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Post by subunit on Nov 14, 2016 20:59:41 GMT
That is if she is only on mars, she could be closer but still someplace away from the direct battle, for example in a AWACs ship trailing the main fleet. Not to hijack the thread, but command/EW/AWACS ships would be amazing- although I think it would require explicit sensor/telescope/antenna modelling and some kind of comms model to be satisfying. Not sure how much interest people have in designing Yagi-Uda backup antennas for an AWACS bird or whatever. Anyway, given the assumption that theres a cloud of surveillance microsatellites everywhere, I assume those are doing a lot of the comms work anyway- the Admiral could be on the nearest asteroid or planet and use the microsat network. One thing that would be very cool would be modelling diferrent microsat densities- you might have perfect knowledge and good comms near an orbital shipyard, but out in the orbital boonies it might take a couple of seconds for an order to get through, or you might miss someone changing vector until a few minutes later, or something like that.
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Post by subunit on Nov 14, 2016 20:31:32 GMT
- Knife-edge safety margin components should have some sort of cost or risk associated with quality control. Right now, running a rocket at a few pascals from burst pressure is one of the ways to keep it cheap!
- Material cost should include both rarity and cost of extraction/refinement. Elemental fluorine should be expensive stuff because of its strong bonds.
Really like the first idea- some risk of component failure would be very cool. I agree with the second idea in principle, but I think if you took this seriously (how much energy is actually expended to get your propellants? fissiles?) you would very quickly realise that the EROEI on the vast majority of fuels, propellants, etc in game is very low (< earthbound renewables and <<< earthbound fossil fuels) or actually negative and that there are probably only a very small number of locations in the solar system that can support industrial activity. Since the EROEI of "space fuels" is generically going to be much worse than oil, far more of the energy surplus produced by any CoaDE society is going to be dedicated to the necessities of life than a 20th century industrial society, and it's not really clear to me how you would maintain an orbital shipbuilding program under those conditions. I think the long and the short of it is that the game's economy as it stands allows you to do all kinds of neat stuff that, practically speaking, is at least not economically viable, and in many cases may simply be energetically impossible (getting fissiles for NTRs from mercury to jupiter using NTRs may well be a net energetic loss, depending on how you mine them and transport them). Which is all to say, I definitely think the economy should be moddable by scenario designers but I think a full model of extraction/refinement/transport/etc costs would probably show up too many of the handwavy assumptions in the base game and make a lot of the stock designs impossible.
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Post by subunit on Nov 14, 2016 20:20:58 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?
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Post by subunit on Nov 14, 2016 20:18:25 GMT
I was watching the stock Cutter fighting to defend itself from a flight of missiles yesterday and I had to wonder, "shouldn't the refraction from the resistojet's plumes be playing hell with the green lasers beam as they pass through it?" This would be a REALLY nice limit on the 1000km lasboats. Boom and zoom tactics against long-range weaponry often requires the defender to be thrusting throughout the tactical phase of the intercept in order to put sufficient distance between themselves and the B&Z fleet to avoid getting ganked on the merge. If thrusting made lasers less effective, you'd have to think a lot harder about thruster configuration and defensive thrusting.
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Post by subunit on Nov 14, 2016 20:15:07 GMT
This looks like a bug. The shots should be biased towards the outer edge, but some still should be in the center. I could get an even distribution with an increased dispersion at extreme ranges, but why would the shots be biased to the outer edge? Logically, there should be an even distribution, or at least one would think so. I think it depends on the system. All of the actually-existing slugthrowers I've used tend to string rounds in patterns that are related to the characteristic of the system that is producing the deviation from the point of aim- barrel or stock flex for instance will string rounds along the axis of the flex. I don't know exactly what's being represented in CoaDE, but I suspect some deviation is applied to every round in a random direction (I don't think the guns are modelled so precisely that you could say anything useful about what pattern a particular slugthrower should produce)- so at long range rounds will tend to cluster around a circle whose radius is defined by the median deviation value.
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Post by subunit on Nov 14, 2016 20:03:09 GMT
I wonder why there aren't any escape pod type mechanics in the game. Why don't we take prisoners? Think about it, every crewman in a spaceship is trained on several fields. They're now very far away from home. They could've died, but they escaped before their ship was destroyed. They are now POW, and can be put to work on the field they trained for. Or even have them change sides? One thing the game doesn't take much into account is how expensive would be to get people into warships. You need well trained individuals who are willing to risk all these things we've mentioned. I can easily picture all the major powers agreeing to a never destroy an escape pod and capture all prisoners rule, if only to encourage the few individuals who can take care of a ship to actually participate in battle. Boarding is at least implicitly represented a couple of times in the campaign, so it definitely happens. My guess is that the overall number of actual crewmembers on fighting vessels for the various factions numbers in the low thousands, so I think you're right that the personnel themselves are quite valuable. I would really like an explicit boarding representation- this could be a couple of little EVA men models that move from a Marine Pod on the boarder's ship to the armor of the ship being boarded, then traverse around the surface of the armor until they find apertures and start moving along the inside of the outer armor till they get to the crew pod, where they stack up and board, and some roll is made for the actual boarding action. This would give low- (no?)-power slugthrowers a much more valuable combat role (sure you've knocked out my main power... but can your marines get across in the face of my machinegun nests??). If we wanted to get really crazy, permit inside-armor weapons, like arming crew pods with firing port weapons... then the marines would really have a rough time of it, and you might have to get them to follow the interior components for cover rather than skating around on the exterior armor.
