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Post by subunit on Nov 21, 2016 20:43:32 GMT
Manned ships would retain initiative and there is no good way to model a smart crew that is simply out of communication.
I agree with what you say except on this point- just don't allow an OOC ship to get new orders from the admiral until they reestablish comms. RtW does the same thing- ships will carry on with their last order, defending and attacking as appropriate, until they're back in touch with a flag officer.
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Post by subunit on Nov 21, 2016 19:38:59 GMT
An excellent examination, obviously there are some easy counter arguments like missile Dv being equal to ships at times and the relative bonus of absolute stand off with a missile focused design. Generally though i think you expanded nicely on the same point i made earlier: Overspecialisation, even a supposedly superior one is very temperamental in regards to the irregularity of actual warfare were conditions are never going to be 100% guaranteed according to plan. Missile boats are definitely going to be the right choice some of the time. In RtW, you should pursue torpedoes as the Japanese- you just shouldn't expect that building your fleet around the engagement envelope of one weapon to be a panacea, and you shouldn't expect your torpedoes or the crews using them to be any good until you've been pursuing that strategy, institutionally, for 10 years or so. You also will have to deal with the reality that fleets are called on to do a lot more than blow up enemy ships- coastal patrol, colonial policing, etc., they need regular maintenance, parts break and overheat (DDs are fast as hell but don't expect to sprint for more than a couple of hours- bearings overheat). If you have to plan for even some of these considerations, the "best fleet" thing goes out the window I think. It depends on political requirements as much as anything else. If you only have one body to defend, and you can turtle, lasersats or kinetic kill sats could be a trivial cheap counter to missile swarms. If you've got to attack miisile-happy belters across 10 tiny bodies, maybe not.
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Post by subunit on Nov 21, 2016 18:51:00 GMT
ah aurora, best source of more or less realistic simulations of space logistics and combat, in other words the fine art of lobbing hundreds of ever more complicated missile systems at each other across Gm ranges Lol "more or less" eh? Last time I checked Aurora's sensor model consists of drawing a circle around a point "maneuvering" on a 2d plane, there are aliens and fantasy tech, and there's no real attempt to do any kind of physical simulation at all. It's the CMANO of space sims, except where CMANO is a glorified Harpoon database made by people with security clearances, Aurora appears to be an inventory management database that has been hacked to "simulate" some bored software engineer's science-fantasy headcanon universe . Neither one contains a genuine systems-level simulation of the platforms being represented. CoaDE does. Both CMANO and Aurora resolve events with hard-threshold die rolls, where the thresholds are chosen by the designer's intuition. CoaDE resolves events with models from IEEE papers, cited in game. I really find no value in looking to Aurora for lessons on what CoaDE should be doing. If we're going to compare CoaDE to "playing" database-sims, we should really be comparing it to Rule the Waves (RtW), which is a FAR more playable sim than either CMANO or Aurora and FAR more accurately represents the actual challenges involved in implementing the kinds of strategies you're talking about. For those of you who haven't played RtW, the player is basically the Fleet Admiral of one of the major powers of the turn-of-the-20th-century world, who starts with an (optionally) historically-informed budget, research base, and legacy fleet, and proceeds through a career from ~1900-1930, if you don't get fired before then. The period is therefore the golden age of battleships and the craft you'll be dealing with range from early submarines and torpedo motorboats to super-dreadnoughts- here's the ship design dialog to give an idea of how it works: So, the "all missile fleet" idea is conceptually equivalent in RtW to going after a torpedo-heavy fleet that performs hit-and-run torpedo barrages, and is probably trained to do so at night (otherwise your fleet is going to get gunned to death by someone who's trained in night gunnery and has a BC or two to blockade you with). The player might choose Japan as an appropriate starting power, as they have slight advantages in night attack training and torpedo research. If you go ahead and pursue such a strategy, what you very quickly find is the following: 1) A fleet admiral pursuing a coherent strategy by building ships around a particular engagement profile (torpedo attack) immediately faces multiple limits:-shipbuilding resources (can I build that 25kt torpedo cruiser at the local yard? Or do I have to get it built in England? Am