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Post by newageofpower on Dec 9, 2016 9:10:39 GMT
Diamond and boron costs for manufactured goods of complex shapes ingame are dirt cheap compared to real life. Metals are feasible to manufacture with, much more so for ones that melt at lower temperatures (look up the process to form tungsten filaments if you are ever bored). Holy. Fucking. Shit.Well, it's not as insane as the Flourine Martyrs. Going to bed, will respond to Amai tomorrow.
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Post by newageofpower on Dec 9, 2016 8:49:28 GMT
Your missing one important thing in all your wonderful calculations... distances. Read up on the inverse square law, k thnx bai! ... I specifically mentioned the inverse square law... ... Space is insanely cold. Your non-cryogenic ship (at 300+K) stands out like a glowing lamp. Sure, resolution on cheap shitty drones at gigameter range is perhaps 1 pixel if I'm lucky. But that pixel stands out. It's relayed to other, bigger, more powerful passive sensors. Once you get closer, multiple gigawatts of energy sweep for intruders. Multi-meter sensors - arrayed with dozens of other sensors of equal fidelity seek any hint of a return. Even a cryogenic ship probably could not penetrate this. Your ship that's glowing over 300k above background is easy prey. Acceleration by gravity is, of course, slower than boosted acceleration. If I pick them up early; they're dead. Even if I pick them up late, my defense grid can prevent them from connecting with my population center.
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Post by newageofpower on Dec 9, 2016 8:42:46 GMT
The reason Hydrogen is used is because it gives the best exhaust velocity for a given MPD power. It would be interesting to see if switching to Neon improves the ship cost and acceleration. My [Cygnus] line use Decane because they support Decane-fueled warships (which use Decane to reduce cross section and increase armor efficiency). I see civilian ships using Methane if we enter a energy-rich version of CoADE or where the gas giant systems are heavily exploited; it doesn't leak the way hydrogen does, and is far more easily extracted/processed/stored than Hydrogen. Plus, production of Hydrogen usually means the catalytic destruction of water - another precious resource in space. Thus, the [Virgo] line uses Methane propellant.
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Post by newageofpower on Dec 9, 2016 8:36:12 GMT
Hmm I think we are discussing different definitions of stealth ship. So let's clarify! My stealth ship has a nano material anti-reflective coated hull My stealth ship cold runs, only doing burns deep in space My stealth ship has a massive radiator flush with its hull to minimise emissions visibility and ensure it can only be seen from one side(that faces away from your sensors) My stealth ship never enters closer the 40Gm of your ships My stealth ship launches missiles from high up in the gravity well with magnetic acceleration so they drop down like rain My missiles cold run only using compressed gas and initial magnetic acceleration to set approximate trajectories. My missiles get most of their velocity from falling into the gravity well My missiles go at roughly 10-50km/s just from riding down the gravity well My missiles are 100kg payloads with 100kg of rocket fuel and 5s burn time for last second trajectory adjustments My missile hits with between 5GJ and 100GJ of energy due to terminal velocity That's my stealth ship First of all, nanocoating obeys Thermodynamics; it emits blackbody radiation. If your ship's exterior is higher than 3-22 Kelvin (depending on sensor refinement) it will emit IR above 3-22k... and that can be spotted with IR. My cheap sensors are everywhere. My cheap IR sensors can detect normal radiator temp (say, 371k for crew cooling) at orbital distances, especially against a cold background. Anything above 3K is detectable, in theory. With enough wide-angle IR sensors, deployed around every large body of interest, even deep space burns will be noted. Since your missiles are "dropping" with gravity, and you are dropping from extreme range, they will take a significant timeframe to accelerate. During this time, they will be warmed by the Sun. I can spot them with IR, again. If you somehow bypass the IR, you enter the Garrisoned Zone. Once you are near my Hill Sphere, FELs (which already exist) will pump Xrays towards any 'holes in space', or just sweep randomly. If you trip an IR sensor's flag, an nuke without filler (to convert hard radiation to heat) will be detonated in the vicinity to shower you in xrays. Multi-gigawatt active scans are basically guaranteed to light you up. My MegaHubble sensor arrays will see your ship/missiles incoming from traces of UV (almost impossible to stop with nanocoatings/etc) and Xray (basically impossible to stop) emissions from active scan sweeps. Although your missiles are smaller than your ship, scanners obey the inverse square law and recieve exponentially more resolution the closer you get. Also, if the exterior of your ship isn't below say 3-22 kelvins (depending on sensitivity of sensor and amplitude of sweep), even an IR sweep will generate a signal louder than background! By emplacing sensor stations at multiple sites, there becomes basically no way to "sneak" ships or missiles through. Multigigawatt+ death stars will eat the missiles, or damage them enough they vaporize during re-entry. Interceptor nuclear missiles (with multiple Teller-Ulam stages measuring in the dozens of megatons, at least) will do the same. If you try to move a large object I cannot redirect easily with multimegaton devices, I can see it from much further out and send a fleet (with combat engineers and propulsion systems) to stop you. Your stealthship doesn't even beat cheap spammed IR sensors. How do you get through a properly set up active sensor and defense grid?The proposed ship of yours fails at every stage of your plan. Sorry.
