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Post by deltav on Jan 15, 2017 6:20:56 GMT
I'm with you regarding drones and missiles being cheaper/smarter overall than "battleships". But with good point defense/lasers, they have the potential to outfire/overwhelm missiles/drones. Each Cannon, Railgun, and Coilgun on average carries 10,000 rounds. Lasers can fire as long as there is power infinite rounds. Dead is dead, and once a Carrier or Missile Ship is out vs a "Battleship", it is really done for, because without the extra weight and size involved of packing drones/missiles, it can carry all the more Guns for the same or even less cost. Gunships vs Fleet Carrier are the top two stock ships in game. Once the Fleet Carrier is out of Drones, it stands no chance. On earth carriers/ missile ships have replaced battleships only because 1. battleships can't see over the horizon, 2. guns weren't controlled by computers, 3. battleships were helpless vs. aircraft. This is already changing with use of sat spotting and great point defense. In space the carrier has almost no advantage over the "battleship" provided it is designed with long enough enough range weapons to take out drones and missiles far away from the ship. In game the Laser Frigate can destroy/beat all of the Carriers and Missile Ships Except the Fleet Carrier, although it is not much cheaper. Check out my updated chart with prices, and full armaments for each stock ship, tell me what you think. yeah but we are talking about stock ship point defense... The default striker and flak missiles didn't have that terrible of armor (1cm AC). Even the AI's default 20 missile swarm could usually over saturate ship defenses and it gets waaaaay worse if you do the logical thing and fire more than that. The laser frig does not stand a chance against a full salvo of cost / mass equivalent missile schooners (which is ~3 schooners). You can fire 600 total missiles (300 flak and 300 strikers) all at once and obliterate it at slightly less cost and mass. Even an alpha strike from a single schooner (firing 200 missiles) will down a laser frigate with a laughable amount of overkill. Of course you are right, the Laser Frigate is toast vs every Missile Carrier except the Privateer, but against every drone carrier except the Fleet Carrier, the Laser Frigate comes out on top one on one. It comes back to our paper, rock, scissors discussion earlier. Lasers beat Drones, Drones beat Missiles, and Missiles beat Lasers (all things being equal). But I left something out, Decoys beat Missiles too. If you have plenty of Decoys and Lasers, plus guns, you can beat Missiles and Drones and eat Carriers and Missile Ships for breakfast lunch and dinner. The Gunship comes very, very close. The only reason the Gunship doesn't beat every other stock ship ingame, is that (quite strangely I might add), the Fleet Carrier has almost all the guns the Gunship has minus just 2 11mm Turreted Railguns.
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Post by jasonvance on Jan 15, 2017 6:24:49 GMT
Here is one missile schooner worth of missiles going up against a laser frig (it kills about 24 missiles before impact) to kind of hit home on how much better missile ships are than other designs.
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Post by deltav on Jan 15, 2017 6:25:13 GMT
Yes Drones can be uparmored enough to withstand lasers. All you need to do is get a decent hit on a Defence Laser and the ship is as good as dead against drones and missiles, and a few extra seconds from thicker Aramid Fibers can do that. The idea I've always seen is you damage with missiles, cripple with drones, and mop up with gunships. Yes you are right, but it's a lot cheaper and easier to add extra armor to a laser, and to add more lasers to a ship without sacrificing delta v and cost, than to add more and more armor to each drone that no matter what happens will be tossed away after the battle. Ingame the Laser Frigate dominates every Carrier except the Fleet Carrier, which happens to be armed with almost all the heavy guns of a Gunship. Long term and overall, the more armor you add to a drone, you more likely you reduce it's main advantage, which is it's small size, relatively cheap cost and large delta-V. But adding more and more guns and armor to ONE ship, is not nearly as costly as trying to upgrade scores of drones, no?
