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Post by jasonvance on Dec 20, 2016 9:10:56 GMT
How much? I've been able to squeeze 90%+ efficiency out of both stages, at least at the pedestrian 200 MW of my main model (only 80/95 on my 600kW baby model). Setting aside the output change, it sounded from upthread like the net effect is halving the required size of mirror for a given performance. So if you can get high efficiency at your chosen outputs and specifics, little reason not to do it. Actually yeah, I have 90% efficiency for both stages for my 20 MW titanium sapphire laser. However, considering I was able to lower the weight and kill silica gel armored missile of my own design decently, I decided that it was worth it. If you want 100% efficiency frequency doublers simply slot in Silver Gallium Selenide, take the optic length all the way up to 10.0cm and then raise the Optic Radius until the errors go away, then continue to up the size until you get 100% It goes in a wave cycle from 0-100% so if you are trending down just keep going you will start going up again and you can stop it right at 100% on any laser. You can of course use other doublers if you want using the same principle but most of them aren't as efficient (don't reach 100%) or have much narrower and harder to hit 100% bands.
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Post by dragonkid11 on Dec 20, 2016 9:31:17 GMT
That sounds incredibly bugged.
LET'S ABUSE IT!!!
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Post by lawson on Dec 20, 2016 14:59:03 GMT
If you want 100% efficiency frequency doublers simply slot in Silver Gallium Selenide, take the optic length all the way up to 10.0cm and then raise the Optic Radius until the errors go away, then continue to up the size until you get 100% It goes in a wave cycle from 0-100% so if you are trending down just keep going you will start going up again and you can stop it right at 100% on any laser. You can of course use other doublers if you want using the same principle but most of them aren't as efficient (don't reach 100%) or have much narrower and harder to hit 100% bands. That does sound incredibly bugged . I'm also pretty sure thermodynamics has something to say about our 100% efficient doublers as well. (my intuition is that entropy in > entropy out and the 2nd law doesn't like that) Also, any loss in the doubler appears to show up as heat in the main laser cavity. For external single-pass doublers, most of the doubling loss will be un-converted light and still be useful to guide to the target. That said, doublers DO absorb some light so >99% efficiency shouldn't be possible and mega-watt beams should have temperature control issues.
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Post by David367th on Dec 20, 2016 17:39:22 GMT
Yes two Silver Gallium Selenide doublers makes the lasers conduct more damage and ablation for free.
When both are at 100% Efficiency, any lower and you take a hit do damage but its still greater than having just one.
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Post by Drahkan on Dec 20, 2016 20:26:34 GMT
So far I've only had a short amount of time to test the new laser stuff - that is, aside from the time it took me to re-tweak all my existing lasers with the extra doubler - but in what testing I did I ran into situations that I thought was interesting, especially in the face of another thread (at least one, I assume there are many more) discussing whether or not armor is worthwhile: * At 1000km range, 1 x 100MW Near Infrared plus 2 x 200MW Near Ultraviolet lasers were able to punch out 4 x 4.7m-wide 30MW lasers with 25cm silica aerogel in a couple seconds. Those 30MW lasers, on the other hand, didn't have the time to burn through the 3 lasers on the first ship (with similar armor but ~12m wide) * The AI was controlling the laser cruiser, while I was controlling the battleship that had the 4 x 30MW lasers. As soon as the battle started I set the battleships 9 x 7mm railguns (~10km/sec) to ignore range, so they start ripping away at the laser cruiser oh-so-far away. * While the slugs are "slowly" making their way across the 1000km gap, the 3 big lasers begin picking away at the railguns and coilgun, all of which have 10cm of silica aerogel. Despite the relatively weak armor, it appears that the changes to laser accuracy actually make a difference: it was taking the laser cruiser forever to burn out the slug-throwers, and the trails of armor damage in the general vicinity of the weapons made it obvious that the lasers were spending a lot of time missing the weapons. * About 1.5 minutes later (game-time; the game was running at about .2 fps at this point due to tracers + some missiles I'd launched, and my machine is a decent rig. I really wish this would get fixed/improved. ) the slugs finally arrive. And despite the laser cruiser being a relatively small ship, and having decent-enough armor, *and* the inaccuracy you'd assume given the distance and simple fact that the laser cruiser had fired its engines during that time-frame, the sheer volume of fire still turned it into an empty shell within a few game-seconds. * During that 1.5 minute travel time, the laser cruiser was only able to destroy about 1/2 of the weapons on the battleship, and were only able to get through the ship's armor in the holes left by the weapons and a random selection of other few non-citadel-armored spots. Moral of the story? First, I'm going to have to do more testing, but it seems feasible that on small weapons, swapping out aerogel for a thinner layer of boron or similar might actually protect slug throwers from long-range lasers due to the reduced ability of lasers to make precise, constant-burn hits at such distances. Second, *armor matters*: make sure your weapons aren't sitting directly over any of the important bits of your ship, but otherwise layered-and-spaced armor seems to protect against lasers. (...and even in a battleship-vs-battleship, railgun-only test I did, citadel-strength armor still kept the ships alive for quite a bit longer than the weaker armor on my laser cruiser did.) And third, uber-lasers don't make slug-throwers pointless; even at 1000km, as long as you have enough armor to keep your ship alive long enough to unleash a bunch of slugs, although the lasers might kill you first, you'll still probably get your revenge a minute later. ...aaaaand of course today's testing/playing is probably going to prove most of this wrong, but hey, that seems to be par for the course with this game.