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Post by newageofpower on Dec 9, 2016 7:31:23 GMT
Weapons are missiles, anything particularly power intensive runs off capacitors and a potato battery... really stealth in space is simple, don't be too hot, don't be too bright, and be far enough away to be practicals invisible. If you particularly feel it's nesesary you can load your boats up with a secondary reactor and boot it up to power weapons for close combat as nesesary.... it's not like once you start blazing away with rail guns stealth maters. Space war for k2 civilisation are like that, it's either all stealth or so much city destroying weapons that nothing organic survives. After all meat bags are fragile! You can't hit what you can not see, and missiles are the only weapons nesesary for a war where range and first strike is all that maters. You are still thinking in terms of "fleets" and "navies" when a lone ship launching nukes into your key population centres is what you are really trying to stop. Stealth is never perfect. Nothing stops active scan; there is no known way to prevent a signal return from an X-Ray burst, even UV is problematic. Also, if you're just unlucky you can occlude a passive IR scanner's view of the background stars at the wrong moment and get flagged for active scan like that. When you get too close to a planetary body, sensors farther from it will see that you are too "cold" compared to the planet, and detect you. Similarly, if you "warm up" to better blend in against the planet, planetside & Low-orbit sensors will see an hot spot and detect you. Passive stealth is strong, but can be countered by a sufficient number of conventional defenders/active sensors. Massed active defenses can stop ridiculous, Macross-level missile waves under the right circumstances. Once a critical density of conventional defense and active detection has been reached, investing further into stealthships brings diminishing returns. Adding a second reactor to your stealthship makes it weigh more, reducing your mass ratio and dV, and increases the coolant you must carry or reduces your payload; it's very much the opposite of what you want as a stealthship. No, the perfect stealthship is one that maximizes stealth and carries pure autonomous weapons (missiles) loaded with a mix of standoff and close weapons for a deadly alpha strike that will deliver the pain even if the stealthship dies.
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Post by newageofpower on Dec 9, 2016 7:19:14 GMT
Graphogel Ian there to stop lasers, graphogel seems to work as a shock absorber, it lets armour on its surface survive truly massive kinetic hits. Mmm, yea apparently graphogel is the ultimate squishy marshmallow, you can literally compress it to paper thin and it will spring back no worse for wear... put a metal plate on it and it will take all the force out of a hit without fractures or suffering catastrophic damage unlike most armour materials It's also much stronger then silica gel structurally, and can survive huge forces that most other material would take damage from. Per kg it's probably one of the strongest materials ingame. Also note that while per kg silica gel is 10-20% stronger then amorphous carbon vs thermal weapons, silica gel has atrocious mechanical properties and is not suitable to taking any kind of kinetic damage. *shrug* armoring missiles vs kinetics is a lost cause (death-spiral of size, mass, performance), so loading up on anti-laser armor is usually the correct call.
