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Post by AdmiralObvious on Jan 25, 2018 23:29:32 GMT
I'm talking from a purely mechanical perspective. Wouldn't it be cheaper to make, a square ship versus a perfectly cylindrical one? As it's going to basically be a matter of welding 4 sheets of armor together, instead of making rounded pieces of armor and piecing them together. It'd also be slightly easier to maintain, assuming the ship has roughly the same armor type running the whole length of the ship, as a flat weld is much easier to fix properly.
This of course ignores material costs, but if you consider time and simplicity of it, and don't mind losing a bit of DeltaV, why not?
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Post by koganusan on Jan 25, 2018 23:37:41 GMT
With the level of automation the setting assumes, I doubt it would be that huge a difference. I think the real win with angled ships is, as I vaguely remember seeing someone point out elsewhere, ease of armor repair. It means that most panels can be standardized, and those that can't can sometimes be cut down sections of the standard ones. Hypothetically, it simplifies damage control, field repair and the associated logistics quite a bit.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Feb 10, 2018 12:31:33 GMT
The cost of non-cylindrical ships should in fact be less (in most cases) regardless of armour manufacture and repair techniques.
The thing about spaceships is that they aren't just hulls wrapped around given volumes. They are hulls wrapped around discrete components.
If you have, for example, a hex cluster of 7 fuel remass tanks, then there is a more economic way of armouring it than making a cylinder around it and calling it a day - making a hexagonal prism with rounded corners so that flats are tangential to the individual tanks and corners reflect curvature of the tanks themselves.
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Post by bigbombr on Feb 10, 2018 13:04:07 GMT
The cost of non-cylindrical ships should in fact be less (in most cases) regardless of armour manufacture and repair techniques. The thing about spaceships is that they aren't just hulls wrapped around given volumes. They are hulls wrapped around discrete components. If you have, for example, a hex cluster of 7 fuel remass tanks, then there is a more economic way of armouring it than making a cylinder around it and calling it a day - making a hexagonal prism with rounded corners so that flats are tangential to the individual tanks and corners reflect curvature of the tanks themselves. True, but the game currently doesn't support rounded polygonal shapes. But it would be interesting (though I'd probably stick to cilinders). |
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Feb 10, 2018 16:30:31 GMT
The cost of non-cylindrical ships should in fact be less (in most cases) regardless of armour manufacture and repair techniques. The thing about spaceships is that they aren't just hulls wrapped around given volumes. They are hulls wrapped around discrete components. If you have, for example, a hex cluster of 7 fuel remass tanks, then there is a more economic way of armouring it than making a cylinder around it and calling it a day - making a hexagonal prism with rounded corners so that flats are tangential to the individual tanks and corners reflect curvature of the tanks themselves. True, but the game currently doesn't support rounded polygonal shapes. But it would be interesting (though I'd probably stick to cilinders). For hex cluster of 7 cylindrical components circumferences are respectively 18.93 radii of individual components (optimal hexagon), 18.84 radii (circle) and 18.28 radii (hex with rounded corners). Even with no rounded corners the kind of hexagon like in our example would (assuming negligible thickness of armour) only require less than 100.5% armour required by cylinder (so only slightly less efficiency), OTOH requiring just over 95% of effort required by cylinder to completely dodge projectile (in optimal direction - flat to flat, and you should always be able to afford that given that you dodge away from stuff, not in specific directions) and presenting better slope for hits near centerline when aligned ridge-on. With rounded corners it requires slightly over 97% armour (making it more efficient) while retaining dodge advantage. Given that the game already generates exact armour mesh for ships, an algorithm trying to sort of stretchwrap the stack and surrounding modules isntead of assuming circular or predefined polygonal crossection would be worth it. As a bonus it would yield more interesting looking ships. |
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