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Post by newageofpower on Dec 9, 2016 3:38:04 GMT
The attitude is unnecessary and unhelpful, but I'll bite anyway. My point here is that hiding things in a great bit empty space will always be easier than finding them. The size of an array you would need to scan every practical approach corridor at sufficient range to allow adequate response time would eat up an enormous portion of your military budget (not to mention it would be rather difficult to keep secret, and there are only so many places to logically orbit such stations), and I can make that job harder just by assembling my initial strike from units that can exist on a minimum of expended power for the coasting phase. If you can make stealth sensor drones to orbit my planet and detect my launches, then I can make stealth missiles to attack your HVTs with and simply spam them out in a greater volume than you can track. I only need one to get through, after all. If you have sensors that can detect my missiles that are comparably stealthy to your sensors, then obviously I can use the same technology to detect your sensors and eliminate them as they enter my AO. The thing that keeps me from doing all this in this scenario is the same thing that kept us alive through the Cold War: You can do it too, and no one wants to take an action that will potentially bring about the end of the human race. Passive sensors are cheaper (in both financial and mass/power terms) than weapons systems. This is even more likely to be true with CoADE level manufacturing tech, not to mention Zero-g manufacture. Missiles must perform significant dV manouevers to engage their targets. As they get closer, odds of detection rise exponentially, meaning missiles that wish to collide with a target (or get close enough for standoff payloads) that has any significant dV or point defenses need a large acceleration and/or dV superiority margin over the target. This is expensive (per missile, to boot) and as soon as you light up a missile drive, extremely visible. Launching drones for a "close enough" look can be done with a coilgun/sail/cold thruster combination, and requires minimum internal dV. This is very stealthy and dirty cheap (once you have the lasing element and/or coilgun set up) in comparison. My point is, three, five, or even ten arrays of ten CoADE Hubbles will be cheaper than, say, ten Gunships or ten LaserStars. If I can only afford 2 gunships or 2 hubbles, obviously buying the warships is better, but when I can afford a dozen warships the sensors become a steal in comparison. If you divide up your fleets to fly through different corridors I probably have enough local margin of superiority that I can probably defeat each in detail with relatively low casualties; otherwise I would be signing concessions instead of fighting a war. If you want to launch them so that they all arrive around the same time; that's multiple launches over a significant window where your fleets are *le gasp* not garrisoning your Hill Sphere. Either you are winning the war, fairly confident I am not about to gank you, or insane.
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Post by newageofpower on Dec 9, 2016 3:18:14 GMT
TBH the lasers are mostly for drones and sniping components. If I have a wall of missiles inbound, i'll just use a drone with a hot flare to decoy it, or a sextuple of coilgun boosted flares from the Hal's sister ship. I'm not even remotely concerned about missile attacks. I think, your preconceptions come from fighting AI. The AI is horrible at using missiles. I don't attack with walls of missiles. I use a continuous tidal wave of them. Four carriers weigh less than 2 KT and can sustain over 60 missiles per second. Sure, you decoys will draw off the first thousand. Maybe you have a sick flare/coil setup that continuously pumps out 2-3 flares per second with no gaps in between. Even when you drain their dV with decoys, the sheer amount of out of dV "dead" missiles will Kessler you to death; it's how my missiles still carried through back when I left their guidance on default and 60% (100% of the light missiles) of them never stopped boosting. Heh. Decoys might be great, actually, missiles from different angles will have different trajectories, making it a sort of rocket shotgun. The AI is also awful at using drones. How well armored are your ships? Heavily armored? They're far more expensive than mine. A paper-thin layer of Sillica Aerogel? I'll send a few waves of minidrone dronecarriers with the drone missile buses, hundreds of minidrones per carrier, with launch rates approaching my missiles. Three out of four will be firing 5mm sand. The others will be firing higher caliber, light-medium armor piercing cannon.
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Post by newageofpower on Dec 9, 2016 3:04:10 GMT
If NASA is concerned about sub-softball-sized debris in earth-orbit, I think it is valid to say that saturating a planet's hill sphere with thousands of disposable sensors will piss a lot of people in a hurry. Although interplanetary space is huge and empty (which is kind of my point when I say that locating spaceships outside of local orbit will be a massive undertaking if they don't want to be found), planetary space is small and cramped. Also, if your long-range sensor station is at Earth-Sol L 2, then all i have to do to get to earth without you picking me up is make my burns from behind Mars. The odds against your seeing me coming are farcically small. If i sling my approach out of the solar plane, or pick a nice hot background event to line up with on the way... Launch a few disposable fleets on vastly different trajectories, and it all but guarantees that at least one will evade passive detection until it is too late. Yes, I'll totally only build one big sensor array. Absolutely. Please believe in these words, divide your fleets and send them at me, on vastly differing trajectories. Nothing can go wrong.*rolls eyes* The IR drones don't have to be in LEO; or even want to be in LEO. You'd send a few dozen-hundred through some Hohmman variation, a similar amount through the ITS to arrive later (stagger launch/arrival) and a bunch to flyby on their way to spy somewhere else. Some will grab a gravitational slingshot and go other places, some will not. Besides, modern nation-states violate each other's airspace all the time with spyplanes and whatnot. Russia and America made it a pissing contest in the Cold War. An American Command/Surveillance aicraft collided with a Chinese Interceptor during a game of National Chicken, killing both crews instantly. Is it stupid? Probably. Will they stop doing it? Nope.
