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Post by panarchist on May 10, 2017 0:36:13 GMT
"Go watch Planetes and think about what you said." I must admit, I've seen all of Planetes and I'm not a huge fan of it. I find it hard to believe that there was no mission past the asteroid belt at the start of the anime, even though there was at least one Lunar settlement with over 100,000 people. With that much daily traffic between the lunar cities and earth, it seems a bit odd that nobody would make a ship with a ton of reaction mass and and go to and from Jupiter in a relatively short period of time. I mean, fusion engines are confirmed to exist in the planetes universe and SSTOs seem rather common. I see no reason why it would take them so long. Also the ending to the show was rather disappointing, and there were several points where I was angry at the characters and their motivations, but it would spoil the anime if I went into it further. The best character in the show was the Lunarian Girl tbh fam. I know this is a super-late reply to this, but it's a point worth observing when talking "realism". Planetes had realism. The mission to Jupiter was using a Tandem Mirror Engine - Planetes was limited by current and reasonably near-future NASA/ESA technology. At that level, getting to the moon takes 3 days. Getting to the asteroids takesmore than a year. Jupiter takes 1-3 years at best. If you get resupplied once a week (or twice a month, even), it's easy to maintain multiple colonies. When resupply happens once or twice a decade, you're only going to have prestige missions like the one shown, no real infrastructure exists outside Earth orbit to support anything major.
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Post by panarchist on May 10, 2017 0:27:39 GMT
Patreon or some other crowdfunding would be great - or anything to buy qswitched a beer, coffee, whatever. I was a very late-stage beta tester, and I would PAY for CoaDE if Steam would let me, but it doesn't since I was comp'd a copy. I think it'd be great to have a convenient means to throw some cash to qswitched periodically. Especially given all the recent support/improvements/fixes. you could make a new account to buy it, put it under family share or something I could, or I could buy it for a friend and try to create another player for it - which I likely will do in the next paycheck or two. The comment is more about setting up something convenient and which allows people to send $1 or $5. (or $1 or $5 each month - like Patreon allows) That way you catch the people who have kids/loans/expenses/a mortgage who can easily pony up $5 but not $20.
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Post by panarchist on May 10, 2017 0:21:40 GMT
the Catapult Class Super Dreadnought, armed with FOUR 40,000 ton HV cannons (250 kmps), four 600Mw lasers, 24 40 kmps PDC cannons, 6 15g railguns (11kmps), and like ~20 3.3Mw railguns the cost is like 30 gigacredits. I'm pretty sure I could use one of those guns as a viable means of propulsion on just about any of my ships. I'm pretty sure the hull of that ship wouldn't be able to accommodate the recoil without cracking its keel. Too bad CoaDE doesn't currently take that into account. OTOH, that's a seriously big gun, and fun to see.
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Post by panarchist on May 10, 2017 0:14:49 GMT
I see two (non-exclusive) possibilities for continued support, that fit IMO a passion and niche project like CoaDE: - funding through something like patreon; - open-sourcing. qswitched have you considered any of these? Patreon or some other crowdfunding would be great - or anything to buy qswitched a beer, coffee, whatever. I was a very late-stage beta tester, and I would PAY for CoaDE if Steam would let me, but it doesn't since I was comp'd a copy. I think it'd be great to have a convenient means to throw some cash to qswitched periodically. Especially given all the recent support/improvements/fixes.
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Post by panarchist on Sept 5, 2016 16:55:23 GMT
Explanation in this blog post: childrenofadeadearth.wordpress.com/2016/07/20/sensors-and-countermeasures/Short version is that every other technique has a countermeasure and a counter-countermeasure, and so on. However, IR homing is the method that is always guaranteed to have a target because of the heat radiators. Cluster missiles can be somewhat created by adding a launcher to a missile (since you can put any system on any other system). It's a little clunky, but you can also somewhat make a multistage missile in this way too. Technically IR has a countermeasure in terms of flares, or any thermal source larger than the target. Does the game take into account sensor blinding from lasers?
