Stock ships redesign - the practical approach

Ok this little fugly thing is the most successful of my versions of the Raider. I allways found the raider an interesting but ultimately flawed design. Several things bug me about it - for example, why does it have 13MWs of power when it does nothing with them? I'm finding the idea of a very armored bow attractive , but on the other hand everything else is completely exposed and the ship has only one large tank and if its hit, it can't maneuver and is ultimetely doomed because its only armor points forward and also it's most effective weapons are useless, it doesn't simply desintegrate when hit.
So my first knee jerk reaction was to widen the bow to shorten the ship and hide everything behind it... like this :


The first raider redesign was effective and resulted in a ship that was trashing 1 and 2 raiders without any problem , however even with the very thick bow armor was getting punctured from time to time and that usually resulted in a spinning ship that was dead meat if unable to reestablish its proper orientation in time. The I decided that I can't leave it completely exposed from the sides and added an additional layer of 1cm Carbon-Carbon under most of the ship with the usual aluminum whipple shield. It gave it the ability to survive for a few seconds untill it can recover its proper orientation after loosing a tank.

I swapped the 4mm railguns in front with the mini 2mm 200kw Coilguns - they were much harder to disable , and this is essential because if the AI looses its bow weaponry it tends to rotate to the broadside and dies quickly.

Main weapons are an armored version of the CIWS 1MW Railgun that go in place of the 60mm conventional cannons on the original.

The Raider redesign III was extensively tested , it was consistenlty winning against 3 Raiders. I did a few duels with corvettes that were very close matched, most of the time the new raider was winning but it was a very very close thing:



It was battling patrol ships , marauders , cutters and corsairs and was winning. 3 cutters proved to be a problem however since it was loosing its weapons before being able to hit back.

 There was a fourth version that was slimmer and closer to the original , however even if it was effective in tests against raiders it died quickly against version III had lower delta V and only one crew compartment instead of 2 that resulted in a few loses. Also it was consistenlty loosing to version III so I just left it out.


So the Raider was interesting but I really don't consider it a very effective ship. The thick armor in the front is still easily punctured by those long streams that the 60mm conventional stock cannons are vomiting around. I wasn't able to increaase the slooping to much without increasing the weight and price way out of the requirements. I'm not sure if we are still seeing the old "wide armor" bug here.

Code is here :





Also in other news the rearmament program is going in a full swing. I did a deliberatly innaccurate radiator buster version of the 4mm and a much more heavy hitting 5g 13MW version without sacrificing accuracy and fire rate. Infact the new 13MWs are hitting accurately even drones at very significant distances.

A few battle shots :


The rearmed versions of the laser frigate and the gunship can now consistently win against 3 ot their stock brethrens and I was able to properly specialize them - the laser frigate has more CIWS and scatter guns and the gunship has considerably more punch with the new heavy hitters. They do well against small combined fleets with laser frigates, gunships,  fleet carriers and few smaller ships - not a 100% win all the time but in a fleet battle with one ship a lot can go wrong.

The new guns :


And the code for the rearmed ships :
The laser frigate :


And the new gunship :

There is only one problem, your cross section is huge, your ships are far bigger targets. is there anyway you can bring that down ?

I didnt mean to, it was a mistake

I find the autofire railgun to be mostly ineffective. The really effective weapon (though usually only in retaliation after demise) is the sniper coilgun.

If I can disable those rapidly then I can weather minutes of almost completely ineffective fire from the other types as the dispersion is too high to saturate the frontal target at long ranges. The coilgun has a similar level of accuracy to the guns I favour, albeit with a much lower velocity (mine ~44km/s or more) and iirc a heavier shot.

Holding fire until the enemy has set their intercept burn and then engaging gives faster ttk of the coilguns, and brings all armament into the strike areas of the incoming fire, rather than missing against a crossing/accelerating target. The most recent engagement of a gunship (modified to give a pointier nose) resulted in one hit from the coilguns, which removed a large proportion of my radiators and two hits from the autofire coilguns which had no effect.