|
Post by bluuetechnic on Nov 2, 2016 14:52:35 GMT
...I know that it isn't entirely possible, but I still want to see some BSG style flak barriers... Actually, ships can put up some surprisingly effective defensive flak barrages: The key is to add flares to flak shells, as when the flare burns out, the flak will detonate. Always add more than one flare, as there is something a bit bugged with them. Sometimes flares will burn out as soon as they are launched, immediately triggering the payload and blowing up your ship. Multiple flares stops this happening. With careful timing of the flare lifetime, a DFB can be pretty cool: The flares guarantee that every shell will explode at a fixed distance, creating an effective barrier. The advantage of a DFB in is that no matter how many missiles the enemy has launched, they ALL have to fly through the barrier. More missiles only slightly increases the chance to hit, unlike lasers which can always be overwhelmed if enough ordinance is thrown at them. Here is it in action (along with the rest of the CIWS railguns and cannons): The result, of 50 inbound missiles: 4 taken down by ABM defences (deliberately turned off after a couple of launches to demonstrate the DFB) 45 taken down by DFB+CIWS 1 missed the ship (and was shot down on the other side). All in all, I'd say that's a pretty convincing test for a DFB. Currently, they are only really useful for defending the targeted ship (as opposed to defending an escorted fleet). There is also the chance that an allied vessel may stray into the DFB, resulting in egregious friendly fire. However, if we happened to get more intelligent fire control and better proximity-fuse settings in a future update, I think this kind of system could actually be monstrously effective at downing incoming missiles. Holy shit dude that's incredible! Why didn't you share this earlier? In all seriousness though, this is awesome - not just in terms of it being an incredibly effective new point defense and anti-missile method, but also just looking freaking AWESOME! If I were you, I'd post this in both the 'post your designs' thread and especially the 'obscure game mechanics' thread (speaking of which I recommend you all check that one out - it has some really useful tips), because I had no idea flares could detonate other warheads (and by the looks of it I'm not the only one) As it is, Flare missile is the ultimate defense against regular missile. If your ship have a low heat signature you can make them very affordable and light, my smallest variant only weight 45kg. When manually controlled, I can make explode massive wave of missile at a distance of 25km with a single flare. At that range, even multi-MT nuke barely heat your armor. I posted my design in the 100mc challenge tread if you are interested. While yes this is generally true (and is one of the big reasons I think missiles aren't as great as everyone seems to think), there are ways around it, or to defeat it. Among other things, you can stage missiles so that they come in tiny packs, or even 1 at a time and you have to waste flares, but that one's not super great. The better solution is to use full homing, particularly on hyper-velocity missiles (or just when used at a high intercept speed). While this does have the downside of being less accurate, and possible to dodge in some scenarios, I've found that it can be used to defeat some traditional flares. (Also it doesn't look as cool, so who'd ever want to use that? )
|
|
|
Post by redparadize on Nov 2, 2016 15:49:07 GMT
Since heat signature is very low on both my drones and ship, my flare missile are extremely cheap. Cheaper than everything but the smallest KKV. Most of my ship and drone pack can defeat +30 separated wave of missile. Keep in mind that I still have guns and nuclear missile capable of shooting down small missile pack at fairly reasonable range. Individual missile wave would be highly ineffective and could be countered by a single low powered laser.
On my part, what I do is I lunch low yield nuclear missile within battle at a rate of 1 per second per launcher. It keep enemy laser away from my module and drones and eventually saturate enemy defense. That's extremely effective. In close combat, most of my ship and drone pack have +7minutes worth of flare missile, that's how long I could counter my own strategy.
|
|
|
Post by bluuetechnic on Nov 2, 2016 15:55:55 GMT
Since heat signature is very low on both my drones and ship, my flare missile are extremely cheap. Cheaper than everything but the smallest KKV. Most of my ship and drone pack can defeat +30 separated wave of missile. Keep in mind that I still have guns and nuclear missile capable of shooting down small missile pack at fairly reasonable range. Individual missile wave would be highly ineffective and could be countered by a single low powered laser. On my part, what I do is I lunch low yield nuclear missile within battle at a rate of 1 per second per launcher. It keep enemy laser away from my module and drones and eventually saturate enemy defense. That's extremely effective. In close combat, most of my ship and drone pack have +7minutes worth of flare missile, that's how long I could counter my own strategy. You're definitely right, and that would almost certainly solve the first point I brought up, but what about using full homing, and missiles that just glide in most of the way unpowered?
|
|
|
Post by redparadize on Nov 2, 2016 16:18:55 GMT
Full homing will often miss target by a long shot, so its not valid for KKV, just for large nuke. Large nuke can be destroyed by regular mean because it can't cost effectively be used in saturation attack. In wave they tend to destroy each other.
