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Post by argonbalt on Feb 18, 2017 1:36:27 GMT
The thing to acknowledge is that even with a very well thought out formula single errors can go a long way towards producing insanely wonky results, so even if 9/10 of the math checks out correctly you should REALLY pay attention to the last 1/10 if you want to be sure. This was behind both the particle beam coil guns and Aerogel supremacy for a long time. What makes that even more interesting is how a single quirk can define the entire meta for months, radically altering our perspective of what future combat looks like.
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Post by newageofpower on Feb 18, 2017 2:12:33 GMT
The thing to acknowledge is that even with a very well thought out formula single errors can go a long way towards producing insanely wonky results, so even if 9/10 of the math checks out correctly you should REALLY pay attention to the last 1/10 if you want to be sure. This was behind both the particle beam coil guns and Aerogel supremacy for a long time. What makes that even more interesting is how a single quirk can define the entire meta for months, radically altering our perspective of what future combat looks like. Even with 3% efficient Arc-Lamp lasers and 9001% efficient Magitech kinetics, Laser armed warships have a pretty good shot at killing the coilship; I could use a heavy laser to begin ablating at 100Mm, far before the coil has a non-trivial chance of hitting the Lasership. Now figure a 50-70% efficient FEL... Yeah. Without Magitech Aerogel, I don't see kinetics becoming the dominant weapon. Once practical reactor powers support high energy, large aperture lasers, directed energy weapons become tremendously more efficient due to undodgeability and low transit time.
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Post by argonbalt on Feb 18, 2017 3:36:37 GMT
The thing to acknowledge is that even with a very well thought out formula single errors can go a long way towards producing insanely wonky results, so even if 9/10 of the math checks out correctly you should REALLY pay attention to the last 1/10 if you want to be sure. This was behind both the particle beam coil guns and Aerogel supremacy for a long time. What makes that even more interesting is how a single quirk can define the entire meta for months, radically altering our perspective of what future combat looks like. Even with 3% efficient Arc-Lamp lasers and 9001% efficient Magitech kinetics, Laser armed warships have a pretty good shot at killing the coilship; I could use a heavy laser to begin ablating at 100Mm, far before the coil has a non-trivial chance of hitting the Lasership. Now figure a 50-70% efficient FEL... Yeah. Without Magitech Aerogel, I don't see kinetics becoming the dominant weapon. Once practical reactor powers support high energy, large aperture lasers, directed energy weapons become tremendously more efficient due to undodgeability and low transit time. I did not mean those two things in conjunction i just meant them in general as the two most significant examples where a slight error in the material calculations or weapon design had huge effects downstream on ship design and tactics.
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Post by newageofpower on Feb 18, 2017 3:46:24 GMT
I did not mean those two things in conjunction i just meant them in general as the two most significant examples where a slight error in the material calculations or weapon design had huge effects downstream on ship design and tactics. Yeah. Ever since the aerogel nerf, armor mass on any non-expendable platform (in rubber/fiber composite) has ballooned dramatically. Of course, as I mature as a COADE player, I've gotten better at minimizing surface area/volume while being able to maintain a certain amount of dV and payload...
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Post by bdcarrillo on Feb 18, 2017 5:08:43 GMT
Fellas fellas... The simple KE formula is great and all, but you need to figure in more variables to arrive at a proper conclusion.
How long is the projectile in the barrel?
We know the average speed (1/2 projectile velocity) and distance travelled (barrel length), so we can figure out how much energy that requires over the time that the projectile is in the barrel.
Basically, our systems must have capacitors, and the weapon checker is overly simple.
Snipped from another thread: Fundamentally it seems that you're stating that 360Mw is insufficient to accelerate a 1.3g shell to ~50 kms in X amount of travel time down the 15m barrel... Right?
Edit- figured out the time... 0.0000006 seconds to apply 1.625megawatt seconds... Or~2.7million megawatt seconds in that brief acceleration time.
Hrmph... Seems the gun needs about 750Mw for a blink of an eye to fire, and our KE to input power Weapon Checker may not dig deep enough.
Well I sit corrected... The cyclic rate for this particular gun SHOULD be about 55% lower than the max theoretical from Weapon Checker to account for capacitor refill.
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Post by newageofpower on Feb 18, 2017 5:52:19 GMT
Eh. Use multiple power banks. Figure out a way to charge them smoothly.
