Where are all the April Fool's jokes for CDE?

I would expect it to be something atrociously soft Sci-Fi.

Nuke cannon is an incredible weapon - Convince an enemy to put it on their ships and you have won.

Not that there is anything wrong with the concept - I have some very effective guns firing nukes. It's just the execution that is beyond horrible and well into downright suicidal.

I guess the hiveship is like a mobile war crime or something. The only thing its cannon could would be stationary target such as space station or ground installation.

Though, I have absolutely no idea what is even Hive ship for besides that, it's just, crap.

What does 'hive ship' even means anyway?

Yeah, "railgun drones plus a nuke cannon for point-defense" could be a perfectly viable plan, it's just that the stock hiveship is much less effective even than the other stock designs because

a) all stock drones are crippled by big/heavy/expensive power plants
b) stock nuke cannon not very effective.

Mmm... maybe I should take another look at mounting a nuclear-micromissile-gun on my small carriers and see how it goes.

The thing is ground installation is going to be buried under a lot of regolith and have all the shielding it can. Without thick atmosphere, with a lot of radiation shielding and with no biosphere to ruin, nukes aren't that powerful. Meanwhile, any orbital settlement or exposed surface "dome city" is going to be messed up just as badly by any old swarm of kinetics.


There are some modules and ships in CDE that are just pure, deeply baffling WTF? to me:

• Hiveship and its nuke cannons (four tightly clustered nuke cannons - on a ship that isn't capable of any significant acceleration or actual manoeuvring)
  
• HE cannon - basically the lesser version of nuke cannon, plus its payloads aren't even fused and HE is worthless in space anyway (has anyone made anything worthwhile with just HE ordnances? Any experience with impact fused projectiles?) - admittedly I have made my first heavy payload guns out of either (heavily modified) HE cannon or nuke cannon, but it didn't resemble its precursor very much when I finished (I have switched to modified Onager later on - similar performance but less cumbersome and more efficient).
• 120mm cannon - doesn't even have ammo can, so you can't use it before enabling custom modules - same applies to some engines.
• 1200mm cannon - ok, I kind of see the point of making an obscenely huge cannon just for the sake of it, but it's obscenely huge, heavy, hideously expensive, somewhat disappointing when you actually shoot something with it (sure, it punches big holes, but those are a fact of life in CDE anyway, it doesn't really mess the target up in any spectacular manner) and there is absolutely no way to mount it safely on a ship - even if you build the ship to survive the inevitable ammo explosion, the resulting spin will kill it anyway.
• Scatter railgun - borderline case - admirable performance, but bad accuracy
• Flak coilgun - it does do decent damage *if* it hits, but the exit velocity and rate of fire are bad (conventional cannon could perform better) - it does make a decent laser bait with some added damage potential if stuck with stock modules and is better heavy coilgun gun than 34mm below.
  
• 34mm heavy coilgun - slow, abysmal rate of fire, inaccurate, huge, heavy, expensive, easily sniped turret - you can do much better modifying flak coilgun to fire solid slugs at better velocity.
• 2mm capacitor coilgun - nice performance but the turret is just absurdly huge.
• Devastator missile (near unworkable delta-v)
• Any, even otherwise decent design that clusters explosive modules together or around CM
• Anything that is meant to participate in direct combat, but can't even exceed 100mG or takes around a minute to rotate.
  
• Anything that isn't a chemically propelled strictly orbital craft or carrier delivered drone that has delta-v somewhere around 2km/s
  

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Well, it does launch lancer drones. Alternatively it looks like it has a bad case of hives.

(I've been wondering the same thing, actually).

Admittedly, making highly manoeuvrable ships and recently, making small, nimble 1kt designs with cannons as main armaments, and watching them duke it out in mirror matches has been a guilty pleasure of mine as of late.

Do note that they are still kind of big for fighters (1kt, 40 crew), have turrets and so on.

If we had less bloated crew requirements (starting with making administrative positions overlap with doers, and some positions overlap with one another), I would have probably gone further in this direction (still not fighters, but much smaller than anything manned we can build, possibly even with single digit crews).

In my defence, in anything short of mature and fully escalated mutual laserstar/KKV annihilation, they seem to work - being capable of dispatching stock designs with relative ease, without skimping on vital necessities like delta-v.


The problem is that right direction is then the direction it's going to be hit from. And hiveship can't really move it's huge, vulnerable turrets out of the way of incoming kinetics - it's a flying brick and having a ring of four ensures they have nowhere to hide. Maybe if you made a massive, conical umbrella of armour, tucked the nuke guns behind it, added powerful engines and fought nose-on, flinging nukes from behind umbrella at any drones or missiles passing too close you could get it to work, but in general huge turrets don't work. They are heavy, expensive and get instantly shot off. The only thing worse than huge turrets is huge, explosive turrets clustered closely together on a ship that barely moves.

Was it turreted back then?

I can definitely see it that way.

The main problem is that it has too low rate of fire to saturate the entire area at range and its 15g projectile might not be a sandcaster, but it still won't 1hk anything. IMO the best of both worlds would be spaced battery of highly accurate guns - shame we can only do it spinally.

It hits nicely IF it hits without glancing off (I have even managed once to have one of my tested drones run straight into 5kg of MMG and the results were amusing) but the problem is that generally it doesn't and it fires too rarely to count on the rare moments when it does.
And it has all the problems inherent in heavy turrets.

Why not put a proper bipropellant engine on an already huge missile?

the heavy coilgun was a 283mm weapon