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Post by Drahkan on Dec 20, 2016 20:34:40 GMT
BTW, previous posts in this thread raised a couple questions in my mind that someone can hopefully answer:
1) How do you determine what a laser's focal diameter (or whatever the correct term is) will be at a given range? (Someone mentioned making their laser hitting a ~1m circle at 3/4 their max range; how do you figure that out?)
2) Is it possible to make (near) x-ray lasers yet? (Or: what's the highest-frequency lasers we can make at this point?) If so, how?
3) Given the relatively low efficiency of low-spectrum lasers, is there any reason to even use them? (Infrared, for instance; why go to the trouble of building the Solar Lance with just that one, inefficient laser?)
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Post by David367th on Dec 20, 2016 20:38:51 GMT
Seeing as Silica's laser resistance got nerfed a while back I think it would be good doing tests on aramid fiber since 1mm of that can withstand a beefy laser for a minute or two.
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Post by jasonvance on Dec 20, 2016 20:44:13 GMT
BTW, previous posts in this thread raised a couple questions in my mind that someone can hopefully answer: 1) How do you determine what a laser's focal diameter (or whatever the correct term is) will be at a given range? (Someone mentioned making their laser hitting a ~1m circle at 3/4 their max range; how do you figure that out?) 2) Is it possible to make (near) x-ray lasers yet? (Or: what's the highest-frequency lasers we can make at this point?) If so, how? 3) Given the relatively low efficiency of low-spectrum lasers, is there any reason to even use them? (Infrared, for instance; why go to the trouble of building the Solar Lance with just that one, inefficient laser?) 1) (not sure how the game is doing this sorry maybe someone else does) 2) Ruby is currently the highest frequency pumping rod composition so with 2 frequency doublers it is 174nm (which is still not close to x-ray which is 10~.01 nm). If you ever want to quickly check what wavelengths you get slot in each gain medium (what the lasing rod is made of) with a single doubler and 2 doublers. That will give you the full set of possible wave lengths in game. 3) I don't really think so, I tried making a heat ray with a powerful IR laser that would attempt to melt components instead of cutting them but it didn't seem very effective. I think it is still worth checking more into though.
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Post by Drahkan on Dec 20, 2016 20:46:02 GMT
Seeing as Silica's laser resistance got nerfed a while back I think it would be good doing tests on aramid fiber since 1mm of that can withstand a beefy laser for a minute or two. I did quite a bit of testing with aramid (along with a bunch of other people) and, although it works great when layered on top of something like carbon, from a cost/weight/effectiveness perspective aerogel still seemed to win since we can't layer armor on turrets. However, with the new laser (in)accuracy, I bet you're right that aramid it may be the new go-to armor for long-range laser protection. Hell, it's my go-to outer armor for everything else...
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Post by David367th on Dec 20, 2016 21:26:25 GMT
I think Silica Gel doesn't ablate from nuke flash like Aramid and Para-aramid do. At Least that what it seems like to my Stuffed Whipple Shield design compared to a whipple-gel-wall-spall liner design.
Maybe a mix of Para/Aramid and gel is the way to go.
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Post by Drahkan on Dec 20, 2016 22:00:39 GMT
I think Silica Gel doesn't ablate from nuke flash like Aramid and Para-aramid do. At Least that what it seems like to my Stuffed Whipple Shield design compared to a whipple-gel-wall-spall liner design. Maybe a mix of Para/Aramid and gel is the way to go. For ship armor I totally agree; but turrets are stuck at only one armor material, so how to solve that? For a "armor to handle all situations" setup, here's my go-to build: Boron (2-4cm) Aramid Fiber (1.5mm) (Air gap and then the following, which is citadel-only armor; it only covers the Important Bits of the ship) Vanadium Chromium Steel (1-3cm) (air gap) Reinforced Carbon-Carbon (2-3cm) Aramid Fiber (1.5mm) UHMWPE is amazingly resilient as well...I wonder if it would work as turret armor, both against ablation, lasers and the occasional slug..?
