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Post by alexey on Feb 3, 2017 7:56:47 GMT
Whatching beautuful and quite laggy battle between my drones and enemy fleet in "Retaking Ceres" mission, I was puzzled why exactly projectile weapons are designed to be like "space machineguns" with high rates of fire. Is there any explanation behind this decision? I've read all articles in dev blog, but this particular feature is not covered, as far as I remember.
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Post by bigbombr on Feb 3, 2017 8:00:17 GMT
Increasing hit probability. Also, making a gun that fires 20 1g projectiles every second at a given muzzle velocity is lighter than a gun that fires one 20g projectile every second at that same muzzle velocity.
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Post by dragonkid11 on Feb 3, 2017 9:36:05 GMT
Because space combats are more like dogfighting with laser and nuke instead of slow battleship brawl.
Most possible case is that you have low intercept time AND low SURVIVAL time when fighting at gun range.
So you want as much mass pumped out of those gun barrel as possible at your enemy in the shortest time possible.
Though my recent approach of making your weapon as long range as possible to minimize exposure to enemy fire works pretty well too.
Those hypervelocity cannon still fires at a very rapid rate though.
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Post by alexey on Feb 3, 2017 9:48:19 GMT
I see you point, it totally makes sense  dragonkid11, do you also use light-weighted projectiles? |
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Post by dragonkid11 on Feb 3, 2017 10:00:26 GMT
I see you point, it totally makes sense dragonkid11, do you also use light-weighted projectiles? Experimented with quite a few 1 gram railgun and coilgun design. They basically shoot so far that your enemy can't hit you at the range you can. And with such a low mass, you can raise up fire rate at less mass and cost. Though I'm also experimenting high mass rapid cannon because they can make huge holes for extra fanciness. |
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Post by alexey on Feb 3, 2017 10:43:04 GMT
Hmm... but lightweight projectile should be awful in penetrating armor, shouldn't it? Otherwise, you could simply shower enemy with high-velocity dust Polish them to death! |
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Post by shiolle on Feb 3, 2017 11:53:34 GMT
They are worse at penetrating armor because small projectiles are easily broken by whipple shields. But it doesn't mean they have less energy in the current version of the game. Given same rate of fire and energy draw of the gun itself (ignoring the loader), if you drop your projectile mass by n times you will increase its speed by square root of n times. The total kinetic energy of the projectile remains the same. And now you have an advantage since you can spray your target and do some damage before it can even fire back. This is amplified by few different problems with the simulation: - Kinetic weapons in the game can have efficiency over 100% (sometimes as high as 2500%). This topic has been done to death, so I apologize. If you want your guns to obey physics you just lower loader power until your fire rate is sufficiently low.
- Time in the barrel is not factored in calculating the rate of energy delivered to the projectile for the purpose of melting or power draw. The greater your muzzle velocity the less time it requires the projectile to exit the barrel, hence the greater amount of power you need to deliver. In reality they use huge capacitor banks to achieve required power output, but you see none of this in the game. This would limit muzzle velocities a great deal I imagine and this limitation cannot be rectified just by lowering rate of fire.
- Adding sub 1 gram explosive payload to your railgun or coilgun tend to magically remove many of those pesky red error messages while accelerating your projectiles to tremendous speed. Again the total energy of the projectile remains the same, but you increase your effective range further still.
Initially, there were two possible kinetic weapons designs: ones that shoot heavy guided shells and the ones that shoot a lot of bumb projectiles. QSwitched said the latter design wins since larger and slower payloads are few and easy to intercept. Of course as people started to optimize things to their (in-game) limits, this assumption was challenged, but mostly these guns firing missiles are competing against regular missile launchers (and they do offer significant benefits), not their regular rapid-firing counterparts. |
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Post by lieste on Feb 3, 2017 12:18:26 GMT
The current rates of fire are impossible in most cases, as are some of the energy levels from the designed rail/coils.
Within the realms of the plausible though a higher velocity is more important than rate of fire once the rate is sufficient to have multiple rounds in the air as with high velocity (and a properly tuned system for higher accuracy) component level targeting is reliable to long ranges, and for PD work a single hit, even by small impactors is often sufficient to disable the lighter drones (and a larger impactor requires significantly more charge per shot, increasing rail mass, energy storage mass and lowering rates of fire for a given input energy).
(Scale of energy levels (at the middlingly extreme level) is 265MJ of electrical energy to power the 286mm "13MW" coil gun, and that delivered in 1/2830th of a second. This has to have major increases in coil stress, system mass and the time needed to power up the storage between shots. To comply with the 'power in the coil' of 13MW would give a V0 in the region of 100-200m/s and to meet the current downrange performance would require at least 740 tons of mass to provide the charge to the gun and probably more within the coil/support, with a reduction of rate of fire to 1 per 20 seconds with the current total input power).
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Post by newageofpower on Feb 3, 2017 13:13:36 GMT
Its ok if a 1 gram sandgun (physics compliant) can't penetrate your armor belt in 1, 10, or even 100 hits, if the sandblaster has twice the muzzle velocity and triple the range, because by the time a heavy slug firing-ship can shoot back it's been turned into Swiss cheese.
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Post by lieste on Feb 3, 2017 14:05:47 GMT
Range currently scales linearly with velocity, and the fourth root of tgt size once stable enough to be velocity limited.
Directly with target size and velocity when accuracy limited by instability but at the lower of these two when both in play.
