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Post by subunit on Nov 8, 2016 9:22:46 GMT
Bullets deform in the barrel to some extent. Pressure behind them exceeding their yield strength on soft metals shouldn't be an issue, though it could shatter brittle materials. That being said, I don't know if it would impact the game (why would you shoot soft bullets against armored targets?) 5.56 NATO has special effects on both commies and greys, common foes in outer space. I.. have no doubt these special properties will fall out of the simulation... as its vital fluids are purified. Barrel yield strength seems really weird that it is off by a factor of 6. That sort of compression on a tube should normally be a buckling failure mode, based entirely on stiffness. I am now somewhat curious the game calculates it. On overall impact, that one does lead to oversized barrels... Lack of projectile friction against the barrel is an interesting one, but I would be tempted to ask how tightly the barrel should squeeze the projectile? On conventional guns it needs to be tight enough to seal and guide. Do you have a better idea? No that sounds about right. The guns in game look to be smoothbore so the friction need not be large, but it should have enough of an effect to show up in the module editor I think.
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Post by subunit on Nov 8, 2016 8:50:30 GMT
Amazed by how responsive these fixes are. Not in changelist: engagement range on lasers now maxes out at 1000 km
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Post by subunit on Nov 8, 2016 4:44:20 GMT
You don't have to deal with atmospheric pressure pushing the bullet back in after a sufficient amount of expansion. That said, barrel friction appears to be missing indeed. If barrel friction is missing, heat from that friction is also likely missing. Kinda leads me back to one of my theories on the ludicrous cyclic rates 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.
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Post by subunit on Nov 8, 2016 2:21:07 GMT
You don't have to deal with atmospheric pressure pushing the bullet back in after a sufficient amount of expansion. That said, barrel friction appears to be missing indeed. Yeah, I think it's a missing barrel friction term. That volume of nitrocellulose should be completely combusted after a couple of meters, beyond that barrel length shouldn't help much and should eventually stop the round dead. Shouldn't have much. H&K's G11 fired a round with broadly similar characteristics and without needing any kind of crazy barrel reinforcement or shattering its slugs. One thing that might help is being able to jacket slugs.
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Post by subunit on Nov 8, 2016 1:25:05 GMT
OK, so I went to make some common small arms calibers in the designer and got stopped dead at my first attempt to make an AR-15: I am here representing a typical 20" AR-15 barrel firing a 62 grain 5.56mm NATO round. I have calibrated the propellant grain size to achieve the normal muzzle velocity of 5.56 from a barrel of this type. Bizarrely, neither lead nor copper projectiles survive the propellant combusting, and the barrel doesn't stand up to the force. I am willing to admit that if you ran an AR-15 at 18000 rounds per minute or whatever, you would damage the barrel. I therefore set about finding the optimum barrel for this system to engage at proper spacecraft ranges and settled on a length of.... 100m: Well, I don't think you can put a 5.56 NATO round in a 100m barrel and achieve 1.35 km/s muzzle velocity.. can you? That just seems silly. Am I doing something stupid here?
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Post by subunit on Nov 7, 2016 7:08:26 GMT
Hey Jonen. After losing Vesta Overkill a couple times with missile duels, I decided to go for a CIWS bird and ended up with the following design as a system defence craft: I had to try a couple of times but I was able to win the Vesta mission with this and some support craft. My biggest frustration was engagement range- I couldn't understand why I was engaging drones w/ my green lasers right outside their gun engagement envelope. I thought I told them to charge those things.. I read your thread and made the suggested (should be stock) engagement range upgrade to the green laser. I also opened the default aperture to around 70 or 80cm, I think. In any case, the Blackguard went from "okay" to "GINSU DEATH WARRIOR" overnight. The Venus mission with the Nipponese was hilariously easy. 3 Blackguards literally sliced and diced (every single ship split multiple times) the entire Nippon Prime fleet before any of them got into engagement range. 250km should NOT be the arbitrary maximum engagement range. It should be infinite. I don't care. No limits on radiation!! We have NUCLEAR REACTORS on board, if I want to slowly heat up your ass so your guys get kinda uncomfy 1000km out, I should be able to do it As the EW guys say- all 'trons are good 'trons- only this case it's 'tons! Seriously though at 250km I was burning out drones coming out of his fleet carrier- this makes lasers a carrier suppression weapon. The AI will need some kind of doctrine to deal with this. It needs to clear its deck before engagement or not try to lift any drones or missiles once within a few hundred km because anyone with a reasonable sized laser is just going to be lighting those things up immediately. A couple things occurred to me about the laser model in game: -is any kind of aiming precision modelled? i.e. if I use crappy USTA plastic flywheels am I going to have a harder time hitting a target at range? It seems like the gunlaying equipment required to aim a laser precisely should be pretty expensive and probably not light? -can lasers be "burnt out" by other lasers? If a laser CAN be laid very precisely, it seems like you should be able to mess up optical equipment with it. At least you should be able to reduce the enemy's targeting ability by shining lasers in their telescopic "eyes". The long range fight might end up being a lot of lasers getting close enough to one another to find out which one can heat the other up faster.. In any case, I think the tactical engagement ranges need to be increased quite a bit. If launching missiles/drones is to have any tactical effect, some kind of "carrier buffer range" needs to be implemented. Also, I agree with your I-War ladder request. I would ask, however, that the strategic-screen maneuvering tracks and controls be displayed just once- at the start of the battle, to allow for pre-plotted burns and see the current overall track of the enemy. This would make very high closure rates much more viable as a tactic. I would expect to see anti-laser ships wanting to use very high closure rates (fast flyby dumping KKVs or nuke coilgun driveby) to minimize time in the "hot zone". It's completely justifiable, I have a crew of 80 on these badboys and they have hours on the ingress to do the preplotting. It would be nice to adjust the engagement range on the preplot as well.
