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Post by boosters on Dec 28, 2016 14:45:58 GMT
Hi all, So I've finally gotten around to experimenting with mega-lasers. I built a ship with an array of seven 10GW near-infrafed lasers, and it will fry any incoming missiles or drones before they can get within 100km. I armored some drones, and the turret of the drone, with 30cm of silica aerogel, and the drones still get vaporized instantly just inside of a million kilometers. So, I'm very pleased with these lasers as an area-denial defensive weapon. But now I am wondering if you all have any successful strategies for delivering payloads through that kind of laser coverage. Should I try more or different armor? Should I miniaturize my drones and send hundreds, instead of tens?
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Post by dragonkid11 on Dec 28, 2016 15:34:15 GMT
Drones barely work against gigawatt without specifically design for it.
It's generally better to use missile with REALLY pointy nose to get the maximum amount of surface on the smallest cross-section possible.
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Post by bigbombr on Dec 28, 2016 15:44:19 GMT
Hi all, So I've finally gotten around to experimenting with mega-lasers. I built a ship with an array of seven 10GW near-infrafed lasers, and it will fry any incoming missiles or drones before they can get within 100km. I armored some drones, and the turret of the drone, with 30cm of silica aerogel, and the drones still get vaporized instantly just inside of a million kilometers. So, I'm very pleased with these lasers as an area-denial defensive weapon. But now I am wondering if you all have any successful strategies for delivering payloads through that kind of laser coverage. Should I try more or different armor? Should I miniaturize my drones and send hundreds, instead of tens? This thread should suit your needs. childrenofadeadearth.boards.net/thread/157/science-on-thermal-armor
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Post by kitten on Dec 28, 2016 16:53:51 GMT
Multi-GW lasers, assuming reasonably efficient design, are simply too strong to be worth armouring most things against currently. When and if we get longer range engagements, we'll probably worry about armouring against them at extreme range—if lasers could shoot out to hundreds of light milliseconds they would both be less intense and much harder to avoid, so some form of armouring would become compulsory. But worry not, that would require large changes to the engine (including modeling appreciable travel time for light at those distances), so in the immediate, keep your capships away and overwhelm them with numbers.
Make your drones and missiles effective at as long a range as possible, send in lots of them and play the numbers game. Kinetic kill missiles don't seem viable against serious point defences because you require the targetable missile to actually hit; instead of 10 missiles it's better to have 10 drones that will put hundreds of hypervelocity projectiles into space before they get vapourised. Also, gigaton class nuclear missiles that detonate for huge AoE flash before the lasers can even be brought to bear and laser drones should be effective. I hope that in future patches it will become easier to design super-flak missiles that fill space with fast-moving, dense debris.
The engagement ranges in the stock game are frankly absurdly close—35km is point blank for RL naval fleets that have to deal with stuff like atmospheric drag and the curvature of the Earth. Right now I'm of the opinion that anything you command in the orbital mechanics portion of the game should only need to be in the general vicinity of its target, having to close the distance in the combat phase is just asking for trouble.
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Post by newageofpower on Dec 28, 2016 18:58:37 GMT
Multi-GW lasers, assuming reasonably efficient design, are simply too strong to be worth armouring most things against currently. When and if we get longer range engagements, we'll probably worry about armouring against them at extreme range—if lasers could shoot out to hundreds of light milliseconds they would both be less intense and much harder to avoid, so some form of armouring would become compulsory. But worry not, that would require large changes to the engine (including modeling appreciable travel time for light at those distances), so in the immediate, keep your capships away and overwhelm them with numbers. Make your drones and missiles effective at as long a range as possible, send in lots of them and play the numbers game. Kinetic kill missiles don't seem viable against serious point defences because you require the targetable missile to actually hit; instead of 10 missiles it's better to have 10 drones that will put hundreds of hypervelocity projectiles into space before they get vapourised. Also, gigaton class nuclear missiles that detonate for huge AoE flash before the lasers can even be brought to bear and laser drones should be effective. I hope that in future patches it will become easier to design super-flak missiles that fill space with fast-moving, dense debris. Armoring against nukeflash is plausible, armoring against frequency quadrupled GW death beams with mirrors over 1m impractical. A killsat with a 23m+ mirror (50m unturreted!) would easily have a useful beam intensity at 10mm or greater distance. Query, do you have a working gigaton nuke design? I haven't gotten anything above 10.2 MT since 1.07. engagement ranges in the stock game are frankly absurdly close—35km is point blank for RL naval fleets that have to deal with stuff like atmospheric drag and the curvature of the Earth. Right now I'm of the opinion that anything you command in the orbital mechanics portion of the game should only need to be in the general vicinity of its target, having to close the distance in the combat phase is just asking for trouble. You're hurting Q-switched's feelings!
