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Post by cuddlefish on Oct 19, 2016 20:00:45 GMT
I've gotten some encouraging results with multi-rod setups backed with small conventional explosives (stock ships through and through with 10 25g osmium rods in front of 100g TNT), so I suspect that the nuclear version would be terrifying, yes.
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Post by cuddlefish on Oct 19, 2016 6:11:55 GMT
Well, do-it-yourself nuke-pumped EFP weapons (using armor or radiation shields placed before the payload) have been shown to function by forumites here. I don't know if that plays well with discrete fragments, though.
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Post by cuddlefish on Oct 19, 2016 6:09:37 GMT
I had a thought, and I figured I'd moot it here, see what folks think.
So, radiators need to be at the output temperature of the coolant loop. If they got hotter, they'd be dumping heat into the coolant, not extracting it.
So... when radiators get heated to extreme temperatures by nuking, shouldn't that have serious ramifications on the modules they service?
I mean, I know the Crew Module radiators have to be very cold (by radiator standards) to keep hospitable temperatures for the crews with the current layouts.
So, if the 293k radiator for a crew module gets nuked such that it's yellow-white hot... shouldn't that lead to the crew broiling, or something equally nasty? Right now ships seem to be able to shrug that off and return to baseline temp - is that accurate?
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Post by cuddlefish on Oct 18, 2016 23:22:07 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.
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Post by cuddlefish on Oct 18, 2016 21:47:25 GMT
The best answer to the drunkard's walk dodge (aside from the fact that it's a more constrained area than pure random, as most ships use gimbal-thrust rather than six-degree thrust flexibility) is to give up a bit of precision for a lot of certainty - just hose the area it could be in, in a roughly random fashion, rather than having the very thin ribbons of fire that either obliterate the target at one specific point or miss entirely. With the dozens of rounds per second many of the guns can fire, you can likely get some very nice shot densities across the overall envelope. It won't snipe modules, but it will put rounds into hulls, and that can be enough.
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Post by cuddlefish on Oct 16, 2016 20:24:18 GMT
The ship was clear of explosion risks, unfortunately.
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Post by cuddlefish on Oct 16, 2016 19:10:55 GMT
It's reassuring - I couldn't figure out WHAT was wrong with my new van-steel armor that a short vanilla railgun burst would suddenly have the ship spinning at a good 90 RPM and all the crew dead.
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Post by cuddlefish on Oct 16, 2016 13:40:05 GMT
Awesome. Still need a fix for proximity fuses, though. I'm sure it's impending - but one issue at a time is a good way to handle things.
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Post by cuddlefish on Oct 15, 2016 19:56:44 GMT
I think it depends on what you are doing. If you can line up a direct hit, frags are undoubtedly more damaging; if you want to be able to chase a flare and still cripple the target (or take out a flight of drones), there is no substitute for a nuke. Micro-nukes also have the advantage of turning poor homing into a virtue - when your kinetic energy payloads all pass just behind the engine, it's frustrating. When your .5kt flashbulbs do it... that's fun times.
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Post by cuddlefish on Oct 14, 2016 18:58:40 GMT
This mission honestly just makes me wonder how the USTA actually uses that depot. I get that it needs to be low to skim the methane, but it seems like the amount of effort to reach it would make trying to get supplies from there a net loss.
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Post by cuddlefish on Oct 14, 2016 13:31:51 GMT
So missiles and drones don't have armor on their engine bell, it seems a whole formation of drones can get disabled by a nuke going off behind them, has anyone found a material composition that could survive a nuke or two? One tradeoff here is that running the rocket colder gives more safety margin for the parts to survive unexpected heat dumps without melting - but that has an obvious efficiency impact. I suppose you'd want to minimize the thermal expansion coefficient as well.
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Post by cuddlefish on Oct 14, 2016 13:29:05 GMT
To be fair, though - in aerial combat (particularly before radar-assisted gunnery) the general range of fire for these mixes was a few hundred yards at most - differences in travel time would still matter, but not nearly as much, particularly given there are so many other confounding factors. In space? The distance is many kilometers or tens of kilometers - so even small differences will add up.
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Post by cuddlefish on Oct 13, 2016 18:50:06 GMT
I've noticed, while experimenting with subcaliber ammunition for my cannons (consisting purely of a single 'radiation shield' of the required dimensions and material), that there's a significantly higher performance load for these items than for full caliber bullets, at the same rate of fire. Presumably the game is doing extra checks of some sort for them, as they are notionally ships rather than just bullets - would it be possible for totally inert (no moving parts, no remote control) payloads to be given whatever more simplified treatment lets bullets be used with such greater quantity without performance detriment?
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Post by cuddlefish on Oct 13, 2016 16:07:35 GMT
"As the gun has an input power of 13MW, this gives an efficiency of (1056.784/13) * 100 = 8129%" Of course it has, why wouldn't it, thanks for explaining it like this to me, I was unsure what reactor output meant, if it was W/h of W/s, until the fix, a nice calculator to compute all this would be nice. Watts is actually a rate measure already (which then sometimes leads to terms like Watt-Hours to discuss specific quantities of energy - in that case, the amount you'd get at 1 watt over an hour), which takes a step out of it. But yeah, doing the googling to figure out what the different design stats meant has been surprisingly informative - and they said kids never learn things playing these newfangled vidyagames.
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Post by cuddlefish on Oct 13, 2016 13:54:58 GMT
I suspect this comes down to two facts - one, the barrels are substantial, but not so much as accelerator rails often are. Much more importantly - there are explosive packages in the gun mechanism, so I suspect the catastrophic kill threshold is not enough heating to melt the gun, but 'only' enough heating to cook off a chambered round. Making your gun overly thick, and of something with a huge specific heat, might help. Storing the ammunition separately from the gun helps to prevent explosions when the inevitable happens. A hundred times this. Overall ammo storage belongs somewhere far from the radiators (and preferably guns), and with some good individual citadel-style armor. Luckily, it can be transferred to the weapon by magic, making this much simpler.
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