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Post by deltav on Jan 26, 2017 21:25:47 GMT
But coilguns are superior sandblasters, especially if you use the new-added in materials. ...wait, what new materials? And I don't know enough about railguns to make that determination, honestly. I do have a very nice 10 MW snub-nosed coilgun accurate to around 15 km on enemy flak missiles that fits into a two-meter box, though, so they're great for space. Screen shots please!
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Post by lieste on Jan 26, 2017 21:26:23 GMT
A mix is best. All have weaknesses when applied alone.
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Post by deltav on Jan 26, 2017 21:50:13 GMT
A mix is best. All have weaknesses when applied alone. Agree 100%. Every weapon has advantages and disadvantages. No one size fits all.
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Post by Enderminion on Jan 27, 2017 12:04:56 GMT
I think overall lasers are probably the most versatile ship mounted weapon, although I still voted for coilguns. Even if you design a coilgun or railgun that reaches out to 1000km, the turret becomes problematic that aiming speed is slow, and also due to the low angle range esp against drones and missiles. Also although the power requirements are low compared to lasers for the power of the weapon, by the time you power the turret/momentum wheels, the power requirements become very "laser like". So overall perhaps lasers are the most versatile weapon overall. I disagree a laser is a laser, the damage they do is a spot that gets bigger with range (I think?) a coilgun can be a flak cannon or can throw needles, even mulit-kilo disks like I use, or even A-bombs
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Post by dorkious on Jan 27, 2017 14:40:35 GMT
My 2 cents,
Coilguns are most versatile, reason being they can fulfill the following roles.
Long range guided missile launcher Sand blaster at various sizes and powers Point defence again with various payload Heavy direct fire weaponry Drone size weaponry
Also compared to railgun has far greater range of payload sizes.
Granted for long range I would recommend a laser for various reasons ( impossible to dodge, turret sniping). Just think that coilguns are literally more versatile.
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Post by theholyinquisition on Jan 27, 2017 16:52:31 GMT
My 2 cents, Coilguns are most versatile, reason being they can fulfill the following roles. Long range guided missile launcher Sand blaster at various sizes and powers Point defence again with various payload Heavy direct fire weaponry Drone size weaponry Also compared to railgun has far greater range of payload sizes. Granted for long range I would recommend a laser for various reasons ( impossible to dodge, turret sniping). Just think that coilguns are literally more versatile. Cost is the big issue there, though. Metglass costs a lot.
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Post by argonbalt on Jan 27, 2017 19:27:51 GMT
And if metglass get's nerfed like vanadium chromium copper did many of our designs will end up kaput as well
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Post by Easy on Jan 27, 2017 20:56:42 GMT
Jan 24, 2017 14:57:40 GMT -5 Easy said: armor against lasers, it takes the bite out, also lasers tend to not be able to kill capital ships. I will ignore 100 GW user designs for now.I heavily disagree, my most capable Laser Destroyer designs rarely use any more than a few GW's and i only have that for the insanely useful MPD drives the reactors can power, likewise well it might not dramatically slice a ship in half, burning off the rockets and letting a bundle or two of highs speed missiles finish off even the toughest ships is hardly difficult. Part of that is the damage system where the laser heats the turret armor which ablates at a certain speed and then the turret disappears from existence. Is it even possible for the turret to sink its heat into the surrounding armor and modules? Even then a turret with melted armor might just have hole in it and otherwise functional. Barrel armor or additional thickness is even more mysterious in how it works or doesn't work. In game lasers are very good and I think most of us passed Veta Overkill with 6-8 of the default 13MW Green lasers. A big part of that is the Lancer and Hellfire drones have ammunition in the nosecone.
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Post by Easy on Jan 27, 2017 21:07:39 GMT
I might love coilguns to death and back (I mean, come on, I have over a dozen variants of them right now) but yeah, railguns are kings of range and cost-effectiveness. You might need to hurl a few thousand grains of amorphous carbon sand at your enemies to kill them as opposed to fewer than a hundred one-kilo rounds from a coilgun, but the sand costs around 20 mc as opposed to tens to a few hundred credits per coilgun brick, so the railgun still wins out on that. But coilguns are superior sandblasters, especially if you use the new-added in materials. Please enlighten me, especially for sub-Megawatt power levels. I can get a 70kW railgun to match the 3.5kW 33mm cannon's performance. Reactors come cheap and light CoDE. In a different thread some posters had calculated US Navy reactors to approximately 1MW/ton of system mass. You can easily build a fairly unoptimized design for 100kg with radiators and still have it with decent radiation shielding. The optimized designs are only a few kilograms and credits owing to the 250g or less of uranium. CoDE is scientifically accurate in most respects but our ability to redline material tolerances is questionable safety at best.
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Post by bdcarrillo on Jan 27, 2017 21:24:01 GMT
I just wish I could multiple types on the nose of my ship... Or angle side mounted turrets forward.