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Post by bigbombr on Dec 28, 2016 19:30:10 GMT
Multi-GW lasers, assuming reasonably efficient design, are simply too strong to be worth armouring most things against currently. When and if we get longer range engagements, we'll probably worry about armouring against them at extreme range—if lasers could shoot out to hundreds of light milliseconds they would both be less intense and much harder to avoid, so some form of armouring would become compulsory. But worry not, that would require large changes to the engine (including modeling appreciable travel time for light at those distances), so in the immediate, keep your capships away and overwhelm them with numbers. Make your drones and missiles effective at as long a range as possible, send in lots of them and play the numbers game. Kinetic kill missiles don't seem viable against serious point defences because you require the targetable missile to actually hit; instead of 10 missiles it's better to have 10 drones that will put hundreds of hypervelocity projectiles into space before they get vapourised. Also, gigaton class nuclear missiles that detonate for huge AoE flash before the lasers can even be brought to bear and laser drones should be effective. I hope that in future patches it will become easier to design super-flak missiles that fill space with fast-moving, dense debris. Armoring against nukeflash is plausible, armoring against frequency quadrupled GW death beams with mirrors over 1m impractical. A killsat with a 23m+ mirror (50m unturreted!) would easily have a useful beam intensity at 10mm or greater distance. Query, do you have a working gigaton nuke design? I haven't gotten anything above 10.2 MT since 1.07. engagement ranges in the stock game are frankly absurdly close—35km is point blank for RL naval fleets that have to deal with stuff like atmospheric drag and the curvature of the Earth. Right now I'm of the opinion that anything you command in the orbital mechanics portion of the game should only need to be in the general vicinity of its target, having to close the distance in the combat phase is just asking for trouble. You're hurting Q-switched's feelings! I can get to 10.3 MT with U-233, slightly higher (I believe 10.6 MT with Pu, but I deleted this one as it wasn't worth the cost).
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Post by kitten on Dec 28, 2016 21:27:39 GMT
Query, do you have a working gigaton nuke design? I haven't gotten anything above 10.2 MT since 1.07. Nope, I've played a bit with tiny nukes and intuitively something seems fishy—it should not be easy (possible?) to get a high fission rate out of a 10g mass. Napkin maths says we'd need to compress a solid core about 55 times to get a critical reaction at all (numbers are approximate since the exact values are classified*) and of course, we're using a hollow core because fusion doping is a thing. I frankly don't know the maths around our explosive lenses but it seems odd they can so massively outperform anything used in real-life nukes. So that kinda discouraged me from more nuclear experimenting. For that matter, the miniature reactors I've seen on the forum seem wrong too—I have trouble admitting that all real and proposed reactors seem to accept that nuclear fission doesn't scale down well, and yet in game it does so extremely well, to the point where radioisotope generators are hugely expensive and heavy for the same power output But I'm willing to accept I'm wrong somehow *Probably an anachronism, since the US government conducted an experiment in the 1960s which found that inexperienced physics graduates could work out a viable nuclear weapon design in only a few man-years using only public domain information as a starting point, i.e. classifying anything about nukes is at best a very minor speed bump to proliferation. OTOH, what the CoDE simulation is probably underestimating in the costs is the extreme difficulty of actually obtaining and handling your weapons-grade fissiles. If there's a shortcut to turning uranium ore into nuclear weapons nobody has found it yet.
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Post by inbrainsane on Dec 28, 2016 23:53:53 GMT
You do not need seven 10GW lasers. You only need a handful of those, see below. Also do not forget to consider mass and cost.
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Post by newageofpower on Dec 28, 2016 23:58:28 GMT
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Post by inbrainsane on Dec 29, 2016 0:13:06 GMT
Fixed.
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Post by amimai on Dec 29, 2016 0:21:08 GMT
hmmmm, did a bit of testing... NIrubber and SiGel seem useless
so far the only cost effective missile armour is found is : AMcarbon/Graphogel/AMcarbon/Graphogel/AMcarbon
tested vs 6x 10GW rainbow lasers
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Post by The Astronomer on Dec 29, 2016 3:13:03 GMT
Why bother with missiles when you can use your capital ship as suicide KKV? Like slamming at the lasership at 10 km/s?
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Post by fenrin49 on Dec 29, 2016 3:27:50 GMT
im using 5 layers of 800um aramid and a healthy point seems to work. look at the infolinks - refractive index spectrum it shows how much things reflect on which wavelengths i suspect that aramids 40% helps quite a bit VS the near zero on alot of the carbon based materials.
works for missiles - drones tend to be slow might be part of the problem they just cant get there on time aramid is expensive but for the number of seconds it buys its good
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elukka
Junior Member
Posts: 73
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Post by elukka on Jan 4, 2017 15:50:00 GMT
hmmmm, did a bit of testing... NIrubber and SiGel seem useless so far the only cost effective missile armour is found is : AMcarbon/Graphogel/AMcarbon/Graphogel/AMcarbon tested vs 6x 10GW rainbow lasers What's your thicknesses and spacing for those?
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Post by vegetal on Jan 4, 2017 16:49:22 GMT
My recipe for missiles is quite simple: a couple millimeters of boron and 3 or 4 centimeters of SiGel. Make a very pointy end and voila! Ultra hardened against lasers.
I can destroy my 9GW laser ship with less than 5 missiles I think.
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