I likely to go to war with them any time soon?) -shipbuilding budget (I have x$/yr to use with my y kt/yr build capacity at whatever yard I've chosen to build the ship) -crew training/experience (I have to actually teach my crews to do things like attack with torpedos at night, and they're not going to be effective right after the shakedown cruise- I need to plan for survivable engagements in both my ship designs and my strategic thinking so my crews get good at torpedo attacks) -research/industrial base (The designs I can build aren't completely arbitrary- complicated/expensive designs are likely to get screwed up if I'm not building them somewhere with a long history of building those vessels, I need to have particular doctrines and technologies assimilated organizationally before I can deploy them- there are some historical limits here which aren't relevant to CoaDE, but you get the idea) -intelligence (I may be able to estimate how long my proposed shipbuilding program will take at some budget and building out shipyard capacity at some rate, but I probably can't estimate how rival powers will react or how quickly they can deploy counters) 2) Limits are malleable, but only to a certain extent-you can push hard for increased naval budgets, at the expense of social stability and international tension. Sure, the warhawk party is in power now, but when the bread lines start getting longer and the proles are still seeing shiny new torpedo boats being churned out at Sasebo, you better start thinking about your job, if not your life. And if you really think the Russians are going to let you complete your shipbuilding program before they take a poke at you to see just how effective Japanese torpedo designs actually are, you're in for a surprise. In other words, you are as likely to be fired as you are to see the apotheosis of your strategic masterplan; if you go to war at all it will be with a hodgepodge of old and new designs. -you can specialise in some particular technology, doctrine, etc., but it's expensive to do so and there are significant opportunity costs (if you later decide you need to specialise in all-centerline-big-gun designs, you have a lot of catching up to do) -you can always gather more intelligence, but spies are eventually caught, and usually right when you're riding that balance between high naval budgets and international tension. -you can have smart designs, but if you really need to switch to oil burners to shave that 10% off powerplant weight, and you haven't got any oil..? Well, for some things, there is no substitute. 3) When the rubber hits the road, specialisation is brittle and expensive
-all-torpedo-boats sounds great right up until you have dig a fleet out of a mined harbour with a torpedo net and a similarly-equipped MTB screen- defensive countermeasures are often trivially cheap compared to the massive organisational effort of pursuing an effective highly specialised capship fleet. -building counters into ship designs often results in a more well-rounded, robust ship at a lower overall cost than building the specialised attacker design does. Eg. torpedo bulges are a bit more mass (think spaced armor in CoaDE) but they make the ship beefier against all manner of waterline attacks, harder to sink, etc. When the AI begins to build counters, they may be able to deploy the designs both quicker & cheaper ("torpedo bulge" does not require a massive engineering effort- "long lance torpedo" does) and end up with a better, more flexible, more well-rounded fleet when the war begins than your (inevitably incomplete) shipbuilding program has produced at that point. Really I think if CoaDE took these things seriously we would be able to stop having a lot of these debates about whether this or that fleet composition is better- what matters is what kind of fleet you can build under the constraints of an unstable political situation domestically and abroad, that will deal with all manner of unforseen contingencies, and a fleet that makes sense as the USTA isn't necessarily going to be a good choice for the IR or RFP any more than a good 1910s Japanese fleet looks like a good 1910s American fleet. Different constraints, different challenges, different requirements.
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Post by subunit on Nov 21, 2016 18:06:16 GMT
Like wise secondary counter measures i have thought up but are not directly modelled in game could include: Electronic hacking, think about it, unless every missile is a hard box and pre wired the potential electronic vulnerabilities can be present. A hacking missile would not need to even be in constant range, simply upload to a single missile in a stack and let it work it's way through the rest. Alternatively if the missile receives back up guidance from a ship, that guidance could be falsified and intercepted. MMMMmmm. Imagine if there was an EW model in game. Hacking missiles would be so good. Even just "sparklers" with telescope-blinding lasers, little EPFCG submunitions, and a bunch of chaff and flares, fly a couple of them in with a missile swarm?
