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Post by icerain on Mar 1, 2017 23:12:37 GMT
Well, this is a new item in the game and i have no idea about how does a capacitor work. I was expecting something like a battery and you set the "volume" of it and it discharge when it's full. So that you can put a powerful weapon on small sized ship. But no, i have no idea how it works in current game. I cant find the relation between the dimension of capacitor and muzzle velocity. I was very confused with this and hope someone can give me a basic idea about how to design a well working capacitor.
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Post by Hicks on Mar 1, 2017 23:50:10 GMT
From what I remember, Capacitor work by storing electric charge on an input plate that is barely seperated from an output plate by some non-conductive material. The charge builds up on the input plate until it leaps the gap of the non-conductive material and floods the output plate with all the accumulated energy at once. Increasing the size of the plates increases the ammount of energy the capacitor can store, and increasing the width of the non-conductive material does much the same. You can actually have a capacitor without the input/output plates touching anything; air or vacuum acts as the non-conductive spark gap.
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Post by randomletters on Mar 2, 2017 0:45:41 GMT
How 2 mak crapassitor 1) Use hafnia 2) make bigger until velocity start to go down 3) play with seperation, smallest size is best for low power
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Post by uberdude9001 on Mar 2, 2017 1:18:32 GMT
How 2 mak crapassitor 1) Use hafnia 2) make bigger until velocity start to go down 3) play with seperation, smallest size is best for low power How does Hafnia compare to water? That's what I'm currently using in my capacitors.
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Post by David367th on Mar 2, 2017 1:24:53 GMT
How 2 mak crapassitor 1) Use hafnia 2) make bigger until velocity start to go down 3) play with seperation, smallest size is best for low power How does Hafnia compare to water? That's what I'm currently using in my capacitors. 1000% better. Give or take a lot.For the same mass of water it's about twice as good. For the same effective speed, water has slightly better accuracy. But its heavier and takes up more volume.
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Post by Pttg on Mar 2, 2017 1:39:39 GMT
Mica, Polyethylene, or Hafnia are favorites. Hafnia can get expensive.
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Post by hyno111 on Mar 2, 2017 7:20:46 GMT
Hafnia capacitors increases reload time a lot. I sometimes use Aluminum Oxynitride in addition to what have been mentioned.
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Post by lieste on Mar 2, 2017 7:29:01 GMT
Not if you build them correctly. It is possible to get nearly perfect (50%) system efficiency with single capacitor designs. (And this doesn't force low performance with modest 300km range weapons being only slightly weaker than the 1.08 version equivalent).
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Post by dragonkid11 on Mar 2, 2017 7:52:03 GMT
In general, always go for a 45-50% efficiency for capacitor so the railgun or coilgun are actually effective for their mass and cost.
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Post by lieste on Mar 2, 2017 8:01:14 GMT
This can make minimal rail designs break though due to higher initial accelerations, and in *some* cases using multiple smaller capacitors can give better total cost and performance because the rail can be slightly lighter.
Peak efficiency of multiple capacitor designs is lower than a single capacitor design, and maximum rate of fire will be calculated as much slower than for a single minimal capacitor for the same shot energy.
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Post by diamondback on Mar 2, 2017 12:42:07 GMT
I like to build the railgun without a capacitor to about the performance I want, add one and increase the volume until it matches performance, optimize efficiency to about 45% using the separation and reducing volume as efficiency compensates for it, and then lower the power requirement until I get the reload rate I'm looking for.
It's easy to make super high velocity guns with low power requirements but restricting us to reaction wheels means we need hundreds of MW to move the thing even if it only takes 25 to charge.
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Post by lawson on Mar 2, 2017 15:42:03 GMT
My annoyance right now is that the game assumes the capacitor is always fully discharged when firing. Best muzzle velocity is achieved with an over-sized capacitor and nearly constant acceleration. The constant acceleration indicates that the voltage on the capacitor is not dropping much during the shot. So where is the extra energy in the capacitor going after the projectile leaves?
Does anyone have a rail-gun design with acceleration that rises along the barrel? That would indicate that the accelerating current is limited by inductance and that system efficiency could exceed 50%.
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Post by Enderminion on Mar 2, 2017 17:02:05 GMT
can't wait till newageofpower starts demanding compusators
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Post by vegemeister on Mar 3, 2017 7:36:55 GMT
My annoyance right now is that the game assumes the capacitor is always fully discharged when firing. Best muzzle velocity is achieved with an over-sized capacitor and nearly constant acceleration. The constant acceleration indicates that the voltage on the capacitor is not dropping much during the shot. So where is the extra energy in the capacitor going after the projectile leaves? Does anyone have a rail-gun design with acceleration that rises along the barrel? That would indicate that the accelerating current is limited by inductance and that system efficiency could exceed 50%. Pulse forming networks can produce fairly rectangular pulses without much leftover energy. So that might be what's going on. The weight of that should be modeled though, ideally. There's going to be an efficiency cap because as you're putting kinetic energy into the projectile, you're also storing energy in the railgun's magnetic field. When the projectile leaves the rails, that energy is going to get dissipated as arc flash. I think you could recover the field energy, though, by lengthening the barrel enough that the cap-gun system rings all the way to the next current zero, with the cap charged in reverse. Then you flip the polarity of the cap and top up the charge for the next shot.
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Post by newageofpower on Mar 12, 2017 4:23:57 GMT
can't wait till newageofpower starts demanding compusators I'm willing to wait for more advanced turrets, composite construction, and cryocooled superconductive weapons first. But I'd like to see KE storage sometime before FELs, mkay?
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