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Post by jonen on Oct 28, 2016 12:51:31 GMT
An anti laser version of the stock gunship (with anti-laser armor, and modules armored with anti-laser coatings, and missiles with anti-laser coating), that starts combat with a small screen of missiles already out, and launches more missiles as they are destroyed, can also close into brawling range. Mind you, the odds of actually killing all of them in one pass aren't great, but you can get into brawling range (though, obviously, your relative velocity as you fly by will be great).
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Post by jonen on Oct 28, 2016 12:47:11 GMT
Using very small missiles, it is possible to build a 1kw launcher with 33 mm/s launch velocity and 20ms reload rate. DO NOT DO THAT. The missiles -- and this is a technical term here -- bunch up in space and explode each other. Incidentally, even after I punched up the initial velocity and increased the reload speed to 500ms, I still had the problem of rapidly deploying over a thousand missiles and turning my computer into slag. I bet it would do great against laser defenses, though! Basics of launcher design: You want to launch objects at sufficient velocity to allow them to clear the launcher before the next object is launched. Advanced launcher design: If you launch things fast enough and at sufficient velocity that your launcher could potentially be used for corrective orbital burns, you probably want to refrain from using "launch all", and set very restrictive ranges for automated launching.
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Post by jonen on Oct 28, 2016 12:42:04 GMT
Something I didn't see mentioned: As you get close to your intercept target, you can start adding in last minute course corrections to control the engagement velocity. It needs to be done with the target set as reference point, and you'll need to drag both the green and red sliders in near equal amounts. Spending 300m/s to drop from 350 to 50 can turn it from a frantic few seconds of dice rolling to an actual tactical engagement. It's also really helpful with missiles to fine tune the final velocity for maximum accuracy (fast enough the enemy can't dodge, but slow enough they can actually home in) Also, adjusting missiles so that they hit dead on, and won't have to burn in combat to cancel out lateral velocity (and usually fail and fly by at a great distance).
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Post by jonen on Oct 28, 2016 12:39:25 GMT
Do it enough and you get a feel for what works. Yeah, not exactly scientific. Actually, I think that's just about the definition *of* scientific. Only if you're taking notes. Otherwise it's just blindly flailing about. But if you're writing it down, then it's scientific.
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Post by jonen on Oct 28, 2016 12:38:21 GMT
Start with simpler things like conventional rocket engines and cannons. Nuclear warheads aren't terrible either. Unfortunately, things that involve controlled nuclear fission (thermoelectric fission reactors, nuclear thermal rockets) are a whole order of magnitude more complex, and anything involving linear accelerators/motors (coilguns, railguns, magnetoplasmadynamic thrusters) aren't much better. I haven't even looked at lasers yet... Also, drones and missiles are much easier to build and quite fun, so I'd recommend starting there. Laser is not difficult, da-ze. (Well, okay, memes aside, it's probably easier to make a laser that works than a coilgun that works, but probably harder to make a laser that's actually effective.)
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Post by jonen on Oct 28, 2016 12:33:42 GMT
Keep in mind, a minimum deltaV deorbit will probably take time to actually touch down, and fly over a lot of rock, and (unless you burn midcourse) it should be possible to estimate your landing zone.
Putting extra deltaV on the lander, or using a deorbit stage on the lander to get it out of orbit with most of it's deltaV still available, would be preferable just for getting on the ground fast, giving the enemy as little time as possible to prepare.
...
Say, have any of you read Seveneves? Part three has all kinds of nifty ideas - and while most are probably either impractical or not possible with the constraints of engineering posed on the Children of a Dead Earth verse, quite of few of them ought to be acheivable with todays technology when limiting oneself to operations over asteroids. In particular, using various clever arrangements of orbital skyhooks to deposit (or extract) troops from the surface without expending (much) remass.
A skyhook would take a bit of time to set up - if it's at all possible or practical on an asteroid, I'd assume it could work with the bigger ones at least - and require the invasion force to suppress any defenses on the surface... That is assuming there isn't a civilian or military set up already present for getting stuff off the rock cheaply that can be appropriated. But once you've got it up and running, just have your troop vehicles join with it on the orbital stage, endure some G's while swinging down towards the surface, and at the end of the line, you're basically stationary relative to the surface for a little while.
And, hey, we already know they've got skyhooks in CoaDE.
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Post by jonen on Oct 27, 2016 23:11:53 GMT
I just finished the Ceres mission and the designer is open to me. I took a look and .....uh....well I feel like a moron. How do I even start learning this stuff? I have no idea how different shaped mirrors or sizes of things or percentage of stuff affects anything. I tried to just build but I have no idea why things aren't working or not working. I don't think there is a guide outside of the developer board, but is there a process I should follow? I've seen forum members say things about how you should "learn how lasers work and then build it b/c the tech is accurate". Fair enough but is that the only way? I have to study physics, chemistry, particle physics etc? Duplicate stock designs, fiddle with the various options and see what happens, you'll figure it out as you go. Look around the forums when people post their own designs, see what they've done and steal let yourself be inspired.
