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Post by anotherfirefox on Sept 20, 2018 23:17:35 GMT
So, where you're fighting is going to make a huge difference - in the belt I expect laserstars to rule the day, around planets it will be missiles and autocannons (and drone mounted autocannons), with railguns and coilguns somewhere in between.
That's one of the reasons why I suppose "Interplanetary Fleet" and "Orbital Defense" would have completely different organization, just like Navy and Coast Guard...They're under so much different conditions and serve for different purpose.
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Post by AdmiralObvious on Sept 21, 2018 1:14:09 GMT
For slower slugs, it's a matter of acceleration of the target. If the target can move so fast that you can't reasonably lead accurately with the gun, you aren't going to actually hit anything, save for some exceptional luck. Sandblasters are effective because they're exceptionally hard to dodge. Of course, there are more factors to that. Fast intercepts turn slow, heavy, easily dodgeable slugs (or payloads) into fast, heavy slugs of doom.
Deep gravity wells make fast intercepts easier as they keep you gravitationally bound even if you travel at obscene velocity and allow you to juggle your potential and kinetic energy around massively changing your velocity vector. If you are intercepting at 30m/s the difference between 10km/s 1g sandcaster and 1km/s 1kg is considerable, because you need to be in the knife-fight range to hope hitting with the latter. Now make it a 30km/s intercept in low orbit around a gas giant and you're effectively dealing with 1g pellets travelling at 40km/s VS massive 1kg slugs hitting at 31km/s, that can be fired as rapidly as relatively modest autoloader can ram them down the barrel.
Ouch.
So, where you're fighting is going to make a huge difference - in the belt I expect laserstars to rule the day, around planets it will be missiles and autocannons (and drone mounted autocannons), with railguns and coilguns somewhere in between.
Of course I generally aim for mixed battery, as it is unusual to ever keep your optimal distance in space, because it is good to be able to counter diverse threats and finally because it allows nifty things like putting the enemy in a crossfire with a single ship.
Indeed. My statement earlier assumes ships are running parallel to each other at relatively low velocity. Defensive acceleration is still a factor in flybys, but it's definitely less effective.
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Post by Dhan on Sept 23, 2018 19:19:03 GMT
The best defense is a good offense. You don't need to worry about heavy slugs if you can outrange them by one or two orders of magnitude. The main concern should be sandblasters and lasers. But at the end of the day it's an arms race first and foremost and the best approach is to outrange the enemy guns so you don't have to worry about surviving hits.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Sept 23, 2018 19:25:27 GMT
The best defense is a good offense. You don't need to worry about heavy slugs if you can outrange them by one or two orders of magnitude. The main concern should be sandblasters and lasers. But at the end of the day it's an arms race first and foremost and the best approach is to outrange the enemy guns so you don't have to worry about surviving hits. ...Aaand that's one of my many reasons for often sticking with stock modules, at least for initial design.
Out-teching the enemy by several orders of magnitude is generally not a reasonable assumption and makes for a poor benchmark of ship design.
At best you are recreating that Indy scene, except with spaceships rather than a gun and a sword.
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Post by Dhan on Sept 23, 2018 20:12:13 GMT
The best defense is a good offense. You don't need to worry about heavy slugs if you can outrange them by one or two orders of magnitude. The main concern should be sandblasters and lasers. But at the end of the day it's an arms race first and foremost and the best approach is to outrange the enemy guns so you don't have to worry about surviving hits. ...Aaand that's one of my many reasons for often sticking with stock modules, at least for initial design.
Out-teching the enemy by several orders of magnitude is generally not a reasonable assumption and makes for a poor benchmark of ship design.
At best you are recreating that Indy scene, except with spaceships rather than a gun and a sword.
Well that's why I want to design against other competitive designs. It's no fun of the opposition doesn't even get a chance to fight back. I guess it depends what you want out of the game. If you want to design with and against relatively weak ships that's fine. At that point armor is very relevant. But if you want to design with and against the most competitive setups that can you engage from millions of meters away, armor use changes drastically.
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ghgh
Full Member
Still trying to make kinetics work.
Posts: 136
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Post by ghgh on Sept 24, 2018 11:19:34 GMT
...Aaand that's one of my many reasons for often sticking with stock modules, at least for initial design.
Out-teching the enemy by several orders of magnitude is generally not a reasonable assumption and makes for a poor benchmark of ship design.
At best you are recreating that Indy scene, except with spaceships rather than a gun and a sword.
Well that's why I want to design against other broken designs. It's no fun of the opposition doesn't even get a chance to fight back. I guess it depends what you want out of the game. If you want to design with and against relatively realistic ships that's fine. At that point armor is very relevant. But if you want to design with and against the most broken setups that can you engage from millions of meters away, armor use changes drastically. I think this is what you meant to say.
