aiyel
Junior Member
Posts: 83
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Post by aiyel on Aug 30, 2016 4:58:42 GMT
My latest design actually make good knife - fighting weapons. Down to about 4kps of dV, but they accelerate quickly. Still trying to work on a launcher design I actually like for close combat missiles. I'd love to use a coilgun system, but that range limitation needs to be patches first.
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aiyel
Junior Member
Posts: 83
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Post by aiyel on Aug 29, 2016 4:06:17 GMT
Currently the workflow for self propelled ordnance is both very clunky and difficult to iterate upon.
Take my latest missile design, a flak missile playing on lessons learned from my solid KKVs.
First, under modules, I must make my warhead.
Then, I go to ships to design the missile itself.
A trip back to the module tab to make the launcher.
Finally, back to ships to put it on something.
And the slightest change to the warhead means I get to repeat ALL these steps. Frustrating when all I need to do is experiment with proximity fusing.
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aiyel
Junior Member
Posts: 83
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Post by aiyel on Aug 29, 2016 0:16:39 GMT
Sometimes, there's no tactical reason to conserve ammo or plenty of tactical reasons NOT to.
You're shooting at a large swarm of drones, you have nothing to lose by opening fire before optimum range.
You have a coilgun launch mechanism for your missiles so the muzzle velocity isn't the whole picture.
You are desperate and praying for the golden BB because if the enemy gets into effective range you are royally screwed.
You want to throw out a wall of violence to force the enemy to maneuver, either to waste dV or to make it easier for you to maneuver into (or out of) optimum range of the big guns.
Your guns have half a million rounds EACH and there's no reason to not tape down the trigger through the entire engagement.
These are just a few examples.
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aiyel
Junior Member
Posts: 83
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Post by aiyel on Aug 28, 2016 15:42:41 GMT
The big advantage to the kkvs is that they're cheap. I might try my hand at making a big frag warhead (by big I mean the individual fragments not necessarily the bursting charge) and about a half kilometer proximity fuse. Spread the damage out a bit.
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aiyel
Junior Member
Posts: 83
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Post by aiyel on Aug 28, 2016 14:16:22 GMT
They do have flaws, of course, like the entire swarm entering and exiting the same hole. With the usual ship design this means a mobility kill with all follow up salvos going to the same spot. But if you get lucky and hit in the right spot, they're ship killers. And a lot cheaper than my 1.1 GT fleet wreckers, too.
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aiyel
Junior Member
Posts: 83
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Post by aiyel on Aug 27, 2016 20:03:11 GMT
so my first module design (aside from a launcher for my KKVs) was a >1GT nuke. Which I stuck on a custom missile.
it's hilariously OP, and tons and tons of fun.
Trying to design my own NTR has resulted in bouts of gibbering madness, as has trying to make my own laser.
I got a coilgun launcher for my KKV missiles, but there doesn't seem to be a way to force it to override firing range (which isn't important because the payload is a missile with its own guidance and propulsion systems) so it flatly refuses to fire at distant targets even though the payload has 7Kps dV.
I find myself thinking ALL weapons need the 'ignore maximum range' button that lasers have because I can think of plenty of situations (like point defense) where a weapon with thousands of rounds of ammo might just want to tape down the trigger and hope for the best regardless of ultimate chances of victory.
Oh, and KKVs really are fun, but with most ships they're really only good as a first-strike weapon, where they core the hull right at the engine cluster then will just pass subsequent shots right through the same hole. they will, however, at an impact velocity of 5kps punch straight through pretty much anything the long way. My design's dV is high but the actual accel is kinda low. MIght be trading those out for a design that has a bit more acceleration, even if I just add a second engine.
Setting a ship or other object as a reference point, it might be beneficial to be able to toggle it to only show the course up through closest approach. This neptune mission, tagging the station turns my course projection into a plate of spaghetti and grinds my desktop to a halt, I shudder to think what it'd do to either laptop.
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aiyel
Junior Member
Posts: 83
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Post by aiyel on Aug 27, 2016 16:15:05 GMT
So I experimented with solid KKV missiles. I basically just removed the warheads from Sniper missiles and put a 1.5m spacer on the nose.
They have something like 7kps dV, and make a satisfying bang when they hit. I'm considering pairing them with a coilgun launch mechanism if I can ever figure that out.
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aiyel
Junior Member
Posts: 83
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Post by aiyel on Aug 27, 2016 4:05:59 GMT
Finallly beat Vesta. Hiding behind the moon is a perfectly valid tactic, and not at all cowardice!
