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Post by deltav on Jan 13, 2017 21:26:52 GMT
Wow can you show me where I can find info on that? I haven't unlocked ship design yet, but so far, lasers are so much more expensive than every other weapons system overall. I know the money isn't real, but I think it gives an idea of how much real resources would have to be devoted/ efficiency. What I am looking for is what weapon types/ ship types are most powerful, as I image modding would only increase the power of the most powerful, and in the end the best is still the best. When I first started playing around with the sandbox, the first thing I did was set up those laser space stations, and found myself very disappointed with what 1 GW laser could do compared to Railgun or other weapons ingame. there is no one best weapon, lasers can do any one task, coilguns lob big shells (10 or more kg) railguns are IMO the worst weapon that still is useable unless you use needleguns At least stock, the 8mm Turrented Railgun is the most powerful single non missile or drone weapon in game. It has a range of something like 55 km vs Capital ships. Although lasers also have a long range, at that long range it is only powerful enough to endanger striker drones and striker missiles. Even Devastators or Hellfires give the lasers a hard time. Not sure why Railguns are supposed to be so poor...
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Post by Rocket Witch on Jan 13, 2017 21:28:59 GMT
Accounting for mass & cost, I think the most effective stock ship is the Missile Schooner; you can have three for every gunship, stock laser ships of equivalent mass & cost can't kill whole waves and the nukes still do sufficient standoff damage if flares are used. This number of Schooners can also afford to spend a fraction of their missiles on intercepting enemy munitions. A recent missile advancement (by jasonvance ) uses a thick frontal armor plate ("radiation shield") to delay lasers trying to burn through. Bulkheads were being made pretty much from the get-go, probably even during beta, and I've seen mention of filling nosecones with progressively smaller blocks of aerogel in November as well as a suggestion to be able to fill empty spaces with armour. Still, what material did jasonvance use? Does it make flat-fronted missiles viable (imo they just look better but it would mean more efficient stacking in ammo bays)?
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Post by deltav on Jan 13, 2017 21:36:06 GMT
If you follow the development of those player megacorps, you will find that gigawatt lasers will dominate the future warfare pretty quickly. Heck, even my 30 MW laser can kill drones from 250 km away, and 20 missiles will be gone when they are 100 km away. ...and that's not even near the gigawatt lasers. If you are, by any chance, prefer realistic fire rate, you will quickly found that coilguns are one of the hardest weapon to keep in the realm of reality. They accelerate their huge projectiles up to absurd speed, and thus consuming a lot of energy. Thus, my preference is railguns. They are much easier to maintain their fire rate. The goofy thing about GiggaWatt+ lasers as a be-all is nothing prevents launching an unmanned laser drone or laser drones of equivalent power (and maybe more laser turret armor) to counter laser turrets with lasers. Then the whole framerate killing laser resistant missile swarm. Combine the two and you have 100km laser versus laser with player optimized missiles crossing the gap very quickly. Don't forget that drones can be capital ship sized and do benefit from the lack of crew. For an experiment duplicate your favorite ship, remove the crew compartment and add a few remote controls. Then put its launcher on an unarmored station. I like that "super drone" idea. In real life most space stations would probably be protected by Capital ships crewed by Computers. Then they can protect and patrol the Hill sphere around the space station 24/7 for months without having to worry about food, water or shore leave. They only would need to dock with tankers to refuel every once in awhile. About the lasers, I'm not at all convinced that lasers are some type of superweapon. For one big lasers means big reactors and also big radiators. All this means a big target for missiles and drones. The 1GW space station laser really sealed it for me. I don't get how anyone could make lasers really superior over the same amount of resources spent on railguns/ coilguns/ cannon, drones, or missiles. Credit for credit and power unit for power unit, laser seem best for one primary function, intercepting Drones/ Missiles at long range.