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Sept 24, 2018 12:09:12 GMT
Well that's why I want to design against other broken designs. It's no fun of the opposition doesn't even get a chance to fight back. I guess it depends what you want out of the game. If you want to design with and against relatively realistic ships that's fine. At that point armor is very relevant. But if you want to design with and against the most broken setups that can you engage from millions of meters away, armor use changes drastically. I think this is what you meant to say. The only thing broken about laser stars is how ineffective they are. With pulsed lasers[1], fixed beam intensity[2], realistic efficiency[3] and a less limiting damage model[4], you could get one or two orders of magnitude more ablation out of your laser than you can do with the ones in game. Not to mention the unrealistic turret wobble and hard cap of 10 Mm on the lasing range. The ship might be significantly heavier and slower than what our laserstars are, but that doesn't really matter when you can kill any ship from a few dozen Mm's out. [1] Pulsed lasers can ablate armor by shattering it instead of vaporizing everything, which is far more energy efficient [2] The game has confused beam diameter and radius, which means all lasers have 1/4th of the intensity they should. [3] Real lasers can reach around 30-40 % efficiency instead of the max 4% we can do in game [4] The laser damage model in game is almost useless. It only simulates heating armor to melting point, and disregards any energy past the ablation cap of a material, so against well optimized targets, you just waste any intensity past around 4 MW/m². With enough power and big enough mirrors, you could lase targets until your effectiveness is limited by light lag instead of beam intensity falling off due to beam dispersion. Past a light minute or so of range, the target can start dodging your lasers effectively due to the travel time of the laser.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Sept 24, 2018 14:57:03 GMT
Well that's why I want to design against other broken designs. It's no fun of the opposition doesn't even get a chance to fight back. I guess it depends what you want out of the game. If you want to design with and against relatively realistic ships that's fine. At that point armor is very relevant. But if you want to design with and against the most broken setups that can you engage from millions of meters away, armor use changes drastically. I think this is what you meant to say. Yes, that's part of the problem. I like what the module editor sets out to accomplish, but there are still enough loopholes to create completely broken stuff - no structural considerations for radiators, insane materials for injectors and CMs, questionably physical nukes, reactors, and radshields, questionably realistic EM guns if pushing the envelope for maximum performance.
Then you have nothing to curb in "tactics" that mostly just force maximum engagement range even if the ship cannot fight effectively from this far, making it untestable by any sane person - 10Mm blank blast launchers, 1Mm low-powered lasers amounting to laser pointers at that distance, etc. so that actual combat time reaches hours with so much crap flying in between engaging ships that your CPU begins to glow like radiators on an [AE] laserstar.
And then, if you find something more or less sensible and download a bunch of ships it turns out that almost half requires Community Materials Pack, most of the rest are broken by it and the remaining ones overwrite all of each others' modules resulting in unfixable mess of /!\s.
IF the module editor was more airtight against broken crap, and each modded design got its own namespace, then I would be more enthusiastic towards "competitive" designs. Right now I'm mostly building stuff that can be used in the campaign because it's currently the only set of somewhat complex scenarios that more or less works, and tend towards designs that, at least on module level, don't make the campaign feel like a spec-ops squad beating up a bunch of schoolchildren for their lunch money.
Of course, once the module editors gets more sanity checks I would also appreciate if the stock designs were also upgraded to somewhat competitive standards.
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ghgh
Full Member
Still trying to make kinetics work.
Posts: 136
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Post by ghgh on Sept 24, 2018 19:32:59 GMT
I think this is what you meant to say. The only thing broken about laser stars is how ineffective they are. With pulsed lasers[1], fixed beam intensity[2], realistic efficiency[3] and a less limiting damage model[4], you could get one or two orders of magnitude more ablation out of your laser than you can do with the ones in game. Not to mention the unrealistic turret wobble and hard cap of 10 Mm on the lasing range. The ship might be significantly heavier and slower than what our laserstars are, but that doesn't really matter when you can kill any ship from a few dozen Mm's out. [1] Pulsed lasers can ablate armor by shattering it instead of vaporizing everything, which is far more energy efficient [2] The game has confused beam diameter and radius, which means all lasers have 1/4th of the intensity they should. [3] Real lasers can reach around 30-40 % efficiency instead of the max 4% we can do in game [4] The laser damage model in game is almost useless. It only simulates heating armor to melting point, and disregards any energy past the ablation cap of a material, so against well optimized targets, you just waste any intensity past around 4 MW/m². With enough power and big enough mirrors, you could lase targets until your effectiveness is limited by light lag instead of beam intensity falling off due to beam dispersion. Past a light minute or so of range, the target can start dodging your lasers effectively due to the travel time of the laser. I think, as AtomHeartDragon said below you, that the primary limitation on lasers would not be the overall design but the logistics of supporting them on a ship (I'm paraphrasing a bit though). The only thing questionable about lasers that I can think of is the efficiency of the frequency doubler, being able to pulse them would be a nice addition. As far as logistics go, having paper-thin radiators is a no go due to micrometeorites and excessive thrust blowing them off. Reactors should not run on the cusp of going super-critical. Another thing, lowering the efficiency of reactors as much as possible only makes sense from a gameplay perspective. "Lets get as little power out of this as possible" said no engineer ever. As such reactors would run much cooler and the radiators would dispense less heat. This would drive up the cost of super lasers because of the rarity of real estate needed to support all those radiators on the ship. I think lasers would still be seen but only on very large expensive ships especially due to the added cost of radiators.