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Post by newageofpower on Dec 9, 2016 7:15:18 GMT
In my opinion 1mg may be too little? Maybe add another set of 20 MPDs burning xenon or krypton that have higher thrust/power on the opposite end of the ship? 1mg can escape from all but deepest gravity wells; you just have to ignore Hohmann transfers and constantly do short, outwards+forwards burns. It's horridly dV inefficient, but with MPD you have dV to burn and no thrust at all. Or you can use tandem drive. Here are some offerings from Altarris Heavy Industries:"The ingenious engineers of Altarris's Ne Plus Ultra Special Projects Department have returned once again, this time in the purely civilian Virgo Product line. Today, we announce our newest release, the [Virgo] Highliner - the fastest Saturine-Martian Passenger transport in existence! For a mere 1.03 Gigacredits, this luxurious and absurdly fast transport can be yours!" "Like all Ne Plus Ultra designs, the Highliner generates 200 gigawatts of power to pump an MPD, achieving incredible fuel/speed efficiencies, and dramatically cutting travel times." "However, we are aware that some retarded special needs captains may wish to take their ship deep within a planetary gravity well, instead of having his passengers board via personnel shuttles or dV-minimizing orbital tetherhooks. For these situations, they can activate up to six Methane Nuclear-Thermal torches and produce nearly 90 miligravities of acceleration, more than sufficient for Hohmann transfer from even Venusian low orbit! Please be aware that applying full drive thrust while in low Jupiter or Uranian orbit is beyond the safe structural integrity rating of the Highliner's Frame and may void your warranty." "Moving over twenty thousand passengers in luxury, the Highliner has seperate Economy, Business, and First Class sections, in addition to seperate Crew Compartments. In a pinch, the Highliner's 7 kiloton cargo bays (normally for shipping First Class client's belongings) can load additional passengers. And of course, the Highliner includes the Award-winning "CancerBGone 1" Anti-Radiation Armor Schema, featuring heavy Boron and Lithium-6 shielding; guaranteed under 25 mSv yearly dosage!" 1. Guarantee does not apply to travelling in Van Allen Belts, within Io's orbital Shadow, or sustained nuclear bombardment. Please refer legal questions to the Ganymede Department of Justice. "For mercantile captains that can't put up with crowds of other people not strictly under their control (we feel your pain) Ne Plus Ultra has developed the [Virgo] Megafreighter!" "New colony ran out of XY or Z? Both sides of a civil war want to buy missiles from you? Want to hide a fleet in your cargo bays? Carrying up to seventy kilotons of cargo (not counting fuel delivery possibilities), the Megafreighter's possibility of making money is only limited by your imagination, and has won the Capitalist of the Year award from New Libertarian Magazine! Buy now for a low introductory price of 634 Megacredits 2!" 2. Offer available while supplies last. Promotion is unavailable in Mercurian and Uranian Orbits. Additional Shipping and Handling expenses may be added for Cerean deliveries."And, of course, the award-winning Radiation-shielding scheme has shown to increase crew morale by 43%! Imagine that, a crew deciding not to mutiny simply because they aren't dying of radiation poisoning! Who would have thought?" "Finally, the long awaited Methane conversion of the original [Cygnus] Ultratanker; the [Virgo] Ultratanker. Found yourself with a futures contract for 300 kilotons of Methane? We're here to help!" "Avoid Bankruptcy! Go really fast! Refuel other multi-hundred kiloton Methane hogs! The Ultratanker, now utilizing the most widespread Civilian fuel, is available for only 772 Megacredits!"
I'll post up more tomorrow. In addition to 300kt 200 GW long range monster craft, I've designed an extensive line of smaller, cheaper refuelers and utility vessels. [Altarris] is my tag for most military objects, using Decane, [Cygnus] is granted to Decane-propelled unarmed logistics vessels, whilst [Virgo] is the purely methane-using Civilian line of products.
