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Post by AdmiralObvious on Oct 31, 2018 4:34:18 GMT
Strange. It worked a while ago for me.
I don't know if you absolutely need the thumbnail anymore though.
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Post by AdmiralObvious on Oct 30, 2018 18:04:45 GMT
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Post by AdmiralObvious on Oct 30, 2018 2:45:54 GMT
I've had pretty good luck at running ~6kg micro drones with lightweight conventional guns. The general strategy is to launch 20-50 drones and have them intercept on a retrograde orbit, the acceleration assist from using this tactic makes use of the additive velocity boost that AtomHeartDragon referred to. The end result is an effective attack platform that unlike a light kinetic kill vehicle can make multiple attack runs and isn't vulnerable to flares. This is true. The only qualm I have with your gun is that it's still only shooting 1 gram plates. When I use chemguns, I try to get to at least 50 grams, myself. More is better of course, but 50 gram shots tend to basically ignore stuffed whipples as long as they're a relatively tough material.
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Post by AdmiralObvious on Oct 29, 2018 1:00:26 GMT
I very much like conventional guns. Overall, for their niche, they are very useful, and as mentioned, make exceptional payload throwers. (The stock nuke cannon is an example. A bad one, but still an example.)
As for how you use the armor, you're going to need to do multiple different types of armor based on what you're getting shot at by.
The only good way to stop a 1 ton shell is at least another ton of armor (or something dense/hard enough to bounce the shot, but you're still going to need armor). Chemguns are best beat with acceleration and rate of direction change. Of course throwing the gun at high speeds adds an additive boost to the normal velocity, and can make conventional guns devastating, like the stock stinger drones.
Sandblasters for energy weapons on the other hand are easily beat with thin layers of most materials. You usually aren't going to he able to dodge hypervelocity sand, but you can usually armor against it fairly easily, as long as you don't mind ballooning the armor profile.
Lasers are going to need more than 1 MW of input power. They aren't very useful with less than that, except occasionally as point defense, but even then the target it's trying to melt will matter significantly.
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Post by AdmiralObvious on Oct 15, 2018 7:00:44 GMT
Here's a capacitor coil that throws 15.0 grams @ 8.14 km/s @ 30 hz with a 1.5 meter turret diameter and it doesn't overheat. It's a little heavy though, if the game had the option of fitting a water jacket and a radiator and a small pump instead of only using passive cooling on high cyclic rate guns this would be a lot lighter and a lot smaller. But naa, lets just use a solid 1 meter cylinder of diamond because that sounds easier to build. Better economy of moving parts this way, fewer things that could go wrong. You didn't need that delta v right? Good.
That thing is laser accurate. Or better. I'm pretty sure that spread's less than the laser wobble.
A tip: if you click that "compare" button in the top right, and you haven't made any changes since opening the editor, you can get all the statistics in one screenshot.
Edit: one thing to look at is the overheat time. Overheating isn't a problem if it only happens after 5 minutes of continuous fire.
Depending on what you're doing, greater than laser like accuracy can be a pretty bad thing. Sure, you might be firing a few hundred shots per second, but if they're all literally penetrating the same spot, it's almost pointless, especially against a near stationary target, believe it or not. Some scatter can be good, especially with the way the AI lays the guns. Also, my overheat standard is 2 minutes. If somehow you're engaged for longer than that, there's probably a serious issue.
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Post by AdmiralObvious on Oct 12, 2018 19:12:57 GMT
It's almost certainly due to the simulation tick rate. I've been playing a bit of From the Depths recently, you tend to get similar issues in that game too with high velocity projectiles, and both games are built (seemingly) in Unity.
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Post by AdmiralObvious on Oct 12, 2018 4:47:18 GMT
It's also marginally cheaper to not have a pointed nose. But that's probably not why it's the case in game for most of the stock ships.
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Post by AdmiralObvious on Oct 11, 2018 0:02:56 GMT
After reading a bit through some of the more recent, and older threads, I've noticed that there seems to be some pretty big issues with differences between firing a payload versus firing an actual projectile equaling the mass and overall shape of the payload.
Payloads seek to be many times more effective at killing an enemy vehicle, as I tested firing at a stationary station with a 5 meter thick sphere of VCS.