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Post by argonbalt on Jan 27, 2017 21:35:17 GMT
Part of that is the damage system where the laser heats the turret armor which ablates at a certain speed and then the turret disappears from existence. Uh yeah that makes sense, generally speaking you need all components of a weapon system to make it work, once even one of those components breaks it is usuall y game over unless you replace and repair the broken part, sure the game could intricately model the annihilated turret ball and all subsequent subsystems and their materials, but the gun is still toast one way or another. Alternatively accurately modelling might make it worse for defending ships, instead of a poofed out turret, you would get a huge electrical or thermal discharge from a superheated hydrogen filled laser cavity exploding, or an explosion of magnetically ripped open gun debris from a coilguns potential MW's of juice suddenly being freed to interact with the hull material, in barrel ammunition or missiles in a launcher(which may be nuclear) cooking off and detonating etc. The current simplified model is if anything a bit nicer on defending craft as the damaged module is simply removed. Is it even possible for the turret to sink its heat into the surrounding armor and modules? Uh no, that is why lasers work, because most stuff in a gun is not aramid fibre, and lasers by default work on the principle of overloading the heat retention of a substance so fast with so much power that it supersonically rips itself out of the previously stable solid state it existed in. Also you would now have to wrap your guns and turret in coolant tubes, more radiator space would be needed, along with the fact that it might do diddly squat, we are talking about even one GIGAWATT of energy being pumped into the material at certain ranges PER SECOND, the fastest way to cool off would be simply to destroy the enemy laser bulb. Even then a turret with melted armor might just have hole in it and otherwise functional. Barrel armor or additional thickness is even more mysterious in how it works or doesn't work. No it is pretty straight forward, you wrap your gun in armour, then if the armour is breached the game moves on to the material of the weapon, if that breaks then you loose your gun. Also even with one Mm ranges and a wavering laser, eventually all turret or barrel armour will be burned off and at that point your gun is gone, your only secondary options are rotating your ship to try to spread the laser damage. In game lasers are very good and I think most of us passed Veta Overkill with 6-8 of the default 13MW Green lasers. A big part of that is the Lancer and Hellfire drones have ammunition in the nosecone. I did not use any laser craft for the most part, i had more fun manoeuvring and exhausting drone Dv, drones weakness is guns weakness, it's not the system by which we calculate them, but the limited ability to armour them that is retarding our counter measures against laser ships. I want better armouring and gun mounting in general, but even then the ranges and damage available prioritise lasers.
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Post by dorkious on Jan 27, 2017 21:58:56 GMT
My 2 cents, Coilguns are most versatile, reason being they can fulfill the following roles. Long range guided missile launcher Sand blaster at various sizes and powers Point defence again with various payload Heavy direct fire weaponry Drone size weaponry Also compared to railgun has far greater range of payload sizes. Granted for long range I would recommend a laser for various reasons ( impossible to dodge, turret sniping). Just think that coilguns are literally more versatile. Cost is the big issue there, though. Metglass costs a lot. Oh yeah, shockingly expensive. I like the iron metglass composite someone suggested
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Post by caiaphas on Jan 27, 2017 22:17:57 GMT
I did some quick rough-and-dirty experimenting and came up with the following conclusions: - Lasers are the king of long-range warfare (no duh). It's pretty difficult (at least for me) to stick enough aerogel onto a turret to make it last against 100 MW/m2, and the mass penalty for that quickly becomes prohibitive if you're trying to make a gun that can actually traverse worth a damn. Aramid fiber does give it appreciable survivability, but again the mass and cost skyrocket as compared to lasers; the best I've been able to do is a mutual kill scenario, which might not be the case if you build a one-gee plus laser ship.
- Railguns and coilguns are actually far superior for close-in point defense against missiles and light drones, but really only if you employ a drone swarm for the purpose. It's easy enough to armor them against lasers, just stick a brick of aramid fiber in the nose, but as far as I can tell it's near impossible to make mass-efficient armor for anything smaller than a capship, it increases your cross-section and cuts into your dV budget too sharply. A good sand-throwing drone swarm can eliminate maybe four or five incoming missiles per firing round. Obviously you've still got a problem if someone chucks a bunch of micromissiles with an intercept velocity of 20 km/s plus at you, but hey, not all problems have a solution.
- I think that with the advent of 100 MW or less mass-efficient long-range lasers, there's basically only two options available for challenging them in a direct fight. Either you get lasers of your own and bring more and better-armored ones, or you bring in a few thousand high-dV missiles with decent anti-laser armor.
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Post by Pttg on Jan 27, 2017 23:50:28 GMT
I've found that cannons are actually subpar compared to cheap coilguns. Coilguns can get into the multi-km/s range with low-kw draws and negligible mass.
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Post by Enderminion on Jan 27, 2017 23:58:50 GMT
you would get a huge electrical or thermal discharge from a superheated hydrogen filled laser cavity exploding, or an explosion of magnetically ripped open gun debris from a coilguns potential MW's of juice suddenly being freed to interact with the hull material, in barrel ammunition or missiles in a launcher(which may be nuclear) cooking off and detonating etc. The current simplified model is if anything a bit nicer on defending craft as the damaged module is simply removed. big problem with this statment about nukes cooking off is, they can't, a nuke will only go off (at full yield) when it works because it relys on microsecond precision with explosives to fizz the core
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