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Post by Hicks on Feb 9, 2017 17:03:53 GMT
I agree. It seems to me that the most cost effective terminal missile defense is a CIWS conventional or rail gun; armor can't protect against a KKV, and proportionaly guided munitions that can out accellerate their target don't miss. If qswitched adds a feature to switch to another target after X shots, I expect to see less armor and a much larger secondary CIWS battery on basically everything.
I guess there's always decoys. Can you make a decoy that outputs more heat than your ship for less than it cost per incoming missile? If not, you'll run out of decoys before I run out of missiles.
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Post by Hicks on Feb 9, 2017 16:41:21 GMT
I wonder what a moe slice of life anime set in the COADE universe would be like. It would have to be around Nippon Prime's territory of course. Perhaps there's some training academy for cadets on Ceres or some Nippon Prime asteroid trying to join the space Kido Butai or something. The MC and her friends would all obviously have to be different Joshikousei archetypes, especially when one considers the average mass for the crew members in the crew modules on these ships. It could be like Girls und Panzer or Lucky Star BUT IN SPACE!!1! U-Until the perfidious RSF fleet destroys them. Realistic space warfare anime in CoaDE? I'd totally watch that; like Knights of Sidonia but without the haegus particles, photosynthesis (srsly?), and conservation of mass defying aliens, fused with the grand strategy of Legend of the Galactic Heroes but without all the super dumb stuff like "narrow space," And have that undercurrent of black humor that makes this game's lore so great.
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Post by Hicks on Feb 8, 2017 17:28:43 GMT
Why are you attacking civilian shipping? What did they do to you? They're just trying to make a living. That is like the entire point of On the Surface of Giants. You nuke a defenseless civillian fuel refinery in extreamly low orbit. I mean, I didn't: I used a big ass laser to snipe of the crew pod's radiator at 900km, but the mission as designed has you command a mercenary fleet to nuke an unarmed station.
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Post by Hicks on Feb 5, 2017 20:35:50 GMT
I can confirm that an 83.5t pure fission grenade kinda beats the pants off of a pure kkv. If you hit the target right on the nose, yeah the kkv can end the fight in one hit, over-penetrating every spinal module. But more likely you take a thousand rounds as the target rotated broadside and you are still pelting the exact same spot but not getting any more modules.
Since my coil gun "missiles" are basically an armored proportionally guided projectile, they fly sideways doing course corrections, not nose first. So I wrapped yust the nuke in a centimeter or so of Osmium. The nuke detonate with 83.5 tons of force, the Osmium jacket breaks up without becoming a plasma, and the fragments spray the entire side of the target with Osmium buckshot.
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Post by Hicks on Feb 4, 2017 22:47:06 GMT
I'll have to try equipping my smart rounds with a nuclear hand grenade. What was it supposed to be? Anything going ~3km/s is like strapping its mass in TNT to the contact spot, but those mini-nukes start equivalent to ~95 tons.
I see some posters shooting NEFP? Which is like your coil gun shooting a homing missile that is itself a nuclear powered shotgun fired point blank into the enemy's face.
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Post by Hicks on Feb 4, 2017 17:48:52 GMT
On interstellar: I was shouting at my TV when they were orbiting the black hole. Why? Because their orbit crossed the accretion disk. They were pictured above its glow, which was pretty, but they were twice dead: first from the X and Gamma rays blasting up from below them, and second because the orbit CROSSES THE FUCKING GLOWING ACCRETION DISK, which is SO FUCKING HOT IT GLOWS IN X AND GAMMA RAYS! The movie went from "ok, I can dig this" to "FUCK YOU THAT IS NOT HOW ORBITS WORK! PLAY SOME KERBAL SPACE PROGRAM YOU FUCKS!"
just had to get that off my chest.
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Post by Hicks on Feb 1, 2017 20:54:48 GMT
Thanks! It went from 4.12dv in combat to 34.5dV for long burns.
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Post by Hicks on Feb 1, 2017 16:25:45 GMT
So there a trick or something to getting thruster type A inside a ring of thruster type B? Because I've been trying for the last half hour and it still has the intersection error. I'd really like my NTRs to down-shift into MPD cruise mode to turn 5 kilometers of dV into 47. Seems like there should be an easier way to do this.
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Post by Hicks on Jan 9, 2017 12:08:59 GMT
You don't need to have a heavy pusher plate. Silica aerogel will catch the plasma and not over heat, just make sure it shadows your ships radiators.
The hardest thing right now is optimizing accelleration. The nose mounted launcher fires the nuke nose first, so I've been placing beryllium oxide and tungsten rad-shields of equal size (about a 1:4 mass ratio) as propellant. The 100kt pulse unit worked the best with the launcher set to 70m. I'll have more when my ISP fixes my modem and I'm no longer tied to this phone.
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Post by Hicks on Jan 9, 2017 8:19:16 GMT
So for reasons I was trying to armor a launcher in silica aerogel, to ward against point blank nuclear detonations, but to my dismay the entire fiber line of armors is unavailable for launchers. Every other class of weapon gets access to fiber armors, is this intended?
