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Post by Easy on Jan 26, 2017 23:19:44 GMT
I do have to question just how fast a 40kt lump of dense rail material is 'shot away' by relatively low powered weaponry though... sure, damage it fast as it would be under high stress during firing... but to actually vaporise it is a bit of a big ask IMO. Destroyed turrets and monolithic parts like radiation shields should remain after being penetrated with some % chance of stopping a projectile/laser that depletes as it continues to absorb damage. Especially when disabled by a laser.
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Post by argonbalt on Jan 26, 2017 23:43:33 GMT
YEOWZA! lieste for one GC i could have no less than a hundred of my laser destroyers, not to mention each has about 100% more D-V. Sorry im sure your guns are really great, but im still betting on the far more cost effective laser ship thank you
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Post by argonbalt on Jan 26, 2017 23:48:54 GMT
You were not around when coiguns were laughably overpowered, if i remember correctly we were getting speeds of several dozen Mm/s (1000 km)/s, the ranges were downright inter orbital with you being able to shoot down enemy ships in LEO from low lunar orbit, by that point they were not really coilguns, more like particle beam weapons. Of course this was exploiting physics loopholes this is before we even got the GW reactors going. It was basically the first (broken) meta With that in mind do you think the weapons the way they are configured now is more realistic? Is this possible this change just made weapons even more imbalanced in favor of lasers? It's not imbalanced it's relatively realistic, lasers scale well with lots of juice (at least the kinda crappy efficiency wise light pumped ones we are stuck with in game), the coilguns we have now are "better" but until we get realistic capacitors and battery usage the fire rates and reload times are pretty suspicious for any heavy shot coilguns. If anything made lasers more favourable it's the huge reactor boost we got. Once you have that much power you are more than set for pumping up lasers.
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Post by lieste on Jan 27, 2017 0:18:10 GMT
YEOWZA! lieste for one GC i could have no less than a hundred of my laser destroyers, not to mention each has about 100% more D-V. Sorry im sure your guns are really great, but im still betting on the far more cost effective laser ship thank you Yup, it is as I said initially a silliness. Only to explore the outrageous end of military procurement. I can get a reasonable fraction of the performance for much lower cost in mass and value, but then I do still need a laser if I want to be viable at the Mm ranges, or to deal with small drones with big guns/lasers (which is a good idea anyway), and a missile carrier or drone carrier for combat at a remove or to bolster point defences. I haven't exhausted all possibilities in the railgun material/dimension/power so while I am doubtful it may be that a cheaper and equally potent mix exists, and a coilgun option might also be viable (but here I am even more doubtful, as the potentials seem to be lower albeit at a lower cost).
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Post by darkwarriorj on Jan 27, 2017 0:21:57 GMT
deltav , how it got so close to my gunstar is this: 1. Short explaination: I wanted/let it get close, to test the effects of 10cm amorphous carbon as anti laser defense. It was anticlimatic. 10cm bought 10 seconds. 2. Longer explaination : Yes, I wanted to test it, but I also forgot to toggle the gun to shoot at targets at all. Ooops. That has since been fixed. Will get pics soon. As for impressions after beating up some stock ships with it after I debugged the firing problem, I have to agree that coilguns are pretty great. Shame about its broken unrealisticness at the moment (energy efficiency and peak power required to actually get the shot to such speeds are too high and far too low, respectively) but my impression is that like railguns and resistojets, the problem is not in output velocity but rather output quantity. I can see this coilgun scoring an even trade against an equivilent laser at the current max capped laser ranges. Even defined by mass and by cost. Of course, missiles still uber allies, because I don't think this gun can handle 2500 missiles coming at it at 25km/s, but neither can the laser. The gun's bullets also cost 1/3rd of the missile (3 bullets per missile), so for bullet based anti-missile defense I think my magnesium railgun drones still dominate that. Given effective ranges, I'm curious if the drone shoots first or the coilgunship now...