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Post by panarchist on Sept 5, 2016 7:18:28 GMT
When playing Vesta, I decided I wanted to overwhelm the larger force with drones, because I kept getting very quickly annihilated by cannon fire and wanted to return the favor. So I modified the Escort Carrier like so: 2 of them came in just under the weight and cost limit, and gave me 200 Stinger Drones to work with. I just kept sending in 20 drone salvos right at the start at 700 mps to 1.2 kps targeting the aft radiators + propulsion on a single ship starting with the Fleet Carrier and working down in size from there. If you set the drones to fire even when out of range, they typically get a vessel kill 2 times out of 3 - first drone wave took out all engines and the reactors on the Fleet Carrier and left it without power. Eventually, one of their drone waves took out one of my carriers, but I finished out the mission with the other entirely undamaged. Completed the mission in under 4 hours. It was awesome.
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Post by panarchist on Sept 5, 2016 7:05:23 GMT
Beta Test feedback from another user:
I realized when getting ready to write this that I've been piloting virtual spaceships "realistically" for more than 10 years now - first with Orbiter (prior to the 2006 release), then KSP. So orbital mechanics are intuitive to me, for the most part. I really appreciate that the maneuver controls are similar to KSP, which has the most intuitive controls I've seen. Still, there are a couple of quirks, and some features which would make things easier:
- The Normal (Tangential) and Radial axes seem to work fine overall, but the Out-of-plane axis doesn't act as I'd expect it to. As a result, it's very difficult for me to match planes with a target, whereas in KSP or Orbiter I can do it no problem. - There's no markings to indicate a closed orbit's apses, or ascending/descending nodes (the latter contributing to the difficulty in matching planes mentioned above) - There doesn't appear to be a save button / option mid-mission, meaning if I have to close the game for any reason, all progress is lost.
Overall, the game is fantastic, already with an immense depth of play and richness of tactics - though brutal for the novice when first confronting projectile weapons. I've already put 35 hours in since Thursday afternoon, and I'm on the Neptune mission. Ceres was HARD, and Vesta was a bit challenging until I figured out a strategy to use which worked. (it was nowhere near as difficult for me as Ceres, since I could build custom ships to support my strategy) One thingI noticed was that since the game drops you into combat immediately on ships passing into weapons range, there's no chance to react to anything, even though on a "real" ship, there would be opportunities to make adjustments in the last few minutes leading up to combat. It would be helpful if there were a way to begin the tactical / combat phase a little earlier so that there is time for last-minute setup / positioning. (or if there were a 1 minute button alongside that 10 minute button) It would also be nice to have options for attitude control without thrust (like RCS or reaction wheels) so that a ship can broadside without altering vector.
Also, the positioning phase is in increments of 10 minutes up to 1 month, but combat is real-time (which makes sense), but it's not clear if the positioning phase is happening in real-time when a button has not been pushed. On certain actions, the maneuver countdown timers will increment with the time elapsed since the last calculation, but they don't update in real time, so it's not clear if time is always passing.
Other quirks / observations (mostly observations):
- Cargo bays apparently only have one size and can't be modified - No provision for docking vessels - Damage control / repairs? Doesn't seem to be any yet, although realistically a lot of things would not be able to be repaired - When designing fission reactors, there isn't a provision for cooling them with liquid sodium. I'd love to see that as an option, especially since there have been several working examples dating back more than 50 years - Would also like to see more radiator options - different architectures, different coolants - Can drones be recovered? Or merely refueled if the proper architecture is present? - As mentioned in other posts / threads, different options for mission kills, etc - Other limitations to combat, like a Delta-V floor (amount required to have left at the end of battle to "get home" or reach a tanker - the conditions would be set as part of the scenario victory conditions) - Would also love to see things to put into a cargo hold. (in addition to just "cargo", how about "ammo", "food / supplies" and "parts" - representing the amount of food, water and air, and spare parts for repairs and such, respectively) Ammo would be the packed version, not deployable and taking up a bit less space - adding food, parts, and ammo allows for strategic campaigns - Would also love to see scenarios which can be linked so that the remaining fuel, crew, vessel condition, food, parts, and ammo from the prior mission can be used as the starting conditions for the "linked" mission
Obviously, a bunch of those are "wish list" items, and some of that might be best served with mods - in the case of that last one, what it would need is some means for a modder to alter the starting conditions for a scenario, or to generate a new scenario programmatically.
