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Post by Hicks on Jun 22, 2017 9:03:26 GMT
...or 2 stage cannons...
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Post by Hicks on Jun 21, 2017 9:01:42 GMT
Yeah, that's pretty huge.
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Post by Hicks on Jun 21, 2017 8:25:26 GMT
I mean, didn't you test it? If you have 2 ships both set to defensive, battles won't happen. And the rules state that you can't edit the AI scrips, not that you can't select one. Anything not specifically banned by the rules is allowed, that's what tournament rules do; don't constrain yourself with rules and bans that don't exist.
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Post by Hicks on Jun 21, 2017 6:50:40 GMT
Uh, rescripting the AI is a feature of CoaDE, but doing it is disallowed for this tournament.
You can always set steam into offline mode and prerecord the tournament, then livestream the commentary with the recording. You don't even need to show the commentators the results so they're going in blind.
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Post by Hicks on Jun 20, 2017 19:35:55 GMT
As long as the event organizers don't have competing designs in the tournament there isn't a conflict of interest, but even if y'all do who cares? There's no money involved, just a bunch of people chomping at the bit to show their stuff in lieu of actual multiplayer. We're just trying to increase exposure of the great simulation, and nothing expands the community more than videos of cool spaceship battles. I've watched more than 80 hours of Reassembly tournaments (and bought that game because of it); CoaDE can only benefit from the same exposure.
There's a few different ways y'all could do it. Live-stream the raw footage and commentary then post it afterword; do that but edit out the setup parts when posting the video; or pre-shoot every battle, splice it together, then livestream the edited video and with commentary then post that afterward.
The first way is probably the easiest to make but the most unpolished product, the last way is the most work but would make the livestream exciting, shorter, and more accessible (more people will sit through a 20-30 minute video than a 4 hour odyssey).
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Post by Hicks on Jun 20, 2017 16:03:41 GMT
When you're recording it. Think of it like a vs. screen in a fighting game; it let's the audience see up close who's fighting and with what. Half the fun of watching stuff like this is the audience making an opinion and rooting for a combatant, and the comparison screen is like a miniature death-battle intro that explains their literal weapons, armor, and skills before the ruckus commences.
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Post by Hicks on Jun 20, 2017 15:38:54 GMT
So for the competition, could you show the screen comparing the 2 ships before they fight? I mean, we know how our ships work, but I don't know how their ships work or what they have. It'd be useful for the folks at home too.
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Post by Hicks on Jun 20, 2017 6:23:40 GMT
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Post by Hicks on Jun 20, 2017 6:22:28 GMT
Mine's in as well. Oddly, I found I didn't have a lot of trouble coming in at 4mc/700kt (it's a stripped-down version of a relatively mature 8mc/1mt design I had laying around) So those metric prefixes are all over the place. 4mc is "four milli-credits" or 0.04c, and 700kt (which should be notated 700Kt) is "seven-hundred kilo-tons" which is 700x more massive than the contest limits; both numbers together is patently impossible. You then talk about a how that comes from an "8 milli-credits" or 0.08c and "1 milli-ton" which isn't a thing but would be 0.01 metric tons or 10Kg. How you inflated a 10kg vessel by 70,000,000x and then halved the credit cost is not really a thing. You probably ment to say 4Mc/700t and 8Mc/1Mt... but then again 8 million credits is way too cheap for 1 million tons; that's 0.008c/kg wich is also not possible... Could you post that again with the right metric prefexes? I have no idea what you just posted.
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Post by Hicks on Jun 19, 2017 7:02:26 GMT
So I know there was research in NTR ramjets, but was there ever any research into resistor/ram jets?
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Post by Hicks on Jun 19, 2017 6:04:27 GMT
Civillians should use Resistor-jet/MPD combo, Military ships use NTR/MPD. The only reason to have an NTR is if you needed the power to thrust AND something else is using all your reactor power, e.g. a big laser.
Reactor+resistor jets / MPD is cheaper and grants equivalent thrust to NTR, and easier to maintain because you don't have N nuclear reactors on gimbals hanging off the back of the ship. Civillian RJ/MPD ships can also support their ports with power generation while they sit at their docks.