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Post by deltav on Jan 27, 2017 0:26:21 GMT
With that in mind do you think the weapons the way they are configured now is more realistic? Is this possible this change just made weapons even more imbalanced in favor of lasers? It's not imbalanced it's relatively realistic, lasers scale well with lots of juice (at least the kinda crappy efficiency wise light pumped ones we are stuck with in game), the coilguns we have now are "better" but until we get realistic capacitors and battery usage the fire rates and reload times are pretty suspicious for any heavy shot coilguns. If anything made lasers more favourable it's the huge reactor boost we got. Once you have that much power you are more than set for pumping up lasers. Why can't the reload times be possible? Most of these long range railguns use 1g projectiles. It's tiny. Also the loading mechanism could be entirely electromagnetic, no moving parts, and friction minimal by using magnetic fields to move around the ammo for loading, etc. (Kind of like a monorail, only in miniature.) Under those conditions, firing speed is only a matter of how fast electronic switches can be operated by computer no?
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Post by deltav on Jan 27, 2017 0:28:04 GMT
YEOWZA! lieste for one GC i could have no less than a hundred of my laser destroyers, not to mention each has about 100% more D-V. Sorry im sure your guns are really great, but im still betting on the far more cost effective laser ship thank you Yup, it is as I said initially a silliness. Only to explore the outrageous end of military procurement. I can get a reasonable fraction of the performance for much lower cost in mass and value, but then I do still need a laser if I want to be viable at the Mm ranges, or to deal with small drones with big guns/lasers (which is a good idea anyway), and a missile carrier or drone carrier for combat at a remove or to bolster point defences. I haven't exhausted all possibilities in the railgun material/dimension/power so while I am doubtful it may be that a cheaper and equally potent mix exists, and a coilgun option might also be viable (but here I am even more doubtful, as the potentials seem to be lower albeit at a lower cost). Pretty unlikely to see ships like that out in the rim, but close to important resources or trading hubs, 1GC ships super long range railgun and/or laser armed ships that outclass everything else would be worth the cost many times over. They would need lots of support from drone carriers and missile ships just like terrestrial aircraft carriers need support from destroyers and frigates, but never the less you only need a few of these 1GC craft of them at important places. They would be the equivalent to the obscenely expensive Aircraft Carriers. Whomever has them can basically dominate everyone else and you only need a few of them.
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Post by argonbalt on Jan 27, 2017 1:54:26 GMT
It's not imbalanced it's relatively realistic, lasers scale well with lots of juice (at least the kinda crappy efficiency wise light pumped ones we are stuck with in game), the coilguns we have now are "better" but until we get realistic capacitors and battery usage the fire rates and reload times are pretty suspicious for any heavy shot coilguns. If anything made lasers more favourable it's the huge reactor boost we got. Once you have that much power you are more than set for pumping up lasers. Why can't the reload times be possible? Most of these long range railguns use 1g projectiles. It's tiny. Also the loading mechanism could be entirely electromagnetic, no moving parts, and friction minimal by using magnetic fields to move around the ammo for loading, etc. (Kind of like a monorail, only in miniature.) Under those conditions, firing speed is only a matter of how fast electronic switches can be operated by computer no? It's funny you should mention switches because actually yeah that is a huge problem for real life coil guns and lasers to operate. In game however it is more a matter of the guns not using/needing any capacitors. A coilgun is more than just a plug in and shoot weapon, unlike even railguns where hypothetically you could potentially just run the current in/current out along the tracks and let the armature connect the zap, coil guns are a phased sequence of attracting and repelling magnetic accelerators. This means they can't all be switched on at once, or the round would simply be stuck halfway in the barrel being tugged by the whole stack. So you need your coils sequenced, what that means is you need your charge sequenced, so you need something to hold, release the charge attracting the round into the barrel, then stop flow, build and release with the repulsion charge backwards pushing up on the round from below. If we had this in game we could say for certain whether it is truly realistic or not, otherwise the guns we are using have invisible built in capacitors
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Post by deltav on Jan 27, 2017 2:46:17 GMT
