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Post by Durandal on Nov 4, 2016 5:07:02 GMT
Nope, it just gives the vaporized material coming off a higher velocity, but doesn't make it any hotter. It's like boiling an egg, if the water is already boiling, it won't get any hotter no matter how much you turn up the heat. I think the laser ships above can be slightly improved if you use mercury for propulsion. Very nice, but unless I'm misunderstanding the way power works wouldn't you need a 10gw reactor for each thruster?
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Post by goduranus on Nov 4, 2016 5:10:58 GMT
Apparently not in this game, I think when a layer received too much energy at once it is counted as "destroyed" and doesn't transmit the excess heat further in. But if you have super concentrated your laser, you're only hitting a tiny spot, which is difficult to hit repeatedly, making it harder to get through. Where as if you use small lenses, the energy spreads out over a slightly larger area that you can repeatly hit more often and break through. Try it yourself, make your laser lenses smaller and see if they take any longer to burn through a set of targets, as long as the Max-range intensity is above 100MW/m^2.(actually I think it needs to be a bit higher, maybe 200MW/m^2 to account for armor sloping) Also, for the real life example, the boil off rate is only proportional to energy input up to a point, if you heat the pan so it's almost red hot, the steam carries too much energy and pushes the water away before transmitting a significant amount of heat to it. www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-eYykJj4rMOn mercury thruster, yeah that ship has 10GW, only one thruster needs to be active at once so it works out.
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Post by apophys on Nov 4, 2016 7:40:15 GMT
I think the laser ships above can be slightly improved if you use mercury for propulsion. Mercury is much much more expensive than decane. The fuel density mass savings are small and aren't worth the cost. Thrust and exhaust velocity are similar, and I could probably get them identical if I fiddle with my MPD. Edit: Indeed I can. At high power like this, a good MPD fuel is defined exclusively by its density and cost, because thrust characteristics can be made identical depending on the balance of the MPD. Mercury is the best where cost is unlimited. In a cost-limited format, things like carbon dioxide become much more interesting. I used decane, because I use decane everywhere and it's compatible with tankers I may build. Very nice, but unless I'm misunderstanding the way power works wouldn't you need a 10gw reactor for each thruster? There is only one 10GW main thruster on the ship, only used for orbital maneuvers out of combat. The combat thrusters are 9x 100MW, so they can fire along with the 9x 1GW lasers in combat, to orient the ship ("broadside," which here means pointing forward). The ship has one 10GW reactor.
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Post by goduranus on Nov 4, 2016 8:55:23 GMT
Mercury is more expensive, but it's normally not a significant amount. I think your ships are so inexpensive, thus you feel the cost of mercury more, because you didn't put any armor on, that 1.8cm of aerogel is gonna get blasted away in 2 seconds.
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Post by apophys on Nov 4, 2016 9:33:34 GMT
It probably will, yeah. But if a fleet can survive all the lasers and close the range enough to blast it away, I'd like to see it (eventually I will update with defensive timed flak to counter missile spam).
The laser fleet should be easy to put the AI in control of, since all it has to do is sit there and burn everything that comes within 250km (and if engagement ranges get increased, it will be significantly harder to break).
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Post by someusername6 on Nov 5, 2016 8:12:07 GMT
Maybe this is old news for people here, but the drones I submitted for this challenge to not stand a chance against the gauntlet of lasers. Neither do the micro KKVs; they get killed too fast. So I worked on some KKVs with more delta-v, and higher acceleration. Still around 24s of burn time. And finally I thought, why hit the targets with a single hole, instead of putting a little flak at the end and hitting the target with high velocity flak instead? (Do your flak missiles depend on delta-v rather than on explosion velocity? Is it still a KKV if there is a little flak?) Anyhow, here it is. I had success killing the gauntlets by sending a couple waves of 300 of these.
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Post by redparadize on Nov 5, 2016 8:26:04 GMT
I want to restart this challenge in a new format. Basicly I will ask player to design a fleet for the AI. We will pick the best applicant, then the real challenge will begin: design a fleet that can defeat all enemy fleet, the winner will be the one that does it for the lowest cost.
Sounds good ?
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Post by someusername6 on Nov 5, 2016 8:34:18 GMT
It may deserve a new thread.
Please also ask for the design files, or at least enough information for us to reproduce it. Or maybe wait until the next patch where we can name modules?
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Post by goduranus on Nov 5, 2016 10:48:59 GMT
There should be some gentlemen's rule on missiles, how many per wave, how many in total, and on drone-launched missiles. Realistically, missiles will probably always get through, but more than 100 lags the computer which is not much fun.
Also I say the defender gets to choose the battlefield, whether it be large planet, small planet, asteroid, etc, which can make deltaV and thrust a significant factor. Also the defenders need to have enough deltaV to reach escape velocity from the designated battlefield into solar orbit, or else the optimum strategy would be to put no engines on to save cost.
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Post by randomletters on Nov 6, 2016 2:52:36 GMT
I'm not quite sorted on what I want for weapons/fleet comp, but here's the cheapest ship I was able to make. The trick is minimum thickness armor on the crew compartments and changing the gimball materials to aluminum. My target is 2.5 MC per ship, and from what I've screwed around with so far it seems to be very possible to get some decent KE missiles and decoys on for that price.
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Post by jonen on Nov 6, 2016 3:09:19 GMT
I'm not quite sorted on what I want for weapons/fleet comp, but here's the cheapest ship I was able to make. The trick is minimum thickness armor on the crew compartments and changing the gimball materials to aluminum. My target is 2.5 MC per ship, and from what I've screwed around with so far it seems to be very possible to get some decent KE missiles and decoys on for that price. Hm. With 13+2X as the absolute, barebones, minimum crew (X being the number of crew modules), your ship uses 8 more crew with five crew modules than it would with one, meaning unless your 5 10 crew modules cost less than one (modified) 30 crew module, you can cut cost there.
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Post by randomletters on Nov 6, 2016 3:37:03 GMT
Hm. With 13+2X as the absolute, barebones, minimum crew (X being the number of crew modules), your ship uses 8 more crew with five crew modules than it would with one, meaning unless your 5 10 crew modules cost less than one (modified) 30 crew module, you can cut cost there. Didn't realize it worked that way, I also did some minor tweaks on every other module to drive the price down slightly. Looks like magnesium is the cheapest crew module composition. After some other minor module tweaks, and a pair of turreted 11.5 km/s railguns the ship now lies comfortably at 2.0 Mc. I think this will be my gunship design. I think I'll try to add a laser and missile variant as well.
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Post by goduranus on Nov 6, 2016 6:04:26 GMT
That ship won't last 2 seconds against the gauntlet though.
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Post by jonen on Nov 6, 2016 6:05:43 GMT
That ship won't last 2 seconds against the gauntlet though. So twenty five of them in less than a minute? Sounds about right.
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Post by randomletters on Nov 6, 2016 6:20:39 GMT
That ship won't last 2 seconds against the gauntlet though. Which means 50 of the 2B (2.0 Mc per) should give me just about a minute and a half of fire from 1g 15 km/s railguns firing around 100 rounds per second. I'll take those odds. Edit: Downsized the crew quarters and cheapened the ship.
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