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Post by subunit on Nov 5, 2016 1:28:01 GMT
It would greatly ease the "learning cliff" if mouseover of the stat indicated its significance for the current item type as well (I know this is a lot of additional writing but much of it could be culled from the infolinks)
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Post by subunit on Nov 4, 2016 23:54:19 GMT
Oh, and obviously, for the crazy people who want the 20 year scenarios, a couple of extra (optional? scale available turn length buttons to scenario length?) turn length buttons wouldn't hurt
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Post by subunit on Nov 4, 2016 23:43:28 GMT
tldr; below follow some suggestions for how the sandbox could be expanded to allow scenario designers to use it. main points are bolded
I want to talk about what would be required to produce a system that allows us to produce credible strategic-scale hard sci-fi scenarios for CoaDE. By "strategic scale" I mean a category including anything from a small 1-gravity well engagement between a couple of podunk oil-age powers (with, say, a few laser sats or kinetic kill vehicles), to a full-scale Jovian invasion of the inner planets with tens of "main" fleets (perhaps themselves throwing off a handful of missile/drone fleets now and then) assaulting multiple bodies simultaneously and lasting 20+ years. My basic suggestion is to try to avoid adding anything that cannot obviously be handled by current mechanics for now and try to come up with suggestions the dev could easily implement on their own while handling sales, updates, communications, and all the other stuff a one-man business needs to do. An example of such a mechanic is, say, Q-ships hidden among civilian traffic. I would love to see this as a mechanic, but I don't know if the game's detection model can do it at the moment, so I'll refrain from mentioning it again. I would propose trying to expand the sandbox level preset system to allow user-defined preset files. I am guessing that the sandbox preset system reads from Resources/Data/Levels.txt. Levels.txt is (obviously) exposed to editing and appears to specify: -bodies modelled in the scenarios (unsure exactly what "MainBody" specifies in terms of what's going into the n-body sim) -enemy behaviour -composition & fuel status of enemy fleet -starting orbits of enemies -initial player fleet compostion, customisation (mass & cost) limits -mission triggers (incl. messsages and mission ends) -time limits and other things. When loaded into the sandbox, some subset of the level's presets are loaded, but other things seem to be stripped out, critically including mass and cost limits, messages, time limits etc. I would suggest the following alterations be made to allow the system to accomodate strategic-scale scenario building:
1) the level preset load code be expanded so that the user could select what parts of the level are read from the preset file- if you don't want to deal with scripted mission events, or fleet composition limits, you could turn them off, but it would allow scenario designers access to those systems. 2) a few further (completely optional) mass/price fleet composition limits. Presently all solar polities in CoaDE are going to be paying the same price for the same materials because everyone has access to the same ship design menu. I would suggest adding the following (all on a per-fleet basis): 2.1: mass-by-fleet-composition limit (refers to default player/enemy fleet material composition to constrain the fleet to the total masses of materials required to produce the default fleets) 2.2: price-by-accessible-body limit (allows designer to "rejig" the economy by listing bodies the allied/enemy factions have access to- prices are determined by abundance across only these bodies) 2.3: designer-specified-material-price limit (allows designer to directly list materials and prices to build a "custom economy" for both fleets) 2.4: banned-material limits (materials can be removed from the design list without modding or preventing their use for the other fleet) If this all seems like an odd ask, I would respond by saying that this is actually critical to building thermoeconomically plausible fleets. What I mean by that is that any given solar polity's access to material resources (the "price" it pays energetically to obtain that resource) is not determined solely by the average solar abundance of that material but rather by the abundance of the material discounted by the amount of energy spent getting to the extraction site, extracting the material, processing it, sending it home, escorting all the fleets and fighting all the invasions required to do all of this, etc. For instance, if a CoaDE power is mostly a Jovian one, the energy return on energy invested (EROEI) on fuels in the Jovian gravity well will be MUCH better than that available from fuels that are uncommon in that well. They will prefer to use rocket propellants that are "locally available", and it will be cheaper energetically and economically to do so. Allowing the user to specify fleet composition limits along the lines mentioned above allows a scenario designer to simulate the constraints on a hypothetical Jovian polity's shipbuilding program far more accurately than the present model. This allows for "asymmetric" encounters between logistically-differently-constrained opponents which are the essence of all real warfare. 