Best chemical cannon (not Rail or Coil)?

You can probably find a ton lying about here someplace or in the Steam workshop, but building your own isn't hard.  IIRC they can be optimized up to a certain point pretty easily but not much further because the speed of the explosives is a fundamental limit.  Assuming you're just concerned about the game (there might be some realism issues here), go for projectiles that are as thin as possible and as wide as they need to be; my most-used gun designs are 14mm and 50mm diameter with 4g and 35g projectiles, respectively, if I recall correctly.  You should be able to get a muzzle velocity of around 2Km/s; VC steel and diamond or amorphous carbon are popular barrel materials.

For increased accuracy make the barrel stiffer with barrel armor (graphite aerogels work well).  You might want to purposely limit accuracy for a CIWS, though, YMMV.  Flak is also a good option for this sort of gun but the designs for that take a good bit of tuning and produce a lot of lag in my experience.  As you say, rate of fire is high - for drones you may want to keep it purposely low so they can fire for longer, and for large ships the cost of the explosives in very large ammo magazines can be nontrivial.

Also, FWIW, ships with mostly conventional guns and launchers can have *very* low heat signatures.  Flares, or drones/missile decoys with a higher heat signature than the mothership (with it's engine off!) may be a viable option.

YMMV, void where prohibited.

In my experience, small guns are fine if you have a high enough rate of fire; that 14mm:4g:2Km/s gun is installed on a 2Kc drone and can empty its magazine in a hurry.  Targets that cross that stream of slugs will get sliced up in a hurry, even with heavy armor.  YMMV, and I think we've actually had this discussion before.  I'm a big fan of the smallest possible drones so they have enough time to close.

That said, I do agree that heavy, low velocity slugs are an under-appreciated option.  I have a drone intended for heavily armored targets with a 10G NTR, 10 Km/s dV and a 60g : 700 m/s gun (!) - the gun isn't so much a weapon itself as terminal guidance for the kinetic warhead...

Chemical guns have two things going for them - ability to fire lots of rounds without using much power and lack of objections towards firing heavy, large diameter payloads (also with modest power requirements).

The former can be exploited by making rapidly firing guns, possibly very small, possibly numerous, and either putting them en-masse on a ship or drone (turreted or spinal - for "shotgun" effect) or making very small drones.

The latter allows for all kinds of interesting payloads - both anti-ship and anti-wave ones (nukes for example are neat for frying thrusters and melting radiators). When in doubt, you can always do crazy stuff like putting microturrets on nuke shells.

Due to their low velocity chemical guns are not affected as much by whipple shielding and in high-velocity intercepts gun itself becomes more of a tool for putting slugs where you want them, than for giving them kinetic energy to deal damage. When you're going for head-on, low orbit intercept around Neptune (about 30km/s), 1g railgun pellets with added 10km/s suddenly pale compared to multi-kilogram slugs that only add 1.5km/s to intercept velocity, but you can fire much more of them rapidly, for much less power.


True, with one exception: if they are rapid firing and accurate enough, they can keep hitting the same spot, which tends to cut through the armour.

Of course maximizing velocity with combustion gun is a losing game, because it goes against the main strength of those weapons, quickly hits diminishing returns and is not going to yield anything particularly impressive compared to rail- or coilguns (and coilguns can fire pretty heavy, rod-shaped slugs).

I have never got the hang of gun-fired mini-flaks.

As for subcalliber munitions, I hope we get the non-payload option at some point - emulating them with payloads is not very good for your framerate.

It's not like melting through a gunship is particularly hard - I can make a bit bigger, Hellfire style drone even out of stock components, that should be able to make a mess out of gunship with a in a flight of two (with high velocity manual intercept, AI sucks with drones).

Also, there is one thing your gun lacks compared to stock 60mm - tracking speed. It's good to be able to aim quickly, especially with something that may only have seconds in range.

For sufficiently high rates of fire every target is stationary.

Actually, I think that the best solution here would be an ability to put tracers on anything classed as payload.


High velocity passes, last-ditch CIWS, etc.

Perfection. Thanks for spreading the truth.