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Post by caiaphas on Jan 1, 2017 5:00:01 GMT
So I've been futzing around for a while trying to create a practical coilgun-launched flak shell because who doesn't love tearing enemy ships to pieces with giant space shotguns, and I'm starting to wonder: what in blazes is its tactical role?
I mean, let's look at it from the perspective of the only practical delivery systems that I've found: coilguns and missiles.
Let's say you have a coilgun that can throw a decent-sized flak warhead and its one-kilo remote control fast enough and accurately enough to hit an enemy warship. By definition, then, you have a coilgun that can also throw a cheaper one-kilo osmium that won't get shot down by enemy laser fire rod faster and more accurately. So you're trying to punch through an enemy Whipple shield by using lots of heavier flak (and if you're using lighter flak for whatever reason, why aren't you using a railgun throwing one-gram rounds significantly faster, more accurately, and more cheaply)? The rod basically ignores that and blows right through. You're trying to defeat hard armor? The rod, again, swiss cheeses that stuff, and it only becomes more and more effective in comparison the thicker the armor becomes. Active defenses? Inert, doesn't get targeted by the AI, can't be disabled like the flak shell.
The one thing where the flak wins out over the rod is, in my experience, taking out enemy radiators. But frankly, I'm of the opinion that light coilgun-fired nukes are significantly more cost-effective in that case, since the ones that miss don't expend their ordinance uselessly but tend to inflict mobility kills on the enemy when they detonate behind them and take out their engines.
So what if you're fighting an enemy drone or missile swarm? Again, nukes are a lot better at disabling lots of them all at once if you optimize the detonation range, and railguns tend to do the same job of throwing lots of little bits of shrapnel at them better.
And you run into the same problems if you try to use flak missiles. Not only does the odd geometry of the explosion tend to make the fan of shrapnel miss entirely (it tends to scythe out in a planar disc in the direction in which the missile is pointing, and since it's usually not pointing at the enemy warship thanks to its terminal guidance, it tends to miss entirely. And you again run into the issue of flak v. nukes in terms of cost-effectiveness, since if you have a missile capable of throwing a decent-sized flak warhead, you probably have a missile capable of throwing a small nuke.
So with those considerations, what the heck is flak useful for?
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Post by newageofpower on Jan 1, 2017 5:05:13 GMT
Cheap missile warhead (since nukes are multiple times more expensive).
Also used in most NEFPs to increase hit probability.
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Post by caiaphas on Jan 1, 2017 5:18:19 GMT
Cheap missile warhead (since nukes are multiple times more expensive). Also used in most NEFPs to increase hit probability. I don't know enough about NEFPs to say anything on the second one, but taking a look at the standards thread, jason's 1.0 kt nuke is 2.88 kg with a 131 c price tag, and the 1.0 kt nuke I personally favor is 555 c. An equivalent-mass nitrocellulose/osmium flak bomb is only around half the cost of jason's and around one-seventh the cost of mine, but again, my experience has been that the flak disc tends to miss well over half the time because of the way the shrapnel propagates and the direction in which the missile is usually aimed (off to the side) when the warhead goes off. In which case I might as well just chuck a nuke on top and be certain that, should it survive enemy active defenses, it'll do some amount of damage rather than none.
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Post by subunit on Jan 1, 2017 6:02:40 GMT
I had good luck with a rod-shaped DU flak bomb with the absolute minimum propellant charge- it split into 5 sub-rods, basically. Using that as a Flak NEFP was extremely satisfying, with a tendency to saw ships in half along the axis of attack, although the chainsaw effect probably has more to do with physically impossible coilgun ROF and power than the round itself. I noticed that when the nuke didn't fuse properly, the DU rods glowed amber, whereas when it went NEFP properly, they were white-hot.
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Post by David367th on Jan 1, 2017 6:08:06 GMT
Flak can be a cheap, light, and easy way to cripple an enemy ship. As flak can easily penetrate simple armors using 10g+ fragments. These fragments can tear anything off the surface of the craft, like guns, lasers, engines, and especially radiators who are their main target. When used correctly Flak can be one of the most powerful weapons in the game, as they can do more internal damages to capital ships than their nuclear counterpart. Damaged radiators, engines, and power supplies can be a heavy and crippling blow to a capital ship, as it reduces their effectiveness to move or supply continuous power to subsystems. Power supplies can run with minimal radiators but they have to deactivate to conserve their lack of heat, this can cause several major problems with a crafts fighting capabilities, especially when using high power consuming modules like Railguns and Lasers. Or even simply cutting power routed to crew modules, shutting off everything in the ship.
Also the lighter and cheaper can afford you extra missiles with more delta-v or allow more armor to counter anti-missile systems. I personally prefer them over nuclear weapons when combating most ships.
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Post by caiaphas on Jan 1, 2017 6:40:45 GMT
To be honest, I'm having so much trouble getting the fusing right on the flak artillery shell that I'm using that I'm considering just going back to a bank of low-powered railgun drones for that purpose. And point taken on the lighter warhead = more dV thing, I hadn't considered that.
How the hell do you get your missiles to aim the NEFP rounds properly, though? I've had zero success with that.
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Post by newageofpower on Jan 1, 2017 6:48:22 GMT
Proportional or Direct Pursuit on Terminal behavior, for slower coilgun-shells or missile warheads.
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Post by dragonkid11 on Jan 1, 2017 7:32:00 GMT
I tried to make a conventional cannon that fire flak shell once and put it on a drone.
