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Post by cuddlefish on Jun 23, 2017 6:35:46 GMT
I was tooling about with a low-emission missile boat, with ~100kw total heat output, and roughly two thousand blast-rack 10MW/10s decoys set with a launch cap of 10 and a generous Shot engagement distance. The thought was, that would give me 2000 seconds of immunity to any missile with a target threshold of less than ~1%, which suited me nicely.
Well, it suited me nicely until a salvo came in (20x missiles) and my ship proceeded to ripple fire the entire magazine of decoys at ~800Hz (between the various bays) in one titanic fireworks display, which I was regrettably having too much lag to appreciate.
I suspect the issue is that the Decoy modules don't add to the player side, so the "amount on side" check always returns 0, so it hasn't yet met the cap and keeps firing.
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Post by cuddlefish on Jun 22, 2017 21:34:23 GMT
All these nitroglycerin setups are terrifying. When I think "things to put in nukes I'm going to be firing out of blast tubes", the last thing I think is "let's use something really twitchy".
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Post by cuddlefish on Jun 22, 2017 4:36:44 GMT
I'm a simple man and as soon as I saw the update, I am just absolutely satisfied. Blast launcher? Swarm missile/drone targeting? Steam workshop? Absolutely glorious. "But sir, all our stuffs are now brok-" CHALLENGE ACCEPTED!!! TIME TO FIX EVERYTHING!!! I can't seem to figure out how to fix micro nuke or nuclear weapon in general though. While I can't figure out what makes a good delaying-agent beyond trial and error, I've had decent results with Nitrocellulose + Amorphous Carbon at as heavy a cut as I can get without ignition failure. So far my best low end result is 480 tons at a hair over 10 grams per ton, compared to better than 4 tons to the gram back with the magical Silicon Nanothermite.
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Post by cuddlefish on Jun 21, 2017 21:51:59 GMT
A military spacecraft in disguise as a civilian ship. ah that could be bad... hey guys look at my crewed cargo vessel... its not loaded with 5 metric tons of Smallpox virus or anything. The big purpose historically was more commerce raiding, on both sides of that equation. As an attacker, it can slip in amongst target civilian traffic, then run out the guns and send the "get to your lifeboats" warnings before anyone knows what's going on. As a defender, it's a bait ship for other commerce raiders - the opponent thinks they've got another tasty merchantman, only to discover too late that you have some heavy ordinance and a battle-hardened crew.
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Post by cuddlefish on Jun 5, 2017 0:49:59 GMT
If WolframAlpha isn't leading me astray, that angle means you have an uncertainty radius of about a human-height, at a megameter. Christ.
At that point - are the abstracted targeting sensors and gunlaying mechanics that precise? Because I wouldn't be sure of that, again if I haven't done an interface fail you've got ~ a third of an arc second of spread.
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Post by cuddlefish on Jan 15, 2017 20:03:12 GMT
It honestly feels very Metal Gear, in its moralizing about its own strange idea of how the world works. Taking it seriously is counterindicated.
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Post by cuddlefish on Jan 15, 2017 6:58:10 GMT
It's part of the kooky backstory that justifies the ever-so-serious scenario that's all just a fancy excuse to get spaceships fighting in the solar system. The plot is... not the game's focus, or strong suit.
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Post by cuddlefish on Jan 7, 2017 4:06:23 GMT
Strictly speaking, that is just a regular old longsword. To count as a ZweihΓ€nder, it should be at least 1.4 meters long. Strictly speaking, it's heavy enough and made from such poor-quality materials that it's probably a failed experiment from feudal Japan! OUCH! :3
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Post by cuddlefish on Dec 28, 2016 18:23:41 GMT
My issue with that is Physics Compliance... A quick calc shows ~3.8MJ/shell of muzzle energy, so about 2GW would be enough to make the gun compliant with conservation of energy. The resultant efficiency would be an optimistic 64%. The host ship already has a 1GW reactor, increasing to 2GW wouldn't be a big change. Well, to be fair, I think there's a hard-cap of 50% efficiency right off the bat because of equal and opposite reactions. But yeah, the accelerator efficiencies aren't the ONLY things rotten in the state of Denmark, the reactors are crazy if most likely in a less easily provable manner.