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Post by newageofpower on Dec 9, 2016 2:48:01 GMT
That laser looks digustingly efficient (I have a hard time bringing my own lasers above 3.2%), but you should really aim for a 3m+ Mirror to maximize intensity at range. got a chuckle out of that XD. For mirror size, i deliberately tuned it to make a 1m diameter spot at 3/4 my desired engagement range. at this range, the Halcyon will burn through all stock missiles in about half a second per missile. Anything close than ~100 km gets pinprick-lasered to death, anything between 100 and 200 km loses aerogel at an alarming rate, unless it is several meters thick, and i can snipe any and all turrets, regardless of armor, at every range i have tried it so far. Stock missiles are trash. I can pop 20 of them with a 100MW laser, in the same time and at twice the range it takes my 1 GW laser to pop 5 of my own missiles.
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Post by newageofpower on Dec 9, 2016 2:43:30 GMT
Don't be ridiculous. Defendable garrison sites like L2 Earth will have massive, well maintained sensor arrays; gigantic super-Hubble sensor arrays (that cover huge chunks of the sky in a single scan) made economical through 0-G manufacture.
The disposable IR drones are there to spy on your Hill Sphere (say you are playing or Mars) and detect any hot launches. Their actual Navigational Hazard level is tiny; I don't think you understand how empty (and huge) space is at all.
Properly angled, a Vantablack probe can last for decades given a few tons of Hydrogen, but why bother? A missile with enough dV to kill one within a few weeks of being detected is almost as expensive as one of these drones; just give them a cheapo solar shade ala many of these space telescopes.
Better yet, launch a bunch of unstealthed versions, and stealth a few different types.
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Post by newageofpower on Dec 9, 2016 2:29:54 GMT
My counter to that is multiple missile drone carriers launching multiple streams of missiles. 15 missiles per second per carrier means that even if my missiles get sucked towards your decoy, I'll make up for them in sheer volume.
For example, my LMK launchers carry 450 Light missiles ea and can dispense 2 a per second per launcher. Their Carrier carriers 12 of these and 8 medium missile launchers.
(I can increase cyclic rate of fire even more but then we get into game crash territory instead of game lag territory)
"Okay, a few hundred or thousand missiles got sucked off. Keep launching a few hundred per second."
In addition, I'll have my own artillery needlegun drones shooting at the laser from beyond 1Mm. Sure, you can return fire with ignore range and pop my drones before my needles impact, but it's likely a few of my 150 km/s (or faster!) needles will hit and the Needlegun drones are far cheaper than Laser Drones on a cost basis.
Lasers are great. Lasers need something else to support them though; I don't think a monolithic arms strategy is at all optimal (i.e. a combined arms stratagem is superior)
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Post by newageofpower on Dec 9, 2016 1:17:13 GMT
Boron, whilst fairly rare on Earth, is hardly a rare material.
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Post by newageofpower on Dec 9, 2016 1:15:54 GMT
No reasonable amount of armor can survive a heavy KE weapon.
I've penetrated a 50m Osmium Target before (that's in the hundreds of GigaCredits lol)
That laser looks digustingly efficient (I have a hard time bringing my own lasers above 3.2%), but you should really aim for a 3m+ Mirror to maximize intensity at range.
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Post by newageofpower on Dec 9, 2016 1:10:57 GMT
someone knows where they are, because they need maintenance. If they transmit to a central relay, then all i have to do is knock the relay out, and someone *definitely* knows where that is, because it will need lots of maintenance (if network hardware is good for only one thing, it is keeping techs employed) It's possible to build working sensors (and drones, the Voyager probes come to mind) that function for decades without maintenance. The lower energies they operate at, the more easily this is done. So you can hurl out waves of disposable cheap IR sensors that are cheaper than my medium missiles (hundreds of credits) by EM-Launch/Laser/Solar Sail (preferably a combination), that given months or years will drift to where you need them, and will continue to function for at least a decade or so. Some will fail due to electronic manufacture defects, since we're building them cheap. Others will have folded/ejected their sails at the wrong moment, or freak accident induces an uncorrectable spin, etc, because you didn't install backup systems or redundancies or enough emergency cold gas thrusters, but that's why you spam more. Tiny, cheap, low power, hard to detect. I orbit Central Relay deep in my 'territory' (say, if I'm playing Earth, put it at Earth-Sun L2 and Backup relay in LEO) where I can see you coming from months out. Of course, the sensitivity and capability of these sensors is low, but they are supremely cost effective against most conventional threats.