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Post by Dhan on Sept 24, 2018 21:17:53 GMT
Honestly, I mainly look at the game for what it is and try to design within the constraints that are provided.
I understand that not everything is realistically represented. But with how vast and complex space warfare would be, I don't want to even begin arguing for or against certain elements because I know that no matter how much research I've done, I will never understand the full picture.
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Post by anotherfirefox on Sept 25, 2018 1:17:34 GMT
I hate Laserstars for 2 reasons: It's the dead end and it has no strategical flexibility. It's the dead end: It's locally or globally optimized but highly asymmetrical. You can't fight against Laserstar with your Laserstar because defender always win. There will be simply no battle unless the inferior is ruled by some ruthless hivemind who can shove his/her personnel into hell. Even in the case the hivemind can hardly win. No strategical flexibility: So the fight must be out of the range of Laserstars. It can be physically outranged(not yet dominated outer planets or tiny asteroids which can't afford the infrastructures) or abstractly outranged(trade warfare or espionage). In any case, Laserstar has no role unlike some irl dominating war machines like MBTs or Supercarriers. That means laserstar will eventually be hard to be justified, just like some useless ICBMs. So I'm highly expecting that Laserstars will act as strategic background not as weapon. Maybe it's strategic role would be like pre-WW2 superdreadnought battleships or Cold War nuclear armaments: Not fighting in battle but fighting in the national financial accountings. However history says that in any case this kind of war machines go outdated within 1~2 generations and be replaced with something else, even if they're still effective than newer weapons. Battleship Iowa can easily knock modern navy down under some conditions but she doesn't exist anymore Honestly speaking I can't stop thinking Laserstars looks like industrial equipment rather than war machines...
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Post by anotherfirefox on Sept 25, 2018 7:14:54 GMT
Another thing, lowering the efficiency of reactors as much as possible only makes sense from a gameplay perspective. "Lets get as little power out of this as possible" said no engineer ever. When it comes to military, sacrificing efficiency for the sake of effectiveness has been always a thing. Airforce Turbofan engines are literally the opposite of efficient engines like civil airliners, so does JP-8 gulping Gasturbine engines of M1 Abrams. Having lower efficiency to get smaller, less likely to hit radiator makes perfect sense.
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ghgh
Full Member
Still trying to make kinetics work.
Posts: 136
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Post by ghgh on Sept 25, 2018 12:26:11 GMT
Another thing, lowering the efficiency of reactors as much as possible only makes sense from a gameplay perspective. "Lets get as little power out of this as possible" said no engineer ever. When it comes to military, sacrificing efficiency for the sake of effectiveness has been always a thing. Airforce Turbofan engines are literally the opposite of efficient engines like civil airliners, so does JP-8 gulping Gasturbine engines of M1 Abrams. Having lower efficiency to get smaller, less likely to hit radiator makes perfect sense. I think it's more about finding a balance. The Abrams engine produces enough power to push the 50+ tons of armor, ammo, treads, etc. along at a reasonable speed kind of like how we trade off thrust for DV (have to get a certain thrust to move the craft along depending on the gravity well). As far as turbofans go, civilian airliners also use turbo-fans. The Boeing 747 uses the General Electric CF6 Turbofan. The engines will be as efficient as their frame allows. Larger craft will afford larger more efficient engines (C-130, 747, B-52 etc). The stress of the engine is more easily distributed across a larger frame. The reactors will be as efficient as they can in order to maintain a safe reactor that will not make your fiscal advisor cry.