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Post by vegemeister on Feb 18, 2017 6:32:44 GMT
Fellas fellas... The simple KE formula is great and all, but you need to figure in more variables to arrive at a proper conclusion. How long is the projectile in the barrel? We know the average speed (1/2 projectile velocity) and distance travelled (barrel length), so we can figure out how much energy that requires over the time that the projectile is in the barrel. Basically, our systems must have capacitors, and the weapon checker is overly simple. Snipped from another thread: Fundamentally it seems that you're stating that 360Mw is insufficient to accelerate a 1.3g shell to ~50 kms in X amount of travel time down the 15m barrel... Right? Edit- figured out the time... 0.0000006 seconds to apply 1.625megawatt seconds... Or~2.7million megawatt seconds in that brief acceleration time. Hrmph... Seems the gun needs about 750Mw for a blink of an eye to fire, and our KE to input power Weapon Checker may not dig deep enough. Well I sit corrected... The cyclic rate for this particular gun SHOULD be about 55% lower than the max theoretical from Weapon Checker to account for capacitor refill. Travel time down the barrel doesn't come into it until you're actually modelling the capacitor bank (or compulsator, or superconducting inductor, etc.). What (I assume; haven't looked at it) the spreadsheet does is it calculates the power of the stream of bullets coming out of the gun. In dimensional analysis terms, (joules/bullet) * (bullets/second) = (joules/second). That is, watts. Multiplying by bullets/second is the same thing as dividing by seconds/bullet, which is the reload time. Then if the power of the stream of bullets is greater than the power into the gun, the spreadsheet can wag its finger at you, because you've violated conservation of energy. It's an a lower bound on the input power, not an estimate. Efficiency would also factor in, but we barely care about that and in fact often benefit from lower efficiency, because it allows turning up the power input without increasing muzzle energy. Capacitor refill isn't a problem. The checker already assumes some handwavium way of converting a steady power draw into a series of short, high-intensity pulses. You can (mostly) do that with a DC-DC converter with some kind of constant power control law, driving a capacitor bank through an inductor (to isolate the converter from nastiness associated with firing).
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Post by bdcarrillo on Feb 18, 2017 12:21:25 GMT
vegemeisterJust going to poke a big hole in your whole post... You state that you assume how the weapon checker works, haven't looked at it, and then make claims about what it does. I find it a little hard to value your counter points when you state that. However, for what you essentially point out requires us to gloss over the unknown efficiency of a core weapon subsystem that isn't modelled in game, and dismiss it with Handwavium. I challenge that approach as flawed and not in the spirit of a physics based simulation.
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Post by vegemeister on Feb 18, 2017 14:04:25 GMT
vegemeister Just going to poke a big hole in your whole post... You state that you assume how the weapon checker works, haven't looked at it, and then make claims about what it does. I find it a little hard to value your counter points when you state that. I assume how the weapon checker works because -- and I know exactly how this will sound -- with the information the game gives, that's the only way to do it and get the right answer. Every time I optimize an electromagnetic gun, I do that same calculation. Open a python terminal, 0.5 * m * v**2 / power. That gives the reload time that corresponds to 100% efficiency. Anything less violates conservation of energy. However, for what you essentially point out requires us to gloss over the unknown efficiency of a core weapon subsystem that isn't modelled in game, and dismiss it with Handwavium. I challenge that approach as flawed and not in the spirit of a physics based simulation. Not modelling it in game is not in the spirit of a physics based simulation, and hopefully, that will be eventually fixed. I am not dismissing it as handwavium. The simulation is currently dismissing it as handwavium. However, any real electromagnetic weapon would use some kind of pulsed power system. Such a pulsed power system could be designed for constant-power charging, which is the input characteristic the current handwavium appears to have. The power requirement of such a system does not have a straightforward relation with the acceleration time. I found a paper (http://www.dtic.mil/get-tr-doc/pdf?AD=ADA389605) that says that railgun losses are very roughly inversely proportional to acceleration time. But a lot of what goes into calculating losses is either not exposed, or not modeled in the simulation. There are numerous problems with the railgun model, like the lack of a pulsed power system, the fact that it doesn't follow conservation of energy in the first place, the lack of barrel bracing, and whatever it is that makes flect guns do what they do. You could go full-hog and design a railgun on paper with real physics, and then try to match its mass and performance in the module designer, but there's no guarantee that matching is possible, and iterating on the design would be extraordinarily slow. Or you could solemnly swear not to field any weapons that violate conservation of energy, possibly with some efficiency handicap based on what has been achieved by real world examples of that weapon type. (I'm seeing 40-45% for railguns, IDK about coilguns.) That, at least, is easily achieved with the information available, since all you need is the power input, the muzzle energy, and the rate of fire. Maybe also throw out another 10% from capacitor charging losses.
