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Post by Pttg on Nov 11, 2016 8:12:00 GMT
I've found that coilguns can easily launch the same projectile faster than a similar railgun while weighing much less (and, therefore, costing less too). In what situations are railguns called for?
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Post by cuddlefish on Nov 11, 2016 8:16:59 GMT
Both have some physics bugs going on at the moment, so I suspect a true answer is going to have to wait for when they aren't easy to accidentally get breaking conservation of energy with reckless abandon. Coilguns at the moment often seem to go faster and faster the more mass you add, even when you're already below the saturation threshold.
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Post by dragonkid11 on Nov 11, 2016 8:26:41 GMT
Pick railgun if you want to save on cost but not weight.
Pick coilgun if you want to save on weight but not cost.
However, railgun pretty much only works well with smaller bullets.
So for big gun, you need coilgun.
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Post by apophys on Nov 11, 2016 9:47:52 GMT
From what I've noticed, if you want to get 1g bullets to very high velocities at low cost, coilguns are excellent. You give up a lot of turret tracking speed to get it, though (if you use a turret).
Without a turret, I've managed a coilgun with 52 km/s in 85 kc, with nearly half of that being ammo, which is probably overkill. The 1MW of power it eats is only 1kc or less worth of reactor.
(Note that this is still for v1.0.6. Also, the gun is broken and fires 20+ times as fast as it really should, even at minimum loader power.)
Coilguns are additionally a fine method for launching payloads like nukes or flak.
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Post by magusunion on Nov 11, 2016 20:15:26 GMT
Rail guns have longer accuracies for targets with lower cross-sectional area. This comes at the price of higher energy demand (and weapon cost).
Coil guns can be built cheaper, and launch heavier projectiles to strike harder than most. Coil guns are easier to fit on drones than rails due to power requirements, so that gives the drones closer engagement range in some instance when engaging capital class space craft.
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