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Post by subunit on Nov 15, 2016 7:58:53 GMT
I don't even use railguns anyways since my sole focus is microdrones. You know what's more broken than microdrones? Microdrones with RAILGUN or COILGUN. Practically instant death to any fleet that doesn't have gigawatt laser. The fluff indicates that debris in militarily relevant orbits is swept by laser brooms, no? Most CoaDE fleets (all invasion fleets expecting to set up shop for months around a body they just blew up a bunch of crap around) will have big lasers on engineering ships at the very least.
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Post by subunit on Nov 15, 2016 5:57:27 GMT
This is a cool idea. What are you using for your frontal armor? amimai boron-graphite aerogel-boron-amorphous carbon-diamond armor composition and...my guns. Yes, I used my guns as extra armor, laser just LOVE to try to destroy guns futilely. By futile, I meant it's because my drones has 20 guns, so it will take a longggg time before my drone will run out of guns to shoot. Here one example. Super multi gun drones are a joke when I first made them but somehow they become viable after laser become actually lethal again. I might switch out diamond for graphite though, after someone mentioned that it might actually work well against laser. What's the turret armored with? I'll have to try this specific configuration- whenever I had a nose mount gun and intercepted a laser boat, the laser just burnt through the center gun and cored the thing out. TBH, the AI should probably target armor breaches with its lasers over a new turret.
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Post by subunit on Nov 15, 2016 5:30:57 GMT
The short and fat set up certainly works better for my drones. I think it's due to my multi-fuel tanks structure. Where in a long and slim drone, once the laser pierce in, it might ruptures all fuel tanks. But in a shrot and fat, the laser need to cut through the entire front just to get all the fuel tanks. It might caused the drones to get shot more easily, but since when is kinetic and missile the main danger to a drones? Though the only issue I have with this is that my missile now looks like giant ice-cream cone. This is a cool idea. What are you using for your frontal armor?
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Post by subunit on Nov 15, 2016 5:25:29 GMT
Is it possible to make a black box weapon that just irradiates enemy crew? I'm thinking a Traveller meson gun. If it has to be physically plausible and the mesons can only go a couple of meters before decaying and killing the enemy crew, I'm ok with that. My crews just need to listen to Kenny Loggins on the merge.
e: actually a bomb pumped x-ray laser might work? Is there a way to make a bomb a power source?
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Post by subunit on Nov 15, 2016 5:23:31 GMT
Though I have to admit - the idea of using thrusters of something with a WILD refractive index to foul up an inbound laser would be amazingly funny if by some miracle the physics on it actually worked. I remember Traveller having "sandblaster" (basically really fine silica flak to break up a laser beam) countermeasures. I don't know if these things would work but if some kind of effective vapor or very fine flak or something could affect the laser beam that would be pretty cool.
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Post by subunit on Nov 15, 2016 4:08:42 GMT
I'm not really talking about modding the stock campaign as much as I am talking about putting strategic constraints on players designing their own fleet in the sandbox (I assume that you would normally provide a suggested fleet composition for a scenario anyway). If part of the game's answer to "what would space warfare 'really' look like" includes polities at war having access to the same resources, at the same prices, irrespective of their demand for those materials, my guess is that we're going to arrive at a handful of design-archetypes that are consistently optimal choices for everyone. This is both sort of uninteresting and has nothing at all to do with the actual material and institutional constraints on shipbuilding or warfighting. I think being able to modify the constraints on fleet customisation would allow for much more interesting answers to the question the game is posing. Agreed. It was mentioned in one of the missions that the goal was to secure or safeguard fissil materials for the war effort. The way we throw nukes and NTRs around a hot war would burn up available material pretty quick I would think. Ammo stocks is something I didn't even think of, but yeah, for sure- one of the most significant logistical problems that crops up when you study hypothetical conflicts between modern nation states is that stocks of conventional ordnance would almost certainly be depleted within days or weeks.
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Post by subunit on Nov 15, 2016 4:06:06 GMT
This is a good point. As it is I think lasers are going to end up pretty dominant and missiles and drones generally wont have enough mass to mount enough armor to close inside their engagement envelope. It would be nice to know if this is an artefact of the way they're modelled, like the way coilguns currently spit 100 nukes/second etc. 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. Most of my time in-game is spent trying to defeat GW laser designs, and I don't think they're impervious, but they're REALLY good. Coilguns are currently REALLY good because they're broken. This is obvious. I merely agree that it is less obvious how we would determine whether the lasers are broken.
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Post by subunit on Nov 15, 2016 4:04:12 GMT
7.62x54r* LOL- can you tell i only mess with NATO?
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Post by subunit on Nov 15, 2016 4:03:06 GMT
<snip> Makes me wonder what kind of society would be able to generate masters-degree-level educated people with near fanatical zealotry levels of nationalism to them in the quantities needed to prosecute a war on the scale shown? THIS. All the this. My argument comes down to, if crew is well educated masters-degree-and-such, it makes less sense they'd be fanatical zealots. Where do you get these people from? How do you create these people? Doesn't their education include history and such? Actually, the game actually makes it clear everybody knows it's war and we're doing whatever we can and we're desperate, so I guess that answers that: desperation. Kinda sad. On the other hand, we meet a lot of bloodthirsty people, or those who are trying to make a difference, so it rather looks like a combination of desperation and sadism? 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.
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Post by subunit on Nov 14, 2016 22:54:09 GMT
I use separate ammo for all my ammo-based weapons. Putting the ammo in-line with the rest of the components generally adds less total volume (which in turn keeps cross-section and armor area down), and once the first ammo bin is placed I can keep adding to the cluster until it hits the cap of 20 or reaches the same radius as its neighboring components, which allows me to pack a lot of ammo into as little space as possible. For ammo that is an explosion hazard, there's the added benefit that all of the ammo can be gathered into one heavily-armored section. 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...
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Post by subunit on Nov 14, 2016 22:27:48 GMT
You could always chamber up to 7.62x51 if you like the Russian stuff. The extra propellant might help. Mosin broadside..
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Post by subunit on Nov 14, 2016 21:09:28 GMT
I love putting small arms on spaceships. If AK is ineffective, you need more AK.
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Post by subunit on Nov 14, 2016 21:06:00 GMT
Someone needs to model some AVT ships/drives. Should be straightforward except for the Drive, which would have to be black boxed, but they have stats on thrust/ISP/mass etc so that should be easy enough... Yeah, I'd like to see how the AVT ships stack up in CoaDE.
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Post by subunit on Nov 14, 2016 21:04:49 GMT
I think it'd be less on the fence about it if it were easier to check lasers for flouting the laws of physics. It's fairly trivial to determine muzzle energy and see something amiss, but is it feasible for a 10GW laser to have an M-squared of 3 or less? Huh... I don't even begin to know how to check that. This is a good point. As it is I think lasers are going to end up pretty dominant and missiles and drones generally wont have enough mass to mount enough armor to close inside their engagement envelope. It would be nice to know if this is an artefact of the way they're modelled, like the way coilguns currently spit 100 nukes/second etc.
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Post by subunit on Nov 14, 2016 21:01:45 GMT
Sorry, I'm still giggling over the lithium water propellant tanks someone mentioned a few weeks back.
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