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Post by bdcarrillo on Feb 13, 2017 19:47:57 GMT
At massive distances, having a tiny engine pushing a few mg of thrust in random directions every 4 hours would likely suffice. It doesn't matter if your drones watch every change, by the time it's relayed to your ship and you fire, we still have a very long time of flight. During that long time of flight, the few mg burns in random directions would result in a miss, OR force you to blanket a very, very large area.
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Post by omnipotentvoid on Feb 13, 2017 20:02:38 GMT
At massive distances, having a tiny engine pushing a few mg of thrust in random directions every 4 hours would likely suffice. It doesn't matter if your drones watch every change, by the time it's relayed to your ship and you fire, we still have a very long time of flight. During that long time of flight, the few mg burns in random directions would result in a miss, OR force you to blanket a very, very large area. I actually hadn't thought of that, thank you for pointing it out. I'd still say that there a point where the expenditure of a bit of amunition is worth the dV the enemy is forced to use to avoid incoming and "potentially incoming" shots, but this does cut down on my expectation of engagement ranges significantly. I still think they could be up to an order of magnitude greater than currently though.
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Post by bdcarrillo on Feb 13, 2017 20:29:14 GMT
At massive distances, having a tiny engine pushing a few mg of thrust in random directions every 4 hours would likely suffice. It doesn't matter if your drones watch every change, by the time it's relayed to your ship and you fire, we still have a very long time of flight. During that long time of flight, the few mg burns in random directions would result in a miss, OR force you to blanket a very, very large area. I actually hadn't thought of that, thank you for pointing it out. I'd still say that there a point where the expenditure of a bit of amunition is worth the dV the enemy is forced to use to avoid incoming and "potentially incoming" shots, but this does cut down on my expectation of engagement ranges significantly. I still think they could be up to an order of magnitude greater than currently though. I agree that we could have much longer tactical engagement ranges, thus my desire to have the range modifier slider. If we express it as a selectable chance to hit, we might see kinetic engagements at incredible ranges. I also agree that there is still strategic value to bombardment or saturation fire with inexpensive munitions, but our expectations on the effectiveness of bombardment need to be tempered by considering time of flight, sensor accuracy limits, and transmission delays from observation drones. Saturation fire may be somewhat effective vs a fleet tanker, but not a compact/nimble gunship.
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Post by Easy on Feb 14, 2017 3:26:40 GMT
At massive distances, having a tiny engine pushing a few mg of thrust in random directions every 4 hours would likely suffice. It doesn't matter if your drones watch every change, by the time it's relayed to your ship and you fire, we still have a very long time of flight. During that long time of flight, the few mg burns in random directions would result in a miss, OR force you to blanket a very, very large area. I actually hadn't thought of that, thank you for pointing it out. I'd still say that there a point where the expenditure of a bit of amunition is worth the dV the enemy is forced to use to avoid incoming and "potentially incoming" shots, but this does cut down on my expectation of engagement ranges significantly. I still think they could be up to an order of magnitude greater than currently though. Ammunition can add up quickly in both cost and mass. A thousand one gram projectiles is a kilogram, and we know with sandblasters it takes a lot more than one hit to penetrate armor and cause disabling damage. So you end up firing millions or more projectiles and the ammunition masses several tons or more. Suddenly a high ISP, low thrust, thruster to induce a bit of Brownian motion doesn't seem so bad. Especially if a kilogram of fuel dodges more than a kilogram of kinetics. It is also a reason to use drones and missiles that will coast in the interim and make course corrections and terminal guidance, It is a lot easier when your bullets steer themselves or an expendable robot carries a gun a lot closer.
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Post by lieste on Feb 14, 2017 3:42:30 GMT
I don't recall a reasonable sandbox mission where my combined use of railgun ammunition exceeded a small portion of a million rounds (although each platform carries ammunition in those quantities, a few hundred thousand in total is usually more than sufficient to deal with hundreds of drone/missiles and their carrier platforms).
While I do use laser platforms to thin out the drone streams at longer range, and to pre-shock armour before the railgun ammunition arrives on target, the predominant kill-mechanism is 1g projectiles penetrating turret armour, removing radiators &/or perforating the bulkheads. I could probably even produce faster kills by concentrating on decoy/missile/drone bays rather than the kinetic/laser weapons, or by focussing fires on the drives (and concentrating fire on smaller parts of the bulkhead/nose), but I tend to look for intact crew modules as a bonus when disabling hostile vessels if possible.
