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Post by David367th on Jan 1, 2017 22:20:39 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). You can time missiles to det after passing its target. |
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Post by caiaphas on Jan 1, 2017 22:31:46 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. Even so, I find it difficult to believe that going for overpenetration is going to be an ineffective tactic. Right now my coilgun chucks around fifty of these a second; if you go broadside and try to evade you're just giving me more potential targets, and right now there's no way to actively defend against them. EDIT: also, not sure if this is actually NEFP or just a side effect of five kilos of diamond shards going into an enemy ship at eight kilometers a second, but I think I have a new favorite weapon. Admittedly, hitting multiple targets is a bit of an issue with these but still. |
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Post by subunit on Jan 2, 2017 3:23:20 GMT
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). You can time missiles to det after passing its target. Sure, but that's not sufficient to generate hits on shadowed rads from any missile design I've seen- I think you need a bit more control over the terminal profile to give a "pop-around". |
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Post by dwwolf on Jan 2, 2017 11:58:33 GMT
If all you are worried about is radiators some rodlike high explosive payloads throw most of their mass sideways at high velocities.
Frag mass will be low but high velocity should be enough to take out radiators.
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