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Post by Hicks on Mar 21, 2017 2:39:38 GMT
Yea, though I fly through the orbits of flack missiles, Boron is with me. It's armor and gun barrels comfort me. It gathers a constellation foes; as presents, my enemies. Surely victory after victory shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in a spaceship of Boron forever.
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Post by Hicks on Mar 18, 2017 2:24:18 GMT
I didn't so much drink the Boron Kool-Aide as I swallowed it whole. It's remarkably solid and resilient at room temperature.
Love, life: Boron.
A fragrance by CoaDE.
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Post by Hicks on Mar 17, 2017 13:28:42 GMT
I mean, you still need to have a capitol ship with the drone operators on it in the local battle zone, because light minute delays are absolutely unacceptable, and you're going to want to armor and gun that for anti missile and drone protection, but the only reason I build gunships is because my computer can't handle the volume of missiles/drones I'm willing to fire in any truthfully effective engagement.
To me, Capital ships are armed with cannon and lasers not to penetrate other capitol ship armor, but to chew through the multi thousand strong missile swarm. My destroyers have 3000 homing nuclear missiles, mass barely over a kiloton, and cost less than 15Mc. But they can't deal with unloading all 3000, I can't even test 300 without my computer becoming a slide-show. But somewhere around the 200 missile mark the destroyer's defenses become saturated and start taking nukes.
So I took a break after the update that broke -all- my coilguns, I started making conventional cannon gunships. Cuz that's fun.
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Post by Hicks on Mar 17, 2017 9:47:00 GMT
So as said before, Q-ships are convoy escorts that don't outwardly look like warships, and false-flag is where you claim you are somebody else who can be trusted not to shoot somebody in the face to abuse that trust to get close enough to sombody to shoot them in the face, and smuggling a multimegaton thermonuclear device into your enemy's base is a black operation, because if you admit to it to get people to fear you then you are a terrorist.
But as far as the main post? Lasers didn't end the gunship, missile swarms did. Battles are fought by slinging missiles and drones far outside of laser range at one another, through screens of interceptor drones to get to the missile/drone platform, the capitol ship, which will be defending with laser drones and a big ass anti-missile/debris laser.
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Post by Hicks on Mar 17, 2017 9:31:42 GMT
Dani Hicks, Goddess of conventional gun ships. Herald of Boron, who is the Fondation, Boron the Protector. Boron is life. All Hail Boron! She sits at Boron's left hand; Boron carries a radiation shield of Lithium-6, and a sword of U-233. From the sword weeps a river of molten sodium that flows into wafer thin radiators that adorn the Amorphous carbon throne. On Boron's chest is a breastplate of Graphogel at least a meter thick, which has a shell of Amorphous Carbon that itself is leaved in Diamond.
I am waited on by gunships that mass half and cost a tenth as much as stock, and all who oppose me shall be struck by kilograms of iron and nuclear fire in excess of 3kps.
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Post by Hicks on Mar 13, 2017 20:17:55 GMT
100 ton torpedo ? What is the payload ? Most likely ~30 tons of "go away." Apply liberaly to the enemy and watch them go from an active shipping hazzard all the way to a passive one.
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Post by Hicks on Mar 13, 2017 20:12:50 GMT
Just to increase the sample size, I also run Methane NTR/MPD for my capital ships, but I also run Methane NTR for my missiles. I like to think that I'm keeping the supply chain simple by only using one propellant instead of 2 propellants and an oxidizer, plus Fluorine is just nuts. Fluorine accidents are just the worst, and I can't imagine managing filling/checking a few thousand micro-missiles without spilling some, and multiply that by evey ship using missiles and it just looks safer to use miniaturized and disposable nuclear reactors with a can of Methane than spilling Fluorine anywhere around a weapons platform. Fires and explosions are actually the smallest (if most deadly) problem; it's far more likely the spill will corrode something important and the storage/launcher will fail in transit or at a critical moment in the battle.
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Post by Hicks on Mar 10, 2017 17:01:52 GMT
So I've been using a variant from earlier in this thread that goes like this:
Boron, 2cm <--Inside Boron, 8cm (front 38% only) Graphite Aerogel, 1m Amorphous Carbon, 1cm Diamond, 5mm <--Outside
And I gotta say that as long as it is taking the hits on the pointed bow, it is immune to everything a Gunship can do to it from the front, including 30 strong Flack missiles. No it dosen't shoot the missiles down, it takes every missile and gun and laser straight in the face and dosen't break. The armor wraps around a custom 5.6kt cannon ship that is armed with 12 conventional gun turrets (armored in 20cm of amorphous carbon) that shoot 1kg of ironover 3kps.