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Post by omnipotentvoid on Feb 14, 2017 11:02:16 GMT
I actually hadn't thought of that, thank you for pointing it out. I'd still say that there a point where the expenditure of a bit of amunition is worth the dV the enemy is forced to use to avoid incoming and "potentially incoming" shots, but this does cut down on my expectation of engagement ranges significantly. I still think they could be up to an order of magnitude greater than currently though. Ammunition can add up quickly in both cost and mass. A thousand one gram projectiles is a kilogram, and we know with sandblasters it takes a lot more than one hit to penetrate armor and cause disabling damage. So you end up firing millions or more projectiles and the ammunition masses several tons or more. Suddenly a high ISP, low thrust, thruster to induce a bit of Brownian motion doesn't seem so bad. Especially if a kilogram of fuel dodges more than a kilogram of kinetics. It is also a reason to use drones and missiles that will coast in the interim and make course corrections and terminal guidance, It is a lot easier when your bullets steer themselves or an expendable robot carries a gun a lot closer. Sandblasters against distance targets, especially well armored ones, are almost inconsequential (verified in testing sandblasters at extreme range using lasers to extend maximum engagement range and shutting them down in combat). That would be the point of projectiles that can instantly kill you. It forces you to dodge, even if the enemy might be firing. Instead of continues fire, I'd fire of rounds timed randomly, making my rate of fire a round every few minutes on average over a 30h encounter. This forces the enemy to dodge a lot while limiting munition expenditure. On the whole, rounds don't need to become much heavier to be threating, between 10g to 1kg at most for railguns, 10 times that for coilguns current ships. Super heavy rounds are only necessary against ships that I would class as super capital, having armor that is meters thick at points.Super high impulse KE weapons (with rounds above a ton in mass) would be extremely effective at very short ranges, provided you survive the sandblasters and lasers, because the can guaranty kills upon hitting ships.
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Post by apophys on Feb 14, 2017 11:29:20 GMT
Sandblasters against distance targets, especially well armored ones, are almost inconsequential (verified in testing sandblasters at extreme range using lasers to extend maximum engagement range and shutting them down in combat). Could you post the stats of the sandblaster you're using? Because from my testing, >100 km/s sand is extremely deadly at 1 Mm (kills an unmoving armored target within seconds of first impact; hard to tell exactly because of the lag).
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Post by Easy on Feb 14, 2017 14:19:19 GMT
Sandblasters against distance targets, especially well armored ones, are almost inconsequential (verified in testing sandblasters at extreme range using lasers to extend maximum engagement range and shutting them down in combat). Could you post the stats of the sandblaster you're using? Because from my testing, >100 km/s sand is extremely deadly at 1 Mm (kills an unmoving armored target within seconds of first impact; hard to tell exactly because of the lag). - Seconds of first impact
- Unmoving Target
Therein lies the rub. Seconds of impact can mean hundreds of projectiles, unmoving target means maximum accuracy and multiple hits to the same section.
That is very different from firing into a probability volume that necessitates a deliberate spread of rounds. If the surface area you're targeting is ten times larger than the surface area of the target, only a tenth of rounds can hit. Now you would attempt to fire your pattern to bias more rounds into the most probable areas, but as time of flight increases and the probability volume increases you must fire more rounds into a larger area.
I am interchanging volume and area, the reason for that is the projectile trajectories can cover multiple positions and times. If space is flat enough time and radial distance from the firing point can be generalized and projected onto each other.
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Post by shiolle on Feb 14, 2017 15:06:09 GMT
Sorry if this may seem a little off-topic, but have you thought that increasing engagement range further makes current tactical UI (that range diagram to the right) completely inadequate. It was good when the only real variable in maneuvering was the initial vector of the two fleets since ranges were too small for meaningful maneuvers. If ranges are huge, you need something like a Homeworld tactical view with trajectory plotting because maneuvers become meaningful.
