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Post by deltav on Feb 15, 2017 0:48:13 GMT
This is what I was thinking. I started playing around with militarized tankers as many of my heavy carrier ship designs trade delta v to have more armor and capacity. They have heavy armor and much upgraded engines so they can keep up with their military ship, but they have minimal weapons, really just enough for them not to run away. I found that to keep your tankers with your warships, you HAVE to armor them, and give them extra radiators as well as a small gun (or they run away as soon as the shooting starts). I don't think kinetics are a wise choice on the necessarily large cross section tankers and cargoships. They might work as a point defense with lasers, but the very last thing you want to do is get in gun range of a hostile. Drones and missiles are very much like docked escorts and they can do very convenient things like forcing an engagement away from the fat transports. Especially useful if the cargoship is already transporting a military shipment of drones and missiles. In regards to armor, aerogel is good against lasers and nuclear flashes, but for a very large vessel you may choose to only armor the crew, power and propulsive modules. The crew might even appreciate something that can stop a few sandblaster rounds. In general your need for escorts will depend on what you expect your opponent to bring. But if the transports are carrying something important, the last place you want them to be is on the firing line. The small cannon is just to take out at least some missiles that get close to the fleet and to help their warship out, at least cost/power. Say you have a fleet of 10 civilian tankers or transports. 20 cannons, 2 firing on each one, can take out a lot of missiles and help the fleet if missiles attack them while the warship is trying to intercept an enemy warship. So what would be your doctrine for escorts of fleet civilian ships/ fleet tankers etc? Would the main warship stay in the same fleet as them? Or would the warship have to very aggressively pursue any enemy ship that comes into the hill sphere? The only way to keep the tanker and the warship in the same fleet is to give the tanker/civilian ship some minimal armor and point defense weapons. Of course you would leave them behind if you wanted your warship to close with the enemy ship. But until you get there, you might be hit with missiles and drones, and without your warship in the same fleet, your soft fleet will be defenseless. If you kept the warship separate from the soft fleet it is protecting, then it won't be able to intercept missiles/ drones that are sent to intercept, since you'd be busy trying to intercept the enemy ship. This is why I thought it might make sense to armor the soft ships and give them a small gun just so they can at least have something against missiles and to keep them close to their protecting warship. (If you try a sandbox scenario with civi ships or tanker and the enemy AI on aggressive, do you get that same result? As soon as you try to leave the ships you are escorting, drones or missiles will take them out.)
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Post by darkwarriorj on Feb 15, 2017 0:53:37 GMT
This is what I was thinking. I started playing around with militarized tankers as many of my heavy carrier ship designs trade delta v to have more armor and capacity. They have heavy armor and much upgraded engines so they can keep up with their military ship, but they have minimal weapons, really just enough for them not to run away. I found that to keep your tankers with your warships, you HAVE to armor them, and give them extra radiators as well as a small gun (or they run away as soon as the shooting starts). 0.o What kind of ship is that!? I mean, I get the idea and thinking behind it, but is it worth it? To be honest, I legitimately don't know because I've simply been following the meta of light anti-laser armor only, but there are good reasons for that. Among them, armor is exorbitantly expensive and massive, and without extreme sloping angles is utterly useless against even 7km/s railguns. Dedicated anti-laser armor for capships tend to merely hold off the inevitable at such high cost that it's better to just bring more laserships to the fight. This has generally held in my experience. However, I have basically not played with tankers at all to be honest. I have some rough ideas for them - namely, stick them onto my generalist cruiser ship and call it a day, but any delta-V needs were completely solved by sticking an MPD drive on a ship. Have you tried using MPDs much? Do you still use tankers with your MPDs? My generalist missile-laser cruiser costs about 1/15th that tanker and has about 70km/s delta-v at a couple miligees of accel. On the rough ideas and militarized tankers bit, I figure that once we have an MPD water tanker, it's not much of a stretch to add lasers and some minimal armor to it, and then it continues to synergize well with missiles for the high speed missile bus attack run so I add on some missiles... alternatively, it could be an area/position holder so it could bring drones instead... and so my thinking is currently converging to every warship in the fleet being tankers, missile buses and laserstars in some sort of synergistic generalist cruiser design. Unfortunately thanks to how turrets are like at the moment, I can't also mount a point defense nuke coilgun on these ships, so specialization to have nuke coilgun defender ships might be necessary (tests showed they were terrifyingly effective against missiles, especially during the terminal phase), but otherwise it's all coming together in some sort of generalist for me.
