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Post by midnightdreary on Mar 7, 2017 20:39:43 GMT
I'm still in the very early stages of finding the sweet spot for everything, but I don't really see the problem with capacitors. Their size seems to be very important though. I only run in to problem in very large systems.
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Post by midnightdreary on Feb 5, 2017 19:30:58 GMT
My usual solution has been to add a nuclear hand grenade fused to detonate at 0 range. After the armor is penetrated, the <20c nukes go off inside the armor. I do this as well. Very effective.
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Post by midnightdreary on Jan 20, 2017 20:46:48 GMT
I thought the general strategy was to have a wide range of different missiles, some very fast to break through defense lasers, then have "slower" ones that can't be dodged as easily because they keep a lot of fuel for the terminal phase. I think it's like a fisherman using the correct hook and bait for the type of fish they are catching.
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Post by midnightdreary on Jan 16, 2017 12:14:34 GMT
<snip> Wow! That thing is an absolute monster of a ship.
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Post by midnightdreary on Jan 13, 2017 11:26:00 GMT
I'll give this a shot. Featuring a state-of-the-art Tessfield 1 MW reactor and a specially designed miniature drone rail firing a simple 1g Van chrome steel projectile at 12.6 km/s out to 90 km. A flat improvement over the original in every aspect (other than length... bleh). 4 km/s delta-v? Wow, really a thing, huh? Anyways, the JTF promised to make better guns later. I took it to heart that all I needed to do was improve, however slight, on all the aspects of a "general workhorse" design. It is cheaper, faster, lighter, better armed, better armored, and has a thinner profile. But otherwise very similar dimensions to the original (since it was mentioned to stay away from micro-drones). The task never mentioned that I needed to design a much larger drone capable of extreme orbital burns or very high speed intercepts. We may simply have interpreted the task differently.
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Post by midnightdreary on Jan 13, 2017 9:59:59 GMT
I'll give this a shot. Featuring a state-of-the-art Tessfield 1 MW reactor and a specially designed miniature drone rail firing a simple 1g Van chrome steel projectile at 12.6 km/s out to 90 km. A flat improvement over the original in every aspect (other than length... bleh).
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Post by midnightdreary on Jan 11, 2017 20:01:38 GMT
<snip> I don't have a name for it yet, and I'm still min-maxing certain modules, but overall I'm quite happy with the result. This ship started out as a modification of the stock corvette and will feature in an upcoming custom campaign I've been working on. It's main armament is thirteen 37.4 km/s Amorphous Carbon coilguns and two (one on each side) 57.4 km/s coilguns. It also has ten 9.4 km/s point defense railguns. Effective range for the coilguns is well over 1000 km though for now engagement range is limited to around ~250-300 kilometres for stock ships. The ship uses hydrogen deuteride (64 tanks total, including the drop tanks). Long range propulsion is provided by a 83.7 km/s 750 MW MPD thruster giving it up 97 km/s deltaV. The NTRs give it 10.5 km/s delta V and a burn time of 1 minute and 39 seconds (almost 6 Gs of acceleration). It also has three directional resistojets. It doesn't have proper armour as I didn't want to add more layers on top of the decorative layers. But if it did it would use a silver/tin/osmium/fibre/aerogel composite. Right now it's only protection is redundancy: 5 reactors, 6 main thrusters, 9 crew modules, 14 main radiators and the 60 internal fuel tanks. The guns are armoured with over 2 centimeters of basalt fibre. Yup, hands down the best looking ship to date. A labor of love for sure.
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Post by midnightdreary on Jan 11, 2017 11:59:58 GMT
Come back with your Whipple shield, or on it.
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Post by midnightdreary on Jan 10, 2017 1:16:37 GMT
Warships. Current doctrine (in my own fleet) is to use MPD for strategic manouvers, then disable MPD to free up all those gigawatts for coils, rails and lasers, with heavy NTRs (~3G acceleration on most warships) enabled to prevent a 10-20 km/s hit from a KKV or NEFP; though banks of medium/small PD rails and coils on ignore range do pretty well at intercepting the incoming kill vehicle. <snip>Can you actually dodge KKV and missiles with 3g on a main warship? I tried doing that, but my higher performance KKV and missiles don't seem to miss very often, even with major combat burns. I opted for ~0.5g-1g on warships and just focused on shooting down the missiles and KKVs before they get to me.