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Post by deltav on Jan 15, 2017 6:36:13 GMT
Here is one missile schooner worth of missiles going up against a laser frig (it kills about 24 missiles before impact) to kind of hit home on how much better missile ships are than other designs. Can you teach me how to record my game video and post it like that? Yes thanks I see your point, yes the Laser Frigate does lose vs every Missiles ship except the Privateer, but the main use of laser is not against missiles anyway. Drones OR Decoys + Point Defense beat Missiles, Missiles beat Lasers, Lasers beat Drones. To kill Missiles you need other Missiles, or you need Decoys to give you point defense guns time to work on them or make them miss. It's paper, rock, scissors. Missile Ships are only superior vs Laser Dominant craft. Bring Drones, or Decoys + Point defense into the mix, and Missiles Ships are at a disadvantage. My main proof is the lowly 35 c Ranger. It can beat every Missile Ship except the Siloship, and even then only if the Siloship fires pretty much all it's missiles in one salvo because the Ranger has great Decoys + Point Defence. What do you think?
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Post by David367th on Jan 15, 2017 6:40:57 GMT
Can you teach me how to record my game video and post it like that? I would actually love this information too. Shadowplay doesn't work with CDE sadly.
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Post by jasonvance on Jan 15, 2017 7:06:25 GMT
Here is one missile schooner worth of missiles going up against a laser frig (it kills about 24 missiles before impact) to kind of hit home on how much better missile ships are than other designs. Can you teach me how to record my game video and post it like that? Yes thanks I see your point, yes the Laser Frigate does lose vs every Missiles ship except the Privateer, but the main use of laser is not against missiles anyway. Drones OR Decoys + Point Defense beat Missiles, Missiles beat Lasers, Lasers beat Drones. To kill Missiles you need other Missiles, or you need Decoys to give you point defense guns time to work on them or make them miss. It's paper, rock, scissors. Missile Ships are only superior vs Laser Dominant craft. Bring Drones, or Decoys + Point defense into the mix, and Missiles Ships are at a disadvantage. My main proof is the lowly 35 c Ranger. It can beat every Missile Ship except the Siloship, and even then only if the Siloship fires pretty much all it's missiles in one salvo because the Ranger has great Decoys + Point Defence. What do you think? To record video download OBS (Open Broadcaster Software). I use it to stream mostly but it is also a pretty good video screen capture and it is free, google should find it, and youtube has a ton of tutorials on how to set it up / use it (though the interface is really user friendly). Decoy point defense is a touchy subject imo from the way missiles behave. You can manually give them trajectory orders and manually detonate, set them to ignore orders etc. and micro them onto target to completely ignore decoys. This might be a bit cheaty but I don't know I would expect it wouldn't be too hard to develop an optical confirmation system to place on missiles to check "Is this a ship sized target or a flare?" I have a bit of trouble believing that in the future chaff like decoy will be useful as cameras and radar are getting cheaper and cheaper. This may lead to new types of decoys possibly in the future, but there is no reason for missile guidance to be relying on IR signatures. I am actually kind of disappointed that is how the game is currently operating as pretty much no existing self-guided missile in service today works like that. Most use X-band radar returns, IR, and guidance updates from fleet combined to target something. So basically I don't think decoy flares should be in the game (at least not in their current implementation). They should have to fool radar, IR, visual, and scramble outside guidance to be effective against current tech. Another interesting point is most of our huge laser boats that are sucking down GWs put of insane amounts of heat, and it is actually near impossible to build a cost effective decoy for them that would over power the ships own IR signature. Regardless of that though all point defense systems (no matter what their composition) have a saturation limit. It doesn't really matter what you use to over-saturate point defenses (missiles, KKVs, drones, other ships, etc.) the end result is the same the payload leaks through and does the damage required. The question will then be "was it worth it?" So you analyze how much it costs to attack a system from a saturation attack. Since the ship has to factor in the cost of weapons and the ship they tend to be at a major disadvantage. Think of a 1,000,000$ tank being beat by a 3,000$ missile. I've been working on cost effective CIWS options lately and it is really hard to beat out tons of cheap missiles without just countering with tons of even cheaper missiles (plus whatever lasers you have going at the time). The stock drones losing to laser craft is more the terrible design of the default drones than anything else, the gun they put on the nose of the ship is a structural weak point with ammo embedded in it so any amount of heating up causes an ammunition explosion destroying the drones. The stinger drone in particular is really really bad in that regard. Any weapon system or ship design you can put on a ship you can put on a drone for cheaper (since you don't need to accommodate the people that it isn't carrying for space).