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Post by deltav on Feb 15, 2017 1:02:18 GMT
This is what I was thinking. I started playing around with militarized tankers as many of my heavy carrier ship designs trade delta v to have more armor and capacity. They have heavy armor and much upgraded engines so they can keep up with their military ship, but they have minimal weapons, really just enough for them not to run away. I found that to keep your tankers with your warships, you HAVE to armor them, and give them extra radiators as well as a small gun (or they run away as soon as the shooting starts). 0.o What kind of ship is that!? I mean, I get the idea and thinking behind it, but is it worth it? To be honest, I legitimately don't know because I've simply been following the meta of light anti-laser armor only, but there are good reasons for that. Among them, armor is exorbitantly expensive and massive, and without extreme sloping angles is utterly useless against even 7km/s railguns. Dedicated anti-laser armor for capships tend to merely hold off the inevitable at such high cost that it's better to just bring more laserships to the fight. This has generally held in my experience. However, I have basically not played with tankers at all to be honest. I have some rough ideas for them - namely, stick them onto my generalist cruiser ship and call it a day, but any delta-V needs were completely solved by sticking an MPD drive on a ship. Have you tried using MPDs much? Do you still use tankers with your MPDs? My generalist missile-laser cruiser costs about 1/15th that tanker and has about 70km/s delta-v at a couple miligees of accel. On the rough ideas and militarized tankers bit, I figure that once we have an MPD water tanker, it's not much of a stretch to add lasers and some minimal armor to it, and then it continues to synergize well with missiles for the high speed missile bus attack run so I add on some missiles... alternatively, it could be an area/position holder so it could bring drones instead... and so my thinking is currently converging to every warship in the fleet being tankers, missile buses and laserstars in some sort of synergistic generalist cruiser design. Unfortunately thanks to how turrets are like at the moment, I can't also mount a point defense nuke coilgun on these ships, so specialization to have nuke coilgun defender ships might be necessary (tests showed they were terrifyingly effective against missiles, especially during the terminal phase), but otherwise it's all coming together in some sort of generalist for me. The idea/ implementation with these "militarized tankers" is pretty rough. But I got to thinking, in any engagement with a serious enemy, afterwards or even during, your delta V is running low. Plus having extra Delta V can be a huge plus. So I started playing around with the idea of heavily armored (against lasers) and lightly gunned tanker ships (mostly just fend off missiles). The idea would be portable gas stations in space, that can defend themselves against at least small missile swarms, can survive laser drones, and some nuke flash, and that are strong enough and fast enough to take with your warship when you need to. And can be left behind for periods without them being destroyed at the first attack and also to even outrun some attackers if need be with high acceleration. It needs a lot of work. But as soon as you add any soft ships into the mix, it seems like without at least some armor and weapons, you might as well just write them off now.
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Post by Easy on Feb 15, 2017 1:09:01 GMT
(Do me a favor and try a sandbox scenario with civi ships or tanker and the enemy AI on aggressive. You'll see what I mean. As soon as you try to leave the ships you are escorting, drones or missiles will take them out.) Is the issue that the missiles/drones are bypassing your picket due to the wonky behavior of multiple fleets in a near simultaneous engagement? If you move your picket further out you will engage all enemy fleets before they can near engagement range of the civ ships. The way the game works is that if you have two fleets occupying the exact same space the one with the longer engagement range enters battle and all other fleets are mysteriously not present even if on the strategic map they are literally a kilometer away. Then you advance time by one minute in the strategic map and the game picks another two fleets to fight.
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Post by apophys on Feb 15, 2017 1:11:22 GMT
I use MPDs on every ship I build nowadays. I haven't used tankers in a very long time, since I have basically no use for them anymore.
When 10-ton laser or kinetic drones have 40 km/s dV, and their carriers have more...
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Post by deltav on Feb 15, 2017 1:12:35 GMT
(Do me a favor and try a sandbox scenario with civi ships or tanker and the enemy AI on aggressive. You'll see what I mean. As soon as you try to leave the ships you are escorting, drones or missiles will take them out.) Is the issue that the missiles/drones are bypassing your picket due to the wonky behavior of multiple fleets in a near simultaneous engagement? If you move your picket further out you will engage all enemy fleets before they can near engagement range of the civ ships. The way the game works is that if you have two fleets occupying the exact same space the one with the longer engagement range enters battle and all other fleets are mysteriously not present even if on the strategic map they are literally a kilometer away. Then you advance time by one minute in the strategic map and the game picks another two fleets to fight. Okay I'll have to try and figure out exactly what that means in game. Thanks. "picket"? What's this?
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Post by deltav on Feb 15, 2017 1:17:40 GMT
I use MPDs on every ship I build nowadays. I haven't used tankers in a very long time, since I have basically no use for them anymore. When 10-ton laser or kinetic drones have 40 km/s dV, and their carriers have more... I haven't done much with MPDs, so far I've been only working with Methane and ungimbaled Nuclear Engines with the same for thrusters for their ease of armoring and high thrust. Okay time to work on MPDs...