A factor in usability (and accuracy) is the case of extreme accuracy, slow traverse weapons that can fall behind and never catch up with slow crossing targets they would otherwise have sufficient velocity to strike. The pilots and gunners will fight over bringing the ordnance to bear but the aimpoint doesn't stabalise before the target is away and either the weapon fails to fire or misses. A manual correction of the flightpath to lead the aimpoint permits the gunners alone to get consistent hits again once the target passes through the currently laid position.
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Post by Enderminion on Feb 3, 2017 16:27:34 GMT
I have a coilgun with sub one millisecond reload time
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Post by lieste on Feb 3, 2017 16:51:50 GMT
- Kinetic weapons in the game can have efficiency over 100% (sometimes as high as 2500%). This topic has been done to death, so I apologize. If you want your guns to obey physics you just lower loader power until your fire rate is sufficiently low.
Much worse than that: Of the three stock railguns, the 11mm and 8mm are okay (20% and 52%), but the light one is 295%. The coil guns are 1707%, 5700%, 8160% and 9461% - all of these could trivially be forced to work at higher rates of fire with no penalty other than increased cost/mass usage, or a shorter engagement sustainability. In fact the 286mm version (which I have reworked to some kind of feasibility) cannot be made to comply with energy usage even at the lowest power for the loader which is permitted. (5.78 seconds per shot compared to the necessary 20+ seconds). My working version is reduced to 340g at 1rps and 6.03km/s at 11cm). |
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Post by omnipotentvoid on Feb 13, 2017 10:11:17 GMT
Its ok if a 1 gram sandgun (physics compliant) can't penetrate your armor belt in 1, 10, or even 100 hits, if the sandblaster has twice the muzzle velocity and triple the range, because by the time a heavy slug firing-ship can shoot back it's been turned into Swiss cheese. That depends actually. If you have t guns that fire at the same velocity, one being a sand blaster and the other has enough mass to penetrate and kill the enemy ship in one shot. Who wins is then determined by whether or not the sand blaster is capable of destroying the enemies weapon or killing the ship before the enemy fires the killing shot. This depends on a few things: -chance: the first shot fired by the high mass gun could theoretically kill the sand blaster ship while the sandblaster must often hit its target hundreds or even thousands of times
depending on armor composition and angle before becoming even capable of killing the enemy ship. -ship design: most ships in the came have relatively light armor in order to achieve high accelerations. Ships specifically armored against light kinetics should actually be able to
withstand a lot of sandblaster punishment. (I'm actually testing armor atm, and high mass kinetics aren't actually that ineffective, even if they are utterly impractical in
terms of costs and weight) -gun laying: gun laying (and gun design in general) is currently geared towards making sandblasters. Truly accurate high mass kinetics would require composite barrels, munitions and capacitors as well as more in depth control over targeting and gun laying to simulate. Thus the current in game guns aren't necessarily a good representation of what rail and coil guns should be capable of. In addition to this, high momentum kinetics are capable of destroying targets without penetrating by rupturing the armor when being deflected. Given thin armor, weapons can be designed that are capable of killing a ship as long as the armor is hit. |
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Post by apophys on Feb 13, 2017 18:38:18 GMT
Ships specifically armored against light kinetics should actually be able to withstand a lot of sandblaster punishment. (I'm actually testing armor atm A payload-abusing railgun firing near 200 km/s has over 20 MJ of energy per shot. That's an extreme example, sure, but armoring against this is more or less futile. I'm rather interested in the armor scheme you would use to defend against 50 km/s sand coilguns. |
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Post by omnipotentvoid on Feb 13, 2017 19:23:52 GMT
Ships specifically armored against light kinetics should actually be able to withstand a lot of sandblaster punishment. (I'm actually testing armor atm A payload-abusing railgun firing near 200 km/s has over 20 MJ of energy per shot. That's an extreme example, sure, but armoring against this is more or less futile. I'm rather interested in the armor scheme you would use to defend against 50 km/s sand coilguns. Multiple wippel shields and ablative armor layers in front of decently strong main armor backed by spall shielding and none cylindrical armor profiles. To be clear, this is for capitals only, drones will always be cheese before the sandblasters. Nothing can withstand sandblasters (even the terrestrial kind) indefinitely, but you can certainly build armor capable of withstanding a few thousand or tens of thousands of 1g 20MJ shots. Thats the problem with high KE, low momentum shells. To kill something, you have to move stuff to were it's not supposed to be. Damage, be it by ablation, plasma shock, spalling, rupture, fragmentation or deformation, basically boils down to: stuff isn't where its supposed to be any more. For example, the fact that a 9g piece of diamond plate that is meant to be attached firmly to the inside of your ablative armor is now embedded in your gunnery chiefs chest, or that the barrel of your railgun is slowly spreading out as a cloud of plasma, tends to be good indication of damage (this is meant to be sarcastic, is there an agreed upon way of expressing sarcasm here?). Of course, displacing matter away from the surface of armor into space is going to less effective than displacing it, say, into the crew cabin. KE is easy to transform into other forms of energy, especially heat, and most of the energy of high KE, low momentum projectiles tends to be wasted on shocking projectile and armor into plasma that expands outwards and emits light. Momentum on the other hand requires velocities to be conserved to some extent. Over all, a heavier projectile with the same KE will tend to move more material, and thus cause more damage, than a lighter one. This is true as long as the heavy projectile is still traveling fast enough, that the damage doesn't spread significantly across the armor (a 10g 20MJ projectile will do more damage than a 1g 20MJ projectile, but a 10¹⁵kg projectile will be moving so slowly at 20MJ (0.0002m/s) that the armor will simply absorb the impact). |
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