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Post by deltav on Jan 15, 2017 7:10:32 GMT
Can you teach me how to record my game video and post it like that? I would actually love this information too. Shadowplay doesn't work with CDE sadly. Yeah I've got to learn to do that. I think this game/ simulator has a ton of potential. If KSP is any indication, the kind of people who like programs like this are the type to figure out mods that can add extra features like being able to upload the design of others into our programs, or maybe one day even be able to run our ships vs each other online. Anywho, I think you are onto something about the Missile Ships. It's true that the Silo Ship can take out the Gunship at range, with almost no risk to itself, and the Silo Ship is half the cost of a Gunship. Of course if a Silo Ship comes against even the weakest Drone Carrier, it's toast. Something to ponder. Maybe the Missile Ship is the most superior weapons platform provided some way can be found to counter drones.
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Post by deltav on Jan 15, 2017 7:25:16 GMT
Can you teach me how to record my game video and post it like that? Yes thanks I see your point, yes the Laser Frigate does lose vs every Missiles ship except the Privateer, but the main use of laser is not against missiles anyway. Drones OR Decoys + Point Defense beat Missiles, Missiles beat Lasers, Lasers beat Drones. To kill Missiles you need other Missiles, or you need Decoys to give you point defense guns time to work on them or make them miss. It's paper, rock, scissors. Missile Ships are only superior vs Laser Dominant craft. Bring Drones, or Decoys + Point defense into the mix, and Missiles Ships are at a disadvantage. My main proof is the lowly 35 c Ranger. It can beat every Missile Ship except the Siloship, and even then only if the Siloship fires pretty much all it's missiles in one salvo because the Ranger has great Decoys + Point Defence. What do you think? To record video download OBS (Open Broadcaster Software). I use it to stream mostly but it is also a pretty good video screen capture and it is free, google should find it, and youtube has a ton of tutorials on how to set it up / use it (though the interface is really user friendly). Decoy point defense is a touchy subject imo from the way missiles behave. You can manually give them trajectory orders and manually detonate, set them to ignore orders etc. and micro them onto target to completely ignore decoys. This might be a bit cheaty but I don't know I would expect it wouldn't be too hard to develop an optical confirmation system to place on missiles to check "Is this a ship sized target or a flare?" I have a bit of trouble believing that in the future chaff like decoy will be useful as cameras and radar are getting cheaper and cheaper. This may lead to new types of decoys possibly in the future, but there is no reason for missile guidance to be relying on IR signatures. I am actually kind of disappointed that is how the game is currently operating as pretty much no existing self-guided missile in service today works like that. Most use X-band radar returns, IR, and guidance updates from fleet combined to target something. So basically I don't think decoy flares should be in the game (at least not in their current implementation). They should have to fool radar, IR, visual, and scramble outside guidance to be effective against current tech. Another interesting point is most of our huge laser boats that are sucking down GWs put of insane amounts of heat, and it is actually near impossible to build a cost effective decoy for them that would over power the ships own IR signature. Regardless of that though all point defense systems (no matter what their composition) have a saturation limit. It doesn't really matter what you use to over-saturate point defenses (missiles, KKVs, drones, other ships, etc.) the end result is the same the payload leaks through and does the damage required. The question will then be "was it worth it?" So you analyze how much it costs to attack a system from a saturation attack. Since the ship has to factor in the cost of weapons and the ship they tend to be at a major disadvantage. Think of a 1,000,000$ tank being beat by a 3,000$ missile. I've been working on cost effective CIWS options lately and it is really hard to beat out tons of cheap missiles without just countering with tons of even cheaper missiles (plus whatever lasers you have going at the time). The stock drones losing to laser craft is more the terrible design of the default drones than anything else, the gun they put on the nose of the ship is a structural weak point with ammo embedded in it so any amount of heating up causes an ammunition explosion destroying the drones. The stinger drone in particular is really really bad in that regard. Any weapon system or ship design you can put on a ship you can put on a drone for cheaper (since you don't need to accommodate the people that it isn't carrying for space). 1. Thanks for the tip about recording, have to look into that. 2. About the Decoys, they weigh between 300 kg and 1 ton and seem to be more than just simple flares. I think the game is assuming that the decoys (even though they are called flares) have the ability somehow to spoof the signature of a ship, and make the missiles think they (the flares) are the ship itself. There are already currently systems already in place called Nulkas which can fool anti-Ship missiles into thinking the decoy is the ship itself. The tech exists currently. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NulkaAlso the Missile has to do a lot of jobs, like track the target over 1000s of km, get to the target, and detonate danger close due to the weakness of Nukes in space, all the meanwhile not getting lost or running out of delta-v. The Decoy only has one job, distract the missiles for a split second during terminal phase so the point defense (guns) can destroy them. Plus you only need a few decoys at a time to distract a swarm of missiles. It's not hard to imagine that a great decoy is cheaper and easier to design than a just "good" missile. Since this game is supposed to be realistic space combat using only tech available today and currently at least in prototype form, I don't see how Decoys can be left out. 3. About Drones, the advantage of drones is mainly their small size imho. Removing the crew compartment doesn't necessarily give much advantage or make the ship smaller. It depends. Let's say you took a Gunship and removed the crew compartment and made it a drone. That wouldn't give it any advantage that a drone has, and it would be just about as big. The advantage of a drone is that it is basically a rocket with a gun stuck to it, (very tiny and therefore hard to shoot at range), meanwhile the capital ship involved is a much bigger and easier target for the drone to hit. If you make drones more than just a tiny bit larger with armor and guns, either they lose so much delta-v that the target ship can make them run out with course corrections (shooting star), or it can hit them at range with weapons the drones can never carry like heavy lasers and railguns. What do you think?
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Post by jasonvance on Jan 15, 2017 8:06:00 GMT
To record video download OBS (Open Broadcaster Software). I use it to stream mostly but it is also a pretty good video screen capture and it is free, google should find it, and youtube has a ton of tutorials on how to set it up / use it (though the interface is really user friendly). Decoy point defense is a touchy subject imo from the way missiles behave. You can manually give them trajectory orders and manually detonate, set them to ignore orders etc. and micro them onto target to completely ignore decoys. This might be a bit cheaty but I don't know I would expect it wouldn't be too hard to develop an optical confirmation system to place on missiles to check "Is this a ship sized target or a flare?" I have a bit of trouble believing that in the future chaff like decoy will be useful as cameras and radar are getting cheaper and cheaper. This may lead to new types of decoys possibly in the future, but there is no reason for missile guidance to be relying on IR signatures. I am actually kind of disappointed that is how the game is currently operating as pretty much no existing self-guided missile in service today works like that. Most use X-band radar returns, IR, and guidance updates from fleet combined to target something. So basically I don't think decoy flares should be in the game (at least not in their current implementation). They should have to fool radar, IR, visual, and scramble outside guidance to be effective against current tech. Another interesting point is most of our huge laser boats that are sucking down GWs put of insane amounts of heat, and it is actually near impossible to build a cost effective decoy for them that would over power the ships own IR signature. Regardless of that though all point defense systems (no matter what their composition) have a saturation limit. It doesn't really matter what you use to over-saturate point defenses (missiles, KKVs, drones, other ships, etc.) the end result is the same the payload leaks through and does the damage required. The question will then be "was it worth it?" So you analyze how much it costs to attack a system from a saturation attack. Since the ship has to factor in the cost of weapons and the ship they tend to be at a major disadvantage. Think of a 1,000,000$ tank being beat by a 3,000$ missile. I've been working on cost effective CIWS options lately and it is really hard to beat out tons of cheap missiles without just countering with tons of even cheaper missiles (plus whatever lasers you have going at the time). The stock drones losing to laser craft is more the terrible design of the default drones than anything else, the gun they put on the nose of the ship is a structural weak point with ammo embedded in it so any amount of heating up causes an ammunition explosion destroying the drones. The stinger drone in particular is really really bad in that regard. Any weapon system or ship design you can put on a ship you can put on a drone for cheaper (since you don't need to accommodate the people that it isn't carrying for space). 1. Thanks for the tip about recording, have to look into that. 2. About the Decoys, they weight between 300 kg and 1 ton. I think the game is assuming that the decoys (even though they are called flares) have the ability somehow to spoof the signature of a ship can make the missiles think they are the ship itself. There are already currently systems already in place called Nulkas which can fool anti-Ship missiles into thinking the decoy is the ship itself. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NulkaProvided the Missile has to do a lot of jobs, like track the target over 1000s of km, get to the target, and detonate danger close due to the weakness of Nukes in space, it's not hard to imagine that cost for cost, it would be cheaper to design a good decoy, which only has one job, to make the Nuke think it's the ship. And it only has to fool the drone for a few seconds so the drone misses. About Decoys not really being in the game, I don't see how they can be left out. Surely if there are missiles, then there are countermeasures to missiles. And you only need a few counter measures to fool huge swarms of missiles, and even then only then for a split second as the missile enters terminal phase. 3. About Drones, the advantage of drones is their small size but it is also their disadvantage. Let's say you took a Gunship and removed the crew compartment and made it a drone. That wouldn't give it any advantage that a drone has. The advantage of a drone is that it is basically a rocket with a gun stuck to it is that very tiny and therefore hard to shoot at range, meanwhile the capital ship involved is a much bigger and easier target for the drone to hit. If you make drones more than just a tiny bit larger with armor and guns, either they lose so much delta-v that the target ship can make them run out with course corrections (shooting star), or it can hit them at range with weapons the drones can never carry like heavy lasers and railguns. What do you think? If the gunship design you have doesn't work as a drone there is no reason to put people on it and send it out to battle then. You have basically said it wouldn't work unmanned or trade cost effectively, throwing people in it doesn't make it any better at doing it's job you just add more sacrifices to the blood god by throwing the crew corridors and people in there. Assuming you can build a good gunship that works well though, what purpose does having a bunch of people on it? If the programmed mission can be accomplished by autonomous maintenance drones/computers. The only thing people do "well" when compared to a machine in combat is making ethical decisions (and one could heavily argue against that as a computer programmed to a threshold of likely civilian casualties would keep to that threshold, as a human may or may not care or do the calculations, or do the calculations correctly). It is very possible that a commander seeing enemies retreat to a civilian city would glass the city (earning a court marshal most likely later). You could program randomness into the ethical subroutine to avoid predictability (which is the true bane of drone systems). Not many people are comfortable thinking about drones making ethical decisions though, just look at the self driving car debate going on right now in who the car should choose to kill. I think one of the main reasons for that is people expect other people to make mistakes or not react fast enough. We call car crashes "accidents" because they usually aren't planned. Everything the self driving car does is deliberate, it doesn't have "accidents" it deals with worst case situations as it is programmed to do, and knowing it will decide someone will die in a situation can be a bit unsettling. Personally, I am not of the popular opinion that leaving it to chance by actually not knowing wtf is going on until after the collision and collateral is already dealt with is better. I'll stop there though because I can ramble on and on about drones, autonomous creations, trans-humanism, and the future regarding them and us. I do agree that making small drones is probably the way to go. My current design philosophy is a bunch of tiny drones with enormous lasers attached to them and a bunch of tiny missiles for attacking and defending. The lasers are enormous by need though to reduce the cost of power and radiators (you need to get a fairly high critical intensity to be able to burn through things and that comes from having either large amounts of power or a large aperture). "The advantage of a drone is that it is basically a rocket with a gun stuck to it" the thing is that is true of any weapons platform regardless of size or if people are on it or not. The F-35 is a platform for delivering missiles stealthily in and out, an Iowa class battleship is a platform for moving the big guns it has around, the predator drone is the same as any manned aircraft, you put missiles on it and go deliver those missiles then come back to get more fuel and missiles. They are all just weapons platforms. Some weapons need larger platforms, but having a larger platform doesn't mean that people are inherently better for some reason. I would just ask if your missile had a fuzzy logic algorithm and a camera that took pictures of targets and analyzed them to ask "is this ship shaped" would the Nulka work at all? Probably not a hovering drone that is much much smaller than a ship and not ship shaped at all would likely allow the ignoring of anything it is doing. Direct guidance from satellite also makes them useless. They were designed to counter old technology, as a war today we would likely see a bunch of stockpiled older tech be fielded. But you have to keep in mind those decoys are designed to beat IR guided only missiles from much older generations of hardware not current tech. Considering the developer has stated over and over that stealth is not a thing in space the idea of decoys is really dumb. If you know precisely where the target is and can track its movements accurately enough to intercept it in the first place there is no way a decoy popped at the last second is going to change the mind of a missile as to where the target is. Unless the decoy is the same size, shape, radar return, and heat level as the existing ship (basically bringing an extra dummy ship along).
