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Post by fallingaggressively on Jan 31, 2021 13:38:00 GMT
I’ll get into details after more play and when I get more time if anyone wants. I'd like to know more. Is it the in game values that are weird or the way in which the tech is depicted?
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Post by fallingaggressively on Aug 30, 2018 1:17:06 GMT
I do wonder though, would the very light projectiles be ineffective against laser defense? Even despite their small cross-section, surely such a small amount of material would be burned away very quickly, necessitating the need for a balance of throw weight (including the rate of fire) and the size of the projectile versus the typical laser intensity in use. Also, wouldn't the ablative effect push the projectile off course (doubly so for pulse lasers I imagine)?
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Post by fallingaggressively on Jan 24, 2018 17:46:10 GMT
Wonder if it means pulse lasers would be effective against radiators?
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Post by fallingaggressively on Jan 22, 2018 3:59:40 GMT
Looking at CoaDE capacitors, it’s looking like you can store about a mega joule per ton. So I figure a mega ton for a one second pulse on a gigawatt laser. Looking at the capacitors for my railguns, it seems to be right around 0.75 MJ/ton after the drop to 45% efficiency (using BOPP). So ~1.667 MJ/ton input charge. A gigawatt reactor is 9.49 tons; with accessories (radiators, laser turret(s) ) that should be around 50 tons of mandatory equipment. I'll consider 12 tons of capacitor; it seems reasonable here. 9 MJ storage (20 MJ input) gives you a pulse every 20 milliseconds, plus discharge time. The shorter your discharge time, the higher the intensity of your pulse. Ingame railguns suggest that firing times in the range of 0.1 ms are feasible, but that may not remain true for lasers. The result is that your peak power is about 90 times more than your constant draw laser, improving intensity by 90 times. This means you can do nonzero damage 9.54 times farther than a constant laser can. If you do choose to engage at this new distance, ignoring shock effects, your rate of drilling through material will be reduced to 1/200 of the constant laser (which is low, but nonzero, unlike the constant laser at this distance; materials can radiate away all heat below a certain intensity of laser). At the same distance as the constant laser, and still ignoring shock effects, the pulsed laser will drill at about 45% of the rate of the constant laser. Pulses induce shock effects, which improves the rate of damage (and provides a different damage mechanic that may necessitate otherwise sub-optimal armor choices in the defender). I don't have a way to quantify those, though. Using capacitors is probably not the best way to pulse a laser, but it should work. A 10x range increase for just 12 tons of capacitor! I can see why you want the game limitations fixed.
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Post by fallingaggressively on Jan 20, 2018 0:11:49 GMT
Elukka is spot on, but wether it is a pulse laser or not may still be a factor if there is significant differences in damage/utility and mass.
If I can get my head around the output formulas and methods of determining the mass of the laser, then I should be able to get an idea of which is better; a big blast laser or a number of long fire lasers.
Looking at CoaDE capacitors, it’s looking like you can store about a mega joule per ton. So I figure a mega ton for a one second pulse on a gigawatt laser. If I can find a reasonable gigawatt laser design I’ll use that for my first run guess work.
Again though, would a one second firing of a pulse laser be better or worse? I read Luke Campbell’s site and it was convincing about their penetration value.
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Post by fallingaggressively on Jan 19, 2018 19:23:08 GMT
So I did some more reading and I realized that the pulser is not a separate component so much as a different way of controlling the gain medium output. I think.
I have a lot more reading to do...
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Post by fallingaggressively on Jan 18, 2018 23:57:49 GMT
Awesome answers. Would a pulse laser still need the same kind of cooling or does the heat load average out as well? The beam generator needs the same cooling as it still produces a continous wave. The extra waste heat comes from the pulser. Oh I never realised! So the pulse mechanism is storing the low power beam energy rather than electrical energy being stored to fire a more powerful laser generator? Does the pulser have a mass ratio to the beam generator or anything for easy guesses to the mass of the whole assembly?
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Post by fallingaggressively on Jan 18, 2018 17:47:52 GMT
Awesome answers.
Would a pulse laser still need the same kind of cooling or does the heat load average out as well?
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Post by fallingaggressively on Jan 18, 2018 7:30:57 GMT
I did a little reading as I thought that too and as I understand it the pulse will shock the target material rather than burn it, but pulsing in this way is done with nanosecond pulses (femto in some cases. I'm not sure of the exact range) and it can be fired in this way as long as you apply power creating a drilling effect. The actual power usage gets averaged out over time, so you can have pulse lasers that are a continuously pulsed beam. Is there a minimum power threshold for a pulse laser to be effective in this way?
I'm mashing the terminology here I'm sure but I don't know how else to say it.
I do like the idea of the range v damage trade off.
I thought the inaccuracy was a collective of all the things that should affect it. Not just sensors but vibration etc. Is the value not moddable? I've not looked.
Thank you all for taking time to reply to this btw.
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Post by fallingaggressively on Jan 18, 2018 0:55:07 GMT
From what I seen with the coilgun capacitors, I’d have though you wouldn’t be able to store enough energy to make it better than more lasers?
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Post by fallingaggressively on Jan 17, 2018 20:19:38 GMT
I was wondering about some depictions of lasers as cannons with low rates of short pulse firing and the reason they would wind up being that way. From what I understand, simply making the laser larger would allow heat build up to be dealt with more easily which means ‘cannon’ style lasers wouldn’t be a worth while alternative to a larger sustained fire style.
So is there a good reason why you might go for a short fire laser over a long fire one? Are there real engineering difficulties cooling or even making larger lasers?
Just how handwavey is COADE’s engineering?
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Post by fallingaggressively on Sept 19, 2017 4:20:04 GMT
I quite like the idea of miniature versions of the capital ship as decoys, but I suspect getting the signature to match would be difficult. Especially in light of the fact that the ships signature changes as it manuvers and switches things on and off.
I was reading about how current seekers can also discriminate acceleration profiles that don't match the target. Would that be something you can put in if there is every chance you know nothing about a targets capability?
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Post by fallingaggressively on Sept 18, 2017 1:38:23 GMT
How costly, in terms of power, would it be to do the sort of multi-spectral jamming this Omni sensor would require? Any guesses?
I'm starting to get on-board the 'sensors should be modelled train'. It makes sense not to bother with the tiny elements as Qswitched says, but the composition of the suite would lead to interesting electronic warfare exploration. The rationale for not physically modelling it would be its arrayed nature giving it built in redundancy.
Maybe just model the active components (ie radar transmitter) that would have large bits.
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Post by fallingaggressively on Sept 17, 2017 3:08:19 GMT
When Enderminion said the radar could be behind armour I thought that multiple sensors in one package would be a prudent move but it does complicate the thought experiment considerably!
So then, how to spoof or jam a hardened multiband IR image spectrum analyser?
Raspberry?
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Post by fallingaggressively on Sept 16, 2017 18:34:43 GMT
Qswitched really did his homework. So the to make the sensor hardened, you narrow the band to shorter IR wavelengths which then require more energy to fry the sensor, but in doing so limits the ability of the sensor to pick a flare from a ship. I guess that means that sensor hardening, and how tough you can make them, is what will ultimately determine what seeker to use and what its defeat mechanism will be.
What is the cut-off point I wonder? And will creative design allow work-arounds. If I had both hard and soft sensors in the seeker then could I leave the soft one protected until the hardend one is confused? Fusing a shutter, or other protective system, shut with a laser also sounds like something that could be designed out.
Sufficient size nuke would still fry them wouldn't it?.
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