My combat ship and pocket battleship drone have large unbalanced RCS for combat maneuver and when I am shooting my ship can drift quite allot. I am pretty that anything trowed at me with full homing from 100km and at 5km/s would miss by at least a 500m.
|
|
|
Post by dragonkid11 on Nov 2, 2016 16:29:14 GMT
I would be able to use low megawatt flare if not for the fact that having four times more radiators then necessary seem to have increased my heat by four times.
This is clearly a bug and it's very annoying.
|
|
|
Post by jonen on Nov 2, 2016 16:37:26 GMT
I would be able to use low megawatt flare if not for the fact that having four times more radiators then necessary seem to have increased my heat by four times. This is clearly a bug and it's very annoying. If you've redundancy in your radiators, you should be able to safely deactivate your redundant radiators to reduce your thermal signature.
|
|
|
Post by redparadize on Nov 2, 2016 17:02:36 GMT
I noticed some heat bug too. Some of my ship are listed at 3 MW heat signature with engine but when I enter in combat its 9mw. If I deactivate engines and reactivate them several time it goes back to 3mw. It's not related to engines because it seem deactivate/activate thing work too with any module really.
|
|
|
Post by jonen on Nov 2, 2016 17:28:04 GMT
With the superlaser designs floating about, usually those have excessive radiators (because it's tricky arranging for just enough radiators to handle all the lasers firing, so you might as well go a little bit overboard), and entering combat view (or zooming in) they always start out with maximum thermal signature, then rapidly drop down to the neutral value, then slowly build up as lasers start firing.
(Of course, with GW lasers and reactors, their signature never drops to the level a flare could distract anything from them.)
|
|
|
Post by Durandal on Nov 2, 2016 18:30:07 GMT
...I know that it isn't entirely possible, but I still want to see some BSG style flak barriers... Actually, ships can put up some surprisingly effective defensive flak barrages: The key is to add flares to flak shells, as when the flare burns out, the flak will detonate. Always add more than one flare, as there is something a bit bugged with them. Sometimes flares will burn out as soon as they are launched, immediately triggering the payload and blowing up your ship. Multiple flares stops this happening. With careful timing of the flare lifetime, a DFB can be pretty cool: The flares guarantee that every shell will explode at a fixed distance, creating an effective barrier. The advantage of a DFB in is that no matter how many missiles the enemy has launched, they ALL have to fly through the barrier. More missiles only slightly increases the chance to hit, unlike lasers which can always be overwhelmed if enough ordinance is thrown at them. Here is it in action (along with the rest of the CIWS railguns and cannons): The result, of 50 inbound missiles: 4 taken down by ABM defences (deliberately turned off after a couple of launches to demonstrate the DFB) 45 taken down by DFB+CIWS 1 missed the ship (and was shot down on the other side). All in all, I'd say that's a pretty convincing test for a DFB. Currently, they are only really useful for defending the targeted ship (as opposed to defending an escorted fleet). There is also the chance that an allied vessel may stray into the DFB, resulting in egregious friendly fire. However, if we happened to get more intelligent fire control and better proximity-fuse settings in a future update, I think this kind of system could actually be monstrously effective at downing incoming missiles. I'm really excited to try this out when I get home. But I do have a few questions. Is it only effective when set to ignore range? If so, would it need to be manually engaged for an inbound missile wave? IF you leave it on when targeting an enemy ship wouldn't it continue to throw out flak shells ineffectivly? Have you tried the shells as a micro missile set at an appropriate range? I was thinking of setting it up as a missile system for my own ships.
|
|
|
Post by nykoliski on Nov 2, 2016 18:34:12 GMT
I've also encounter a bug with the heat rejection calculations for multiple laser modules of the same type not scaling as more lasers are added. I'm using a 100MW laser that dumps 97MW individually. If I mount six of them all facing forward so that they fire simultaneously, the required heat rejection in the builder is still only 97MW. So pretty much any laser ship that mounts multiple lasers is broken right now.
|
|
|
Post by jonen on Nov 2, 2016 18:48:18 GMT
I've also encounter a bug with the heat rejection calculations for multiple laser modules of the same type not scaling as more lasers are added. I'm using a 100MW laser that dumps 97MW individually. If I mount six of them all facing forward so that they fire simultaneously, the required heat rejection in the builder is still only 97MW. So pretty much any laser ship that mounts multiple lasers is broken right now. While the designer only calculates waste heat (and power requirements) for one instance of any given weapon at a time, you should note that having multiple weapons you will only fire as many as you can power. For heat, AFAIK the laser heat slowly builds up while firing, so you can lase with more lasers than you have cooling capacity for a while, but eventually you'll start overheating and will only be able to lase with one.
|
|
|
Post by ross128 on Nov 2, 2016 18:51:53 GMT
Actually, if you don't have enough radiators for all your lasers, you'll only be able to fire the full array for about a minute, and then most of it will go into thermal shutdown.