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Post by subunit on Nov 21, 2016 17:57:43 GMT
Speaking of ammo stocks, wouldn't it be nice to have an attachable loader module to go with ammo bays? It would make that fleet/drone play even better. Since we're talking operational/strategic scales, this could be a legitimate source of cost savings for an op. Pack just enough ammunition and fuel for a one-kill flyby, rendezvous with the mothership and repeat. There's almost certainly some armor-weight savings, and what ship wouldn't want the extra armor of a 100k round drum of tungsten slugs? That's how I've been developing my boom & zoom anti-laser tactics in the tactical mode. I haven't optimised for dV with decane engines and so on, and I don't really need to because I bring a freighter a long and usually have them refuel in along the burn. This is one thing that the strategic engine could benefit from- more attention to the state of supply ships. For instance, you can build a refueler with an absurdly slow pump and get an instant, complete, multi-kiloton refuel with 15 minutes to go on an intercept even though if you sat around in the tactical mode it would take days. Similar with launchers. Ammo loaders as you suggest are a fantastic idea and should be in to really make the one-kill-flyby + supply fleet formula truly deadly. But the properties of those systems should matter- you want to refuel or load ammo on a high closure rate intercept, you better have built the thing to pump fuel/transfer ammo quickly.
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Post by subunit on Nov 21, 2016 17:50:18 GMT
Thanks folks. Good to have a board full of people with some of the same ruts worn in their brains. I was looking for "Dawson's Christian" the other day but couldn't for the life of me remember the name of the song. acatalepsy's got a good pick too- Bomber suits the campaign all too well.
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Post by subunit on Nov 16, 2016 9:16:42 GMT
low acceleration and low Dv, 10/10 would outrun. The design posted above has thrice the Dv for 1/4 of the cost They're called propellant tankers, man. A boom and zoom fleet doesn't go anywhere without a tanker. Anyway, I'm using mostly stock-type components, so it's nothing fancy, and only designed to kill that particular lasboat as piloted by the AI. The AI doesn't seem to maneuver against intercepts so I have no idea how I would test anything else. The point is that you can tank large numbers of 1GW lasers across 1000km if your armor configuration hides the modules and rotation dissipates heat. I'm not claiming my stuff is anything special- I'm sure someone else has a much better design that counters GW laser sniping even more reliably and at higher powers.
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Post by subunit on Nov 16, 2016 8:04:53 GMT
The Atomic Rockets link thorneel provided mentions that; it suggests all you're doing is spending a bunch of energy to put crappy armor with holes in it in space that could be better used on the hull.
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Post by subunit on Nov 16, 2016 6:29:48 GMT
The way to counter them is closure rate and rotation. Get an intercept that passes within the engagement envelope of your lasboat killer at 5+ km/s, roll it all the way in on the merge (so the AI can't concentrate on any one armor spot), and the laser will not have enough time to kill all your guns. 1000 km divided by 5 km/s gives you 200 seconds. Even when silica aerogel was broken, 2 cm of it on a turret would melt in a split second under "just" 2 GW of violet lasers. You can't even armor weapon barrels decently, you can't have radiators made of silica aerogel, and even then one can just target engines and wait a few seconds to try for a crew kill You don't expose your turrets or your rads on the merge, you hide behind your armored nosecone: This is my current B&Z craft- admittedly the coilgun is broken, but you could probably replace it with something else and achieve the same effect. I have used two of these guys, with the 4 guns around the neck and all gear hidden behind the nosecone: to gank 5 of these broadside orbital brooms: with a 4 km/s intercept. Lost I think 3/8 total of the guns doing it but all 5 of the lasboats were literally chainsawed in half by NEFPs through the front armor. By the time the target is visible to the ring of 4 coilguns around the Spad's "throat" behind the nosecone, it's within 100km or so, and as it's spinning each turret in turn engages targets that are in their 1/4 of the sky. Works good, YMMV depending on what you're shooting up.
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Post by subunit on Nov 16, 2016 6:18:48 GMT
Ya. For a good example of how not to arrange your ammo bins- the stock Hiveship has 4 nuke mags placed very precisely around the ship's wasp waist... Well, in all fairness, the nukes, as far as I can tell, would only really be a problem in that the propellant might get lit off by sustained laser fire, which isn't likely to set off the nuclear warheads as anything other than a fizzle. Granted, that would still fuck the ship up something fierce, because you've got several kilos of high explosive going boom surrounded by lots of shrapnel behind all of your armor, but that's better than having your nukes light-off in full on detonations. Although, really, I question the use of conventional guns to propel ordinance in the first place. Honestly, all of the Nippon Prime designs seen in the game that we can be relatively certain are purely Nippon Prime designs seem rather extraordinarily terrible. The Cutter and Corsair both have utterly fracking pointless water resistojet RCS, along with using water as the fuel for their NTRs, which is a terrible choice because water produces terrible exhaust velocity compared to even decane, and is actually almost as bad if not worse than LH2/LOX chemical rocket motors, which leaves me wondering why Nippon Prime even bothered. The Hiveships are also horrible designs, because they have to close to suicide range to employ their most dangerous weaponry, which makes them functionally useless in any fight with someone packing coilguns or railguns. Sure, they have railguns of their own, but a tiny number of them, which are practically guaranteed to get sniped by anyone with lasers followed by the Hiveship being ignored until every other enemy ship is dead. Target a hiveship's cannons with a 1GW laser at 1000km. The first magazine will detonate in seconds, usually chain-detonating the others and splitting the ship in two. I think this happens every time. A wider range of outcomes for magazine cookoffs would maybe make this less of a liability though.
