blkcandy
Junior Member
Burn complete. Crawling back to bed.
Posts: 78 
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Post by blkcandy on May 18, 2018 3:10:19 GMT
I just thought up a new challenge. Clear vesta overkill with everything on the spine. You must only use ONE spinal weapon per ship, no missile nor drone allowed, and cannot have anything placed parallel to each other, except for the engine and radiator which you can have only two so you can rotate and retain the center of mass.
You may use unlimited number of ships and design as long as they follow the design rule. Score is based on the total cost spent clearing the mission. The cheapest win.
Current leaderboard:
Vanilla:
*No entry
Modded:
*No entry
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Post by Enderminion on May 18, 2018 4:07:10 GMT
easy enough, box launch a bunch of missiles
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on May 18, 2018 16:46:28 GMT
I believe this will quickly get silly if missiles and drones are allowed.
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blkcandy
Junior Member
Burn complete. Crawling back to bed.
Posts: 78
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Post by blkcandy on May 19, 2018 6:21:10 GMT
Hmm... Indeed, let's add a condition to ban missiles and drones. I want to see guns. Big,big guns.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on May 19, 2018 11:11:07 GMT
Hmm... Indeed, let's add a condition to ban missiles and drones. I want to see guns. Big,big guns. Given that: - You have effectively prohibited all good and obvious ways to achieve redundancy and resilience (clusters of small tanks, multiple radiators, radially offset modules, redundant weapons).
- Your challenge effectively limits participants to one target per ship at a time.
- Chosen mission have player attacked by swarms of small targets.
- Cost effectiveness is the main criterion and the game doesn't account for the cost of *crews*.
I am not expecting *big* guns. 
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Post by samchiu2000 on May 20, 2018 5:11:36 GMT
Are lasers allowed? Or only those *big* guns you are looking for are welcomed in this challenge?
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on May 20, 2018 9:55:58 GMT
Are lasers allowed? Or only those *big* guns you are looking for are welcomed in this challenge? I'm not sure how well would aiming a laser work without gimbals (I am almost sure it won't), but a huge laser would solve the problem of your ship getting inevitably cored and/losing all of its non-redundant radiators - just burn everything while it's still on the other side of Vesta. |
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Post by samchiu2000 on May 20, 2018 10:10:55 GMT
Are lasers allowed? Or only those *big* guns you are looking for are welcomed in this challenge? I'm not sure how well would aiming a laser work without gimbals (I am almost sure it won't), but a huge laser would solve the problem of your ship getting inevitably cored and/losing all of its non-redundant radiators - just burn everything while it's still on the other side of Vesta. Oops, I thought that it's OK as long as you place the weapon at the nose of the ship and didn't notice that it has to be an internal one too. Anyway thanks for correcting me! EDIT: In fact, somebody actually tried to use fixed lasers as weapons, and they just did nothing... |
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on May 20, 2018 11:25:47 GMT
The only huge gun concept as opposed to multiple tiny hoboships with cheap slugthrowers I can see working here is a huge atomic railgun/coilgun mated to obscenely powerful reactor and a large magazine - engage at standoff range and don't worry about actually hitting anything or switching targets - just flash everything in the area. Repeat at several Hz.
Maybe put the nuke on a an unguided rocket to augment velocity.
Edit:
It's unlikely to be cheap, though, so it won't win.
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blkcandy
Junior Member
Burn complete. Crawling back to bed.
Posts: 78
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Post by blkcandy on May 22, 2018 1:58:59 GMT
I don't expect a ship with such limitation to be cost effective. I mean you can only put on one weapon, on each ship, all must be crewed. I'm expecting the fleet cost to bloat.
And by big gun I meant in relative to the ship size. A ship designed to fit and fire just one weapon and no more.
And laser allowed. No turret though. So I don't know if it is even possible.
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on May 22, 2018 14:34:20 GMT
The nuke cannon hoboship is doable but very much too annoying to get to work. I have a 3.5 Mc ship firing 10 kt nukes at 240 RPM. 10 of those would be enough to destroy all enemies when split into 4 passes, but in order for it to work you need multiple perfect intercepts on the enemy fleets which is not fun to do with the way the game works. If the AI decides it doesn't want to give you a perfect intercept, there's nothing you can do since the automatic flyby mode doesn't work well enough. Most of the time I end up with some lateral velocity when doing it by hand. If you use the flyby view, the worst outcome I got was a 6 km/s perfect intercept where my ships started 150 km away from the last alive enemy ship, moving away so fast I couldn't do anything about it. If the orbital view was more usable though, I would have a 35 Mc entry easily, maybe even less.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on May 22, 2018 18:18:00 GMT
I don't expect a ship with such limitation to be cost effective. I mean you can only put on one weapon, on each ship, all must be crewed. I'm expecting the fleet cost to bloat. And by big gun I meant in relative to the ship size. A ship designed to fit and fire just one weapon and no more. And I'm just saying that: - On a small ship even a dinky gun can be "relatively large" - it's still a dinky gun, though.