Why can't the reload times be possible? Most of these long range railguns use 1g projectiles. It's tiny. Also the loading mechanism could be entirely electromagnetic, no moving parts, and friction minimal by using magnetic fields to move around the ammo for loading, etc. (Kind of like a monorail, only in miniature.) Under those conditions, firing speed is only a matter of how fast electronic switches can be operated by computer no? It's funny you should mention switches because actually yeah that is a huge problem for real life coil guns and lasers to operate. In game however it is more a matter of the guns not using/needing any capacitors. A coilgun is more than just a plug in and shoot weapon, unlike even railguns where hypothetically you could potentially just run the current in/current out along the tracks and let the armature connect the zap, coil guns are a phased sequence of attracting and repelling magnetic accelerators. This means they can't all be switched on at once, or the round would simply be stuck halfway in the barrel being tugged by the whole stack. So you need your coils sequenced, what that means is you need your charge sequenced, so you need something to hold, release the charge attracting the round into the barrel, then stop flow, build and release with the repulsion charge backwards pushing up on the round from below. If we had this in game we could say for certain whether it is truly realistic or not, otherwise the guns we are using have invisible built in capacitors I don't understand this focus on capacitors. (I've seen many members bring it up on this thread.) I haven't seen any wiring diagrams for any of the modules in game. In fact, I haven't seen any wiring at all in game. It's presupposed. Really there isn't any of that kind of minute detail in game. There are refuelers but no fuel lines. No clearly defined life support systems or anything like that. So why all this talk of capacitors? We don't talk of any electrical components at all in game, all of that kind of extreme detail is left out and for good reason. There's no clearly shown valves, couplings, water recyclers, and so on, although we know such things exist, it's really not the point of the game. This isn't a ship engineering simulator. The point is realistic space combat and everything in game focuses on that. About the switches, you are right of course. But we are talking the difference between the early computers in the 1960s and the iphone. The switches are not even the biggest problem with railguns right? Isn't it the metallurgy? I heard right now they only can shoot maybe 20 times and then they fall apart. What is a computer? Nothing but a series of switches isn't that so? More than that, but essentially a matter of switches. The only way to know if the game is realistic would be to compare our designs to real built prototypes. Then we would look at the problems with the prototypes and try and imagine if the problems, mostly ones of construction and metallurgy were corrected over time as the problems with early computers, airplanes and so forth were. Right?
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Post by theholyinquisition on Jan 27, 2017 3:07:05 GMT
It's funny you should mention switches because actually yeah that is a huge problem for real life coil guns and lasers to operate. In game however it is more a matter of the guns not using/needing any capacitors. A coilgun is more than just a plug in and shoot weapon, unlike even railguns where hypothetically you could potentially just run the current in/current out along the tracks and let the armature connect the zap, coil guns are a phased sequence of attracting and repelling magnetic accelerators. This means they can't all be switched on at once, or the round would simply be stuck halfway in the barrel being tugged by the whole stack. So you need your coils sequenced, what that means is you need your charge sequenced, so you need something to hold, release the charge attracting the round into the barrel, then stop flow, build and release with the repulsion charge backwards pushing up on the round from below. If we had this in game we could say for certain whether it is truly realistic or not, otherwise the guns we are using have invisible built in capacitors I don't understand this focus on capacitors. (I've seen many members bring it up on this thread.) I haven't seen any wiring diagrams for any of the modules in game. In fact, I haven't seen any wiring at all in game. It's presupposed. Really there isn't any of that kind of minute detail in game. There are refuelers but no fuel lines. No clearly defined life support systems or anything like that. So why all this talk of capacitors? We don't talk of any electrical components at all in game, all of that kind of extreme detail is left out and for good reason. There's no clearly shown valves, couplings, water recyclers, and so on, although we know such things exist, it's really not the point of the game. This isn't a ship engineering simulator. The point is realistic space combat and everything in game focuses on that. About the switches, you are right of course. But we are talking the difference between the early computers in the 1960s and the iphone. The switches are not even the biggest problem with railguns right? Isn't it the metallurgy? I heard right now they only can shoot maybe 20 times and then they fall apart. What is a computer? Nothing but a series of switches isn't that so? More than that, but essentially a matter of switches. The only way to know if the game is realistic would be to compare our designs to real built prototypes. Then we would look at the problems with the prototypes and try and imagine if the problems, mostly ones of construction and metallurgy were corrected over time as the problems with early computers, airplanes and so forth were. Right? This is why. Just to sum up, without capacitors, none of these weapons would function. And realistic space combat=space engineering simulator, at least according to this forum.(and, I suspect, qswitched.) As for switching, It's actually about how the coilgun knows which coils to turn on and off.
