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Post by bluuetechnic on Oct 19, 2016 15:38:32 GMT
I am a huge fan of giant, slow-firing, naval style guns. Does anyone currently know if there's any viable ways to make them? In particular I absolutely adore railguns in general (to the point that I've even made small ones IRL lol), so would it be possible to make a railgun that fires extremely heavy projectiles at very high speed, at the cost of fire rate and even accuracy/range? thanks
Side notes: 1.) Heat (specifically cooldown) currently seems like almost a non-factor in railguns and coilguns atm, at least in my experience, when in real life it's the exact opposite, with heat being one of the largest problems facing their use and development. Does anyone know why?
2.) My friend and I used to discuss (argue) over the effects of using a high velocity and low mass projectiles versus low velocity and high mass ones in railguns in space combat. He (correctly) pointed out that if the same energy was applied to each, they would each have the same muzzle and impact energy (Ignoring efficiency)(Duh, but somehow I managed to screw up badly enough in my calculations that I somehow thought that a lighter faster projectile would have more energy). After that though, the conversation eventually turned to this: Because a high mass projectile would have the more momentum relative to the lighter one for the same energy (Actually we thought in most cases it would probably have slightly more energy, because the friction energy loss from higher speed would be greater than the loss from greater surface area, but that's besides the point). So TL;DR, would having greater momentum cause more damage/be more effective?
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Post by captinjoehenry on Oct 19, 2016 15:54:19 GMT
I can confirm that using slower but more massive shots is definitely the more effective method. With the notable exception of if you can get a very light weight projectile firing at 1000 rounds per second. At that point if you can get them to hit mostly the same spot nothing at all will protect you. But against most reasonable armor schemes a slower, lower fire rate and higher mass projectile is much much more destructive. And I have yet to be able to get railguns to even begin to have any sort of good performance with high mass projectiles. Coilguns on the other hand are very easy to get high mass projectiles traveling at more than decent velocities that destroy any stock design that they hit in very few shots.
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Post by elouda on Oct 19, 2016 15:56:59 GMT
The main issue with really big guns right now is that the reaction wheel style turrets for them don't really work. The largest I've been able to use within reason was a coilgun firing 75kg shells, but beyond that I couldn't make a sensible design. This thing still fired several rounds per second though.
My most successful gun design at the moment is a 150mm firing a 5kg round, which I suppose would be more of an 'intermediate' weapon, with a rate of fire like 20 rps.
As for energy/momentum - there's a few things to consider here;
1) Heavier shells have upsides in atmosphere as they retain velocity better due to their energy/momentum ratio being smaller, this is not a factor in space
2) Energy/momentum ratio and sectional density has a large role in penetration, but its important to remember that a lot of 'conventional' wisdom ceases to apply once our projectiles are doing 5-6km/s instead of 700-1200m/s.
3) Lastly, the biggest advantage to energy over momentum is of course the fact that you get more muzzle velocity for the same energy, which means less travel time and hence (generally) more accuracy. This is less of a factor in atmosphere as resistance scales approximately as a square, so you give up that velocity rather quickly (though see point 1 above), but in space thats going to be maintained all the way to the target.
I think once the coil/railgun efficiencies are fixed, there's going to be some -very- interesting choices to make. As an experiment, I adjusted the stock Corvettes guns until they were around 80% efficient, and the 286mm was only firing every 5-6 seconds if I recall.
I think that larger flak rounds may be a very interesting option for larger guns once we have more control over the proxy fuzes. It would also be nice for larger guns to be able to have multiple types of shells for different situations.
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Post by dwwolf on Oct 20, 2016 7:36:58 GMT
You only need 2 types of shell for space combat.
Solid penetrators, whether AP, APDS or APDSFS doesnt really matter.
And
A versatile multimode SAPHE round...google bofors 3P ammo. Fuse can be set in the barrel.
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Post by fenrin49 on Nov 19, 2016 4:51:19 GMT
 cost 102 GC almost all of that is in ammo cost you can get it down by cutting armor reaction wheels etc yes its as fun as it looks is it practical? well if you can get it into range it will punch big holes in things but armoring big turrets is hard might want to go for max armour and get some heafty GW reactors |
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Post by redparadize on Nov 19, 2016 5:11:09 GMT
Most of my gun are around 10g to 100g per round. I do this because its less CPU intensive... But I did not manage to do a cost effective super large gun.
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Post by Durandal on Nov 19, 2016 7:11:46 GMT
 I built a MAC gun.  |
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Post by wazzledazzle on Nov 19, 2016 18:52:21 GMT
Did somebody say coilguns? Higher projectile mass is obviously harder to get to high speeds, but the nice thing with larger projectiles is that the force of the impact can actually tumble ships, if they hit far enough from the center of mass. I used to have 50kg projectiles (back when coilguns were horribly broken), but 5-10kg is more reasonable.  Nice firepower, decent ammo count, and the price isn't too bad! Probably could optimise it further, though. The main issue with really big guns right now is that the reaction wheel style turrets for them don't really work. Yeah, turrets tend to make those things expensive/too large and heavy. I prefer to mount them directly and use resistojets for aiming. That way you can have ships with a much smaller cross section, giving you time before the enemy can engage. Also, has anyone experimented with guided or fragmentation shells? That would improve their usefulness quite a bit (Fire a salvo - move out of range - repeat as needed) |
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Post by beta on Nov 19, 2016 19:59:21 GMT
Currently, you need to include the 1kg remote control module into any fuzed munition. So, it limits your rounds to relatively high mass. That being said, if you can afford to throw a 25kg payload at your target, you can probably get some really nice effects with the remote control and a bunch of fragmentation payloads.
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Post by apophys on Nov 19, 2016 20:40:26 GMT
Isn't the remote control unnecessary if you have a flare for a timed fuse? I haven't played around with that stuff much, but a 10s flare can be made as light as 5g.
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Post by someusername6 on Nov 19, 2016 21:35:16 GMT
I think a remote control lets you use the detonator ranges, while a flare timed fuse will always explode after a given time (no matter where you or the other ships are).
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Post by bluuetechnic on Nov 20, 2016 6:18:04 GMT
I built a MAC gun. Alright that's not bad, but have you seen my MPAC ( Macroscopic Particle Accelerator Cannon) II-T? It shoots at 125 km/s and can target any decently sized ship from farther than 1000 km away  Oh also, thanks for all of the cool coilgun designs everyone! They're really sick. But as much as I love coilguns, I like railguns even more. I have a personal attachment to them for a couple of reasons, but in particular I actually built a small scale one irl. But keep the coilguns coming too! (Also how did this thread suddenly come back to life? It was like super dead for a while) |
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Post by apophys on Nov 20, 2016 6:56:12 GMT
I actually built a small scale one irl. That's awesome. I wanna see!  |
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Post by amimai on Nov 20, 2016 7:36:18 GMT
this is a bit more practical, the shell is only 250g but you can actually mount the turret and it does put a hole in virtually anything  or if you want to do it properly without giving physics the middle finger  |
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ribera1945e
New Member
Hi. I am Japanese. I can't speak english well. Please use easy words for me...Thanks you.
Posts: 5 
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Post by ribera1945e on Nov 20, 2016 8:07:43 GMT
I like BIG GUN. that is my biggest coilgun. will deliver the devastating for the big fortress...with 34.9 Giga credits. lol Attachment Deleted |
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