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Post by Hicks on Jun 19, 2017 5:49:39 GMT
That line of reasoning is fallicious, and my proof to counter you is the home comming mission race. NTRs have thrust, but only matters in the context of overcoming gravity, in orbital freefall its thrust is nearly irrelevent; dV is nearly everything.
You orbit, accellerate, coast, decelerate, and orbit again. Methane NTRs get ~6 km/s dV, Hydrogen NTRs get ~9 km/s dV; both take ~10 minutes to achieve maximum velocity, but can only coast at 3 and 4.5 km/s. And, IIRC, they take 6 months to go from Earth to Mars and years to get to Jupiter. A Methane MPD gets 56~100 km/s dV, which means they coast at 28 to 50 (!) Km/s, and can do the Earth-Mars run in 2-3 monthss and MONTHS to get to Jupiter.
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Post by Hicks on Jun 19, 2017 0:30:03 GMT
Honestly, I was a NTR girl until CoaDE, and would have said that if you wouldn't get on a NTR because it had a nuclear reactor you didn't deserve to go to space; dV is king and NTRs have more. And then CoaDE converted me to 2 things: Boron, God's wonder material, and MPDs.
MPDs are just too efficient, their exaust velocity too great, and their propellants too abundant and cheap and easy to extract. You take a nuclear reactor, but instead of just dumping its coolant out the back through a nozzle you hook it to a thermocoupleand radiator and have that electrical energy drive the MPD. And the dV is nuts. It's just nuts.
So though I understand that flying a nuclear reactor to space would require testing, anyone who wouldn't get on a nuclear powered MPD because it has a nuclear reactor dosen't deserve to be in space. That's a hard line, but they'd have never reached where we're going to go anyway.
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Post by Hicks on Jun 18, 2017 22:23:22 GMT
I think you have it wrong. Good AI puts the nose foreward, bad AI goes broadside. Well designed, angled nose armor can tank nearly everything, but broadside armor just gets cut to ribbons. The reason nose foreward seems bad to you is because you're probably using stock ships which have a flat plate on their nose, which is even less angled than broadside armor.
And what's the 3v3 supposed to test? Good science eliminates as many variables as possible: 1 gun vs. 1 armor scheme, and the armor shouldn't be able to fire at the gun platform.
The experiment should consist of 2 ships
The first is the Armor Platform. It is nothing but a weak thruster, a reaction mass tank, a minimum crew/radiator/powerplant, and an aggressive drone controller. On its nose put a spacer and then cover just the nose in the armor scheme you're testing. You only need to armor the front silouette, so everything, including the radiators, must be covered by the lowest layer of the armor when viewed from the front.
The second is the Gun Platform. This has the same engine and reaction mass tank, but the crew/reactors/radiators are the minimum required to operate the Gun you mount on the nose.
Set up both in the sandbox, with you controlling the Gun platform and the Armor platform set to striker AI. Set up an intercept with a low closing velocity and set your Gun Platform's weapon to ignore range and Orders to Nose Foreward.
So what can you test with this setup? Every angle of any armor scheme by adding/removing length spacers to the Armor Platform, from flat (the worst!) with no spacers to a slight bulge to simulate broadside (still bad) to a comical number of spacers to get a needle nose (ease up! Ever hear of diminishing returns?). And you can test it against any gun by switching the weapon on the Gun Platform.
And I cannot stress this enough: One (1) Armor Platform vs. One (1) Gun Platform. For. Each. Test. Period. (.).
That's the only way do get usable data. Eliminate as many variables as possible so you're only testing what armor protects against what gun. Oh, and pause a lot with the armor viewer so you can see what's going on.
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Post by Hicks on Jun 18, 2017 19:34:52 GMT
Man is the AI ever a dumb coward. My armor scheme will bounce everything a gunship can throw at it, but nearly every script freaks out and tries to dodge instead of just sitting nose foreward. Hell's bells, only one preset kinda-sorta worked. And i had a hell of a time trying to get within the dV, mass, and credit limit. Every time I'd improve one the other two would exceed their limits, so the DD is just a mess of compromises.
Oh well. Good luck to everybody in the tournament, and if your vessel dosen't win at least let it be entertaining for the folks at home.
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