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Post by Easy on Feb 15, 2017 1:25:50 GMT
Is the issue that the missiles/drones are bypassing your picket due to the wonky behavior of multiple fleets in a near simultaneous engagement? If you move your picket further out you will engage all enemy fleets before they can near engagement range of the civ ships. The way the game works is that if you have two fleets occupying the exact same space the one with the longer engagement range enters battle and all other fleets are mysteriously not present even if on the strategic map they are literally a kilometer away. Then you advance time by one minute in the strategic map and the game picks another two fleets to fight. Okay I'll have to try and figure out exactly what that means in game. Thanks. "picket"? What's this? A picket is a blocking patrol. It could be a blockade of ships around a seaport, a crowd of protesters outside a building or soldiers in the field. In the context of CoDE, your picket will be the fleets of missiles, drones and/or combat ships you are using to intercept enemy fleets.
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Post by darkwarriorj on Feb 15, 2017 1:27:53 GMT
The idea/ implementation with these "militarized tankers" is pretty rough. But I got to thinking, in any engagement with a serious enemy, afterwards or even during, your delta V is running low. Plus having extra Delta V can be a huge plus. So I started playing around with the idea of heavily armored (against lasers) and lightly gunned tanker ships (mostly just fend off missiles). The idea would be portable gas stations in space, that can defend themselves against at least small missile swarms, can survive laser drones, and some nuke flash, and that are strong enough and fast enough to take with your warship when you need to. And can be left behind for periods without them being destroyed at the first attack and also to even outrun some attackers if need be with high acceleration. It needs a lot of work. But as soon as you add any soft ships into the mix, it seems like without at least some armor and weapons, you might as well just write them off now. Ah, I considered the same scenarios and sorta concluded that MPD drives presented a situation such that everything synergized together. Let's consider the problem in pieces: 1. If we don't have any way to defend ourselves, the enemy can send one - just one frickin gun drone and wipe the floor with us. This problem applies to civilian merchant ships as well as military tankers. Hanging out beside the capital fleet all the time is also a non-starter because the fleet isn't going to dedicate its time to defending its merchants during war. Hey wait, we have an MPD drive... this means we have a powerful nuclear reactor on board... Solution: Equip a laser onto the ship. Laser costs and mass, even with huge lasers, are puny. At absolute worst, we bring 20% more cost and mass with us. Armor is not necessary against drones when we can burn them out of the sky, and same applies to missiles. In essence, laser power IS armor - and not just armor, but armor capable of swatting drones out of the sky. Screw gundrones anyways. Result: Wait, our merchant ship has a laser, and a very powerful one at that. What differentiates it from a warship again? 2. There may be situations in which the standard amount of delta-v provided is insufficient, so we need to bring a tanker along. Wait a minute, we already gave our tanker a laser... And our warships have stupid amounts of delta-v thanks to highly efficient MPD drives anyways... Result: Warfleets will being drop tanks. If more delta-v really is necessary to boost a member of the warfleet up to some more delta-v, the rest of the warfleet can act as the relevant tankers - perhaps because they are the relevant tankers. As a bonus, said rest of the warfleet can defend themselves against annoyances such as enemy missile swarms and drones. 3. After combat with the enemy, we might not have enough delta-v to say, escape. What do we do now? Wait, we have an MPD drive, meaning that when we're near empty we still have 5km/s delta-v and now we have say, 15miligees of accel... Result: Run back home with the MPD. Now, MPDs might not be totally realistic at the moment thanks to channeling way too much power through far too small a thing, but even larger, bulkier variants still allow for this easily.
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Post by deltav on Feb 15, 2017 1:40:55 GMT
Everything written above makes a ton of sense. In that case tankers make little sense for the most part. Better to focus on high delta v MPD ships. But then where do Civilian ships fit into things? And to go along with that, take the scenario below. Say the mission was to protect a civilian fleet and your warship patrol came into orbit with this setup... Rephrase 1: Say you had this scenario as pictured. How could you stop your Civilian fleet from being attacked with missiles and drones? Rephrase 2: What I'm really asking is how far away can your warship be from civilian ships, and still protect them from missiles and drones? Rephrase 3: How do pickets work when you have orbits involved? Does the warship have to stay in the same orbit? How does it work in your mind? Part II Part of the reason I ask, is in realistic space combat for sure there are always civis hanging around somewhere. Sooner or later when we start writing our own missions, someone's going to start incorporating them. Also sooner or later planetary bombardment is going to be implemented. I think is kinda silly to have 400 nukes on board, but not think any of them would be used against the planet being orbited. So I would wonder how would protecting a planet or soft fleet work.