You'll only be able to continuously fire as many lasers as you actually have cooling for. Apparently your ship can temporarily sink the excess heat somehow, but once it's saturated your radiators suddenly become a limiting factor.
|
|
|
Post by Durandal on Nov 2, 2016 18:53:37 GMT
I've also encounter a bug with the heat rejection calculations for multiple laser modules of the same type not scaling as more lasers are added. I'm using a 100MW laser that dumps 97MW individually. If I mount six of them all facing forward so that they fire simultaneously, the required heat rejection in the builder is still only 97MW. So pretty much any laser ship that mounts multiple lasers is broken right now. While the designer only calculates waste heat (and power requirements) for one instance of any given weapon at a time, you should note that having multiple weapons you will only fire as many as you can power. For heat, AFAIK the laser heat slowly builds up while firing, so you can lase with more lasers than you have cooling capacity for a while, but eventually you'll start overheating and will only be able to lase with one. I can vouch for this. A dreadnought I'd built the other night overheated in an early iteration after a short time of sustained firing. Doubling up on radiators fixed the issue.
|
|
|
Post by jonen on Nov 2, 2016 18:53:42 GMT
Actually, if you don't have enough radiators for all your lasers, you'll only be able to fire the full array for about a minute, and then most of it will go into thermal shutdown. You'll only be able to continuously fire as many lasers as you actually have cooling for. Apparently your ship can temporarily sink the excess heat somehow, but once it's saturated your radiators suddenly become a limiting factor. With sufficient lasers and radiators matched more precisely to the capacity of the requirements of the one laser, you saturate the radiator a lot faster than a minute. And while you'll only be able to lase continuously with one laser, if you have but slightly more radiator capacity than needed for the one laser, you will be lasing intermittently with a second as the radiators cool enough to allow it (but only until the radiators are once more saturated - in my test build the second laser was literally fluttering on and off).
|
|
|
Post by madscientist on Nov 2, 2016 19:44:06 GMT
Holy shit, you made timed flak cannon!? People playing this game is getting smarter and smarter everyday. EDIT: Oh and my the way, could you show us your flak cannon design? The cannon itself is nothing special: There's no point forking out for a electromagnetic gun. The shells are only going to fly one or two Kms before detonating. I tried to optimise for cost and a decent muzzle velocity, but the most important factors are rate of fire and turning speed. I'm sure other folks can make a better one Holy shit dude that's incredible! Why didn't you share this earlier? In all seriousness though, this is awesome - not just in terms of it being an incredibly effective new point defense and anti-missile method, but also just looking freaking AWESOME! If I were you, I'd post this in both the 'post your designs' thread and especially the 'obscure game mechanics' thread (speaking of which I recommend you all check that one out - it has some really useful tips), because I had no idea flares could detonate other warheads (and by the looks of it I'm not the only one). Glad you like it. I may post it in another thread when I have a ship design that I'm a bit happier with, as the current one is still a bit pricey and over-engineered in other ways. I suspect an escort vessel armed with lasers, a DFB system, and more thermal output than necessary (to attract more missiles) may be the best current option for defending fleets from long range missiles (excluding overly effective decoy missiles). After that, the age of the missile will end, and the battleship will reign supreme once more! I'm really excited to try this out when I get home. But I do have a few questions. Is it only effective when set to ignore range? If so, would it need to be manually engaged for an inbound missile wave? IF you leave it on when targeting an enemy ship wouldn't it continue to throw out flak shells ineffectivly? Have you tried the shells as a micro missile set at an appropriate range? I was thinking of setting it up as a missile system for my own ships. Ignore range should not be used. I only turned it on for a few moments to take the second screenshot. The shells will only ever fly 1-2 Km before detonating, so turning it on at long range just wastes shells.I have experimented with micro-missiles for traditional ABM defences before, but not for a defensive flak barrage system. The idea of a DFB is to saturate a volume with as much flak as possible. I don't know if guided projectiles will do anything more than raise the cost. I think ABMs work better as a complimentary system to take down heavily armoured nukes, while the DFB deals with swarms of cheaper missiles.
|
|