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Post by anotherfirefox on Sept 25, 2018 12:43:43 GMT
When it comes to military, sacrificing efficiency for the sake of effectiveness has been always a thing. Airforce Turbofan engines are literally the opposite of efficient engines like civil airliners, so does JP-8 gulping Gasturbine engines of M1 Abrams. Having lower efficiency to get smaller, less likely to hit radiator makes perfect sense. I think it's more about finding a balance. The Abrams engine produces enough power to push the 50+ tons of armor, ammo, treads, etc. along at a reasonable speed kind of like how we trade off thrust for DV (have to get a certain thrust to move the craft along depending on the gravity well). As far as turbofans go, civilian airliners also use turbo-fans. The Boeing 747 uses the General Electric CF6 Turbofan. The engines will be as efficient as their frame allows. Larger craft will afford larger more efficient engines (C-130, 747, B-52 etc). The stress of the engine is more easily distributed across a larger frame. The reactors will be as efficient as they can in order to maintain a safe reactor that will not make your fiscal advisor cry. Sure, finding the balance is what engineers do. What I meant was that when it comes to military it's way more toward effectiveness, not efficiency. Military always make your fiscal advisor cry, and they're more than willing to put some salt on his/her eyes. Abrams always has had far much effective alternatives other than Gasturbine, and Airforce Turbofans are intentionally made inefficient to secure the thrust. Most of all, if you want to go efficient you'd not have any war machines at all
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Post by vegemeister on Sept 26, 2018 9:36:41 GMT
The only thing broken about laser stars is how ineffective they are. With pulsed lasers[1], fixed beam intensity[2], realistic efficiency[3] and a less limiting damage model[4], you could get one or two orders of magnitude more ablation out of your laser than you can do with the ones in game. Not to mention the unrealistic turret wobble and hard cap of 10 Mm on the lasing range. The ship might be significantly heavier and slower than what our laserstars are, but that doesn't really matter when you can kill any ship from a few dozen Mm's out. [1] Pulsed lasers can ablate armor by shattering it instead of vaporizing everything, which is far more energy efficient [2] The game has confused beam diameter and radius, which means all lasers have 1/4th of the intensity they should. [3] Real lasers can reach around 30-40 % efficiency instead of the max 4% we can do in game [4] The laser damage model in game is almost useless. It only simulates heating armor to melting point, and disregards any energy past the ablation cap of a material, so against well optimized targets, you just waste any intensity past around 4 MW/m². With enough power and big enough mirrors, you could lase targets until your effectiveness is limited by light lag instead of beam intensity falling off due to beam dispersion. Past a light minute or so of range, the target can start dodging your lasers effectively due to the travel time of the laser. I think, as AtomHeartDragon said below you, that the primary limitation on lasers would not be the overall design but the logistics of supporting them on a ship (I'm paraphrasing a bit though). The only thing questionable about lasers that I can think of is the efficiency of the frequency doubler, being able to pulse them would be a nice addition. As far as logistics go, having paper-thin radiators is a no go due to micrometeorites and excessive thrust blowing them off. Reactors should not run on the cusp of going super-critical. Another thing, lowering the efficiency of reactors as much as possible only makes sense from a gameplay perspective. "Lets get as little power out of this as possible" said no engineer ever. As such reactors would run much cooler and the radiators would dispense less heat. This would drive up the cost of super lasers because of the rarity of real estate needed to support all those radiators on the ship. I think lasers would still be seen but only on very large expensive ships especially due to the added cost of radiators. Even if you're optimizing for efficiency, heat engines are more efficient the greater the difference between the hot side and cold side temperatures, so you do want to run the reactor as hot as physically practical. But the limited resource for nuclear power on a spacecraft is mass, not fuel, so power systems would be engineered to minimize mass, not fuel burn. If the radiators make up most of the mass of the power system, their size is minimized (in spherical cow world) by setting the cold side temperature to 3/4 of the hot side temperature. See the derivation beginning on PDF page 9. But in the hexagonal cow world of CoaDE, we have an additional constraint that the hot and cold side temperatures of our thermocouples cannot differ by more than ~500 K. It seems like the optimal hexcow temperature ends up being ~2630 K radiators, which is as hot as possible without reducing the ΔT across the thermocouple.
But it is indeed correct that doom lasers are unrealistically advantaged by the ability reject heat with paper-thin radiators, without regard for flow rates, structural strength, or inlet-outlet temperature gradients. (Somehow, my reactor pumps sodium at 2630 K into the radiator loop and gets back sodium just above the melting point, even though the radiator works as if the whole surface is at 2630 K.) Now I'm not a laser expert, but I've never read of any real life laser with continuous power output of more than a few hundred kW, and those don't have to reject heat to space.
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