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Post by captinjoehenry on Nov 1, 2016 17:08:03 GMT
Honestly if things come to a cap ship engagement lasers even massive GW class arrays are pretty worthless against competent armor that is fairly cheap and kinetics rule the day. So be it in my experience the best weapon in a capship on capship situation is coilgun launched high yield nukes. But yeah missiles are the main thing that settle things. Ive found it to be situational. Most KE guns can be burned off with a sufficient amount if laser input at 250km ranges. However, if the enemy *also* has 250km lasers it becomes a first strike situation on who an burn off more lasers the fastest. That said, a ship which protected it's KE weapons behind armor through rotating or some means could preserve enough weapons to survive into effective range. I know one user here had a ship with side-mounted nose guns which rotated into firing position after advancing in a quasi-broadside fashion. True. So be it some kinetic weapons are quite happy to engage effectively at 250km. And if you have the money to deploy a nuke coilgun that'll engage at any and all ranges and be utterly devastating. Definitely costly but it works wonders.
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Post by Rocket Witch on Nov 3, 2016 17:20:21 GMT
a fringe possibility of highly radioactive drones coming close I wouldn't consider it a fringe possibility when you're probably gonna be launching a lot of those yourself. They'll be in close proximity to the rest of the fleet for a considerable time as they slowly stream out of the launchers. That said though, yeah, very easy to block. Since 5mm of Li-6 consistently blocks all levels of radiation (in my experience) I wonder if it's a bit bugged, but I dunno how neutrons work.
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Post by thorneel on Nov 3, 2016 18:20:24 GMT
For what I remember, light elements are best at blocking neutrons. Water, being full of hydrogen, is pretty good at it, for example. Lithium being the lightest (room-temperature) solid element should be pretty good at it as well.
Note: in general, you want to put anti-particle shield (the light element) before the heavy element gamma-ray shield. Otherwise, neutrons hitting your heavy elements can create secondary radiation that won't be stopped by the light elements. Then again, radiation shielding wisdom has so far not been developed in the context of gigawatt lasers and hypervelocity bombardments...
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Post by coaxjack on Nov 3, 2016 22:13:21 GMT
Ah brehmsstrahlung, nothing like your own shielding backfiring and turning your crew compartment into some kind of hideous magnetron device, lol.
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hal
New Member
Posts: 34
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Post by hal on Nov 4, 2016 17:15:10 GMT
I was just thinking about how x-rays are used in staged thermonuclear devices and the thought occurred to me- wouldn't it be possible to use the same principle to use the x-rays as a weapon directly? Since in a staged device the x-rays are 'reflected' by the surrounding material, what's to stop someone from designing the x-ray reflector to focus the x-rays at a point in front of the weapon?
I have no idea if this would be at all useful, though.
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