Now on to some tasty module desi- SWEET MERCIFUL CTHULHU INFORMATION OVERLOAD
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aiyel
Junior Member
Posts: 83
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Post by aiyel on Aug 26, 2016 12:19:20 GMT
Okay, I have NO idea how you succeeded on Ceres. I can't get anything like a workable intercept worth my missiles against the enemy drones. We seriously need better tools for plotting maneuvers, and the game desperately needs to have an option for high- speed intercepts with the intercept tool that doesn't try to cancel out all the vectors first. Wow uh i had no problems with Ceres, i actually got it gold ranked on my first try. If you need help with anything i could give you some advice. I've passed it, and now it's not really a challenge. Vesta on the other hand....
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aiyel
Junior Member
Posts: 83
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Post by aiyel on Aug 25, 2016 18:33:21 GMT
While we're at it, how about the ability to review battles with time controls so we can check weapon effectiveness a little more reliably. As it is, things tend to happen too fast.
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aiyel
Junior Member
Posts: 83
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Post by aiyel on Aug 23, 2016 17:43:46 GMT
Flak missiles are, technically speaking, KKVs.
As for their operational use, currently the only thing stopping you from using them this way is scenario design.
I'll let those more knowledgeable soak to the issue of stealthing them
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aiyel
Junior Member
Posts: 83
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Post by aiyel on Aug 23, 2016 14:55:42 GMT
FOURTH: capacitors that would allow a ship to fire bigger weapons than it could technically power at a lower rate of fire.
FOURTH AND A HALF: keel-mounts to put really flipping huge weapons in a narrow but long fixed mount buried in the hull. With above this would allow for monstrosities like the Halo games' MAC cannons. Effective? Probably not. Fun? Heck yeah!
FIFTH: the ability to separate a laser's internal organs from its aperture. There's no reason the lasing equipment needs to be anywhere near the ball turret. Also, allowing more than one turret per laser to increase effective coverage without significantly increasing mass. (Plus redundancy, yay! ) potential benefit: putting the guts of your laser between two armored fuel tanks and d distributing turrets so that one small nuke can't kill them all.
FIFTH AND A HALF: this one's purely aesthetic, and iknow the core gameplay comes before graphics, which is why this is a far future request, but laser Ball turrets that actually look like the real thing (see airborne laser)
EDIT: autocorrect will probably start world War 3 by complete accident.
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aiyel
Junior Member
Posts: 83
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Post by aiyel on Aug 23, 2016 12:45:23 GMT
So I've got a new laptop, a macbook. The game won't even start, and I can't seem to find crash logs for it anywhere.
Suggestions?
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aiyel
Junior Member
Posts: 83
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Post by aiyel on Aug 21, 2016 16:21:33 GMT
Here I will (and cell free to contribute) create a list of features I'd like to see in the distant future, potentially even as down the road DLC.
FIRST: a dynamic campaign with campaign level strategic AI. I'm thinking something like Rule the Waves IN SPAAAAACE! Where we basically play the role of the admiralty for one of our space nations and have to make military decisions based off of semi- random political and foreign relations changes.
SECOND: about two more scenario based campaigns, fighting for the other sides perhaps.
THIRD: differentiated faction ship designs. Obviously since we have a designer, we can do what we want, but maybe each faction has certain strengths and weaknesses in production and thus have mass or cost penalties for technologies outside their area of expertise, so their units are designed to take this into account, and players are encouraged to do likewise because of cost concerns.
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aiyel
Junior Member
Posts: 83
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Post by aiyel on Aug 20, 2016 19:56:36 GMT
Okay, it makes sense, but I think radar could still be useful. Yes, ECM is a thing, but it's also a thing with mass and energy requirements. Radar absorbent materials are also both relatively fragile (thus useless as armor and vulnerable to damage from sources that would otherwise be negligible concern) and not insignificant in mass. About the most effective defense in a space environment (at a glance without running the numbers) would be chaff, which is light weight and easy to dispense, but even modern missiles are resistant to being spoofed by chaff alone. Typically it takes a combination of chaff, jamming, and hard maneuver and the distraction is momentary before the chaff cloud dissipated into uselessness.
I imagine that a good defensive option would be drones that carry ECM equipment and chaff seeded throughout the fleet a few minutes before the engagement in an attempt to turn the entire fleet into one big cloud of jamming and radar reflective bis of metal.
I'm not saying there aren't counters to radar guidance, but those counters aren't free, and this should probably be taken into account.
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