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Post by midnightdreary on Jan 10, 2017 0:59:35 GMT
I believe Lithium takes the cake in the ultra-light / cheap category. Next comes Magnesium for light, but good performance. Then Boron? If you're breaking the wheels with VanCrome Steel you might have the radius to small. Post a pic? Sorry, should've clarified, I wasn't breaking the VC Steel, I was toying with some other materials and they tended to shatter. At this point I'm getting the best performance out of Magnesium with a turning speed of 44.3 o/s and a turn angle of 78 o, but seeing as this is meant to be a PD weapon that still feels way too low for me. I'm starting to think that it's largely a consequence of my self-imposed limit of 10 MW, to be honest; I'm going to try shrinking the turret and shaving some mass off of the railgun itself and see if I can squeeze some more performance out that way. EDIT: sidenote, what's a good mass/cost ceiling for a drone if you're planning on fielding up to 40 at a time to serve as a PD screen? Most of my designs up until now haven't really been designed to work as part of a fleet in terms of tonnage or cost, they've gone more for the WTF factor. Here's one I whipped together that is similar to the overall dimensions you have, weighs a little less, but about 50 kc more for the big performance gain. (you could tune the wheels more, but this seems to be working fine) Edit: Here are the general shenanigans for rails I like to slap on to micro drones for screening purposes. I tend to pre-deploy 100+ drones before intercept.
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Post by midnightdreary on Jan 9, 2017 18:59:27 GMT
Does anyone have any tips on reaction wheels for light railguns? I'm trying to get my total power requirements, mass, and cost below 10MW, 10t, and 100kc (for a 3-meter railgun that's 3.85t and 69.4kc without the turret) for a light PD drone, but I'm not having any luck with osmium, vanadium chromium steel, or any of the other heavy metals; either my mass balloons into the 30t range or the required RPM breaks the material. I believe Lithium takes the cake in the ultra-light / cheap category. Next comes Magnesium for light, but good performance. Then Boron? If you're breaking the wheels with VanCrome Steel you might have the radius to small. Post a pic?
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Post by midnightdreary on Jan 9, 2017 1:01:44 GMT
Design tips. What material properties do I want for a given purpose, do I use NTRs for missiles/drones or not, what would be a good way to test new ideas, etc. tessfield has a wonderful thread compliling just about the entire forums combined efforts into researching most systems and what's best for them as well as examples in the case of apophys ' reactors and my Completely Gratuitous Blue Laser TM. NTRs can be used for missiles/drones, if I remember right they are performance to weight orientated, where as combustion is high thrust. As for testbeds, I don't know if other people make ships from scratch but I use a disarmed Gunship for capital ship designs and Stinger for drone designs. One thing I've also started doing, when I use someone else's designs (I almost exclusively use apophys' reactors, for example), is to name the component after the original creator. It keeps me from getting sued by Apophys Incorporated for copyright infringement. Kidding aside, it's a way to honor the hard work of the min-max community. I would one day like a way to "subscribe" to other people's products (like steam integration) so when I toss on their coil gun it gets updated as they continue to update the design as well.
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Post by midnightdreary on Jan 8, 2017 11:26:24 GMT
I currently use two different lines of my "products." One is centered around min-maxing the cost effectiveness, like jasonvance mentioned above. I consider this what I could use in the campaigns and beat any stock ships with ease. My second, premium, line of products is pure performance, with no expense spared. (with some luxuries spared, such as maintaining some level of armor). A simple rail gun comparison:
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Post by midnightdreary on Jan 8, 2017 8:34:06 GMT
I hope we stay with existing tech... We can "what if" science fiction arguments all day. <snip>... "be useless for hitting anything aside from the broad side of a planet". Which, I think, is the perfect use for a relativistic kill missile. Hard to move a planet out of the way, so it might be fine to take years.
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Post by midnightdreary on Jan 8, 2017 8:22:34 GMT
I hope we stay with existing tech... We can "what if" science fiction arguments all day.
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