3) blacklists for particular components by type and name. This allows modded "stock" components to be introduced or removed over the course of many scenarios, simulating development or decay of a particular polity. It also allows the simulation of differing cultural and organisational proclivities- moral aversion to nuclear weapons, a lack of laser production expertise, etc. 4) support for multiple fleets and triggered fleets under "allied crafts". What I mean by this is that the "engaging crafts" list would allow the player to specify that particular spots in the list will be in particular fleets (playable or no) in game- ship 1-3 will be around mars, 4-6 will be around earth-luna L3, etc. Ideally we would be able to trigger the appearance of particular fleets (as reinforcements, new cosntruction, etc.) with a delay, and a designer-specified limit could be placed on the number of ships in each fleet. These changes would do 90% of what I would want to do as a modder in representing any kind of near-future, realistic space war, in a way that doesn't ask the player the same strategic/tactical question every time (optimize within the default "bitcoin glibertarian solar economy" ). If there was a simple GUI to edit these parameters in game (ideally with a preview window, although that might be a big ask) that'd be amazing. This would all allow people to distribute missions on the forums as snippets to paste in your levels.txt. You could even give backstory/intel in the forums post with spoiler tags, so that you have to read old intel before designing the currently-existing legacy fleet, and then more recent intel before designing the "triggered-appearance-at-the-shipyard-in-1-year" fleet. The possibilities are endless. Well.. except for Q-ships. Ok, I mentioned them again. Please share any ideas you have about this.
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Post by subunit on Nov 4, 2016 21:25:37 GMT
Realistic space warfare, delta-V limit, orbital maneuver, ALL THE DRONES AND MISSILES AND NUKES. But aside from that, what is it make you really gleefully and happy about Children of a Dead Earth? I just realised all the game files are in editable .txts, and the soundtrack is in its own folder. This game has an insane amount of polish and mechanical interest for a one man effort, and the soundtrack is great. The physical approach to the visual style looks great IMO as well.
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Post by subunit on Nov 3, 2016 19:30:58 GMT
Anyone else have problems with the enemy AI in this mission ramming Remus over and over? I guess I should intercept the enemy gunship on the near side of Remus, but this seems pretty weird. Aye. They seem suicidally determined not to allow us to capture them, even when the ships we bring are less potent than their Gunship. (Missiles to disable engines seem to work fairly well - with flak missiles there's a chance you'll knock out power and propulsion in one go - then go in an finish off their powerplant by shooting out radiators, or engines if those survive - or just use modded long range lasers, if available, to shoot out engines and radiators from a safe distance - be sure to try to intercept them on the near side of Remus.) Thanks for the advice, I was able to flak missile the rads to the point where I could close and polish off the engineering section with coilguns. I was using one of the partially-armored "broadside" designs I saw here for my coilgun frigates, and one thing I noticed is that they start in the lengthwise orientation on an intercept instead of broadside with engines to the rear. I wonder if that's a bug as well.
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Post by subunit on Nov 3, 2016 6:28:37 GMT
Anyone else have problems with the enemy AI in this mission ramming Remus over and over? I guess I should intercept the enemy gunship on the near side of Remus, but this seems pretty weird.
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Post by subunit on Nov 2, 2016 5:34:04 GMT
Funny story - with my attack laser design, retracting the radiators will cause a crew kill. Downsides of running hot radiators, I guess. Obscure mechanic: When prioritizing targets - say radiators on an enemy ship - you can select specifically which systems to target (instead of just targeting all targets of a specific type) by selecting the systems you want to target manually on the enemy ship, then clicking the symbol to prioritize/deprioritize it. This is as opposed to targeting by type by selecting them on the list on the right hand side of the screen. So with, say a Gunship (at say, Main Belt Extraction) with the same type of radiator for the reactor and the lasers, when you want to kill its power quickly you can deprioritize the non-glowy radiators, thereby avoiding wasting lasing time on non-critical targets. Super useful, thanks.
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Post by subunit on Nov 2, 2016 4:22:32 GMT
I had the same issue with mission 3, the cause was that I was not setting the drones orders correctly. Given that the drones guns are spinal mounts instead of broadside I was not using the broadside orientation setting and as such failing to engage. I don't think you need to, I used the conservative homing order and it was fine.
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Post by subunit on Nov 1, 2016 21:09:33 GMT
CoaDE ships are orbitally constructed anyway, right? So having stripped-down mobile repair facilities makes some kind of sense, particularly in the context of invasion fleets.
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