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Post by caiaphas on Feb 18, 2017 17:14:54 GMT
Fellas fellas... The simple KE formula is great and all, but you need to figure in more variables to arrive at a proper conclusion. How long is the projectile in the barrel? We know the average speed (1/2 projectile velocity) and distance travelled (barrel length), so we can figure out how much energy that requires over the time that the projectile is in the barrel. Basically, our systems must have capacitors, and the weapon checker is overly simple. Snipped from another thread: Fundamentally it seems that you're stating that 360Mw is insufficient to accelerate a 1.3g shell to ~50 kms in X amount of travel time down the 15m barrel... Right? Edit- figured out the time... 0.0000006 seconds to apply 1.625megawatt seconds... Or~2.7million megawatt seconds in that brief acceleration time. Hrmph... Seems the gun needs about 750Mw for a blink of an eye to fire, and our KE to input power Weapon Checker may not dig deep enough. Well I sit corrected... The cyclic rate for this particular gun SHOULD be about 55% lower than the max theoretical from Weapon Checker to account for capacitor refill. I already addressed this; you can use the reload time as an average minimum power delivery time because throughout that interval the reactor can be charging a bank of capacitors to deliver all that power in a much shorter interval.
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Post by lieste on Feb 18, 2017 18:02:11 GMT
The issue with coil guns and heavy projectile railguns is that the energy requirements are rather high, but the game produces weapons which are extremely light. I suspect that some may be invalid and too light for their duty, but in any case they will be far lighter than the requirement of weapon and power conditioning for that level of power.
Many coil guns in the 100kg range would require support by tons to kilotons of energy storage to provide even one shot, never mind the often impossible to fix relationship between minimum fire rate and delivered power (and the *maximum* efficiency once you store energy between shots in order to increase peak energy is 50%).
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Post by newageofpower on Feb 18, 2017 19:42:28 GMT
The issue with coil guns and heavy projectile railguns is that the energy requirements are rather high, but the game produces weapons which are extremely light. I suspect that some may be invalid and too light for their duty, but in any case they will be far lighter than the requirement of weapon and power conditioning for that level of power. Many coil guns in the 100kg range would require support by tons to kilotons of energy storage to provide even one shot, never mind the often impossible to fix relationship between minimum fire rate and delivered power (and the *maximum* efficiency once you store energy between shots in order to increase peak energy is 50%). Seriously, Spectra flywheels/Compulsator can store ~2MJ/KG. Increasing the mass of the system by a factor 100 to smooth out power curves/redundancy/charging is still far less than kilotons.
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Post by bdcarrillo on Feb 18, 2017 20:57:18 GMT
A meme in gameplay discussion? Tsk tsk
Bottom line, we agree that there are issues that can be eliminated with improvements to the game
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Post by lieste on Feb 18, 2017 21:00:12 GMT
Storing it is one thing, getting it out without breaking things is harder, which means you need more storage to permit shallower extraction of the stored energy.
a 750kg compulsator is described in a technical paper which can store 9GJ of energy... but it can only deliver this over *at least* 13 seconds. The amount that can be delivered in a short EM coil is much less because the fast moving armature is only energised while it is in the coil. The stock coil gun needs nearly 600 times this power to throw it's 132MJ shots downrange, and after a point where material stress limits are met the mass of KE storage goes up and the rotational speed goes down to obtain small increases in power.
The technology looks fantastic for low power/light weight EM weapons, but it may not scale well to larger sizes. (Even then the mass required is still 750kg from a total .60" EM gun plus power conditioning of ~900kg).
The mass density is excellent for energy storage, and for the delivery of multiple charges from a running start, but it is not as favourable as it looks at first glance when the single high power charge/discharge cycle is compared to that of capacitors - it can be better, but the difference is small (~factor of 2 for demonstrated small scale applications).
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Post by newageofpower on Feb 18, 2017 21:34:21 GMT
Use more systems in parallel. Your 12MJ/KG system is heavily optimized for density rather than rapid charge/discharge; something closer to 6 or even 2Mj/kg would allow for shallower charge/discharge.
An array of these could allow for efficient charging (on one array) and discharge load on other arrays, to whatever peak power is needed; with *some* capacitors/SMES etc to smooth out the power flow.
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