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Post by vegemeister on Jan 20, 2018 8:01:58 GMT
Long, skinny flak bombs require less explosive for the same fragment weight. But a single long, skinny flak bomb is difficult to fit in the missile. By using multiple flak bombs, you can get a short/fat payload that makes lots of small fragments.
This is not an exploit, because realistically you would use pre-cut shrapnel (think tetrahedral buckshot or long rods). The explosive would just be for dispersal. You wounldn't even have to use explosive. Centrifugal launch might be the best way to get even distribution of shrapnel.
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Post by vegemeister on Sept 20, 2017 2:49:39 GMT
Presumably missiles would only expose their own cameras for terminal homing. A swarm of missiles could include a number of cold, non-maneuvering sensor drones on nearby trajectories. If you only need 10 seconds of local sensor function, you can do really silly things like using film cameras, which continuously replace the sensing element and so are only disabled by lasers so long as the laser is actively pointed at the camera. The optics would still be vulnerable, but could be similarly protected by an ablative transparent tape continuously-spooling lenscap.
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Post by vegemeister on Sept 20, 2017 2:32:14 GMT
You'd think a 10 kiloton bomb going off a few hundred meters from a patrolcraft would turn it to confetti, or at least irradiate the crew and the computers. A dozen 9 megaton bombs at close range will sometimes manage to burn through the armor or disable the engine, and I killed the stupid methane depot on Neptune with them. They also make decent anti-drone flyswatters if you don't like lasers or hypervelocity railguns. Are radiation effects modeled? Is the damage accurate? The thermal flash of a 10KT nuke at 100m is rather minor, it can just vaporize 11mm of aluminium and can't even produce Impulsive Shock. But the radiation is quite lethal. An Nuke in space would release 10% of its energy as neutrons. This means at 100m the neutron density is 333MJ/m². If an 70 kg adult male has an frontal area of 1m² he will absorb 500,000 rads. This should kill any complex living organism as we know it. Even if 90% of the Neutrons is absorbed by the ship's walls you would still fall in coma in the matter of seconds. Eh, if you vaporize 11 mm of aluminum from the surface of the ship, I think that will create a hell of an impulsive shock on the inside.
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Post by vegemeister on Jul 13, 2017 16:11:15 GMT
You can type in the box and get more digits of precision than are displayed. So long as you do that, there doesn't seem to be any problem with controlling reaction wheel mass.
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Post by vegemeister on Jul 11, 2017 18:24:12 GMT
It looks like a multi-turn railgun armature.
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Post by vegemeister on Jul 11, 2017 18:20:36 GMT
When testing different materials, it might be better to change the thickness so all armors have the same mass.
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Post by vegemeister on Jul 10, 2017 13:09:38 GMT
Logic gates, visual scripting... why not just embed a lua interpreter? It's pretty common for game scripting. People could use standard tools (text editors and version control) to develop their AI, guidance, and gunnery systems. There's a high performance implementation available with a non-copyleft open source license.
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Post by vegemeister on Jul 9, 2017 19:45:32 GMT
Multi-stage coilguns do run into the high-speed inductive load switching problem though, as velocity increases and the time each stage acts on the projectile goes down. couldn't you space the stages out to avoid the switching problem though? That makes timing easier, since you have more time to observe the position and velocity of the projectile and generate the gate drive pulse for your switch. But that's only part of the problem.
The magnetic field created in a coilgun coil pulls the projectile toward the center of the coil. So the work done on the projectile depends on the field being stronger when the projectile is moving into the coil than when it is moving out. Ideally, the field would disappear just as the projectile crossed the center. If it's still there as the projectile moves out of the coil, you get "suckback".
The magnetic field in an inductor is stored energy, just like the electric field in a capacitor. You can only increase the field as fast as you can supply energy, and you can only decrease the field as fast as you can absorb it. This means huge instantaneous power if the projectile is moving at a high speed so you have to build and destroy the field in a very short time. If you space the coils out you don't have to worry so much about how long it takes to build the field, but you're losing energy to resistive losses any time you have current in the coil but aren't applying substantial force to the projectile (because it's way out side the coil). And you still need to worry about switching the field off at center-crossing.
If you can manage it, the best way to absorb energy from the field is to shunt it into the next stage. Second best is to put it back in the current stage's capacitor for the next shot. Third best is to dissipate it in a resistive snubber. Worst is to dissipate it in the magic smoke trapped inside your switching transistor (in that case, your coilgun is only good for one shot).
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Post by vegemeister on Jul 8, 2017 21:14:48 GMT
IRL coilguns have no reason to be as horridly inefficient as COADE coils, though; COADE coils are artificially constrained by the requirement for each capacitor stage to be identical. We're basically using rails as the model EM weapon until coils get fixed. Multi-stage coilguns do run into the high-speed inductive load switching problem though, as velocity increases and the time each stage acts on the projectile goes down.
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Post by vegemeister on Jul 8, 2017 11:42:22 GMT
someusername6 your designs have horribly low efficiency, you should aim for 30%+ if not 40%+ Is that even possible on capacitor coilguns?
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Post by vegemeister on Jul 8, 2017 6:18:44 GMT
I thought I'd try to be clever by using plasma for compactness, made this, then looked at the acceleration and burn time... Isn't it cute though?
What's the efficiency on the MPD? I've gotten the best results out of sodium propellant and potassium electrodes at very low power levels.
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Post by vegemeister on Jul 8, 2017 6:12:26 GMT
Cost is more of an issue than weight, I think - don't have game on computer in front of me but I wouldn't be surprised to see reactor costs double on the best designs. OTOH it won't affect radiators and once you factor those in too the overall system cost increase probably isn't that bad. Just watch, we'll all be waiting for the Great Laser Nerf and it'll turn out that the one thing that gets hosed is small conventional gun drones. More detailed radiator modeling (taking into account coolant pressure and structural integrity under acceleration) would be a much bigger nerf to lasers I'm afraid.
Also, radiators somehow manage to cool sodium down to 371 K while keeping their entire surface at 2630 K. If radiator temperature gradients were modeled, you'd either have to accept much larger radiators, or greatly increase coolant volume and flow rate in the cold side loop.
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Post by vegemeister on Jul 8, 2017 6:00:05 GMT
And my entries:
Here's my entry for the light category: 42 g, 8.6 km/s, 0.002° spread for a 9.22 km range against 1 m^2 targets. There's also a 100 MW version with platinum reaction wheels that's slightly heavier but far cheaper. And for the middleweight category... It's not gonna win any awards for accuracy, but it will ruin your day if you're on the receiving end of one of its 23 MJ slugs.
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Post by vegemeister on Jul 8, 2017 4:47:58 GMT
An ultralight category could be interesting. One of my better drone configurations fires a 35g projectile... at 900 m/s (range on 1m target under 900m). That doesn't sound like an effective weapon... except that the drone will usually be closing at ~3 Km/s when it fires. 35g coming at you at 3.5 Km/s is no joke coming from a relatively cheap drone (the weapon itself is under 100Kg).
I haven't tested my micro drone dispenser missiles since the last patch, so it's possible this has been fixed. But I don't remember seeing it in the changelog.
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Post by vegemeister on Jul 5, 2017 5:20:08 GMT
I don't see the need for secure+fast transport of information. If you have secure+slow, you can send a one-time pad. Then you can transmit securely as fast as you like at the speed of light with ordinary radio.
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