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Post by shiolle on Oct 18, 2016 10:36:04 GMT
I've personally went back and forth between these two variants. First I tried to make a ship that was twice as light and twice cheaper than the standard Corvette and would win a fight against it. After that I tried my successive designs against previous versions and against the Corvette. There are a couple of things I would like to mention. - It's better to assume all ships will have similar weapons. If you have a ship with one of those physics breaking coilguns and engage the enemy at ten times its effective range it doesn't matter how your ship is armored or what kind of layout it uses. It's not hard to design something that is unquestionably better than stock ships.
- If the weapons are similar, who fires first is determined by who gets the smallest profile. It seems that here the "arrow" designs have absolute advantage, but there is one catch. Even if you have a broadside ship, it's better to orient it towards the enemy until your weapons get into range, and then suddenly present its broadside. This way you are negating enemy's advantage in profile. That is also why I think that even broadside designs should have a pointy nose.
- That also means that ships with larger profile would want a faster intercept speed, while the ship with lower profile would aim for as low intercept speed as possible.
- Often it is not enough to have only one design with low profile. I usually have a fleet of ships of several classes. When I first designed a gunship with low profile it did extremely well on its own, but when I tried it in a larger fleet engagement, suddenly my drone carrier got targeted. This seems extremely obvious, but that's something I (comically) missed. Alternatively, you can field a single type of ship that does everything. However, I dislike this approach since it offers little flexibility.
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acatalepsy
Junior Member
Not Currently In Space
Posts: 97
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Post by acatalepsy on Oct 18, 2016 19:15:49 GMT
It's worth pointing out that needle ships have much more limited manuevering options. In a long range duel, sure, it doesn't have as big of a profile, but a broadside ship with even halfway-decent acceleration can generate a miss regardless just buy thrusting out of the way of incoming fire. A needle ship can accelerate towards an opponent, and...that's it. This is especially important for dealing with missile swarms, at least until the algorithm is improved.
Also, if you want to avoid an engagement and still have defensive fire, you're kind of screwed.
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Post by redparadize on Oct 18, 2016 19:55:54 GMT
I have quite strong RCS on my needle design, while maneuvering, it strafe enough to prevent fast projectile to focus on specific stuff. Turn rate is 16s to 22s. Even 3km/s intercept I can manage to stay oriented to the enemy, as long as I don't pass right next to them.
Even without maneuvering, 20 stock gun drone do no damage at all to my front armor, achieving the same with a broadside design mean sacrificing way to much DV to armor.
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Post by beta on Oct 18, 2016 20:17:54 GMT
Dodging is currently overly effective with high g engines (1G+). The gun targeting does not take enemy ship acceleration into account, so high g engines generate misses constantly. If target acceleration was accounted for, there would be far more hits on target and low cross section would become a more important facet of long range gunfights.
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Post by redparadize on Oct 18, 2016 21:23:26 GMT
Aiming mechanic is not necessarily to blame here, Unless you can predict how much acceleration a ship will do during bullet travel time, it will miss. Since We can't steer ship manually or maneuver named "lets dance!" Im ok with how it works for now.
Note that For needle ship, you don't need to fully dodge incoming rounds, just enough to protect the forward gun, hit on insanely sloped nose are don't matter.
Again, the main limitation of needle is the amount of forward mounted weapons. I hope we get forward looking radial turrets, if we do then broadside design will be completely obsolete. Just like per-dreadnought battleship.
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Post by beta on Oct 18, 2016 21:27:41 GMT
Yeah, you can "drunk walk" your ship around to avoid incoming fire, however there are targeting solutions to allow for hits in that state as well, far better than the firing solution being permanently 100m behind the enemy ship.
I have had success with mounting the weapons on the nadir/zenith side of the spacecraft in a cluster, then facing the ship slightly off centre, with a 70 degree turret you can depress a large amount and your spacecraft is still quite nose on.
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Post by redparadize on Oct 18, 2016 21:46:59 GMT
Targeting solution still suffer for light lag and travel time, even for laser it would be a issue. There is only one way to avoid these thing, course correction.
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Post by cuddlefish on Oct 18, 2016 21:47:25 GMT
The best answer to the drunkard's walk dodge (aside from the fact that it's a more constrained area than pure random, as most ships use gimbal-thrust rather than six-degree thrust flexibility) is to give up a bit of precision for a lot of certainty - just hose the area it could be in, in a roughly random fashion, rather than having the very thin ribbons of fire that either obliterate the target at one specific point or miss entirely. With the dozens of rounds per second many of the guns can fire, you can likely get some very nice shot densities across the overall envelope. It won't snipe modules, but it will put rounds into hulls, and that can be enough.