For some magical reasons, the enemy ship ONLY dodge the flak shell and since the drone can't lead for crap, the rest of the shell missed.
But when it hit, it hit real hard. So I'm keeping it around for when drone can finally lead the shot.
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Post by David367th on Jan 1, 2017 16:30:25 GMT
To be honest, I'm having so much trouble getting the fusing right on the flak artillery shell that I'm using that I'm considering just going back to a bank of low-powered railgun drones for that purpose. Missiles have a distinct advantage over drones, that they can have more complex armor layers than a railgun. A railgun is more easily ablated off from a laser with its exposed barrel and its single armor layer. Missiles can use Layering to its advantage to use heatsinks when coming under laser fire.
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elukka
Junior Member
Posts: 73
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Post by elukka on Jan 1, 2017 16:48:21 GMT
Kinetic rods tend to overpenetrate past a certain level of kinetic energy. They go clean through a ship, and though they will destroy whatever component they go through, the damage is not very widely spread and most of the kinetic energy is likely not deposited in the target. I use explosives in my kinetic missiles to fix this. I don't use an actual flak payload with a shell of shrapnel, but it still works like flak - I just put a small explosive on top of my rocket motor, and set it to explode ten meters from the target. This mulches the engine and tankage into a shrapnel cone. I'm surprised this works, but it does, and I think that's a testament to the robustness of the simulation. Here's damage from pure kinetic missiles - no payload of any sort: i.imgur.com/qizqyp6.jpgHere's damage from the same missiles with the addition of a 500 gram explosive set to go off 10 meters from target: i.imgur.com/XmHPhfR.jpg
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Post by kitten on Jan 1, 2017 19:01:33 GMT
The tactical role of flak is stripping radiators, really. Radiators are huge targets that can't be sufficiently armoured, and stock ships are EXTREMELY vulnerable to a radiator kill. Player-designed ships will have redundant radiator capacity if they're meant to go in harm's way, of course—it should take more than a lucky hit to the crew compartment radiator to disable your ships. However, with compartmentalised radiators redundant capacity can be very expensive in mass.
I think this gives an advantage to certain designs; NTR for instance require far less radiators, while multiple laser ships will have a prohibitive ammount of radiators and still can currently only target one incoming missile at a time.
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Post by Guest on Jan 1, 2017 20:35:34 GMT
the role of Flak is in missile warheads a flak missile will penatrate armour better then a Nuke, from futher away
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Post by caiaphas on Jan 1, 2017 22:05:53 GMT
Kinetic rods tend to overpenetrate past a certain level of kinetic energy. They go clean through a ship, and though they will destroy whatever component they go through, the damage is not very widely spread and most of the kinetic energy is likely not deposited in the target. I use explosives in my kinetic missiles to fix this. I don't use an actual flak payload with a shell of shrapnel, but it still works like flak - I just put a small explosive on top of my rocket motor, and set it to explode ten meters from the target. This mulches the engine and tankage into a shrapnel cone. I'm surprised this works, but it does, and I think that's a testament to the robustness of the simulation. Here's damage from pure kinetic missiles - no payload of any sort: i.imgur.com/qizqyp6.jpgHere's damage from the same missiles with the addition of a 500 gram explosive set to go off 10 meters from target: i.imgur.com/XmHPhfR.jpgSee, in my case overpenetration is a good thing. Since most of my ships are geared towards hitting the enemy from outside their operational range (1 Mm laser death stars notwithstanding) they're usually still pointing bow-first at me when my first rounds hit, and since I'm shooting 1 kg osmium rods, which the AI seems to ignore as "debris", they don't try to maneuver away from them either, which only helps me. What then tends to happen is that one good shot will punch through the frontal armor and just keep going through the spine of the ship, wrecking the internals so thoroughly that it usually takes only a couple good shots to disable the enemy ship. And yeah, now that I'm getting closer to the right fusing distance, I must concede that flak is peerless in taking out enemy radiators, but the damn stuff still isn't even managing to make it through stock gunship hard armor. It takes something like ten to fifteen seconds of firing to chew through a section, at which point its buddies have closed the distance and murdered me to death.
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elukka
Junior Member
Posts: 73
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Post by elukka on Jan 1, 2017 22:14:38 GMT
Ah, yeah, the AI isn't smart enough to do that sort of thing into account - I'm kinda basing my designs on hypothetical intelligent opponents. It's kinda hilarious when you have a bunch of kinetics going for a ship with a nose-mounted laser that isn't clever enough to turn away before impact. All that's left is an empty shell.
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Post by subunit on Jan 1, 2017 22:18:52 GMT
The tactical role of flak is stripping radiators, really. Radiators are huge targets that can't be sufficiently armoured, and stock ships are EXTREMELY vulnerable to a radiator kill. Player-designed ships will have redundant radiator capacity if they're meant to go in harm's way, of course—it should take more than a lucky hit to the crew compartment radiator to disable your ships. However, with compartmentalised radiators redundant capacity can be very expensive in mass. I think this gives an advantage to certain designs; NTR for instance require far less radiators, while multiple laser ships will have a prohibitive ammount of radiators and still can currently only target one incoming missile at a time. Player designs normally have rads in the armor shadow relative to the laser broadside- you can't easily strip rads off most of the more effective lasboats using flak. Missiles would be better in this role if you could specify a terminal guidance maneuver (aim to pass the craft 20m to either side, maintaining nose-on orientation, detonate after passing the craft).
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