The payload doesn't bounce, it just gets deleted, and often kills the station. The actual "shell" moving at the same speed tends to he subject to the laws of physics, and can either bounce, penetrate, or in rare cases, get deleted.
I'm chalking it up as a bug, but I don't know for sure if there's even a possible way to fix such an issue at this point.
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Post by AdmiralObvious on Oct 10, 2018 22:15:42 GMT
If it comes back due to the steam cloud, blank it out and save it.
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Post by AdmiralObvious on Oct 9, 2018 20:04:48 GMT
even railguns? I always got the impression that firing more than a few hundred slugs from a modern-day RG wore out the rails. It does. The game has a hard time showing that, at all. Granted being in space makes the effects less bad.
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Post by AdmiralObvious on Oct 8, 2018 22:56:13 GMT
I personally prefer adjusted (or whatever it was called, it's been a while since I made guidance, made one that worked for everything and never touched it since) pure pursuit for the starting boost phase. That way the missile is attempting to aim ahead of the nose of the target by a few meters, so it seems to work best for "rough intercept". The rest works great with APN though.
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Post by AdmiralObvious on Oct 8, 2018 6:27:52 GMT
Basically everything in a stock game already exists, or did exist at one point or another (within reason). You don't have multi gigawatt lasers on modern cruisers, because they take up too much power and don't play well with atmosphere. You do have a few hundred megawatt lasers currently in use for point defense on aircraft for example though.
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Post by AdmiralObvious on Sept 27, 2018 5:53:45 GMT
Yo rocketwitch, this is off topic, but do u know where all the old regulars went ? These forums used to be bustling with all these familiar users, and now there almost all gone. You, newageofpower, apophys and (maybe) me, are all thats left of the old guard I still watch this forum more or less daily, though admittedly I'm not that renown. But I've also noticed many familiar faces (so to speak) are gone. It's the nature of things. I do the same. Mostly via my phone. I'd post more, but the banner ads on the mobile version of this site sometimes seems to crash the page.
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Post by AdmiralObvious on Sept 22, 2018 4:27:05 GMT
The big win here isn't that the armor spacing makes a good fuel tank. It's that a fuel tank makes *fantastic* armor, because fuel is far denser than anything you could reasonably use as whipple stuffing without compromising the mass ratio of the ship. A meter of ethane has much greater sectional density than a meter of graphogel. And if you make it a self-sealing fuel tank, the fuel doesn't even leak away if you get shot up a bit. I'm not sure you want liquid fill between your Whipple shields and inner armor belts, though; that might conduct shock waves cleanly and defeat the whole purpose of a Whipple shield. Probably. Most whipples wouldn't be thick or strong enough to contain most fuels though.
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Post by AdmiralObvious on Sept 21, 2018 1:14:09 GMT
For slower slugs, it's a matter of acceleration of the target. If the target can move so fast that you can't reasonably lead accurately with the gun, you aren't going to actually hit anything, save for some exceptional luck. Sandblasters are effective because they're exceptionally hard to dodge. Of course, there are more factors to that. Fast intercepts turn slow, heavy, easily dodgeable slugs (or payloads) into fast, heavy slugs of doom.
Deep gravity wells make fast intercepts easier as they keep you gravitationally bound even if you travel at obscene velocity and allow you to juggle your potential and kinetic energy around massively changing your velocity vector. If you are intercepting at 30m/s the difference between 10km/s 1g sandcaster and 1km/s 1kg is considerable, because you need to be in the knife-fight range to hope hitting with the latter. Now make it a 30km/s intercept in low orbit around a gas giant and you're effectively dealing with 1g pellets travelling at 40km/s VS massive 1kg slugs hitting at 31km/s, that can be fired as rapidly as relatively modest autoloader can ram them down the barrel.
Ouch.
So, where you're fighting is going to make a huge difference - in the belt I expect laserstars to rule the day, around planets it will be missiles and autocannons (and drone mounted autocannons), with railguns and coilguns somewhere in between.
Of course I generally aim for mixed battery, as it is unusual to ever keep your optimal distance in space, because it is good to be able to counter diverse threats and finally because it allows nifty things like putting the enemy in a crossfire with a single ship.
Indeed. My statement earlier assumes ships are running parallel to each other at relatively low velocity. Defensive acceleration is still a factor in flybys, but it's definitely less effective.
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