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Post by newageofpower on Feb 14, 2017 15:52:31 GMT
Sandblasters against distance targets, especially well armored ones, are almost inconsequential (verified in testing sandblasters at extreme range using lasers to extend maximum engagement range and shutting them down in combat). That would be the point of projectiles that can instantly kill you. It forces you to dodge, even if the enemy might be firing. Instead of continues fire, I'd fire of rounds timed randomly, making my rate of fire a round every few minutes on average over a 30h encounter. This forces the enemy to dodge a lot while limiting munition expenditure. On the whole, rounds don't need to become much heavier to be threating, between 10g to 1kg at most for railguns, 10 times that for coilguns current ships. Super heavy rounds are only necessary against ships that I would class as super capital, having armor that is meters thick at points.Super high impulse KE weapons (with rounds above a ton in mass) would be extremely effective at very short ranges, provided you survive the sandblasters and lasers, because the can guaranty kills upon hitting ships. Even 50km/s sand is incredibly lethal to practical (i.e., less than 10 meters of a non-gel substance) armor schemes. Would you like to post your gun design?
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Post by deltav on Feb 14, 2017 19:14:49 GMT
I actually hadn't thought of that, thank you for pointing it out. I'd still say that there a point where the expenditure of a bit of amunition is worth the dV the enemy is forced to use to avoid incoming and "potentially incoming" shots, but this does cut down on my expectation of engagement ranges significantly. I still think they could be up to an order of magnitude greater than currently though. I agree that we could have much longer tactical engagement ranges, thus my desire to have the range modifier slider. If we express it as a selectable chance to hit, we might see kinetic engagements at incredible ranges. I also agree that there is still strategic value to bombardment or saturation fire with inexpensive munitions, but our expectations on the effectiveness of bombardment need to be tempered by considering time of flight, sensor accuracy limits, and transmission delays from observation drones. Saturation fire may be somewhat effective vs a fleet tanker, but not a compact/nimble gunship. We should have longer engagement ranges and a time ticker to speed up time by 1min/5min/10min etc just like in orbital view.
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Post by omnipotentvoid on Feb 14, 2017 19:38:31 GMT
Sorry if this may seem a little off-topic, but have you thought that increasing engagement range further makes current tactical UI (that range diagram to the right) completely inadequate. It was good when the only real variable in maneuvering was the initial vector of the two fleets since ranges were too small for meaningful maneuvers. If ranges are huge, you need something like a Homeworld tactical view with trajectory plotting because maneuvers become meaningful. The current tactical UI is inadequate anyway. For very large ships, like the one I mount my "Doomhammer" coilgun to, I get engagement ranges of beyond 1.7Mm for my super high accuracy guns. TtCA has reached several hours in many cases. Which brings me to my guns everyone asks for: RailgunModule 1.000 GW 8mm Turreted Railgun 3.4MJ "Longspear"
UsesCustomName true
PowerConsumption_W 1e+009
Rails
Composition Zirconium Copper
Thickness_m 9.2
Length_m 50
BarrelArmorThickness_m 0.225
Armature
Composition Vanadium Chromium Steel
BoreRadius_m 0.0037
Mass_kg 0.001
Tracer Hafnia
Payload null
Loader
PowerConsumption_W 1e+008
Turret
InnerRadius_m 15
ArmorComposition Maraging Steel
ArmorThickness_m 0.01
MomentumWheels
Composition Tin
RotationalSpeed_RPM 8.6
AttachedAmmoBay
Capacity 10000
Stacks 1
TargetsShips true
TargetsShots true This is currently my range testing railgun. I was reluctant to post it, because I haven't finished testing yet and it's probably really unoptimized since I'm still new at the game and haven't learned any better yet. Also, I know someone will point out that it's huge and expensive and impractical. I know. It's meant to test the limits of the simulation, not be an effective weapon. As for the test so far (sample size is still small because the tests take a looooooooooooong time): Using the Longspear to force long ranges and fighting around Ganymede, I get engagement ranges between 1.8 and 2.2 Mm against a 10000m² target. By the time the target is destroyed, the ranges can open up to over 3Mm. Time to closest approach varies wildly, getting as low as 2 hours and up to 20 hours. At the end of engagements, the target is often moving away due to the impact of projectiles. The time to first hit is around 17s for the Longspear and between 1.75 and 2.5 minutes for the Doomhammer. Time to kill is between 3.5 and 6 min for the Longspeer and between 20 and 70min for the Long spear. The Doomhammer needs between 20 and 40 hits to kill its target and has an has a hit percentage of around 4-6%. The Longspear used between 7000 and 10000 shots to kill its target. All tests started with flat, stationary targets (unarmed stations), armor composition was 1cm UHMWPE 1cm boron 10cm graphite aerogel 4m space 2mm tungsten rhenium (again, not optimized and not the point of the test). 9 tests were done, 4 scraped because of me failing to operate a stopwatch (*sigh*). Other observations: - The railgun needed to destroy/damage alot of armor to be able to kill the ship. Over all most of the armor was damaged or destroyed by the time the target was killed. The coil gun left most of the armor intact, almost no armor being damaged and little being destroyed by time of target kill.
