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Post by caiaphas on Jan 15, 2017 9:14:22 GMT
The fundamental limitation of lasers is you can never build a perfect beam, it always comes out somewhat cone shaped and degrades over distance. You can counter that by brute force and pump more and more energy until it is useful again at whatever range you were aiming for, or you can build a better optic to focus the cone tighter (most likely you will do both). There is very little in space to defract a beam (the loss in intensity you see on the stats is the beam divergence over distance or how coney it is at certain ranges) So now that we have covered the fundamental problem of lasers lets talk about projectile weapons. They are limited to whatever velocity they can be imparted by the weapon that fires them (and possibly some sort of missile attached to the projectile for guidance but to keep it simple lets just talk about mass drivers etc as it would be unlikely a missile would impart much extra delta-v for anything other than steering). The fundamental limitation of projectile weapons is their muzzle velocity. Targets can move, even though you imparted 10GW of power to a projectile more efficiently than a laser can impart power to your ship hull and got it up to an impressive 300km/s. If the target can move out of the way in 5 seconds your effective range is only 1500km. If that round lands it will for sure devastate what it hits. Meanwhile a laser has a muzzle velocity of 299,792 km/s which gives it a maximum effective range against the same target of 1,485,000. You for sure have to pump a lot of energy into a lasers with a really large focusing aperture to do any damage at that range but I can assure you that the requirement to get a projectile weapon to preform at even 10% that range is many orders of magnitude greater. Good points about the lasers, but back to the inverse square law. I haven't heard anyone address it. Lasers get weaker exponentially the further you get from the beam. CGs/ RGs don't have that problem, they have the problem of accurately hitting the target. Watt for watt, credit for credit don't lasers lose out? Yes, lasers do lose intensity with range. The thing is, though, that our output intensities (at 1 meter) tend to be in the terawatt range, so even a reduction of 10^6 doesn't really affect it much . I have an unoptimized 1 GW laser with 50 MW intensity at 1000 km that weighs 2.18 tons and costs 39.8 kc as compared to the stock 286 mm coilgun's 72.9 tons and 19400 kc pricetag. It does draw roughly a hundred times the power, but guess what? apophys has a 1 GW reactor that's 11.2 tons and 251 kc. Mass-limited, I can literally stick in five lasers for every coilgun and still come out on top cost-wise, and you're not going to be doing a whole lot of fighting once your guns have been melted to scrap. By the way, my laser platforms tend to have 1 g or greater of acceleration. I can dodge 20 g coilgun-launched missiles with some of my lighter designs; now imagine that with an unguided projectile. EDIT: and apparently I, at some point, built a 1 GW laser with less than half the mass and cost and twice the intensity at 1000 km.
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Post by teeth on Jan 15, 2017 9:19:57 GMT
Looks like he's deleting all his posts, I think you guys just successfully slayed a troll by overfeeding it.
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Post by newageofpower on Jan 15, 2017 9:22:27 GMT
Looks like he's deleting all his posts, I think you guys just successfully slayed a troll by overfeeding it. Yeah, now I look like I'm arguing with the air. *shrug* oh well worth
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Post by caiaphas on Jan 15, 2017 9:29:42 GMT
Looks like he's deleting all his posts, I think you guys just successfully slayed a troll by overfeeding it. Yeah, now I look like I'm arguing with the air. *shrug* oh well worth (I jest.)
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Post by deltav on Jan 15, 2017 9:29:52 GMT
I made this thread to try to add something to the board. I'm not here to make anyone upset. I was hoping my questions and threads/posts would be welcome. The more people we get playing COADE and on this board the better right? Hard Scifi has a pretty small fanbase. We should welcome new members who have questions, not attack or insult them. Please check out my other thread and comment and vote. childrenofadeadearth.boards.net/thread/710/stock-ships-headPlease pics and video, there is no way to verify simple text or to learn how to replicate the results. Thanks to everyone who took the time to participate on this thread. This thread is about guns and it was a mistake to add lasers to it, so later I'll try to make a separate thread of lasers vs guns. Thanks for everyone who welcomed me to this thread by really getting into the discussion.
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Post by The Astronomer on Jan 15, 2017 9:30:59 GMT
Did we just broke them or what happened?
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Post by teeth on Jan 15, 2017 9:31:58 GMT
You're never going to outgun a laser with a gun armed capital ship, the only reasonable way to do it is to use massive swarms of very small drones. Lasers have a bit of trouble reliably hitting them at 1000 km, mine seem to take out about 5 at a time, then stop taking them out for several seconds, take out 5 more, then stop taking them out for several more seconds, sometimes stopping altogether. Maybe my lasers are just bad, but if the game could handle that many drones I think it might be reasonable to take them out with mega swarms.
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Post by argonbalt on Jan 15, 2017 9:33:25 GMT
Please post pics and or video which graphs if you can showing the mass, cost and power output at different ranges of these more efficient designs. Also even better if you have simulations vs stock ships like the Fleet Carrier or the Gunship showing the effectiveness vs these craft at reasonable cost. Thanks a ton. Fine I'll bite, one the left is the default green YAG stock Laser, on the right is one of my own designs for a UV model. As you can clearly see it's lighter, cheaper, has better intensity over all, it is a little hotter and needs a bit more power but the leap is nothing considering i get like a 1000% increase in damage per watt. Not to mention mine having a range of at least a Mm vs the like what 20km of the default?