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Post by deltav on Jan 13, 2017 22:15:51 GMT
If you follow the development of those player megacorps, you will find that gigawatt lasers will dominate the future warfare pretty quickly. Heck, even my 30 MW laser can kill drones from 250 km away, and 20 missiles will be gone when they are 100 km away. ...and that's not even near the gigawatt lasers. If you are, by any chance, prefer realistic fire rate, you will quickly found that coilguns are one of the hardest weapon to keep in the realm of reality. They accelerate their huge projectiles up to absurd speed, and thus consuming a lot of energy. Thus, my preference is railguns. They are much easier to maintain their fire rate. The goofy thing about GiggaWatt+ lasers as a be-all is nothing prevents launching an unmanned laser drone or laser drones of equivalent power (and maybe more laser turret armor) to counter laser turrets with lasers. Then the whole framerate killing laser resistant missile swarm. Combine the two and you have 100km laser versus laser with player optimized missiles crossing the gap very quickly. Don't forget that drones can be capital ship sized and do benefit from the lack of crew. For an experiment duplicate your favorite ship, remove the crew compartment and add a few remote controls. Then put its launcher on an unarmored station. The only thing about Capital sized drones is that they give up the main advantage of drones which is their small size. Only their small size allows them to outgun much larger and more heavily armed craft.
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Post by deltav on Jan 13, 2017 22:21:40 GMT
Accounting for mass & cost, I think the most effective stock ship is the Missile Schooner; you can have three for every gunship, stock laser ships of equivalent mass & cost can't kill whole waves and the nukes still do sufficient standoff damage if flares are used. This number of Schooners can also afford to spend a fraction of their missiles on intercepting enemy munitions. A recent missile advancement (by jasonvance ) uses a thick frontal armor plate ("radiation shield") to delay lasers trying to burn through. Bulkheads were being made pretty much from the get-go, probably even during beta, and I've seen mention of filling nosecones with progressively smaller blocks of aerogel in November as well as a suggestion to be able to fill empty spaces with armour. Still, what material did jasonvance use? Does it make flat-fronted missiles viable (imo they just look better but it would mean more efficient stacking in ammo bays)? I'm all with you, the Missile Schooner is a very good and cost effective craft. You can get almost 8 for the cost of every Gunship. The only thing is that a Gunship can beat up to 10 Siloships, so even seven massed Missile Schnooers would lose for sure if the skill of their commanders was equal. The problem is that anything more than about 30 or so missiles pre-detonate each other instead of hitting the target, right? Also the Missiles Schooner only carries Strikers which the Gunships 4 100MW lasers can destroy with ease before they get close. So when it comes to missile ships vs the Gunship due to it's flak and lasers, they are at a huge disadvantage, right? Against any other craft minus larger missile ships or Carriers (or Ranger or Corvette), Missile Schooner is close to top dog.
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Post by Rocket Witch on Jan 13, 2017 23:10:13 GMT
I'm all with you, the Missile Schooner is a very good and cost effective craft. You can get almost 8 for the cost of every Gunship. The only thing is that a Gunship can beat up to 10 Siloships, so even seven massed Missile Schnooers would lose for sure if the skill of their commanders was equal. The problem is that anything more than about 30 or so missiles pre-detonate each other instead of hitting the target, right? Also the Missiles Schooner only carries Strikers which the Gunships 4 100MW lasers can destroy with ease before they get close. So when it comes to missile ships vs the Gunship due to it's flak and lasers, they are at a huge disadvantage, right? Against any other craft minus larger missile ships or Carriers (or Ranger or Corvette), Missile Schooner is close to top dog. How is a Gunship beating 10 Siloships? The Gunship can only fire one 100MW laser at a time (120MW powerplant, modules require full power to operate) and strikers and flaks can get through that with a 25-50% loss rate, to say nothing of devastators. The thing lasers quickly kill is drones, so it might beat 10 Fleet Carriers. I just ran a few tests based on equal mass (equal cost would mean more Schooners), giving 5 Schooners and 1 Gunship: - Both balanced AI - Gunship's flak missiles took out all Schooner delta-v but once those were spent it just got bombarded with a torrent of nukes (flaks couldn't penetrate the armour) until it lost power generation. - Assuming more ideal strategies on both ends (aggressive Gunship and ranged Schooners) results in the Gunship intercepting and killing the Schooners without them firing anything back, which seems to reveal a shortcoming of the AI more than anything else. The rock-paper-scissors of both stock and player design balance appears to be missiles > lasers > drones (this isn't quite cyclic, drones > missiles only if they can justify their increased cost through a high enough kill/loss ratio, otherwise you're stuck with missiles = missiles, broadly speaking). Guns can augment laser PD versus missiles though, meaning between equal fleets there's this big attritional shitfest followed by them engaging like battleships anyway, or retreating. Missiles' danger to themselves varies by design. In my experience the range of the damage of strikers is limited enough that you might get one or two pairs collide and detonate as they enter the terminal stage without affecting the rest of the wave.
