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Post by dragonkid11 on Oct 9, 2016 10:46:42 GMT
While the designing setting for conventional cannon was quite limited compared to railgun and coilgun, they are still worth it as they are often cheap and light weight in the lower scale.
On the heavier size, large conventional cannon is kinda... too heavy and slow firing to be worth it.
It was a shame that there isn't much way to optimize conventional cannon.
Which is why I always tried to make the cannon as light and dirt cheap as possible without sacrificing power.
And of course, with cheap and light weight, they can be put in drone for some cheap, fast firepower package.
If only I could figure how to take screenshot so I can show off my drone design with more 33mm cannon than I have fingers with...
Sooo, anyone has good conventional gun design?
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Post by cuddlefish on Oct 9, 2016 11:57:26 GMT
In steam, by default hitting F12 will take a screenshot through their overlay.
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Post by Durandal on Oct 9, 2016 12:11:05 GMT
In steam, by default hitting F12 will take a screenshot through their overlay. I don't know why, but I've never gotten this to work either. I've never adjusted my screenshot settings in steam. All my screenshot in have been made using a snipping tool.
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Post by Rocket Witch on Oct 10, 2016 17:52:44 GMT
I designed this a few days ago, originally patterned after the 20mm Oerlikon cannon among a couple of concept tests for guns inspired by WWII-era naval air defence weapons. This particular gun showed some promise as a demolisher of stock missile waves at best, and a provisional self-defence weapon more useful overall than the 60mm at worst, while used in large 8 & 12-gun fittings. I think it would be best used on small picket gunboats (probably drones, though possibly barebones capitals in the 200m 2 size range) that intercept incoming missiles/drones and can evade them in combat while laying down fire. Able to acquire targets very quickly, and hit them at near enough the longest practical range for a turreted conventional gun (you can get velocities like 3.30km/s but that seems to necessitate increasingly larger calibres and longer barrels with a smaller increase in projectile mass, and increasing unsuitability for turrets). Despite firing measly 1g carbon steel pellets, it turned out to be surprisingly effective against capital ships, maybe due to sheer volume of fire as I tested them in large numbers (4 ships with 24 or 36 each). The only major issue with it (even after mitigating it by switching from vanadium chromium to maraging steel) is the long cooldown time. I'm not entirely sure what the relation between reload and cooldown times is (I tried lowering reload to match it, but this made the guns fire much slower, so it's not a hard limit), but presumably the gun will slow after prolonged firing and/or increase the parent ship's heat signature disproportionately.
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Post by RA2lover on Oct 10, 2016 18:41:00 GMT
Switch to a boron barrel and you can get 10ms cooldown times.
In a different topic, has anyone figured out the sweet spot between projectile mass and velocity? My hunch is projectiles at high velocities like this gun has don't have enough cross-sectional density to penetrate armor and also get vaporized by whipple shields.
Another thing to consider are low power autoloaders for drones. How much projectile mass can you shoot in a single second with just 100W worth of loader power?
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Post by blothorn on Oct 10, 2016 19:54:49 GMT
Below 3km/s I think Whipple shields are not much of a concern--on the scales at which Whipple shields are designed to work, this is rather low. On the other hand, you need a fair bit of mass to impart enough energy to bother armor at these low speeds; in my armor tests, a 1g@13.1km/s (86kJ) railgun penetrated armor better than a 5g@2.83km/s (8.4kJ) conventional gun, despite presumably suffering much greater fragmentation from the Whipple shield.
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Post by redparadize on Oct 11, 2016 0:28:51 GMT
If you switch your barrel to Osmium, fire rate won't get limited by cooldown time. Here is my design: Bullet speed is not fast, but I use these guns on 8k DV drones so it doesn't matter. If you are looking for something lighter, at 26.4 ms of reload time it weight 60kg with ammo.
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Post by captinjoehenry on Oct 11, 2016 0:53:30 GMT
I would not say these are the best designs but the first one is pretty good the second.... Well it fires over 600 rounds a second!
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Post by oprean on Oct 11, 2016 18:56:51 GMT
captinjoehenry, why is that thing so accurate? I mean it's pinpoint accurate at 50km, has anyone figured out what affects weapon firing cones?
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Post by captinjoehenry on Oct 11, 2016 19:04:40 GMT
Well I do not know why it is so accurate but it does a very good impression of a laser cutter on enemy ships. In one case it made one hole as big as the shell on one side and another on the other side of a gunship and all the follow up shots went straight through that hole! So apart from the low velocity it can be used to snipe pretty much anything you want. Especially with the 600 rounds per second one! Now the projectiles are osmium so it's rather costly but they definitely do the job! A drone with this can engage a gun ship outside of the gunships laser range or if it doesn't it will easily snipe the laser and then you can use it to snipe any other weapon and from there you can move on to shooting randomly and pretty much leave a trail of shell holes in the enemy ship!
As for accuracy I believe the curvier the effective range line the more accurate the weapon is at all ranges. Now I don't have a huge amount to back this up but I made a silly broken CWIS 4mm railgun that at over 300km range is still laser accurate and as it is optimised to shoot tiny tiny targets at as long a range as possible it has a nicely curved engagement range chart. And other weapons that can fire out to long range that have a less curvy line are much more like a shotgun.
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Post by redparadize on Oct 11, 2016 19:29:02 GMT
Yeah The previous version of my gun had that too. While It was shooting right trough a enemy ship it was not realy effective at destroying multiple internal module and often would not kill it. I reduced barrel tickness to resolve this "issue". It is a bit game breaking anyway, I am sure it is a bug, no gun is that accurate.
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Post by captinjoehenry on Oct 11, 2016 19:32:05 GMT
To be fair to guns outside of an atmosphere and gravity it is much easier to aim the gun and less factors effecting the projectile in flight. In addition the design of the turrets we use in game is more optimized for dealing with recoil. So the guns should be quite accurate. Now the current extent I am not sure of but the accuracy should be better in space than on earth.
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Post by redparadize on Oct 11, 2016 19:46:09 GMT
Indeed, A single shot would have a impressive level of accuracy in space. But at 500 rounds per second, probably not!
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Post by captinjoehenry on Oct 11, 2016 19:54:55 GMT
There is definitely that! But again the gun barrel is half a meter thick for a cross section of over 1 meter so the cannon isn't really going to care at all about the recoil or heating just because of how massive the barrel is. So as far as realism is concerned if a gun was going to withstand that fire rate I would think having a 53cm thick barrel all around the shell would be a good way to do it! I mean the barrel along weighs over 10 tons from a guese from the chart. For comparison the 16inch guns on Iowa weighs 10 times as much with a shell that weighs 400,000 times more!
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Post by redparadize on Oct 11, 2016 20:46:18 GMT
Its also a question of harmonics. Even with thick barrel sound shock wave would deform the barrel slightly. When multiple shock wave hit each other the effect is amplified and can even shred the barrel. Thick barrel would also have a non-linear propagation. I don't know if it would be a good thing or not...
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