so saturation attack would be less cost effective and it would bring back the quality vs quantity balance. But even if they do that, I would still go for the guarantee kill... I believe they need to make better and lighter large scale turret. That would do it.
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