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Post by beta on Oct 18, 2016 21:50:44 GMT
Yeah, that would be a solution. The further out (time is the key factor) the target is, the less effective it will be because your shot density will drop very quickly.
I don't think light-lag is a concern for my 6km/s railgun that can fire at a max range of 60km. Travel time is already what creates the max range for projectile weapons.
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Post by redparadize on Oct 18, 2016 22:05:19 GMT
6km/s railgun have a bullet travel time of 41sec at 250km. More than enough time for the ship can change course, randomly or not.
Edit: I am dumb, I missed your point. sorry about that.
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Post by millesmissiles on Oct 18, 2016 22:55:46 GMT
As to drunk-walking:
It's already been mentioned that ships accelerate primarily on 1 axis using gimbals to turn. A 6-axis ship would require large engines placed all around the ship, which is inefficient (only use 1 for main burns, haul around a bunch of useless engines) and creates a radiation hazard. I don't think a 6-axis ship is a viable solution at all, considering the massive penalties incurred.
For that matter, drunk-walking is most often discussed in the context of laser fights from thousands to millions of kilometers away. At 100km, which is a pretty long distance already in COADE's combat system, drunk walking is much less effective.
Consider: our main weapons are 10 kps railguns. This means they cross the void to our target at 10 seconds.
How much the enemy capital ship can "drunk walk" depends on a few factors, primarily acceleration. Many capital ships have accelerations under 500 milligees, and given 10 seconds to dodge this means that they can displace themselves AT MOST by 250 meters. Other directions are limited by the strength of the ship's attitude thrusters and its angular momentum.
I want to say that this is an area where "broadside" ships are more effective (squat design gives less angular momentum and higher turn speeds), but I'm not so sure. Others have already pointed out that the RPM-ratings on our railguns mean drunk-walking is a lot less effective. For that matter, broadside ships present a much larger target cross-section, which means more hits when the hits inevitable start coming in.
In the end, I prefer needle designs with a nice big plate of steel + spall shield up at the front. Not only is a 10m diameter circle a tough size to hit with a gun, but even if you do connect a hit it's probably not going to penetrate the citadel unless it's a nuke or something physics-defying.
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Post by beta on Oct 19, 2016 3:24:47 GMT
There are quite a few ways to optimize your weapons and targeting to defeat a maneuvering ship, especially at the "short" ranges we are dealing with.
At the end of the day, maneuver to avoid enemy fire is not going to work with high fire rate guns and short distances - thus low cross section ships will have a large advantage. You will have to try and overcome that advantage through weight of fire with the broadside.
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Post by captinjoehenry on Oct 19, 2016 3:45:56 GMT
Honestly maneuvering to dodge isn't going to help against shotgun style of nukes When you can cook off the enemy radiators from kms away with a nuke launched from a coil gun you don't need or even want to hit them! You just want nukes all around them so go ahead and dodge as long as my nukes blow up they'll still wreck you
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Post by jonen on Oct 20, 2016 14:43:50 GMT
Personal experience with needle layout is that, as weapons tend to generally be the weakest point in any given armor layout, and enemy tends to focus fire on the nearest subsystem (meaning weapon in your nose if you go with needle), the main downside of the needle layout is that you're probably lining up all the insides of your ship with a weakpoint in your armor.
IE: Enemy takes out a gun, you're liable to lose everything behind it, and when all the insides of your ship are behind your gun...
Broadside, aside from allowing you to maneuver laterally, allows you to put your weapons on an otherwise empty section, with internal compartmentalization protecting crew modules, propellant tanks and volatile ammo (anything with its own propellant or explosives) - that is assuming a liberal structure budget anyway.
... So I'd say nose guns only for drones with kinetics that need to close in on the enemy anyway, and broadside for big ships (which makes sense given you can only mount so many weapons broadside, and big ships can and should carry multiple weapons systems).
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Post by Argopeilacos on Oct 20, 2016 15:46:05 GMT
Personal experience with needle layout is that, as weapons tend to generally be the weakest point in any given armor layout, and enemy tends to focus fire on the nearest subsystem (meaning weapon in your nose if you go with needle), the main downside of the needle layout is that you're probably lining up all the insides of your ship with a weakpoint in your armor. IE: Enemy takes out a gun, you're liable to lose everything behind it, and when all the insides of your ship are behind your gun... If we could set a default orientation for turrets, we would be able to put forward-facing turrets at the base of the frontal cone so that no subsystem is in line with incoming ordinance, so a shot destroying a turret wouldn't find anything behind it (except maybe the tip of a radiator). This would maximize forward firepower as well as armor angling (and some cover for radiators if the hull tapers towards the back).
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