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Post by bdcarrillo on Feb 22, 2017 16:28:02 GMT
So how do I make an engine that my missiles can shut down in mid flight? As it is its fairly annoying to have a huge number of missiles but all of them use up all their delta v while still 100kms out from the target. Edit the parameters of the remote control? Or are you looking more in depth at what causes a failure to shut down at high%dv initial burns?
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Post by bdcarrillo on Feb 22, 2017 14:54:10 GMT
That's likely per single firing event, not an accumulation over time.
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Post by bdcarrillo on Feb 22, 2017 14:46:36 GMT
Command guidance at strategic ranges has a limitation on communication speed. That delay of several light seconds could be the difference between a hit and miss.
Command guidance also has countermeasures... You need a signal of some sort, and (in general) signals can be tampered with.
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Post by bdcarrillo on Feb 22, 2017 13:30:24 GMT
The loader is likely a completely separate linear actuator. It looks like there isn't error checking between them and the gun physics.
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Post by bdcarrillo on Feb 21, 2017 15:53:08 GMT
Copy, I think I would have erroneously mixed up energy and power too.
We need a sample railgun posted to dissect, perform math, and analyse.
Some formulas I used before: Avg velocity=(start velocity+muzzle velocity)/2 Time in barrel=avg velocity/barrel length
By incorporating the time in the barrel to the KE formula, we'll see just how much juice the thing needs per shot, rather than an overall average per unit of time. (I think)
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Post by bdcarrillo on Feb 21, 2017 14:54:39 GMT
Thanks for commenting, please read my post and really think about it, and ponder it first, like really ponder it and come back and tell me if you have any thoughts on it tomorrow. I'm really not sure what there is to comment on it besides it's flat out wrong. It's based on a very limited understanding of physics (as you've just demonstrated above), and I've done my best to try and explain why, but as I said above, I suggest grabbing a highschool physics textbook (or hell, even wikipedia) and doing a little bit of reading. EDIT: Not sure why your responses above this just vanished. Guide us through the errors and revise the original formulas if needed. Just stating that there is an error doesn't advance the discussion. I do get a sense that figuring the energy per shot is a move in the right direction. I did some napkin math on a railgun I made, but probably goofed watts/wh/watt seconds as well.
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Post by bdcarrillo on Feb 20, 2017 5:14:10 GMT
what do all these capacitors and compuslator compare to good old Li-ion batteries? They'd explode.
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Post by bdcarrillo on Feb 20, 2017 5:12:11 GMT
Looking at Ragone charts, nothing seems to beat capacitors for what a railgun needs.
-break- neat stuff I found:
The naval research lab had a small railgun the ran at 11kv and discharged close to 1.3MA... For a total output of 5Mw over 0.008 seconds to get a 1kg projectile to 1.7km/s. The reported capacitive energy store was 11Mj, KE output was 1.44Mj. Weight estimates for the capacitor bank are 10,000 Kg.
A 1Mw discharge in a similar timeframe from a compulsator required an 11,000 Kg machine. This was done by University of TX under a DARPA contract.
So, it looks like capacitors may be 5x more mass efficient. We haven't even touched on "refill" time, but a compulsator would be capable of several shots in a row followed by a long dwell, versus a consistent fire/dwell for capacitors.
Also interesting: Estimates place ship power generation requirements at 20-30 MW for even a 32 MJ railgun, in order to fire at its maximum projected rate of 6-10 times per minute.
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Post by bdcarrillo on Feb 20, 2017 1:38:03 GMT
Turned out to be slow acceleration... the drone was banging into the flares.
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Post by bdcarrillo on Feb 19, 2017 18:20:30 GMT
As a weight comparison, we could fling an entire reactor running at 2500k and the associated radiators for less mass than the conventional chemical flares could achieve.
I did try making a drone that pops out flares, but for some reason deploying the first flare destroys the drone. The same flare dispenser on a cap ship doesn't do any damage. Heck, if I pop out a drone then immediately launch a flare, it'll damage the mother ship. Something funky is going on
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Post by bdcarrillo on Feb 18, 2017 20:57:18 GMT
A meme in gameplay discussion? Tsk tsk
Bottom line, we agree that there are issues that can be eliminated with improvements to the game
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Post by bdcarrillo on Feb 18, 2017 12:21:25 GMT
vegemeisterJust going to poke a big hole in your whole post... You state that you assume how the weapon checker works, haven't looked at it, and then make claims about what it does. I find it a little hard to value your counter points when you state that. However, for what you essentially point out requires us to gloss over the unknown efficiency of a core weapon subsystem that isn't modelled in game, and dismiss it with Handwavium. I challenge that approach as flawed and not in the spirit of a physics based simulation.
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Post by bdcarrillo on Feb 18, 2017 5:08:43 GMT
Fellas fellas... The simple KE formula is great and all, but you need to figure in more variables to arrive at a proper conclusion.
How long is the projectile in the barrel?
We know the average speed (1/2 projectile velocity) and distance travelled (barrel length), so we can figure out how much energy that requires over the time that the projectile is in the barrel.
Basically, our systems must have capacitors, and the weapon checker is overly simple.
Snipped from another thread: Fundamentally it seems that you're stating that 360Mw is insufficient to accelerate a 1.3g shell to ~50 kms in X amount of travel time down the 15m barrel... Right?
Edit- figured out the time... 0.0000006 seconds to apply 1.625megawatt seconds... Or~2.7million megawatt seconds in that brief acceleration time.
Hrmph... Seems the gun needs about 750Mw for a blink of an eye to fire, and our KE to input power Weapon Checker may not dig deep enough.
Well I sit corrected... The cyclic rate for this particular gun SHOULD be about 55% lower than the max theoretical from Weapon Checker to account for capacitor refill.
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Post by bdcarrillo on Feb 17, 2017 20:59:48 GMT
I could see a self-guided missile being used here, just one button press and away it goes. As long as you have 30 people on board, sure!
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Post by bdcarrillo on Feb 17, 2017 20:56:28 GMT
I appreciate the War Department's optimism, but if the biggest energy source you can put on the table is an RTG, and your opponent is fielding 13MW railguns, you're in a bad pickle. You might want to be calling your diplomats instead of your engineers. That said, if the working assumption is that your opponents are under similar restrictions then your odds might be better. Conventional guns and missiles will pretty much be the only threats on the table, since those are the only weapon classes that can reasonably run on just a couple kilowatts. These are essentially short range troop transports, the big boys in the same fleet get the fission reactors.
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