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Post by tukuro on Jan 15, 2017 9:26:27 GMT
If the gunship design you have doesn't work as a drone there is no reason to put people on it and send it out to battle then. You have basically said it wouldn't work unmanned or trade cost effectively, throwing people in it doesn't make it any better at doing it's job you just add more sacrifices to the blood god by throwing the crew corridors and people in there. Assuming you can build a good gunship that works well though, what purpose does having a bunch of people on it? If the programmed mission can be accomplished by autonomous maintenance drones/computers. This is my observation as well. The end result is a design philosophy that either leads to massive (but still less massive than stock ships) vessels armed with huge weapon systems (multi gigawatt lasers, 50+ km/s coilguns, or just plain missile/drone carriers) where the crew add only negligible mass and cost, or tiny "drones". At this point I'm not even sure if they should even be called drones considering they're one use only. After all, what is the point of adding a gun when you can just add a flak bomb, and then why use flak bombs when you can use a simple explosive attached to the remote control as your "warhead"? Or no warhead at all and just use the remote control as a kinetic penetrator. I don't think there is anything a human can do that a purpose build machine is not able to do better, at least in the future. It seems this will effectively result in either radical transhumanism (thus becoming the machines) or AIs taking over everything. This is also relevant in regards to to ship crew requirements: Do we really need this much crew? Computers can calculate trajectories, they can aim for us, they can keep check of supply stocks, they can even calculate hit percentages and estimate optimal engagement ranges. If doctors are really necessary they can travel with the fleet. And we don't really need cooks either because all food will be packaged beforehand. It seems to me that at most the only crew we need is the captain and a team of flexible technicians that can fix our no-safety-margin components.
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Post by jasonvance on Jan 15, 2017 9:31:53 GMT
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Post by deltav on Jan 25, 2017 5:12:42 GMT
If there was multiplayer, it would probably use stock ships only, at least as first.
Any thoughts on this list? Any mistakes in it?
Anyone found that the listing changes if AI behavior is modified such as launching all missiles/ drones at once?
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Post by deltav on Jan 26, 2017 21:29:57 GMT
My opinion is really changing regarding missiles/ drones. It seems like for cost they are very hard to defeat.
If sent in large swarms they give even the most powerfully armed laser or gunned ships a real challenge.
I think I want to try making defensive drones that are heavily armed and high in delta v which have the job of just defending ships against missiles and drones.
Something I want to try.
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Post by Enderminion on Jan 27, 2017 12:23:20 GMT
If there was multiplayer, it would probably use stock ships only, at least as first. Any thoughts on this list? Any mistakes in it? Anyone found that the listing changes if AI behavior is modified such as launching all missiles/ drones at once? Newtons a mean SoB, any ship with weapons can kill another given time and good tactics
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Post by deltav on Jan 29, 2017 9:51:53 GMT
If there was multiplayer, it would probably use stock ships only, at least as first. Any thoughts on this list? Any mistakes in it? Anyone found that the listing changes if AI behavior is modified such as launching all missiles/ drones at once? Newtons a mean SoB, any ship with weapons can kill another given time and good tactics All things be equal is what we are talking about. Sure it's theoretically possible that a WW1 era biplane could destroy a Superhornet. But all things being equal, one type of craft is superior to another. This test was run with AI, but I'm asking if you saw anything you disagree with in the rankings based on your own simulations.
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