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Post by cuddlefish on Dec 28, 2016 18:19:24 GMT
(...) Edit: I think armouring a realistic spaceship is fundamentally the same problem as armouring a tank or a warship. You can't armour against everything, and specifically you can't armour against a comparable vehicle if it's allowed to come up to you and shoot unhindered. Against another tank or another battleship (or aircraft carrier or whatever) you have to be able to blow him up before he blows you up. However, that logic cannot be applied to everything and you need to be able to survive smaller, cheaper, harder to detect threats. Nobody smart is going to invest into a supercarrier that can be sunk by a single frogman with a hand-carried mine, or a tank with a great gun but that gets totalled by a crude IED. There is a major caveat here - some platforms can be used to protect others. For example, tanks in the 30s and 40s were very, very vulnerable to dismounted attack if caught unawares in rough terrain - your archetypal Spaniards or Finns with petrol bombs, for instance. However, people still built and used them quite successfully, because they had infantry to cover that weakness - it didn't matter so much if an infantryman within 5 meters meant a dead tank, if you could have an infantry cordon 40 meters out from your tanks to keep them safe from such an attack. Similarly, warships - the big ones are distinctly vulnerable to missile or torpedo attack, but they have support assets used to screen them from threats, and provide terminal defense if that fails. Or, more succinctly, defensive measures can be outsourced with the right tactical doctrine.
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Post by cuddlefish on Dec 27, 2016 4:34:11 GMT
what i meant was that it is likely that a new round is chambered before the first exits - if far enough apart the stages wouldnt pull them back this could be what im seeing when i load them to fast - coils start to slow shells down. of course i have no idea if it simulates that. It doesn't really matter for the core problem, though - much, much, much more energy comes out of the barrel than goes into it. That's physics broken, badly.
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Post by cuddlefish on Dec 25, 2016 16:47:46 GMT
As far as I know, they don't have the same pitfalls - one interesting factor is that they, like Lasers, have an explicit energy-efficiency metric displayed, letting you confirm this (ballistic efficiency is, afaik, how much of the propellant energy ends up as KE in the projectile).
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Post by cuddlefish on Dec 21, 2016 15:27:11 GMT
Hobbes is definitely worth a read, though as other posters here have pointed out, he should be read with a 1-ton bag of salt at your side. Though, this tends to be true of any philosopher: all of them have their share of baseless junk, some more than others. In Hobbes' case, the Philosopher King was nonsense when Plato came up with it and it's nonsense now. Essentially, Hobbes points out a very real and observable problem: that anarchy devolves into chaos and chaos coalesces into tyranny. On the other hand his solution, to skip straight to the tyranny part, is... sub-optimal at best. For better solutions to the Hobbesian problem I recommend reading up on Adam Smith, John Locke, Mises, and Hayek. Same catch as usual of course: none of them are perfect, but all of them are on to something. Honestly, the Philosopher King has enough of the seeds of his destruction (as incoherent, not just impractical) sown in Plato's own argument that I have to figure it was being used as a device for Socrates to talk about the way the just man should behave, even as the other political elements were being used for that and to take shots at Democracy.
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Post by cuddlefish on Dec 21, 2016 13:59:00 GMT
He does, to be fair, use the saintly ruler for a rhetorical purpose - he wants to get to the point where it's agreed to be good with a good ruler, then draw the contrast between the shitty ruler and the state of chaos and ask "Is [having a shitty ruler] really so much worse that you'd want this instead?"
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Post by cuddlefish on Dec 21, 2016 13:43:20 GMT
On the off chance you haven't looked him up - English political philosopher of the Early Modern period, who lived in the shadow of the English Civil War and associated chaos. The central thrust of his work is the idea that, left to their own devices, people will naturally fall into viciousness and chaos (the 'state of nature' for the purposes of his work), which sourced a great number of quotations that still see usage (the ones mentioned above, the war of all against all, etc). The only solution is, in his model, for people to subordinate their freedom of action to an agreed-upon means of arbitration, so we have a way of resolving disputes we all agree on without anyone getting brained with a club - he reccomends an absolute monarch, as it minimizes (in theory) the risk for that authority to become divided against itself and fail. This then creates a serious problem for international relations, as there isn't one of those on the scale of nations. Even if everyone in the kingdom really does embrace the rule of (the same) law, you still have all those other kingdoms, and so you'll fall into that state of war and anarchy in the grand scheme even if the individual pieces are ordered. It would be the logical thing, then, for all the nations to agree on a ruler to prevent that. I'm sure they'll get right to it. That's his model, anyway. It's a subject of debate, like most famous philosophers. Personally, I think his argument is interesting, but (deliberately) overstated and over-universalized, and so getting too excited about its implications is a bit silly. Opinions vary. I leave the comparison between his model and your response to the lockstep scenario for you to evaluate the merits of. sounds like a quack to me. Anyone can plainly see that the flaw with his thinking is the idea that everyone would willingly submit to a single leader, when a large portion of them would need a whack on the head every now and then for that to work. It was a work of philosophy, not a practical manual. The argument isn't that this is an achievable real-world solution, but rather that this should be preferable to the alternative. Which, if you accept his premises about human nature, us agreeing on something is better than us beating folks to death - or more concretely for him, to the long and bloody years of instability resulting from the spats over religion and royal authority that had torn England apart in his day. I mean, it's essentially making the case for the basic premise of rule of law - having something we agree on and stick to is worth a lot, even if it makes shitty decisions fairly often, because chaos bad.
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