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Post by cuddlefish on Oct 13, 2016 12:42:42 GMT
Does anyone know good high Yield Strength insulators? Because I suspect that's the key for a las-resistant cannon. The closest I've found so far is good old UHMWPE plastic - a couple GPa of strength, and only 20 W/m K thermal conduction. You do get some heating issues, on account of its low melting point and its difficulty getting heat to the outer surfaces where it can radiate, but my 122mm cannon 'only' needs a minute per shot to get back to reference temperature, and has seemed to get a good thirty or fourty seconds of fire (25 gram long-rod in 2 gram plastic sabot, at 2.5 km/s, at ~8 shots per second) before having to stop for heating, which is often enough to do some hurt if the aim-point is good.
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Post by cuddlefish on Oct 13, 2016 12:32:06 GMT
Notably, these aren't recoil operated devices - they've got some sort of linear accelerator (?) throwing shells in and presumably opening/closing the breech as well.
In terms of power supply, usually the loader on a conventional cannon as implemented is a trivial power cost compared to the turret traverse via reaction wheels.
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Post by cuddlefish on Oct 13, 2016 10:02:53 GMT
Has anyone had success in preventing conventional guns from getting destroyed by lasers extremely fast? They seem far more susceptible to laser damage than the other guns. I don't think lasers can even do damage to railguns for example. 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.
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Post by cuddlefish on Oct 12, 2016 20:44:50 GMT
At the moment, my houserule set is to use pure fission nuclear, lasers, and conventional ordinance exclusively. I suspect that dodges most of the major "wait what" results.
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Post by cuddlefish on Oct 12, 2016 17:25:40 GMT
I've been fiddling about making replicas (well, caliber + mass + velocity clones) of real world weapons, and I've noticed that you tend to need really rather massive barrels to avoid mechanical difficulties. Anyone know good ways of minimizing the amount of barrel bulk needed?
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Post by cuddlefish on Oct 12, 2016 11:08:15 GMT
I wanted to try to make an effective coil gun with the least amount of power consumption it let me -- in order to mount multiples in a single drone. Who knew that you could make those out of Calcium? And that the bullets could go that far? Idea here was to make a gun I could mount multiple of in a single drone. It seems very effective, mounting 6 coilguns with two nuclear minifridge reactors and 1.5t decane : 5t oxygen. It is so effective it kills my FPS though. Thoughts? (Just for the record - that's got 44kJ per round coming out the barrel. With 100kW in...)
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Lasers
Oct 12, 2016 11:04:14 GMT
Post by cuddlefish on Oct 12, 2016 11:04:14 GMT
To be fair re: laser expense and efficiency, the deck is a bit stacked against them, in that both electromagnetic and nuclear weapons have some serious shenanigans in their performance ATM.
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Post by cuddlefish on Oct 11, 2016 17:36:12 GMT
I've been experimenting with little missiles powered by straight Hydrazine rockets made out of PTFE plastic. Mostly because it amazed me I could actually have plastic rockets that burn at north of a KM/s exhaust velocity. Current model clocks in just under 50kg / 400cr and a hair under 2km dV for a 7.5kg flak payload - but it's only got 2G thrust, so I've been having trouble getting the little rascals to actually hit the target.
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Post by cuddlefish on Oct 11, 2016 16:33:29 GMT
Concur on the fusion fuel density. It seems like there should at least be a strength check on the fissile sphere that is intended to be containing the gas at that pressure. I did the math once, and IIRC, to compress D-T down to 20Mg/m^3 would require something on the order of tens of gigapascals. Around the level where you can turn charcoal into diamonds, or squish copper into degenerate matter. I don't use nukes anymore. Oi. I wonder why the slider even goes that high, then...
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Post by cuddlefish on Oct 11, 2016 16:22:54 GMT
The thing may be that any burn by the enemy for any purpose will "evade" a pre-planned intercept, in that the precise burn ordered will no longer suffice. They don't need to be reacting to you to want to burn for some purpose.
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Post by cuddlefish on Oct 11, 2016 16:20:55 GMT
I think part of why the gun mounts are external only is that the clear assumption is that the gun is dumping heat via the barrel - containing that in the ship should logically require additional radiators, so you'd need to do some work to make sure it's generating the right amount of additional workload at the right temperature. I'd assume it's in pipeline, but there's a lot on the docket already.
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Post by cuddlefish on Oct 10, 2016 12:51:11 GMT
Or, if using the Steam overlay, hit F12.
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Post by cuddlefish on Oct 10, 2016 8:14:20 GMT
Concur on the fusion fuel density. It seems like there should at least be a strength check on the fissile sphere that is intended to be containing the gas at that pressure.
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Post by cuddlefish on Oct 9, 2016 11:57:26 GMT
In steam, by default hitting F12 will take a screenshot through their overlay.
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Post by cuddlefish on Oct 9, 2016 11:54:34 GMT
Also, with the game in it's current state I'm suspicious of any mega-power strategy that involves low power consumption (or high velocity) magnetic accelerators. But yeah, that ship looks like its main weakness is nuclear weapons frying them from outside gun range. Try a layer of good thermal armor over the top.
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