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Post by David367th on Dec 20, 2016 22:37:51 GMT
Did some quick testing.
Against a 1.16 GW/m^2 @ 100km blue laser, at a range of 250km (roughly 200-210 MW/m^2)
1cm of Aramid lasted roughly 5-10 seconds
1cm Silica ablated away instantly
1cm of UHMWPE lasted about 2-3 seconds
These tests were very rushed and the range is probably too close to really measure how well these materials work, but Aramid still seems to be working the best.
EDIT: Some more quick tests, Nitrile Rubber and Ceramic Oxide fibers seem to be doing better than Aramid, but who knows when they're fully ablated in 5-10 seconds. Maybe changing the thickness to a meter is better than a cm
EDIT Part 2: at 10cm Aramid lasts quite a long time and Silica and Graphite ablate in 2-3 seconds.
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Post by ross128 on Dec 20, 2016 22:45:29 GMT
BTW, previous posts in this thread raised a couple questions in my mind that someone can hopefully answer: 1) How do you determine what a laser's focal diameter (or whatever the correct term is) will be at a given range? (Someone mentioned making their laser hitting a ~1m circle at 3/4 their max range; how do you figure that out?) 2) Is it possible to make (near) x-ray lasers yet? (Or: what's the highest-frequency lasers we can make at this point?) If so, how? 3) Given the relatively low efficiency of low-spectrum lasers, is there any reason to even use them? (Infrared, for instance; why go to the trouble of building the Solar Lance with just that one, inefficient laser?) One way using the in-game stats is to take the total energy and divide it by the intensity. This will get you the total area in square meters. Intensity*Area=Energy, so Energy/Intensity=Area.
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Post by Drahkan on Dec 20, 2016 23:23:37 GMT
One way using the in-game stats is to take the total energy and divide it by the intensity. This will get you the total area in square meters. Intensity*Area=Energy, so Energy/Intensity=Area. Ah, cool! Thanks! Now to spend even more time testing to see what difference that makes...
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Post by Drahkan on Dec 20, 2016 23:44:06 GMT
Same here, although my setup was quite a bit different as I wanted to continue testing whether or not armor on slug-throwers can protect them from uber-long range lasers long enough for 1) the slugs to get to (and destroy) the laser-carrying ship and 2) survive with enough (any?) weapons and other components surviving to keep the ship combat-worthy. To that goal I had the AI use my battleship, set to Defensive (so it wouldn't lob missiles at me), and I used a test ship with either a 100MW ultraviolet OR a 100MW near-infrared laser (which was interesting in its own right, since damage-wise the ultraviolet should be way better, right?) firing at 750km. The goal was to target the battleship's 4 lasers, 2 coilguns, and 9 railguns, and see how long it took for them all to be destroyed: * If the weapons had silicon aerogel armor, the ultraviolet laser destroyed all guns, but only about 25% faster than the near-infrared laser did. (~1.5 minutes vs. ~1 minute.) * For non-huge weapons (i.e. lasers), 1/10th as thick Aramid Fiber replaces silicon aerogel for almost exactly the same price and weight. So, after the above test and switching to aramid, my turrets ended up with ~1cm aramid on slug-throwers and ~2cm on lasers. * Ran the same test, but this time results were shockingly different. Not only did the aramid last at least 3 times as long (despite me stripping the enemy ship of all but one small engine, after 3 minutes or so the stupid AI would decide to start spinning in circles, making it difficult to keep lasers on-target and so throwing off the test's time), but the near-infrared laser *actually seemed to outperform the ultraviolet laser*. It was tough to tell, but it definitely wasn't any *worse* than the ultraviolet laser, so given that the ultraviolet laser should have "done more damage" it was a shocking result. This wasn't what I'd call a scientific test, but as a quick and dirty answer goes, I agree that aramid fiber is the go-to turret armor, at least without a bunch of serious testing of all the other possible candidates for optimal weight/thickness/cost material. But given that aramid is good against slugs as well - or at least, good enough..? - I doubt I'm going to spend more time testing. As far as infrared vs. other colors is concerned, however...THAT is something I want to look farther into. It makes sense that some materials will melt quicker than they will cut, but I didn't expect the quick results I got. It makes me wonder if other lower-spectrum lasers might be even better at combining heat with cutting power. Ideas, anyone?
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