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Post by ross128 on Oct 7, 2016 0:39:30 GMT
I would classify the AI's sending an entire launch of missiles against a single drone a bug--the smart policy would seem to be to kill the drone with a small number of missiles and continue the intercept with the rest. Well, the trick to drone interception is not giving them the choice. Once they plot a course for your ship, you launch the drone to counter-intercept. Once you're in the combat screen, control of the missiles is lost: they're going to home in on the nearest heat source (the drone's radiators). The most the AI can do at that point is cancel the missiles' orders, in which case the drone will fly into the formation and set off the prox fuses, or give a scatter order to minimize how many missiles the drone can kamikaze, which will devour the missiles' delta-V (meaning if you change course after that encounter, the missiles won't be able to plot a new intercept). |
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Post by blothorn on Oct 7, 2016 1:01:41 GMT
Yes, if you are willing to exploit the AI to that extent, you can just throw a nominal warhead and remote control together and dupe the fuses for about 12kg.
But while that sort of min-maxing may be the cheapest way to exploit the game's present fuse and intercept mechanics, I do not think it very insightful into what would be possible if AI and fuses could be given a modicum of intelligence.
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Post by tukuro on Oct 7, 2016 1:37:43 GMT
It's really difficult testing the effectiveness of the drone when the AI aims all its missiles at the drone. It really needs to understand that using 40 devastators on a 12kc drone is a bad idea.
A longer projectile appears to work though, even if it decreases the effective range. The most effective way to intercept seems to involve trailing the missiles. Sadly we don't have a "keep distance" command yet, which limits the effectiveness of such intercepts. Though using the move command mitigates this a bit.
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Post by captinjoehenry on Oct 11, 2016 18:39:15 GMT
Hmm one thing I would love is if I can have each of my CWIS rail gun turrets target separate missiles. That would be really great as even when railguns get fixed if you mount a nice rail gun and a fair few of them you will still be able to shoot down quite a lot of missiles in the terminal phase of the engagement. The railguns would not be ideal for long range engagement but at close range! Man do railguns just shred missiles but no matter how many you have they all target the same missile letting most of them through.
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joker
New Member
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Post by joker on Oct 12, 2016 4:51:26 GMT
My not-so-glitched railguns (~9km/s) meet complete failure in intercepting missiles and drones. My point defence are mainly 1MT nukes.
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Post by captinjoehenry on Oct 12, 2016 18:30:02 GMT
My not-so-glitched railguns (~9km/s) meet complete failure in intercepting missiles and drones. My point defence are mainly 1MT nukes. Hmm that is interesting as when I used high fire rate conventional gun with about 3km/s of delta v and starting to engage at only a few km and they shot down over 10 missiles before impact. So I would say that if you could optimize the 9km/s rail gun for precision against as small a target as possible and give the turret a high rotation rate it should be far far more effective. Again if we could get our guns to each target one missile and only fire so many rounds before switching targets would make all of these CWIS guns far more effective. |
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Post by blothorn on Oct 12, 2016 18:45:11 GMT
Also, my experience is that ultra-high-velocity light-projectile railguns are far less damaging than their kinetic energy suggests, even against targets without Whipple shields. I would suggest increasing projectile weight, even if it costs velocity.
The problem with relying on point-blank interception, though, is that flak is fairly effective within about 10km.
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Post by nivik on Oct 12, 2016 20:47:19 GMT
My not-so-glitched railguns (~9km/s) meet complete failure in intercepting missiles and drones. My point defence are mainly 1MT nukes. I'm finding that putting a decoy flare on a missile can actually help some. Granted, for flares to be a reasonable solution, your ship's heat output needs to be relatively low, but strapping a rocket onto a flare so it gets away from my ships has helped some. |
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joker
New Member
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Post by joker on Oct 15, 2016 20:46:00 GMT
Also, my experience is that ultra-high-velocity light-projectile railguns are far less damaging than their kinetic energy suggests, even against targets without Whipple shields. I would suggest increasing projectile weight, even if it costs velocity. The problem with relying on point-blank interception, though, is that flak is fairly effective within about 10km. Yeah, since I use 1cm V steel as whipple shield against heavy projectiles, ~5g railgun projectiles simply bounce off. |
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Post by nerd1000 on Oct 16, 2016 2:48:15 GMT
I've got a railgun drone design that fires a 1g tungsten pellet at 3.5 km/s (deliberately nerfed from 4.2km/s to avoid violating conservation of energy, though they're probably still impossibly efficient). I originally designed them as 'fighters' to intercept missiles and drones but I'm yet to find a capital ship armour layout that can hold off a squad of 15 of them, even for a couple of seconds- if you target a module for focus fire they'll cut through 1cm V steel whipple+ 14cm boron armour like it's made of cheese. And they do that for a mere 46.7kc per drone...   They're actually so good that I'm contemplating removing all kinetic armour from my designs and relying on a combination of maneuver and point defense with high yield nukes to hold them off. Lasers are no use because a simple 1cm layer of aerogel buys the drones more than enough time to get in range and open fire. |
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