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Post by newageofpower on Dec 9, 2016 1:00:24 GMT
I suspect that a lot of the blame for the ungodly-death-laser meta can be laid at the remarkably high energy reactors able to be made at present. Improved coolant modeling will likely change that state of affairs dramatically - so that might be worth looking at first, before going too far in terms of accommodating for said meta. Missile spam beats Death Stars, though, on a ton for ton or credit for credit basis. True, doing so will lag the game, but that's not Lasers are imba, it's that hyperoptimized missiles coated in some form of aerogel+carbon composite are super cheap and have great performance. Plus, if you can manage a multi-km/s intercept (always doable vs AI) the laser has almost no time to kill your missiles before it dies.
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Post by newageofpower on Dec 9, 2016 0:16:32 GMT
This is actually pretty intelligent. It may lead to some failure modes we haven't thought of before, but overall, inefficiencies in low power states are more than worth it for increased inefficiencies in a high power state.
Plus, we run our reactors within 5k of meltdown anyhow. Don't see what's so different here ; )
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Post by newageofpower on Dec 9, 2016 0:13:34 GMT
until you nuke the observation sats. It's not like those things can run dark, they gotta transmit what they observe. Passive scan obsats can use whiskerlaser to transmit data, which is very difficult to detect. If you're willing to accept low bandwith, even very long range transmission is practical. Much easier if receiving station is beacon'd, making the receiving site easy to ID and kill, but usually a smart faction will orbit that thing somewhere near the core of their sphere of influence ; ) However, it's pretty hard to pick up a good stealthship (Hydrogen steamer comes to mind) without Active Scan. Active Sensor Suites are also an order of magnitude more expensive. You either position them where they're more easily defended or suck it up when someone nukes them. At least the sensor-clearing fleet will be obvious.
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Post by newageofpower on Dec 9, 2016 0:01:31 GMT
His ship has less than 1.5 km/s; it's not really a ship anymore, more of a orbital defense platform with about 4 milli-G acceleration to stop people from cheesing it with KE tactics.
For reference, the Saturn V mission had more than 10x that dV budget.
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Post by newageofpower on Dec 8, 2016 20:04:30 GMT
The light weight railguns are arguably not as good because of the slower muzzle velocity though. Ya, I suspect if the OP posts specs on the stardestroyer, we could build ships to match its capabilities with 2% of the cost and mass. In particular, how many fighters does the stardestroyer carry? It's not designed to be a minmaxed warship, it's a glorious paperweight. Yes, I can probably kill it with less than 1 kiloton of carrier drone, but that's not the point. EDIT: Old version of my of carrier drones. Those were 406t ea, my newer ones, with more optimized missiles are 455t ea and pack roughly 20% more launchers and missiles per carrier. Newer carriers also have roughly 20m 2 less cross section while posessing almost .5 km/s more dV.
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Post by newageofpower on Dec 8, 2016 18:46:20 GMT
Well, theoretically (If I understand this part), you could make a ship that run a very cold reactor with around several dozen kilowatt power, giving away maybe several hundred kilowatt heat. The ship would then run a very low powered missile launcher while having a very small NTR reactor that push out around several kilowatt of heat only. The ship will have to be practically unarmored and run on near minimum power using a dual reactor design to shut one off for the cold run. The ship would most likely dump a bunch of missiles to the target from deep space before running away back home to resupply, leaving nothing behind. Well, at least in theory that would work. How do you get rid of a few hundred KW of heat without people noticing? If you use radiators, you're screwed. If you use open cycle coolant, you need to carry a huge amount of coolant. MPDs produce minimal thrust. 200 GW of MPD produces maybe 6 MN of thrust; 10 KW of MPD produces less than 10 millinewtons of thurst. Add coolant in and the whole setup becomes impossible; the more coolant you add the more your ship weights the slower your acceleration, and the more coolant you need. It's a death spiral. It doesn't work in theory, because the amount of power you can produce from a cryogenically cooled reactor is never going to be enough to drive an MPD to propel the entire assembly. What you need is some sort of externally-powered propulsion; EM coil launch, laser sail, solar-thermal furnace... and then you have the hydrogen steamer.
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