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Post by newageofpower on Dec 9, 2016 5:44:51 GMT
1. Yes my entire fleet would be made of stealth ships... space submarines are infinitely practical in a war where armour is meaningless and the first attack is usually the only attack before target is dead. 2. My missiles are many, they are nuclear or hyper-V kinetic, and they point in saturation firing patterns at all your population centres... remember the Cold War? Like that but now with more missiles. 3. You can spot one missile, maybe you can even spot 10000, but I will simply drop de-orbit the asteroid belt into your planet! Where's your god now b***? I may not kill you, but I will kill all you love, burn your fields, poison your lakes, and turn the very air you breathe to ash. Thus we have achieved mutually assured destruction, not war but genocide, mutually assured extinction. Missile ships ala cryogenic Hydrogen Steamer are indeed powerful and useful. However, they are extremely fragile, have a limited payload to mass ratio, and are just impractical to mount powerplants on. You know those X GW laser battlestars Shurugal brags about that deletes drones/missiles? Minmaxed Coil/Needleguns that can hit 1km ships at 1000 km? Yeah... fight them without your own lasers. With only a few kw-mw of power available. With only 10% of your ship as payload (because the rest of it is cooling/etc) Fight them in giant 2.4km long hydrogen bags whose total acceleration is 170mm/day. Pound for pound, proper warships should beat stealthships. The problem is when the proper warship is docking for resupply. For when it's powered down for maintenance. For when it leaves garrison and you attack their capital city. Asteroids are not stealthy at all. Big asteroids can be seen coming from long distances. Small asteroids; you might as well save yourself dV and just bring your own KE impactors.
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Post by newageofpower on Dec 9, 2016 5:38:01 GMT
are 150 km/s rail/coil projectiles still possible? I had thought that was changed. Concretedonkey's 'needle' system lets you decrease payload mass below .2 grams, so yes. The main problem with needleguns is the immense amount of lag upon impact they cause. It's far worse than my missile storms, which is saying something.
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Post by newageofpower on Dec 9, 2016 5:36:27 GMT
A huge 20GW mercury MPD and appropriate sized nuclear reactor could cut the trip down from years to months easy. I have gotten really massive ships to have fairly high dV and surprising acceleration ratings using mercury MPD, and there really is no reasonable limits on how much power you can pump into one, I think it caps out at a couple TW but that's more then enough to burn a small country worth of mass to appreciable % the speed of light from just a couple kt of fuel across a week or 2. Actually with the ingame MPD a mission to Alpha Centauri is probably possible using something the size of a city ship and a few very high power fission/fusion reactors. I would like to see the exhaust velocity of your best mercury MPD. I haven't gotten over 100MM/s on a sub petawatt design. Civilian spacecrafts, if maintained well, could easily live over 100 years. They might even outlive generations and generations of baseline humans. What might be a problem is that old, INFOAge striking 'outdated' problem, when people will abandon their old spacecraft in favor to the new fad. This will greatly reduce the ships' average life expectancy. Anyways, do you guys have any GIGAWATT nuclear reactor plans? Check out Tessfield's Solar System Standard Organization thread in the other forum. Apophys's 25 GW reactor is the most powerful practical reactor, power/weight wise (assuming paper thin radiators) and should be the main supply in any MPD based vessel.
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Post by newageofpower on Dec 9, 2016 4:31:48 GMT
Err we were looking to see if it's at all possible to be fend your boat with armor, but go ahead on a crusade of your own... We got into a tangent from... Er. The Laser Range thread. Some people there are like "nerf lasers OP" and personally, I think Lasers are not OP. Very important, yes. Maybe, even the most important weapon, if you agree with Shurugal. But pure laser fleets (or almost-pure laser fleets) are less efficient and less effective than a combined arms fleet, that is my analysis. Conflict makes us stronger! Instead of me and Shurugal shooting each other IRL, we shoot at each other's virtual ships with virtual weapons!
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Post by newageofpower on Dec 9, 2016 4:20:35 GMT
I've designed a bunch of 'superior' civilian vessels. Let me know if you guys are interested in seeing them.