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Post by jonen on Oct 27, 2016 21:01:17 GMT
Teeny tiny little Tachikoma ... The Eclipse Phase Reaper-morph may be an approach for a combat drone (roughly disk shaped with weapons on the flats and mobility systems and sensors on the disk edge). If we're constraining mostly to tried and proven technology like the main game, things are probably a bit less interesting than that... Space suit design would probably be the one thing - if anything - that'd advance by leaps and bounds just from the increased demand, and power armor should be doable (exoskeletons do exist). Given what we're seeing with quadrotor minidrones nowadays, a microgravity variant for mapping the insides of habitats and pressurized areas.
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Post by jonen on Oct 27, 2016 17:59:02 GMT
Yeah lasers can be set to a max range of 250km no matter what their power is. So I personally would consider it always beneficial to have even a shitty laser on a space craft with its range set to 250km to force missiles and other things into combat at that range. On my to do list is a small, cheapskate version of the drone laser to be mounted on all spacecraft for this purpose. Just waiting for the ability to name modules before doing it. I'm thinking "Dazzler" or "Target Marker" or "Laser pointer". (If you don't want to engage at 250km, disable the laser before intercept, and hope the enemy doesn't have one of their own.)
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Post by jonen on Oct 27, 2016 17:56:43 GMT
In my experience, partial homing actually does re-start the missile's burn near the end of the flight path. That is my experience too, but it also appears that the AI is a bit late in doing so. When I have a stream of missiles, launched from a ship in the combat, or have manually set them up to stream in, I find that setting all the missiles to full homing as soon as the first missiles on controlled homing starts doing their terminal approach burn, I get more hits from the missiles in the middle of the group, while the controlled homing group tends to miss, and the tail end of the group may end up burning through all their deltaV while the enemy can still maneuver. That is of course assuming any of the missiles that hit don't impart enough momentum (say, by opening a propellant tank) to send the target to "safety". OTOH, since the missiles are generally going for the radiators around the reactor and/or the main thrusters as the hottest part of the target, maneuver kills that leave the enemy unable to dodge the rest of the stream are not uncommon once you start getting hits. Manually setting up streams could be easier. As is, split groups individually or in groups of five, and use the keyboard shortcuts rather than using the menu. H for full homing, C for controlled, space for cancel orders, etc.
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Post by jonen on Oct 27, 2016 14:33:08 GMT
The stock 1kt cargo module can probably carry landers or lander components, probably military ground vehicles as well, if required. So a troop carrier should probably have at least one, plus refuelers for whatever remass works best for the landers. A necessity for operations, or at least troop recovery (and medevac?). Hatches, and mechanisms for that - would those be light enough you can get away with not adding anything, or just place a special armor layer to simulate the additional complexity and weight of a hatch? Or would the troop carrier even be armored in the first place?
Deployment and resupply ... Anyone fancy modeling a launcher - a Starship Troopers (novel style) troop deployment mechanism? Figure a big gun (coil, rail, conventional? Heck - hydraulic?) pushing a 500+ kg payload* out of orbit with a maximum acceleration of 3Gs?
* = Don't forget batteries and packaging: armor, insulation, decoys and countermeasures, and probably a heatshield just in case (even if it's not an atmospheric drop) - you're mighty exposed until you touch ground, wouldn't do for a single concealed infantry railgun or laser to be able to swat your invasion force out of the sky. Payload should probably have enough deltaV and thrust to make a soft landing after being deorbited as well. Enough deltaV to supply enhanced mobility on the ground would also be nice, but not strictly a requirement (unless maybe we're talking small rocks where every step'd send you on a suborbital trajectory without compensating thrust). Probably should have each suit come with its own bivouac as well - light inflatable emergency shelter, if you're going to be spending more than a few hours or days deployed.
If you're willing to throw around ordinance liberally, and your troops are highly mobile and got superior sensors... Dazzlers and HARM to blind enemy ground based sensors from orbit prior to going in? I'd assume anything on the surface that so much as looks hostile will be taking orbital fires before the Ground Pounders touch down. An asteroid raiding force could be fairly Heinlein - doesn't necessarily need to hold territory, just smash and grab anything on the surface and bug out. Either lure defenders into the open to be smashed from orbit, or encourage them to consider surrender, or do recce in force, sweep and clear a place to touch down with heavier landers and set up for subsurface or habitat operations for total conquest and occupation. You want to capture a body, you'll need to send people down the bugholes, for which you'll actually need numbers. That doesn't sound like a job for the guys in the asteroid raiding force. Tight close quarters tunnel fighting... If they do it, probably only enough to sweep unpressurized areas and secure airlocks (or attach their own) to then send in Habitat Combat Units (would these need more or less training than boarding parties?) - shouldn't need to weigh those guys down with full, bulky, armored spacesuits, just body armor and tactical gear, and maybe enough pressure suit to hopefully give the illusion of the possibility of survival and rescue in case of habitat failure and explosive decompression (and incidentally protection against enemies messing with the life support controls in contested habitats).
