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Post by coaxjack on Nov 11, 2016 19:15:34 GMT
1 cm of iron as the drone/missile body ? I expect that the iron is a small cone in the front of the missile, to provide both additional armor and fragments for the bomb. Exactly, the Fe goes from the top of the fuel tank to the nose only. I may end up changing what I use there but I initially wanted something kind of ductile for a single-layer armor shell.
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Post by coaxjack on Nov 9, 2016 22:38:55 GMT
Newer development: Missile Bus, Long Range model 6 Bravo (MBLR-6 B), and it's little friend, Submunition Standard Missile model 3 (SSM-3) While testing I have discovered this thing is almost immune to decoys. Lasers, however... Edit: Okay, it only reliably (70-80%) penetrates conventional flares. Rocket flares throw this thing completely off. Attachments:
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Post by coaxjack on Nov 8, 2016 3:04:45 GMT
The diamond combustion chamber is the only thing able to stand up to the heat and pressure. I tried boron and a bunch of other things but ceramics with the requisite temperature resilience are too brittle. Looking at my design now, there are some things I could rework.
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Post by coaxjack on Nov 7, 2016 21:10:26 GMT
Not deuterium, but this is my current primary thruster for all designs over ~75kt. Smaller than that and I prefer to use a smaller 60MN design. Weird, I came up with a very similar engine on my own, but I use it on my medium/light warships giving them between 2.0-3.5 g's of thrust...Nothing quite like a ship the size of a small office building being able to lift off from Earth's surface.
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Post by coaxjack on Nov 7, 2016 0:22:25 GMT
Oh, right. Kind of overlooked the part where missiles are launched 20 at a time, ha. There's still a problem where a real spicy laser could fry each seeker head in turn in a few seconds, like when you send in missiles with crappy armor and they are destroyed in about 4 milliseconds each.
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Post by coaxjack on Nov 6, 2016 21:45:51 GMT
The ability to modify RC units would be real nice for making really small drones and missiles. I don't really know how this would constrain the actual computer that goes into the unit, but I assume something the size of an SD card could feasibly control a drone or missile even now, let alone 200 years from now
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Post by coaxjack on Nov 6, 2016 18:16:27 GMT
That presents an interesting problem again, which is something this game seems to generate in spades: If you were using a SESpaD missile or missile bus/drone, how would it even home on the laser emitter without being fried? If you're using a seeker that would be resilient (or "dull" enough, if you follow?) against military grade lasers, surely it couldn't be sensitive enough to accurately home in? I'm very familiar with laser seeker heads as I used to deal with them in the military, and they work off of reflected coded-pulsed light, not direct lasing in the MW/m2 level. I guess there could be some kind of step-down optical device, the opposite of a photo-multiplier tube...
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Post by coaxjack on Nov 5, 2016 22:42:17 GMT
Insert this huge control rod into your hot reactor core.
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Post by coaxjack on Nov 4, 2016 22:13:50 GMT
It's great that even without the ultra-high pressure fusion cores we can still build a nuclear bomb the size of a can of soda.
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Orion
Nov 4, 2016 19:25:08 GMT
Post by coaxjack on Nov 4, 2016 19:25:08 GMT
Set the engine pulse timing computer into Offense mode and let the bomb launcher fire off drive bombs that have much longer fusing delay.
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Post by coaxjack on Nov 4, 2016 2:21:16 GMT
I know there is usually a rapid and vast arms race that occurs because of questions like this, but if there is a ship made to dodge long range missile fire, get within ~50 km and engage, I think it is likely superior in that arena. Granted I spend a lot of time working on armor piercing coilgun ammo, but there you go. It's hard to dissuade an incoming ship that is actively outmaneuvering and blasting out countermeasures specifically designed to defeat incoming missiles.
Sure a 14.5mm jacketed APIT round won't reach the enemy instantly, and can even be dodged. What about 2,000 of them?
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Post by coaxjack on Nov 3, 2016 22:13:21 GMT
Ah brehmsstrahlung, nothing like your own shielding backfiring and turning your crew compartment into some kind of hideous magnetron device, lol.
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Post by coaxjack on Nov 3, 2016 0:02:42 GMT
The power applied to accelerate the projectile also repels the coils of the coilgun.
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Post by coaxjack on Nov 2, 2016 19:29:19 GMT
Using a single warhead-less nuclear powered missile that is travelling tens of thousands of feet per second and costs roughly $700 USD to completely disable an enemy capital ship is real satisfying. Ha, loser, your nuclear reactor was just vaporized by an inanimate tungsten rod.
(I pegged the price of the credit to Zinc, which is around $2.50/kilogram right now to estimate this, meaning 3.51 credits/kg for zinc makes a credit about 70 cents)
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Post by coaxjack on Nov 1, 2016 22:34:35 GMT
I've found the best counter to drones is drones - you only have to send out a force 10% of the size of the enemy drone fleet, and once they get into dogfight range, they will usually maneuver and countermaneuver while taking (ineffective) potshots at each other until they run out of fuel. Sure it might be expensive to launch a whole drone or three just to basically throw away, but the alternative is a square kilometer sheet of 33mm rounds ripping you a new...orifice.
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