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Post by newageofpower on Jan 15, 2017 9:37:50 GMT
You're never going to outgun a laser with a gun armed capital ship, the only reasonable way to do it is to use massive swarms of very small drones. Lasers have a bit of trouble reliably hitting them at 1000 km, mine seem to take out about 5 at a time, then stop taking them out for several seconds, take out 5 more, then stop taking them out for several more seconds, sometimes stopping altogether. Maybe my lasers are just bad, but if the game could handle that many drones I think it might be reasonable to take them out with mega swarms. Even with laser wobble, though, the amount of drones required to saturate even a half-assed laser grid is huge, far more massive and expensive than the lasers. If you test at close range (try under 500km), you'll find drones just evaporate, due to the inability to armor the barrel of the gun-drone with any sort of efficient anti-laser armor (indeed, the best barrel materials tend to melt to lasers the easiest). I thought I had a workaround, but it turned out to be too mass/cost inefficient to be anything more than niche. On the other hand, tiny, pointy micromissiles made of fiber/gel/carbon composite can give most lasers a hard time, have usable dV, very high acceleration, and can be launched in the millions. Just beware of catastrophic frame-rate collapse.
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Post by deltav on Jan 15, 2017 9:39:04 GMT
Please post pics and or video which graphs if you can showing the mass, cost and power output at different ranges of these more efficient designs. Also even better if you have simulations vs stock ships like the Fleet Carrier or the Gunship showing the effectiveness vs these craft at reasonable cost. Thanks a ton. Fine I'll bite, one the left is the default green YAG stock Laser, on the right is one of my own designs for a UV model. As you can clearly see it's lighter, cheaper, has better intensity over all, it is a little hotter and needs a bit more power but the leap is nothing considering i get like a 1000% increase in damage per watt. Not to mention mine having a range of at least a Mm vs the like what 20km of the default? This is great, please more like this. Thanks a ton.
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Post by tukuro on Jan 15, 2017 9:43:55 GMT
I'm going to disagree with lasers as the universally best option. It's possible to create low cost coilguns able to launch projectiles at well over 30, 40 and even 50 km/s.
Assuming both systems use the same amount of power, an amorphous carbon/titanium-aluminide coilgun and 10,000 metallic glass rounds - which ingame are very expensive compared to real life, where metglas components only become prohibitively expensive if you're trying to make them larger than a few centimeters - are cheaper than a comparable laser system and its radiators. Even if we are cheesing the momentum wheels so they are a negligible percentage of the mass/cost.
And assuming we are ignoring range, the coilgun system is just as effective as the laser. Which would be even more so if they'd properly lead their targets.
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Post by deltav on Jan 15, 2017 9:44:23 GMT
Anyone know how to figure out the fire rate of cannons, coilguns and railguns in game?
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Post by jasonvance on Jan 15, 2017 9:45:07 GMT
I made this thread to try to add something to the board. I'm not here to make anyone upset. I was hoping my questions and threads/posts would be welcome. The more people we get playing COADE and on this board the better right? Hard Scifi has a pretty small fanbase. We should welcome new members who have questions, not attack or insult them. Please check out my other thread and comment and vote. childrenofadeadearth.boards.net/thread/710/stock-ships-headPlease pics and video, there is no way to verify simple text or to learn how to replicate the results. Thanks to everyone who took the time to participate on this thread. This thread is about guns and it was a mistake to add lasers to it, so later I'll try to make a separate thread of lasers vs guns. Thanks for everyone who welcomed me to this thread by really getting into the discussion. It is cool man, we can be vicious sometimes, and I hope we didn't give you a too bad of a feeling, but that is just because we have spent so much time asking and answering the same questions already that it looks obvious to us and some people can get frustrated when something looks obvious to them and they have to explain it. I am sure you can relate to that in some way. I personally like to stick to the math and keep my own opinions out of things as much as possible since it is really hard to get mad at math and not sound crazy. I hope you stick around it is good to have people to talk with. This was the most active the forums have been in a while and brought up some good debates. I was actually surprised to see some of the results on these polls and hope to see more.
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Post by deltav on Jan 15, 2017 9:46:42 GMT
Also anyone know who to calculate damage given by lasers at different ranges in joules/ ftlbs of energy ingame?
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Post by deltav on Jan 15, 2017 9:49:42 GMT
I made this thread to try to add something to the board. I'm not here to make anyone upset. I was hoping my questions and threads/posts would be welcome. The more people we get playing COADE and on this board the better right? Hard Scifi has a pretty small fanbase. We should welcome new members who have questions, not attack or insult them. Please check out my other thread and comment and vote. childrenofadeadearth.boards.net/thread/710/stock-ships-headPlease pics and video, there is no way to verify simple text or to learn how to replicate the results. Thanks to everyone who took the time to participate on this thread. This thread is about guns and it was a mistake to add lasers to it, so later I'll try to make a separate thread of lasers vs guns. Thanks for everyone who welcomed me to this thread by really getting into the discussion. It is cool man, we can be vicious sometimes, and I hope we didn't give you a too bad of a feeling, but that is just because we have spent so much time asking and answering the same questions already that it looks obvious to us and some people can get frustrated when something looks obvious to them and they have to explain it. I am sure you can relate to that in some way. I personally like to stick to the math and keep my own opinions out of things as much as possible since it is really hard to get mad at math and not sound crazy. I hope you stick around it is good to have people to talk with. This was the most active the forums have been in a while and brought up some good debates. I was actually surprised to see some of the results on these polls and hope to see more. Thanks my friend. I know we are just getting to know each other, but I hope we can call each other that. I'll work on trying to be more precise on just what I am asking. I'll try to be more precise with my posts so I cut right to the point of what exactly I am looking for. I think what I was looking for was not quite what I was getting and that's why I kept posting what must have sounded like the same question repeatedly. I'll learn from this experience.
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