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Post by vegemeister on Jan 27, 2017 3:19:03 GMT
I don't understand this focus on capacitors. (I've seen many members bring it up on this thread.) The current way electromagnetic guns are modeled is quite different from reality. IRL, electromagnetic guns are pretty much universally pulsed power devices. This involves some kind of energy storage device, almost always a bank of capacitors (although I have read about pulsed generators being used). The way railguns and coil guns are modeled now, you tweak the power consumption directly, optimize the gun, manually calculate the muzzle energy, then set the loader power to give a rate of fire that doesn't violate conservation of energy. If they were modeled realistically, you wouldn't tweak the power consumption. Instead, you would tweak the shot energy and the loader power, and the total power consumption of the gun would be calculated as RoF * muzzle_energy * efficiency. There would also be dummy weight proportional to shot energy, which would represent the capacitors. That has two effects. First, you don't have to manually calculate muzzle energy. Second, you can run very high velocity guns off of very low power, as long as you are willing to accept a low rate of fire.
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Post by argonbalt on Jan 27, 2017 3:23:26 GMT
theholyinquisition pretty much summed it up, if you want a simple metaphor deltav, it's like having a firearm simulator without a hammer or firing pins. The game lets us make the barrel cartridge chamber cylinder and stock, but without the firing pins and hammer we cannot really test if it is realistic or feasible.
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Post by Enderminion on Jan 27, 2017 4:01:27 GMT
6:30pm PST and it will be posted, most of the power is used by the turret this is the coilgun I was talking about, it costs 350kc and masses 37 tonnes, it seems to be far more effective then my needle railguns and 1-gram railguns, it fires 100,000 rounds a minute as well
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Post by deltav on Jan 27, 2017 4:31:36 GMT
I don't understand this focus on capacitors. (I've seen many members bring it up on this thread.) The current way electromagnetic guns are modeled is quite different from reality. IRL, electromagnetic guns are pretty much universally pulsed power devices. This involves some kind of energy storage device, almost always a bank of capacitors (although I have read about pulsed generators being used). The way railguns and coil guns are modeled now, you tweak the power consumption directly, optimize the gun, manually calculate the muzzle energy, then set the loader power to give a rate of fire that doesn't violate conservation of energy. If they were modeled realistically, you wouldn't tweak the power consumption. Instead, you would tweak the shot energy and the loader power, and the total power consumption of the gun would be calculated as RoF * muzzle_energy * efficiency. There would also be dummy weight proportional to shot energy, which would represent the capacitors. That has two effects. First, you don't have to manually calculate muzzle energy. Second, you can run very high velocity guns off of very low power, as long as you are willing to accept a low rate of fire. That's grand, and just fine. But what you are arguing for is not "capacitors". Capacitors are in the game even if they are not explicitly mentioned. Without capacitors, no railgun or coilgun could work right? What you are arguing is a change in the way the railguns and coilguns are modeled and designed in game. That is a totally different thing isn't it? Capacitors are not the issue. The way design and power of railguns and coilguns is modeled in game is what you have issue with and that's entirely different. You aren't asking for "capacitors". You are asking for a more realistic model of the way coilguns and railguns work with different "sliders" and "variables" in game than is used presently. Isn't that so?
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Post by deltav on Jan 27, 2017 4:38:07 GMT
6:30pm PST and it will be posted, most of the power is used by the turret this is the coilgun I was talking about, it costs 350kc and masses 37 tonnes, it seems to be far more effective then my needle railguns and 1-gram railguns, it fires 100,000 rounds a minute as well It's a marvel, very cool stuff. I've spent the last week playing around with this stuff and the most important variable seems to be what materials are used. What do you think? What seems the make the biggest differences in the success of your design attempts?
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