That's 100 flack missiles, some sniper coilguns, and a 100MW laser. Drones can still strip the turrets though. Needs a better turret armor.
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Post by Hicks on Mar 8, 2017 0:32:12 GMT
SO MechJeb will execute burns that you set up, as long as you are watching that one vessel during every burn, and Kerbal Alarm Clock will notify you when you need to drop everything you're doing and focustomer on one vessel so you can watch it burn, and Protractor will calculate/show the phase angle of the KSP planets, and Kerbal Engineer tells us how much dV, Thurst to Mass ratio, and how much each stage masses...
And CoaDE does all that out of the box, with the exception of planetary phase angles. Every one of KSP's navigational mods except ONE is a base feature of the game, and you get N-body physics, and you can set the frame of reference to your target, fleet, or any named point so you can set your engagement up exactly as you want. Hell, it even displays closest approach and closing velocity.
CoaDE's navigational suite is very robust, and exceeds KSP's. What more functionality would you add?
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Post by Hicks on Mar 7, 2017 21:57:35 GMT
One thing I'm really interested in is the simulation of civilian operations and exploration missions. Travel from planet to planet is quite important for that too. Even if it is only 2 planets. Now if we had tools to plan the burn a la KSP ... So we're going to start this post by saying that I've been building warships in KSP for 3 and a half years. And KSP is a great and wonderful game. And with that out of the way... Honestly? CoaDE's astrogation blows KSP's out of the water. CoaDE will let you plan this burn, the next burn, and hover many more you need to execute for this fleet and every fleet you control. You can even do fancy stuff like split a fleet so half go to Io, the other to Europa, and then have them meet up and merge at Ganymede, and you have complete control of any aspect of those burns and can plot it all out before you start. And CoaDE let's us fast forward through multi-hour burns from our custom made everything. KSP has us sit through each burn, you can only control one ship at a time, and all your planning is lost as soon as you switch to another vessel. That is because KSP's game play is timer game play, as you execute burns and try to manually land stuff. CoaDE isn't about waiting for a burn, it's about executing orbital maneuvers and eliminating your opponents, and to that end the "game play" eschews waiting and the game play is astrogating the fleet maneuvers and skipping all that waiting and at the end you watch a few minutes of terror as nukes explode, lasers burn, and guns fill the void with tracers, all to erase your opposition; this is punctuated by occasionally having to deal with a missle/drone swarm. And then there's the whole 3/4 of the real game after Vesta Overkill where you design the operating perameters of nuclear reactors and lasers and nuclear warheads and every other placate component in the game. The CoaDE simulation game play would not be improved by the timer and timing game play of KSP.
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Post by Hicks on Mar 6, 2017 23:02:56 GMT
Truth in advertising. Thanks qswitched!
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Post by Hicks on Mar 6, 2017 17:43:50 GMT
Physics? I can normally get decent additive acceleration (at or above stock velocities) out of ~4 stages, but the main difference is between my designs and this is that I never-ever use more than one layer in the coil if possible, and my armatures are kilogram mass blocks of raw iron.
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Post by Hicks on Mar 4, 2017 23:58:04 GMT
Nuclear Fission. I am a big proponent of Thorium nuclear liquid salt reactors, mostly because you don't need to worry about uncontrolled meltdown if it's already melted and under control, as others have pointed out. If you asked me 10 years ago I'd have said hydroelectric, but as it turns out dams are both very ecologically damaging and limited by geography in a way nuclear reactors just aren't.
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Post by Hicks on Mar 1, 2017 23:50:10 GMT
From what I remember, Capacitor work by storing electric charge on an input plate that is barely seperated from an output plate by some non-conductive material. The charge builds up on the input plate until it leaps the gap of the non-conductive material and floods the output plate with all the accumulated energy at once. Increasing the size of the plates increases the ammount of energy the capacitor can store, and increasing the width of the non-conductive material does much the same. You can actually have a capacitor without the input/output plates touching anything; air or vacuum acts as the non-conductive spark gap.
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Post by Hicks on Feb 28, 2017 7:30:54 GMT
Hey qswitched, thanks for all your hard work, and for an excellent simulation. No matter what, you did a good job with CoaDE, and we're thankful for that.
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