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Post by The Astronomer on Jan 14, 2017 2:10:27 GMT
If you follow the development of those player megacorps, you will find that gigawatt lasers will dominate the future warfare pretty quickly. Heck, even my 30 MW laser can kill drones from 250 km away, and 20 missiles will be gone when they are 100 km away. ...and that's not even near the gigawatt lasers. If you are, by any chance, prefer realistic fire rate, you will quickly found that coilguns are one of the hardest weapon to keep in the realm of reality. They accelerate their huge projectiles up to absurd speed, and thus consuming a lot of energy. Thus, my preference is railguns. They are much easier to maintain their fire rate. The goofy thing about GiggaWatt+ lasers as a be-all is nothing prevents launching an unmanned laser drone or laser drones of equivalent power (and maybe more laser turret armor) to counter laser turrets with lasers. Then the whole framerate killing laser resistant missile swarm. Combine the two and you have 100km laser versus laser with player optimized missiles crossing the gap very quickly. Don't forget that drones can be capital ship sized and do benefit from the lack of crew. For an experiment duplicate your favorite ship, remove the crew compartment and add a few remote controls. Then put its launcher on an unarmored station. Let's see how the future warfare will be.
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Post by apophys on Jan 14, 2017 5:04:32 GMT
Bulkheads were being made pretty much from the get-go, probably even during beta, and I've seen mention of filling nosecones with progressively smaller blocks of aerogel in November as well as a suggestion to be able to fill empty spaces with armour. Still, what material did jasonvance use? Does it make flat-fronted missiles viable (imo they just look better but it would mean more efficient stacking in ammo bays)? Bulkheads were made indeed, but I only saw them used for kinetic protection. They didn't catch on because sloped hard armor is better vs kinetics. He used a single solid cylinder of 10cm aramid, sized to cover the whole front of the missile, instead of a nosecone. With a thin profile and the recent sensor inaccuracy update, it apparently lasts a really long time. (I expect 15cm nitrile rubber would work similarly, and much cheaper.)
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Post by David367th on Jan 14, 2017 5:09:07 GMT
Bulkheads were being made pretty much from the get-go, probably even during beta, and I've seen mention of filling nosecones with progressively smaller blocks of aerogel in November as well as a suggestion to be able to fill empty spaces with armour. Still, what material did jasonvance use? Does it make flat-fronted missiles viable (imo they just look better but it would mean more efficient stacking in ammo bays)? Bulkheads were made indeed, but I only saw them used for kinetic protection. They didn't catch on because sloped hard armor is better vs kinetics. He used a single solid cylinder of 10cm aramid, sized to cover the whole front of the missile, instead of a nosecone. With a thin profile and the recent sensor inaccuracy update, it apparently lasts a really long time. (I expect 15cm nitrile rubber would work similarly, and much cheaper.) If you saw those laser tests I conducted, we have evidence that Aramid fiber is more cost evective when using the same amount of mass.
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Post by The Astronomer on Jan 14, 2017 6:03:35 GMT
Bulkheads were made indeed, but I only saw them used for kinetic protection. They didn't catch on because sloped hard armor is better vs kinetics. He used a single solid cylinder of 10cm aramid, sized to cover the whole front of the missile, instead of a nosecone. With a thin profile and the recent sensor inaccuracy update, it apparently lasts a really long time. (I expect 15cm nitrile rubber would work similarly, and much cheaper.) If you saw those laser tests I conducted, we have evidence that Aramid fiber is more cost evective when using the same amount of mass. It depends on surface area, too. Don't forget that. NOTE: MASS EFFECTIVE, NOT COST EFFECTIVE
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Post by jasonvance on Jan 14, 2017 7:11:17 GMT
Bulkheads were made indeed, but I only saw them used for kinetic protection. They didn't catch on because sloped hard armor is better vs kinetics. He used a single solid cylinder of 10cm aramid, sized to cover the whole front of the missile, instead of a nosecone. With a thin profile and the recent sensor inaccuracy update, it apparently lasts a really long time. (I expect 15cm nitrile rubber would work similarly, and much cheaper.) If you saw those laser tests I conducted, we have evidence that Aramid fiber is more cost evective when using the same amount of mass. Your math was wrong on those assessments. 95.192 seconds of survival for aramid fiber with equal total mass 51.342 seconds of survival for rubber with equal total mass 1 ton of rubber costs 36.7kc 1 ton of aramid fiber costs 264kc that alone makes rubber 7x cheaper since the survival time is roughly half it reduces it to 3.5x more cost effective (really rough rounding here). That would mean you need roughly 2x more mass of rubber than aramid fiber to have equal time to kill performance but the total cost of 2x more material is 3.5x cheaper.