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Post by newageofpower on Dec 9, 2016 4:18:44 GMT
Did you even read my last paragraph? I literally stated that such tactics would be mutually-assured destruction. What? If I successfully defend against enough of your attacking forces and retain sufficient fleet, you have lost the war (as I'll counterattack your near-undefended Hill Sphere with an overwhelming advantage). This is difficult to pull off, but it comes down to the competence of the fleet commanders and relative margins they have. That's most certainly not Mutually Assured Destruction; you *may* have an advantage (depending on how long it takes my defended, active sensors to find your fleets) ranging from overwhelming attacker's advantage to huge defender's advantage. Have you ignored my entire post? 'Stealth missiles' have problems against anything with dV or that is defended (i.e. everything important) while spydrones work on a huge variety of stuff (and are likely to be able to say "RED ALERT, MARS GARRISON EMPTY!, unless your entire fleet is made of stealthships...). Passive spydrones can get work done at dozens-hundreds of mm while a missile has to intercept to zero (or a sub kilometer for most nuclear packages). The difference between them is gigantic.
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Post by newageofpower on Dec 9, 2016 4:05:46 GMT
When the Delta-V of a ship gets over 100Km/s, you can pretty much ignore orbital mechanics and burn strait for your destination. When you get to Torch-ship levels of dV, just use a Brachistochrone Transfer. However, since MPD's have terrible thrust, you have to start the reverse burn a little earlier.
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Post by newageofpower on Dec 9, 2016 3:59:47 GMT
How fast do your drones close to launch range? what is the flight time of your missiles? Can you kill my ship before i get a few salvos off from my coilgun? At 1Mm engagement range, I can maneuver in a tight spiral to waste the aim of your 150 km/ railgun, but my missiles don't become less accurate against maneuvering target as range increases. The best case scenario for one of your drone carriers against one of my coilgun launchers is MAD: we both die. If you're launching missiles from more than a few hundred km, I can keep up the flow of flares long enough to play the endurance game, and closer in i can disarm your missile carriers as fast as you can throw them at me. If you wish to rely on Kessler Syndrome to kill me, you could certainly make it work eventually, at the cost of denying yourself the space you just wrested from me. I'm not even slightly concerned about your gun-drones, because until barrel armor becomes a thing, my lasers are already sufficient to manage milisecond kill times on any gun. And, as you pointed out, there is a whole shitton of room to improve my lasers. There's no reason I couldn't make a laser that will strip you of drone launchers and needleguns from 1Mm in a handful of seconds. True, you can do the same thing, but now we are literally just waiting to see who runs out of laser turrets faster, and that is boring. In a modern war between equals, there is no fight to wrest ground or gain; there is only deny the opponent and destroy his assets. If I spend 2-5 kt mass to wipe out 20 kt of yours, I consider that an overwhelming victory, and damn the orbital space. Even below 2kps closing speed, I find that my missile carriers do not run out of medium/small missiles before flyby (I leave them on cancel orders during combat, otherwise there's a chance they explode from object collision) even if I queue up all missiles for launch upon entering combat. The best case scenarios for your flareguns/laser fleet is either I approach at maximum speed (forcing me to 'predeploy' most of my missiles) and a few flares drag off my entire missile wave, or I approach at minimum speed and you have all the laser time you need to burn out the drone launcher's missile bays. Having not actually played your designs yet, I suspect the sweet spot (for my fleet) is somwhere between 2.5 km/s and 6 km/s. I suppose I could try to cheese you by manually leaving my missiles on Cancel Orders until within terminal manouvers range against your ships, but that is highly dependent on lag. In real life, missiles would be far less vulnerable to simple IR decoys, anyhow. The laser is a wonderful weapon. I use tons of them, from 1 GW massed drones to massive 2000m 2+ 10 GW drones (that are sitting ducks to my own needleguns at 3,000+ km, but whatever). However, massed missiles have a huge role in the arms triangle even in their current highly limited state. For pure lasergun vs lasergun fights... much of it is RNG. I've tried this vs AI (employing identical laserstar fleets), and it's almost a coinflip at who shoots out whose laser turrets first. I've found 20cm Boron and Sillicon Carbide to buy some time for my medium turrets, but it's just not enough. While testing equal cost in needlegun fleets, I don't know if the AI is dodging correctly but I can almost always connect (and kill) the opponent before I die; I'm uncertain if this behavior is true at higher numbers because massed needleguns crash the game quite consistently.
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