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Post by Hicks on Jan 9, 2017 8:05:47 GMT
Hey qswitched, I really like how you modeled the visuals in the game to reflect what we should see in real life, it let's me check for the defraction caused by the wave of plasma just after the nuke flash. That's pretty awesome.
In other news, a launcher armored with 1m of tungsten rhenium lasted 457 pulses of a 2kt detonation, propelling a ~250kg of tungsten and beryllium oxide plasma. The newer, lighter, cheaper 20m radius 3m thick silica aerogel pusher plate took it like a champ and is still good.
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Post by Hicks on Jan 9, 2017 5:42:44 GMT
Hey! I just saw something: because I mounted the launcher on the nose, the nuke comes out with it's nose out too. This means we can wrap it in depleted uranium "armor" and have a "rad shield" of tungsten on the back where the armor won't cover anyway, which provides a perfect shape to focus the nuclear blast! I'm gonna test this right now.
Edit update: tungsten rhenium is now the launcher armor of choice. Lasted longer than a 3m thick maraging steel pusher plate, which lasted 300 2kt detonations at 50m.
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Post by Hicks on Jan 8, 2017 6:34:02 GMT
EDIT: Fixed the nuke image. So I'm kinda new to this, so here's the .txt file with everything in it, because of course. And by everything I mean everything, it's just the raw file. UserDesigns.txt (43.81 KB) So the absolute key to this is getting the launcher to survive. It works just like you think an Orion would, you queue the number of pulse units you want to launch and accelerate in jumps. Keeping the launcher cool is an absolute must, as what seems to happen is that it just melts under the prolonged point blank nuclear bombardment. Prolonged being the operative word. A better engineer could math hammer out how long stuff needs to cool between pulses and tune the pulse launcher accordingly. I literally just eyeball everything because I barely know what I'm trying to do, and have no idea how to accomplish that without iterative destructive testing. FEATURE REQUEST: I'm pretty sure we could devise an actual nuclear shaped charge: we just do what the text says and armor the pulse unit in Depleted Uraninum while leaving a window that will be covered by a patch of Tungsten armor as directed propellant. The only problem with that is the rotational armor slider: we need another one. as of right now there is no way to have, like the 180-270 degree radius have armor without also armoring the 0-180 degree radius. So we really need another slider like the front/back: a Clock/Counter, combined with the front/back will give us a can with a directional hole to be covered by the propellant. Hey qswitched, you made an awesome simulator. It is literal childhood wish fulfillment of an actual wish for a space fleet. You done good.
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Post by Hicks on Jan 8, 2017 5:35:38 GMT
So I'm a big fan of nuclear pulse propulsion, and was naturally kind of disappointed that it was not included in the base game. I mean, I understand why, but I'll be damned if I was not going to try to include it anyway, despite my complete lack of programming ability and complete lack of math hammering the physics behind it. So after a few hours, and an unsuccessful* attempt utilizing comically large radiation shields (2cm diamond outer, 1m maraging steel, 10m graphite aerogel, and finally 1m maraging steel inner), I finally got this thing to actually move while under atomic bombardment: What makes it all work is 1/3 this: and 1/3 this: Why yes Virginia, that 0.5kt nuclear fission bomb is the absolute heart of the vessel. Why so small? because I wanted it to work as a test for proof of concept without having to redesign the pusher plate a zillion times because it cant handle the bomb. But that's not enough to make the Orion Drive work. and I even forgot about it myself for the first two iterations: PROPELLANT. like in this handy declassified diagram: So the final 1/3 that makes this all work is wrapping that nuclear firecracker in a few millimeters of tungsten: And that is how we get from this: ...to THIS: ... to ALL THE WAY OVER HERE: THAT'S... actually kind of unimpressive. The launcher finally broke on the ~80th pulse, which lasted longer than any previous test. So the key is to use a launcher that discharges a nuke clad in propellant, which is timed to go off after 0.995 seconds, and the launcher has a reloading speed of longer than that. You can get the pulse unit to detonate extremely precisely by tuning the launcher's ejection speed (in m/sec). I think this version had it tuned to go off 25m in front of the ship. And now for the "quirks." The pulse unit is backward, and the armor pusher plate is mounted on the nose of the ship, because the ship designer likes to leave a big-ass hole where a thruster would normally go even if there is not a thruster mounted, and having an open window to a fission propelled cloud of tungsten plasma is just the absolute worst. The launcher is maximally armored in diamond, and WILL get blown off if it over heats. Going from the battle view to the orbit view and back instantly removes all heat built up on the armor and launcher, and it also instantly kills off all velocity gained from all previous nuclear pulses. So to be honest, THIS ship sucks. but that's OK. It exists to prove that Nuclear Pulsed Propulsion can work in some fashion within the limit of the game's current engine. I offer it to the forum so you guys and gals can actually math-hammer and re-engineer this starting point into something iteratively better. Because Project Orion is awesome. Fun Stuff and other links: www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/supplement/GA-5009vIII.pdf www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/enginelist.php#id--Pulse--Orion
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