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Post by darkwarriorj on Feb 15, 2017 2:36:00 GMT
But then where do Civilian ships fit into things? And to go along with that, take the scenario below. Say the mission was to protect a civilian fleet and your warship patrol came into orbit with this setup... Rephrase 1: Say you had this scenario as pictured. How could you stop your Civilian fleet from being attacked with missiles and drones? Rephrase 2: What I'm really asking is how far away can your warship be from civilian ships, and still protect them from missiles and drones? Rephrase 3: How do pickets work when you have orbits involved? Does the warship have to stay in the same orbit? How does it work in your mind? Part II Part of the reason I ask, is in realistic space combat for sure there are always civis hanging around somewhere. Sooner or later when we start writing our own missions, someone's going to start incorporating them. Also sooner or later planetary bombardment is going to be implemented. I think is kinda silly to have 400 nukes on board, but not think any of them would be used against the planet being orbited. So I would wonder how would protecting a planet or soft fleet work. I like to imagine my faction as a sort of merchant trade empire, where my civie ships become my warships in times of war, but that's on the lore side. For Rephrase One: When it comes to that scenario, assuming it just is and I was told to take command, my first reaction would be: "WHAT THE- THAT'S FUBAR." Essentially, the hostile ship, should they desire, will be able to attack/send missiles at said civie ships, which are presumably unprotected, meaning that if the situation just is, then those civies are done for. I don't believe there is any way my weapons or my ships could reach the enemy before the enemy or their weapons reach those civies, assuming similar ships and a clear killing intent on their behalf. I would proceed to resign because I can't work miracles, and unless those ships are a lot closer than they appear such that they are already within my weapons range (I currently presume that is not true with your given scenario, though it would be true if I were allowed to use my light-second range laserstars without that range cap somehow) then it really shouldn't be doable. For Rephrase Two: My warships could probably be as far away as their maximum weapons effective range allows. In game, this means within the same fleet. Theorycrafting wise, that means within the one light second sphere or so that is the maximum effective range of my laser weapons, roughly speaking. Ideally though, we wouldn't be protecting civilians. That's no way to wage a good war. Part II: Ideally, if I were running my faction, and assuming the tech environment allows for it, I would arm as many of my civie ships as possible during wartime so they can swat some degree of missiles and drones on their own. See the mention of laser armed MPD merchant ships. Assuming they are caught flat-footed at war's start though, well that's going to suck. Alternatively, if the tech assumptions don't allow for this, then either trade is suspended for the duration of the war, trade is limited to close to my settlements where they can be protected, or trade occurs sporadically in gigantic convoys protected by half the fleet. As for protecting planets, there's a bunch of stuff written on other websites such as Atomic Rockets or Rocketpunk Manifesto, but one potent defense is to have planetary lasers, which unlike their space based counterparts can be arbitrarily large and use the entire planet (or at least its local part of it) as a heat sink. There's also kinetic interceptor mines/missiles in orbit ready to intercept anything coming too fast, and so on.
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Post by apophys on Feb 15, 2017 2:37:56 GMT
Rephrase 1: Say you had this scenario as pictured. How could you stop your Civilian fleet from being attacked with missiles and drones? Rephrase 2: What I'm really asking is how far away can your warship be from civilian ships, and still protect them from missiles and drones? Rephrase 3: How do pickets work when you have orbits involved? Does the warship have to stay in the same orbit? How does it work in your mind? 1. Civilians run away, warships release a large load of drones and have the drone fleet rush to engage the enemy. If the enemy has fired drones/missiles, a part of the allied drone fleet splits off to engage those. Your distances look pretty short though; it looks like an engagement would be almost immediate. If civilians cannot run away from that position, they are dead. 2. Normally you'd have warships in between enemies and civilians. The particular situation you presented would only occur in the very early stages of a war, when the previously-neutral nation was allowed within your space and declared war while in your space. Or if you are at war with another power on the same celestial body (which CoaDE does not appear to consider). 3. It should be enough to just have warships in the same Hill sphere as civilians, as long as you do not have enemies in that Hill sphere. If enemies are coming, war drones burn to meet them before the enemies arrive (and can threaten allied assets).
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Post by Easy on Feb 16, 2017 17:26:35 GMT
A 6km/s hydrogen resistojet with 22K exhaust is certainly workable. The primary engineering challenge is balancing the desire to make it lightweight while still minimizing the high temperature radiation that escapes along the thrust axis. I'm sure you could block some of the hotter end with some geometry ingenuity at the cost of exhaust velocity.
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Post by apophys on Feb 17, 2017 3:35:38 GMT
A 6km/s hydrogen resistojet with 22K exhaust is certainly workable. If all you need is 22 K exhaust, you can do a hell of a lot better than that.
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Post by Easy on Feb 17, 2017 4:04:25 GMT
A 6km/s hydrogen resistojet with 22K exhaust is certainly workable. If all you need is 22 K exhaust, you can do a hell of a lot better than that. outstanding. However your expansion angle is 6 degrees, for a 12 degree cone of unstealthy. So either a reduced expansion angle or a straight cowl after (almost the same) to reduce signature. We don't want pesky sky searchers to look up our nozzle.
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