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Post by bigbombr on Jan 14, 2017 9:31:30 GMT
If you saw those laser tests I conducted, we have evidence that Aramid fiber is more cost evective when using the same amount of mass. Your math was wrong on those assessments. 95.192 seconds of survival for aramid fiber with equal total mass 51.342 seconds of survival for rubber with equal total mass 1 ton of rubber costs 36.7kc 1 ton of aramid fiber costs 264kc that alone makes rubber 7x cheaper since the survival time is roughly half it reduces it to 3.5x more cost effective (really rough rounding here). That would mean you need roughly 2x more mass of rubber than aramid fiber to have equal time to kill performance but the total cost of 2x more material is 3.5x cheaper. But the increase in weight negatively impacts delta-v and acceleration, so you'd need more fuel tanks and engines, which increase cost and weight. For the same performance, aramid fiber might end up being cheaper.
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Post by The Astronomer on Jan 14, 2017 9:36:07 GMT
Your math was wrong on those assessments. 95.192 seconds of survival for aramid fiber with equal total mass 51.342 seconds of survival for rubber with equal total mass 1 ton of rubber costs 36.7kc 1 ton of aramid fiber costs 264kc that alone makes rubber 7x cheaper since the survival time is roughly half it reduces it to 3.5x more cost effective (really rough rounding here). That would mean you need roughly 2x more mass of rubber than aramid fiber to have equal time to kill performance but the total cost of 2x more material is 3.5x cheaper. But the increase in weight negatively impacts delta-v and acceleration, so you'd need more fuel tanks and engines, which increase cost and weight. For the same performance, aramid fiber might end up being cheaper. Same question, different view.
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Post by jasonvance on Jan 14, 2017 10:03:20 GMT
But the increase in weight negatively impacts delta-v and acceleration, so you'd need more fuel tanks and engines, which increase cost and weight. For the same performance, aramid fiber might end up being cheaper. Same question, different view. Considering fuel and engines are generally the cheapest part of the ship / missile (payload and armor are 1st and 2nd) I really doubt that it would be the case that you would gain cost effectiveness with aramid fiber over rubber. You would gain mass efficiency for sure (no one is arguing that point). The problem I pointed out was simply the math was wrong. It did not take into account any of those factors originally it was just messed up multiplication. But I mean don't take my word for it do the math and try it: Here is an example of 3.5x more rubber than aramid fiber for cheaper with the same delta-v (yes it is a lot more massive): *note I could even shave a lot more mass and size off that by actually going through the trouble to make actual scaled up tanks of the proper ratio but even with all the wasted space that having side by side tanks gives it is still more cost effective so this is near worst case scenario* Remember fuel is typically at most 6c / kg (hydrogen) and as low as 0.4c / kg (neon) and thrust increases to engines to cover the extra thrust needed are near ignoble fractions of credits when compared to the total cost.
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Post by David367th on Jan 14, 2017 13:45:15 GMT
If you saw those laser tests I conducted, we have evidence that Aramid fiber is more cost evective when using the same amount of mass. Your math was wrong on those assessments. 95.192 seconds of survival for aramid fiber with equal total mass 51.342 seconds of survival for rubber with equal total mass 1 ton of rubber costs 36.7kc 1 ton of aramid fiber costs 264kc that alone makes rubber 7x cheaper since the survival time is roughly half it reduces it to 3.5x more cost effective (really rough rounding here). That would mean you need roughly 2x more mass of rubber than aramid fiber to have equal time to kill performance but the total cost of 2x more material is 3.5x cheaper. And that's why I said we have evidence and not that it's fact. Thanks for clearing that up. Didn't know if I should've done ablation rate or time to black for effectiveness.
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