The troops actually going to be fighting in pressurized environments (or just handling occupation, if you're not bothering to capture anything pressurized that actively resists) can be ferried down in groups for economies of scale - a decently economical lander or crew transfer vehicle should suffice. Troop recovery vehicle for raiding force would probably be one the lighter side, if you assume that most of the raiding force will have reasonably intact suits at recovery, they can probably ride back to orbit before getting into a pressurized area (particularly for hot extracts).
Oh they've got no time for glory in the infantry... Well, that's my boat calling.
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Post by jonen on Oct 26, 2016 14:39:54 GMT
I find it amusing that people were pointing me at this thread despite the fact that I'd already posted in it..... Might have helped if you'd made clear that it was you, O Manley One. At any rate, once you get module design you can science the shit out of missions. Or break physics and design a coilgun capable of firing bits of ferrous alloy at several dozen kilometers a second. Or Magical Physics Dinkery thrusters with exhaust velocities in excess of lightspeed. (Well, I've not managed to design a usable one yet, but work continues!)
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Post by jonen on Oct 26, 2016 14:36:34 GMT
So...I seem to have a problem using MPD thruster. I tried to make a dual thrusters design warship that is as cheap as my full NTR warship so I could have the high delta V transit from the MPD thruster and the combat manuerve with NTR truster. Unfortunately, instead of getting what I expected as 6 extra kilonmeter of delta-V, I got...3 meter of delta-V. I checked to see if it's power problem, so I turned off all weapons and unnecessary system, but it still remains unchanged. I have no idea how to solve this, does anyone know how? Deactivate your NTR, and you should see huge DeltaV (but you don't get much thrust, obviously). If you can get away with low thrust maneuvering, using MPDs to maximize the deltaV out of your tank works. Then when it's time for combat, switch engines and be ready to burn through what little you have left.
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Post by jonen on Oct 26, 2016 6:42:21 GMT
Not sure the extent of it, but I've cheap designs that have crew compartment and remote control (so that if the crew module is pasted, the thing can still fire weapons - part of my early, stock module superlaser array).
I got the impression that the ones on remote control were more sluggish responding to fleet orders (though that may have been battle damage). In any case I didn't extensively test it.
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Post by jonen on Oct 26, 2016 6:37:06 GMT
I love lasers. I am particularly fond of the idea of the Composite Beam Superlaser (that is to say: Many individually weak, smaller lasers focus fire to OP effect). That said, the forum inspires me to use larger lasers according to the same schema. So I did a thing.Thus. ... I find myself in need of tips for good anti-laser designs that'd survive closing into gun range or delivering a missile warhead even if the ships focus fire, because a pair of these things will annihilate stock fleets in seconds of coming into 250 km range - like if you flicked a lightswitch. Hell, you don't even need to focus fire to melt stock fleets, smart use of focus just makes them go away faster. The biggest weakness in the design so far is that they run themselves out of deltaV right quick if they need to fire thrusters in combat (and all those radiators mean if they need to start turning, they need to burn more or less continuously just to cancel out angular momentum - I could probably do with some more thrusters to help with that, but meh). (Oh, and note the price - these are being worked on for the 100mc fleet challenge. Cheezy Laser Module Sniping.) This thing is incredibly difficult to fight. It outranges pretty much any ship in the game, and the only way I've found to take it down is to completely overwhelm it. You can cheese it by waiting to launch missiles until combat starts, causing the AI to prioritize the missiles as targets. If you send enough missiles, it never even fires on you ships until they get in weapons range. (For reference, in tests with gunships, the lasers took out almost 500 flak missiles.) Another way I tried to take it out was to armor missiles more. Adding a few centimeters of silica aerogel to the Devastator design yields great results until close range, when the added armor doesn't really make a difference. I've also found a strange phenomenon- often, when sending large missile salvos, the ship will struggle to take all of the missiles down- until the last moment. The up-armored Devastators would have worked, with about 200 missiles out of 300 hitting, if the last 200 hadn't all been mysteriously disabled in the seconds before detonation. Most had no actual damage, and hadn't collided with each other either. I'm not sure what happened there... What happened is the Devastators expended all their deltaV accelerating, and the ship just sat there lasing away. Then when they get close, it starts accelerating to dodge, and the missiles discover they're no longer going to hit and don't have the deltaV to correct, and so are disabled. Playing as the lasing ship against AI missiles, if you wait until the relative velocity stops increasing, then start maneuvering, even for a couple of seconds, you eliminate all the missiles.
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