- The scenario favours numerous - therefore small - ships because there are many targets and likely only one target per ship.
- The scenario allows no redundancy - see above.
- You have put cost effectiveness in as the only grading criterion.
So my expectation is that the winner will effectively be a more or less manned Stinger or Lancer with a (somewhat) bigger gun, repeated times mass budget/wet mass, not jtyotjotjipaefvj 's nuke ship nor any advanced big gun scheme.
Want seriously big, spinal cannons? Try something like this: - No missiles, nor drones (as defined by CoADE - if it displays circle or triangle, it's off limits).
- Only internal weapon mounts are allowed (on both ships and munitions), all oriented along ship's axis (on ships only).
- Central stack can at most only include the following (everything else must be radially offset):
- Engine(s)
- At most one cluster of powerplants
- Weapons (any number, any combination of allowed of types)
- radshields and spacers as necessary, provided their combined length doesn't exceed the length of the longest weapon used (basically "bolt a huge gun to an engine and wrap a ship around that").
- No purely structural weapons - if depriving a weapon of ammo plus any alterations necessary to maintain ship's shape and mass distribution doesn't affect it's performance, it's disqualified. Note that blast launcher aiming aids in the form of ballistically tuned guns ARE functional even if they fire self-destructing slugs and don't deal actual damage - they are needed to aim blast launchers.
- Use mission or missions where you have to fight bigger ships - possibly also something requiring delta-v and decent manoeuvrability in gravity wells, to make it an actual ship rather than space station + stationkeeping RCS - impose additional budget or mass limitation if the mission would be too easy. Allow unarmed tankers in addition to combat fleet.
- Grade by least amount of crew lost > least amount of crew used > least cost. This will reward effective use of possibly few big guns rather than swarm tactics.
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on May 23, 2018 3:16:13 GMT
So my expectation is that the winner will effectively be a more or less manned Stinger or Lancer with a (somewhat) bigger gun, repeated times mass budget/wet mass, not jtyotjotjipaefvj 's nuke ship nor any advanced big gun scheme. The issue with hoboships is that they either need to have long range, or they need to be able to deal with devastator nukes and drones. If you go long range, you'll see a fat load of this thanks to the great targeting AI:  If you want something that can destroy or withstand a wave of devastators, you'll run into some issues as well. Either you need to cheese them with single separated fleets, which is so reliant on intercepts working that I don't care to do it, or you need to put on nuclear autocannons that can kill lots of missiles despite the garbage aim the targeting system has. If I was allowed to install a single gimbal on my ship that would let me make it actually accurate, I could do it with less than 1 Mc but now just completing the mission is too much of a chore for me to bother. |
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on May 23, 2018 17:52:14 GMT
So my expectation is that the winner will effectively be a more or less manned Stinger or Lancer with a (somewhat) bigger gun, repeated times mass budget/wet mass, not jtyotjotjipaefvj 's nuke ship nor any advanced big gun scheme. The issue with hoboships is that they either need to have long range, or they need to be able to deal with devastator nukes and drones. If you go long range, you'll see a fat load of this thanks to the great targeting AI: If you want something that can destroy or withstand a wave of devastators, you'll run into some issues as well. Either you need to cheese them with single separated fleets, which is so reliant on intercepts working that I don't care to do it, or you need to put on nuclear autocannons that can kill lots of missiles despite the garbage aim the targeting system has. If I was allowed to install a single gimbal on my ship that would let me make it actually accurate, I could do it with less than 1 Mc but now just completing the mission is too much of a chore for me to bother. I'm not sure it is necessary to do anything with Devastators as they are perfectly capable of running themselves out of delta-v nearly unassisted.
Still, it would be nice to see a challenge that wouldn't end up rewarding "make a hoboship with potassium crew can" BS for a change.
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Post by Rocket Witch on Jun 7, 2018 18:40:59 GMT
Still, it would be nice to see a challenge that wouldn't end up rewarding "make a hoboship with potassium crew can" BS for a change. I've had the idea of a armouring a ship by the armour solely allowed directly on the modules with no actual hull cladding, where one might see literal meters of steel on the exposed crew cans and tanks. I haven't tried to see if it works at all (I think it might be mechanically impossible in the game for exposed modules to survive nukes), but if it does a challenge could be made around that. |
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