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Post by zuthal on Oct 31, 2016 20:07:36 GMT
also, lithium is an alkali metal, highly reactive. it's soft enough to cut with a knife, and if you used it in pure form to build an engine IRL it would probably explode as soon as you activated it You think that's bad, the game has no problem letting you build propellant tanks out of lithium. And water as the propellant. Or having a lithium turbopump pump fluorine, which I am pretty sure would result in the pump spontaneously and spectacularly combusting as soon as the fuel valves are opened.
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Post by zuthal on Oct 27, 2016 4:50:49 GMT
OOooh, that might be what was messing with my missiles too! They were trying to dodge, and thus not stopping the thrusting. And missiles I don't think ever really need to dodge... cannon CIWS is extremely low-ranged, especially since the AI never sets its guns to engage beyond range, and lasers have perfect accuracy anyways.
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Post by zuthal on Oct 27, 2016 4:46:08 GMT
I mean, we wouldn't even need the coast phase if we could a) have engines not burn at max throttle and b) set some details about missile behaviour.
I would say, set a terminal range (i.e. range after which the missile is to accelerate just full tilt), or maybe alternatively a terminal time-to-target, and then, if that isn't too computationally expensive, have the missile before then limit engine thrust such that it will have, when entering terminal range, just enough fuel left that it runs out when it hits the target (and you could also set other behaviours, of course).
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Post by zuthal on Oct 26, 2016 6:41:15 GMT
A CW laser does damage mainly through thermal soak - it melts, vaporises, burns or otherwise gradually ablates its way through the armour plate, or damages heat-sensitive components.
A pulsed laser instead does damage by thermal shock - it explosively vaporises a thin surface layer with each pulse, and at high enough ablation rates, it can also cause mechanical damage to the armour.
In general, a pulsed laser - if it has a high enough peak power to cause instant vaporisation - would likely do more damage to an armour plate than a CW laser of equal average power, but you could probably make CW lasers of higher power in the same size/mass package.
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Post by zuthal on Oct 26, 2016 5:43:33 GMT
Have they perfected spherical cow technology? Yes, but you have to keep them in a vacuum. Don't forget to keep it frictionless, too!
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Post by zuthal on Oct 25, 2016 11:43:50 GMT
The atmospheres of Uranus, Neptune and Titan all contain significant amounts of methane (2.3%, 1.5% and 1.6%, respectively). That is why in On the Surface of Giants, the propellant depot is in such a close orbit - it is skimming methane from the atmosphere. And the methane is relatively easy to distill out of the atmospheric gases that are collected, as it boils quite a bit higher than nitrogen, hydrogen and helium, and quite a bit lower than ammonia.
And you are right in your terminology, the stuff you toss out the back is propellant or reaction mass (or remass for short), the fuel is what gives the propellant the energy. Propellant and fuel are the same only for combustion rockets.
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Post by zuthal on Oct 25, 2016 6:42:58 GMT
The remote control is one kilo, 10 cm in diameter and looks to be ~2.5 cm thick, so it has a volume of ~0.2 L, for a density of 5 kg/L (or 5000 kg/m^3). So it actually makes for a relatively decent kinetic impactor, plus it has the missile behind it.
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Post by zuthal on Oct 25, 2016 1:01:07 GMT
I made a little graph to compare different possible weighting algorithms. In this, x is the target power (in arbitrary units), P is the total power radiated by all targets, and y is the probability of the target being chosen by the missile. One problem with algorithms that are not linear, though: The sum of all weights of all targets will not, generally, be 1.
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Post by zuthal on Oct 24, 2016 13:40:02 GMT
Offtopic, but....why do you have a fairly powerful multistage coilgun? Why do you not have a fairly powerful multistage coilgun?
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Post by zuthal on Oct 24, 2016 13:37:43 GMT
Yeah, I am planning to make further variants of my missiles with smaller engines. However, I cannot currently make the engines smaller, since having a rocket engine with a throat radius smaller than 3 mm leads to a CTD on launch. I also plan on making them non-gimballed, instead using several engines with differential thrust for steering (thus ideally looking to reduce the engine diameter to below 3.33 cm, to keep the 10 cm internal diameter, while having seven engines), which would make it probably a lot more survivable against nukes.
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Post by zuthal on Oct 24, 2016 10:08:56 GMT
I haven't heard anything about it being implemented in the supplementary material, so I doubt it is implemented. And you could anyways still close the valves and stop propellant flow.
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Post by zuthal on Oct 24, 2016 7:41:15 GMT
One thing this is also useful for is quickly checking whether your weapon breaks physics - if the input power is smaller than the output kinetic power, you should either not use that weapon or reduce its fire rate.
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Post by zuthal on Oct 24, 2016 7:38:08 GMT
They accelerate at twenty-two and a half gravities, but why would that lead to them not obeying an explicit order to stop all burns? (I.e. setting them from "Controlled Homing" to "Cancel")
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Post by zuthal on Oct 24, 2016 6:29:30 GMT
If it's not too much to ask, could we get a roadmap? Not necessarily a long one, just some info on what the next update might have. Would be nice knowing what to expect next. Currently, aside from crashes, the top items I'm working on are missile guidance, proximity detonator issues, and railgun/coilgun issues. For rail- and coilguns, I think what would be more or less needed is doing at the very least implicit capacitors - and I feel that explicit capacitors might be what you have planned, since there are, in the game files, already capacitor-related constants for some materials. What I would suggest is to let the player set, for both types of electromagnetic artillery, the energy per shot (instead of the power). From that and the parameters of the weapon, it then calculates peak power demand, and from the input energy and the fire rate it calculates average power demand. If you want to do a capacitor-less design, you need reactor power equal to or greater than the peak power, and for a design with capacitors, only reactor power at least equal to the average power (but your caps need to be able to keep up, and of course add cost and mass). And missile guidance and proximity detonator changes? Yes yes yes yes! Thank you!
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Post by zuthal on Oct 24, 2016 6:14:30 GMT
I have seen that issue a few times now... when you have a few dozen missiles in a fleet, and give them all a command at the same time (via the appropriate button in the UI), not all of them seem to obey that command. For example, if I set them from controlled homing to off, a lot of them keep burning. Also, missiles seem inconsistent with the controlled homing command too, with some stopping the burn midway, and others just burning all their fuel in the initial boost. Why is that? Do I need more badges to be able to control my missiles?
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