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Post by subunit on Nov 15, 2016 19:16:23 GMT
I wouldn't be so sure. Lasers are good, but I wouldn't expect each and every tactical consideration to be solved by GW lasers. If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Lasers are OP, no way around it. Choice between module-dooming accuracy at 1000km (large mirror) and ability to ablate several m 2 of armour in a few seconds (small mirror), limited cost and limited mass (less than 4 tons and 45kc for a 1GW laser), 100% accurate and impossible to avoid, dodge, or mitigate... Only downside is the massive amount of radiators required. Even before 1.0.7 lasers were disgustingly good, now that silica aerogel is fixed there is no way to counter them. The way to counter them is closure rate and rotation. Get an intercept that passes within the engagement envelope of your lasboat killer at 5+ km/s, roll it all the way in on the merge (so the AI can't concentrate on any one armor spot), and the laser will not have enough time to kill all your guns.
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Post by subunit on Nov 15, 2016 19:11:01 GMT
An ability to "button up" rads would add a large array of tactical options. Maybe you could eject the sinks in an emergency as an ersatz flare? Or vent them. "Button up" would be a great strategy against nuclear missiles, but I also would like to include here an optional component that would close the engines with armored plates and bind all of it to a button. An armored bell around the rockets would be super useful. I'd throw one on my boom&zoom craft so if they screw up the merge, they stop getting lasers up the unprotected butt on egress.
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Post by subunit on Nov 15, 2016 19:09:10 GMT
On the other hand, has anyone experimented with "sandcaster" microgram flak to sand off anti-laser aerogel armour? Does the material ablated from armor "hang around" in the simulation? That would be super cool.
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Post by subunit on Nov 15, 2016 18:54:05 GMT
Let's see here... babysit some computers for 6-8 months while being sterilised by the 4GW nuke plant 20 meters away, enter combat for 60 seconds and either have the ship break up and spin off into space (hoping I get killed by Gs before asphyxiated), get burned alive 1000km away by lasers, or just get gibbed by railguns. Well... what's the pay like? Decent, but there's unfortunately nothing to spend it on. LOL- good point. The typical shore leave blandishments available to sailors are somewhat fewer and farther between in CoaDE, hey?
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Post by subunit on Nov 15, 2016 18:52:31 GMT
Technical education does nothing to instill virtue. Most of the architects of the worst atrocities of the last hundred years have been highly educated. There are all kinds of people with graduate degrees and no moral compass, there are all kinds of people with graduate degrees and fanatical commitments to particular socio-political formations (visit your local econ department). I don't really see a difference between what's happening in CoaDE and recent history. Agreed. Though in current society it's impossible to get a purely technical education. The best public college in my country has a 1 year general education course before focusing on technical education, for instance. Propaganda machine and war needs would probably void this kind've thing though. Just hard to put myself in a to-be soldier. Is conscription a thing? The requirements just seem so high... How many people are actually in the military anyway in CoaDE? Perhaps all this is offset by the actual amount of people in the military being so low that you can actually get enough of the right amount of people I guess it depends on whether they have to actually occupy any of the colonies- I don't think the "navies" are very large, but any ground component would probably have to be decently sized. Out of curiousity, are you in Europe? I was able to complete my BSc, MSc, and PhD coursework without ever being required to take a single philosophy, epistemology, history of science, etc. class. If I didn't have good friends and time to read stuff outside work, I'd be just another handle-cranker who sees everything through the lens of their equipment. Many "good" schools in North America are like this now- you can complete a technical education without ever having any meta-knowledge about what you're doing, the significance and limitations of empiricism, etc.
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