Overall, this is definitely the most realistic space combat game ever created, and it's amazing how much is already in here, and how well it's working. I'm definitely looking forward to the launch so I can buy the finished product, and I'm really looking forward to the further evolution of the game and whatever else you decide to do with it!
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Post by panarchist on Sept 2, 2016 20:49:57 GMT
This is on the OSX version (0.5.1) - test system is mid-2014 MacBook Pro - Nvidia 2GB GPU, 2.5Ghz i7 processor, 16GB RAM.
When in the combat scene, if "M" is pressed while the focus is on an enemy unit, the application crashes to desktop.
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Post by panarchist on Sept 2, 2016 20:47:25 GMT
Concerning the Orion drive, it was very much on the cusp of feasible technologies. Everything is there except for certain aspects about the pulse unit. Side Note: in game, if you drop nukes behind your craft and detonate them manually, you can actually accelerate your craft that way. However, the efficiency is mediocre, because the detonation is omnidirectional. Also, the energy is transferred via photons rather than mass, which increases exhaust velocity and drops thrust to abysmal levels. The missing piece was how effective the pulse unit could transfer the energy into the channel filler and then into the propellant. From the papers on Orion that I found, they mentioned pulse unit would effectively channel the propellant into a cigar-shaped plasma jet which is... rather impressive. If you dump 10 million degrees K into a material, it will turn into plasma which will expand in every direction. By my calculations, with Tungsten, 10 million K will yield an exhaust velocity of about 100 km/s (it cools through space to the pusher plate, which is why the exhaust velocity is lower). The pulse unit is somewhat shaped like a nozzle to contain the plasma, but temperatures as high as 10 million K, the nozzle will have very little effect on the propellant as it leaves the pulse unit. The shape will be less a cigar and more of a giant, sprawling cone at best. And since the nozzle will vaporize in microseconds too, much of the energy will still be emitted spherically anyways. This goes back to a recurring problem that I've seen crop up a lot with many of these designs. To date, as far as I am aware, no nuclear detonation has ever been contained or controlled within a small container. At 10 million K, no material can withstand a nuclear detonation, and there is no data on how many microseconds something can stay together when a nuke detonates inside it. Regardless, a giant cone of plasma is still pretty feasible for a drive, providing you're okay with far lower efficiencies than what the papers predicted. I could model the plasma jet as less of a jet and more of a fat cone or hemisphere, and the rest would work. I am a little iffy on doing original calculations rather than taking calculations from peer reviewed papers. However, I have done it for one particular system in game. The explosive lens on the nuclear devices is completely classified, so the equations governing it's implosion is approximated based on various sources. I could do something similar in this case. With all that in mind, implementing the Orion drive is something I have mulled over a lot over the last two years working on this project. I will say that it will not be in the base game when it ships, however if I ever do further post-ship updates/patches/content, the Orion drive would be very high on the priority list. That was one of the benefits of Medusa - it would have captured more of the blast than the standard Orion drive. But Medusa is a lot more hypothetical. One of the things I thought interesting about Orion is off-axis detonations being used for steering. It'd be interesting to see how that panned out.
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Post by panarchist on Sept 1, 2016 20:57:11 GMT
It's important to note that Orion at least had a (non-nuclear) proof of concept demo, and the science and engineering behind is, at least in part, known. NSWR is almost entirely theoretical. It's got a major cool factor, but in the "real world", would any nation ever allow it to be tested?
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