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Post by cuddlefish on Oct 25, 2016 5:22:05 GMT
Huh. I took the 'warheads' out of my kinetic missiles... and the dang things still work. I guess a few kilos of plastic at 4+ km/s is still enough to ruthlessly through-and-through the Gunship, unless it's the remote control doing the business. I would never have guessed that.
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Post by cuddlefish on Oct 24, 2016 22:20:38 GMT
And the thrust has to be that extreme, because you need the missile to be able to perform if it has to engage a target early in its burn. My current standard missile platform is 40 kilos of bi-propellant with 5 km/s of dV, on account of the former being a number that makes the ratio math easy, and the latter being nice and round. With my engine, that comes to a 10.8 mass ratio, so if it's going to have enough muscle to be able to hit a target while having most of its reserves as it enters the final approach (which is next to inevitable when orbiting small bodies), it has to have horsepower - I went for a hair over 5G. As currently configured, that means it's north of 500 newtons to the kilo when it's reaching burnout.
That's a frankly absurd amount of power, but if I want the thing to be able to close distance well with the really quite short approach distances[1], I'm not sure how to avoid it.
[1] Given the length of your final run is determined by the enemy weapon range... I wish you could plug in a minimum trigger distance for your missile, to ensure you have time for things like KKV to get up to speed.
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Post by cuddlefish on Oct 24, 2016 22:00:48 GMT
one thing to note about cross sectional density is the fact that when you are talking about many km/s of velocity all that really matters is the mass and velocity as after hitting something the projectile will just turn to plasma under more or less all situations. As such it cross sectional density doesn't really matter I thought it was more or less the opposite of that, at least so far as ability to penetrate barriers? Newtonian impact depth is all about density and length - do the plasma effects really flip the script that aggressively?
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Post by cuddlefish on Oct 24, 2016 21:54:20 GMT
Does it look like reduced-distance proximity fusing will come with the next missile guidance update? I was attempting to create a crude tandem-warhead design today. By putting an additional warhead in the tail of my go-to small missile I was hoping to exploit the hole the nose-mounted EFP charge created by then detonating the secondary fragmentation warhead inside the armor of the target, but the 1 meter minimum was preventing that. Now that I think about it, a negative distance could be useful too, considering that's how the actual delay fusing on bunker busters works. I think the focus at the moment is on getting the fuses to actually fulfill their current specifications.
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Post by cuddlefish on Oct 24, 2016 5:26:55 GMT
I've done 7-engine clustered missiles and they maneuver quite nicely (not to mention looking pretty) - the one major caveat is that you tend to need high thrust to get decent turn rates, which means the collective mass flow has to be massive - which in turns means rapid burnout times.
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Post by cuddlefish on Oct 24, 2016 1:40:27 GMT
AFAIK, that means is that there's insufficient thrust to get the maneuver done - more dV can't solve that problem, because you just don't have enough ability to employ it in the window required. This becomes a tricky optimization problem, in that usually Thrust and dV are competing goals.
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Post by cuddlefish on Oct 22, 2016 3:27:58 GMT
It looks bright enough to me? I just wish the sunlight can be brighter sometimes too... I'd imagine that scales with your location? Try setting the sandbox locale to Mercury, see if it's any better.
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Post by cuddlefish on Oct 21, 2016 1:59:00 GMT
Huh. I guess the IR takes the completion of their mercenary work very, very seriously.
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Post by cuddlefish on Oct 21, 2016 1:26:46 GMT
I started to look at my list, and then I realized my favorite counter-missile uses nearly a MCr of U-235 (2.5MT fission). I'll need to do some... engineering. That, and I've slashed the ammo reserves from 80 to 10 per intercept ship.
I think mass is self-limiting when you have a credit budget, assuming there's a reasonable dV floor.
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Post by cuddlefish on Oct 20, 2016 21:58:00 GMT
Heh. You are literally increasing the volume of your fire ... aim less, hit more?! Auuuuuugh! That was wonderful, I salute you.
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Post by cuddlefish on Oct 20, 2016 21:37:54 GMT
There are few problems that can't be made more soluble by increasing volume of fire. Well, save for collateral damage and CPU load, anyway.
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Post by cuddlefish on Oct 20, 2016 21:28:50 GMT
I make a policy of 3cm V.C. Steel on all my crew modules, along with keeping them distant from ammunition and radiators. Granted, most of my losses are mission or power kills rather than direct crew casualties, but I like to think my brave space men and women appreciate the sentiment. It... does make up a good half the cost of my standard flak-wagon, though. But at least for nuke carriers it's not that bad.
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Post by cuddlefish on Oct 20, 2016 18:51:51 GMT
It may be civilian infrastructure, but as described it is crucial to their ability to operate. If the UFP intelligence analysts are able to determine it's a single point of failure, then presumably the USTA admiralty is equally aware. On the one hand, they had such a long detection distance for any RFP assets that you can redeploy in reaction... the IR are described as having been in hostility with the USTA in past, and obviously they had military equipment in range to attack. It's not implausible as such, but it certainly is sloppy of them. They'd have been much safer with an accessible orbit and a garrison, which would probably be cheaper in propellant overall.
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Post by cuddlefish on Oct 19, 2016 20:56:48 GMT
Currently, aside from crashes, the top items I'm working on are missile guidance, proximity detonator issues, and railgun/coilgun issues. Woo! Much obliged! Seconded heartily!
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Post by cuddlefish on Oct 19, 2016 20:45:48 GMT
I've been experimenting with PTFE for non-aerogel laser armor. It's got good insulative abilities, and it isn't translucent. My 3.3 dry-kilo missiles have a bit under a millimeter on the front, and take attrition but make it through against a stock laser frigate when you fire a few score of them.
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