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Post by subunit on Nov 14, 2016 9:37:48 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?
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Post by subunit on Nov 14, 2016 9:30:27 GMT
So, about that coilgun... A 3.09 kg missile launched at 5.88 km/s would have a kinetic energy of 53.4 MJ. Launching one every 119 ms means an output of 448 MW just in kinetic energy, from a gun that has power use of 150 kW. It seems like a physics-defying coilgun? Is there a consensus on whether coilguns are still broken? I've been avoiding them since -- but I sure would like to be able to send projectiles that fast, on a reasonable budget. I think coilguns are still broken. I've created a successful anti-lasboat boom & zoom craft that can tank 6 to 8 1GW lasers with ~ 4km/s closure rate across 1000km of engagement range, and then spit 6km/s nukes at the lasboats from within 100km as it passes, using a modified version of the above coilgun. I made it way smaller so it can actually track targets and I got rid of the propulsion on the nukes (you can't do terminal guidance on a missile with a 6-10 km/s closure rate and only 1km/s dV with not a lot of acceleration) and inserted a 5kg DU flak bomb ahead of the nuke instead. Works great, but I really don't think the coilgun should work as well as it does- thing runs at 100kW, all the power goes to the turret and loader:
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Post by subunit on Nov 14, 2016 9:21:31 GMT
Having the resources be restricted based on location is a good concept, but if you are essentially making your own campaign, you can simply restrict the allied/enemy fleets to specific designs. This reduces player choice somewhat, but it is an option that would be much easier to implement (already done in the campaign). Would be awesome to be able to create custom campaigns. Would greatly extend the replayability and lifetime of the game. 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.
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Post by subunit on Nov 11, 2016 0:04:51 GMT
the boat was using a 10MW sapphire lasers set to have a 30km engagement range for testing purposes, it was a fairly thickly armoured(20cm hard armour+2m aerogel) ship I use to test missiles on. so a 4MC drone took on a 200MC warship and won 30km engagement range is very short, so I tried against a 4x1GW titanium-sapphire violet laser boat at 1000km. I put a modified version of your coilgun on the nose of each of 2 capships intercepting at ~2.5 km/s. As soon as the violet laser lit me up I ignored range on the coilgun and spammed the mini-nuke missiles. Overwhelmed the poor lasboat with ~300 missiles before getting through the lasers and ripping the guy to shreds. Your weapon is an effective capital standoff gun- I'm using much larger/denser reaction wheels to get some kind of tracking going on the turret and the majority of my power needs for the gun are just for that, but it works great as a nose turret on a boom & zoom setup.
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Post by subunit on Nov 10, 2016 18:20:08 GMT
I just discovered something awesome! <snip> Hi- what was the engagement range of the lasers set to? When did you start firing the gun? If you have to get inside 250km, you will still have difficulty against 1Mm engagement range lasboats I think. Muzzle velocity on the coilgun is very good though. Could work great for boom&zoom on lasboats depending on the dV of the host craft and orbital environment.
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Post by subunit on Nov 8, 2016 19:22:39 GMT
That would explain things . Thanks for making this thing, which will inevitably destroy my marriage, by the way
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Post by subunit on Nov 8, 2016 18:58:02 GMT
Well, the bursting charge of the Mark 8 shell is 18.55 kg. I actually cannot fit the full mass of the shell into an explosive payload, so I am using a 1000 kg payload, and an additional 205.5 kg shell in the cannon "under" it. And that will work with any "shell" material that has a tensile strength of at least 256 MPa. In general I think the system works OK- the fact that you got a weapon thats pretty close to the earthbound equivalent means the sim is working pretty well. I think with some tweaking to the payload stuff, maybe editable slug composition (m855 green tip has tungsten penetrators, necessary for my AR drones ), barrel friction and other things added in, things would be pretty close to perfect. I am a little surprised that simulated earthbound guns tend to be worse than their real equivalents given no air resistance and what seems to be no barrel friction. I think the problem might be nitrocellulose propellants? I don't know.
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Post by subunit on Nov 8, 2016 18:32:05 GMT
Would a shell made of, say, zirconium copper and with a payload consisting of a barrel of whatever the TNT load of the shell should be, survive the propellant detonation?
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Post by subunit on Nov 8, 2016 17:39:13 GMT
Likewise barrel wear isn't going to be simulated properly. Some stainless or cromoly barrel isn't going to feed 50k rounds without destroying the rifling and losing accuracy, requiring a change. Is rifling necessary in space? Doesn't rifling only make the bullet more aerodynamic, something that doesn't matter in space? Rifling stabilises the projectile. If barrel wear was simulated, rifling would have a purpose, I think- to stabilise the projectile after your barrel crown has been melted by a 20000 rpm magdump
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