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Post by the_Demongod on Dec 28, 2016 19:16:16 GMT
I often end up building weapons that aren't realistically feasible to gimbal with reaction wheels (gah can't wait for hydraulics/motors) so in those cases I nose-mount them. I haven't tried it with no gimbal at all, but you don't need much. The turret only needs enough rotational speed and traverse angle to take care of the fine-tuning to take that load off of the engines. Has proven effective so far.
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Post by the_Demongod on Dec 23, 2016 23:35:32 GMT
It was indeed a Fluorine/Methane missile but the issue turned out to be related to that delta-V bug mentioned above. The bug masked the root cause which was that I hadn't properly worked out the fuel mass ratios, so I was burning through all my Fluorine well before burning through all the Methane, and couldn't tell that something was up because the delta-V readout seemed fine. Thanks for all your help anyhow.
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Post by the_Demongod on Dec 23, 2016 19:59:56 GMT
Weird, I can't say that my situation meets any of those conditions. This happens against stationary, non-retaliating targets (cargo stations), using missiles with small engines. They simply burn all their dV during the boost phase and become "disabled," despite using default homing rules. This usually happens to at least 4/5 of all missiles launched in a barrage. I'll shoot 100 and only a few dozen actually reach the target, if any. Could it be the 50% available delta-V 'bug' noted in the bugs section. After all if the burn is based on 65% of the planning delta-v it will run out completely if being expended at 2x rate. You might be onto something there, I'll go look at the bugs section.
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Post by the_Demongod on Dec 23, 2016 19:16:30 GMT
Has anyone else had issues with missiles exhausting all their deltaV during the boost phase? I first noticed it with a missile I was building and wrote it off as a problem with my design (I'd heard high acceleration can cause engines to be unable to shut off fuel flow) but after further testing and a brand new missile design (with relatively low acceleration), I'm still having the same issue. I even tested the stock missile schooner and had the problem occur a couple times (but not nearly as often). An issue or something I'm missing with the new guidance system? I'm only using the stock remote control module and default tracking behavior though... and the remote control very clearly has a 65% boost deltaV setting so something's not working right.
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Post by the_Demongod on Oct 28, 2016 1:21:49 GMT
Well, if one looks at the modern naval analogue... things only could get to an opposed gunfight if a lot of people have really, really screwed up. Same with modern air to air combat (I recall reading there hasn't been a jet-on-jet gun kill since the '70s?) as well, though it at least has more scope for it. So if Space combat does indeed hash out that way, it's not overly surprising. I think this is exactly right. Anyone who plays study sims like DCS or BMS can attest to the fact that as years go on, standoff ranges just increase. Nobody wants to lose even a single fighter, and so we end up with the current method of missile "jousting": climbing high and going as fast as possible to lob your missiles further than the enemy can, before turning away to avoid any missiles the enemy fires back. What we really need are better CIWS capabilities on capships, and a combination of that + flares will make missiles far less powerful. Additionally, it's not a good idea to just wait for enemy drones and missiles to hit you. Every time an enemy drone or missile group is launched at me, I launch a few missiles and intercept them to thin their numbers before they can intercept my capital fleet. You can knock out an entire fleet of missiles with one nuke because they'll all track it and be destroyed upon impact.
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Post by the_Demongod on Oct 28, 2016 1:03:35 GMT
Start with simpler things like conventional rocket engines and cannons. Nuclear warheads aren't terrible either. Unfortunately, things that involve controlled nuclear fission (thermoelectric fission reactors, nuclear thermal rockets) are a whole order of magnitude more complex, and anything involving linear accelerators/motors (coilguns, railguns, magnetoplasmadynamic thrusters) aren't much better. I haven't even looked at lasers yet...
Also, drones and missiles are much easier to build and quite fun, so I'd recommend starting there.
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Post by the_Demongod on Oct 7, 2016 6:05:30 GMT
I guess my perspective is skewed because I play a lot of realistic flight sims and recreate ICBM flight profiles in KSP, but in my mind missiles fly primarily ballistic trajectories and have an initial powered phase followed by a long coast period. Even in the atmosphere but especially in space, missiles can coast and continue to be highly effective long, long after they've burnt out. Air to air missiles in real life like the AIM-120D only burn for 3-7 seconds, yet fly 90+ miles to kill targets. ICBMs are even more extreme examples of this, performing one long, aggressive burn at 45° to enter a high orbit with a vertical semi-major axis before proceeding to coast many minutes to apogee before deploying their submunitions which again fall for several minutes back to earth before reentering the atmosphere. We don't have the advantage of flight (and therefore unpowered steering) that we get with an atmosphere, but we do avoid the disadvantage of drag which also comes with atmospheres.
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Post by the_Demongod on Oct 4, 2016 2:12:34 GMT
The problem is that the missile simply don't get that close unless you preserve a lot of dV for the last few second (5-10 km) of the engagement. Otherwise the missiles don't get that close. I'd agree it would be nice to be able to change fusing and even the percentage of dV left for terminal interception. If you're interested, I just made a post about this here.
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Post by the_Demongod on Oct 4, 2016 2:06:50 GMT
I've heard many things about the missiles, both good and bad, but in general I really like them. My primary gripe is related to using them in head to head combat. In short, when using the 'controlled homing' command, missiles burn constantly until they have about 400m/s of Δv before entering their coast phase. In an ideal situation it might work fine, but as soon as the target vessel deviates slightly from its initial path, all bets are off. The missiles wait until they're almost about to pass the target before trying to burn those few 400m/s to correct their trajectory, but to no avail. I've launch huge barrages of flak missiles only to have them all miss one by one by less than 300m after the target has moved, all because they didn't correct their trajectory early enough.
What we need is the ability to tune the remote control's guidance computer to optimize the tracking. If we had the ability to instruct the remote control to save x much Δv for the terminal phase, coast at a specified velocity, or respond more/less aggressively to a target changing direction, the problem would be fixed. To be honest it would probably be fixed if you could simply designate how much Δv to save for corrections and terminal phase. For example, if I could tell my missile (which has 1.5km/s of Δv, definitely more than enough for a head-to-head engagement) to save just 100m/s Δv for the terminal phase but reserve an additional 500m/s for mid-course corrections, it would massively improve the accuracy and capabilities of the missiles.
Thoughts?
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