- Most of the inaccuracy of the weapons seemed to come from the way the turrets tract across the surface of the target. This is particularly noticeable on the Longspear, but the shot patterns of the Doomhammer reveal the same problem. I suspect that the TTK of the Doomhammer could be reduced to about 2/3 of the current by targeting center, and the Longspears may even be cut down to 1/3 of its current TTK.
- While the Longspear will win most of the time, if the Doomhamer gets a killing or weapon disabling blow within the first minute of engagement, the Longspear will be unlikely to be able to kill/disable a Doomhammer. (This will hapen in less than 2% of the cases by my quesstimation)
- Despite the Doomhammers rounds weighing 5000 times as much as the Longspears, it uses only 10-20 times the mass to kill the target.
I will be conducting further test with significantly thicker armor
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Post by lieste on Feb 14, 2017 20:49:38 GMT
Zirconium Copper is far from the best material to use for the high power ~GW class railgun.
I've got a "perfect accuracy" example that throws 134km/s 1g sand for around half the mass and 1.35Gc (or 600Mc less cost), and slightly smaller, lower powered versions at 129km/s for "only" 37.5kt and 993Mc.
These are obviously still not practical weapons nor are they probably valid once the EM code is overhauled, but they don't deliberately exploit any obvious bugs in payload handling, and I deploy them with a handwavium capacitor (Alu rad shield) with sufficient mass to account for 4x the shot energy at 360J/kg, plus limit the fire rate to a total duty cycle of <25%, which is the best I can do for now. (The fire rate I select is deliberately lower than this too - at the longer ranges the weapon is used at, the tof gives sufficient hits to kill most modules which can be hit reliably (e.g side on radiators, turrets (from any angle), missiles/drones) that additional dwell is only a waste of ammunition. Significant improvement in PD performance can also be increased by manually stepping through drone fleet/missile fleet individuals as priority targets based on lateral proximity/shortest path, rather than allowing the AI to select based on range only.
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Post by omnipotentvoid on Feb 14, 2017 21:33:34 GMT
Zirconium Copper is far from the best material to use for the high power ~GW class railgun. I've got a "perfect accuracy" example that throws 134km/s 1g sand for around half the mass and 1.35Gc (or 600Mc less cost), and slightly smaller, lower powered versions at 129km/s for "only" 37.5kt and 993Mc. These are obviously still not practical weapons nor are they probably valid once the EM code is overhauled, but they don't deliberately exploit any obvious bugs in payload handling, and I deploy them with a handwavium capacitor (Alu rad shield) with sufficient mass to account for 4x the shot energy at 360J/kg, plus limit the fire rate to a total duty cycle of <25%, which is the best I can do for now. (The fire rate I select is deliberately lower than this too - at the longer ranges the weapon is used at, the tof gives sufficient hits to kill most modules which can be hit reliably (e.g side on radiators, turrets (from any angle), missiles/drones) that additional dwell is only a waste of ammunition. Significant improvement in PD performance can also be increased by manually stepping through drone fleet/missile fleet individuals as priority targets based on lateral proximity/shortest path, rather than allowing the AI to select based on range only. Off topic question: What materials are best material for building railguns? Can you share your design?
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Post by deltav on Feb 14, 2017 22:03:28 GMT
omnipotentvoidHOw are you getting such long engagement ranges? Have you been able to engage at the range ingame? If so, how?
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