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Post by omnipotentvoid on Feb 18, 2017 10:33:13 GMT
Don't all systems in the game use assumptions and simplifications in order to simulate them in a way that doesn't fry our computers? As far as I can remember from researching rail guns, rail geometry is incredibly important to the calculation of the force applied to the projectile. The game doesn't simulate this, rather it assumes a rail geometry for which the equations are known/simple and uses them. I imagine implementation of sensor systems would be similar: assumptions are made so that the calculations that the game has to make based our input parameters are simple enough that our computers can handle it. The only in-combat difference that a different geometry simulation would cause is a change in the parameters applied to the barrel and projectile. This doesn't add new parameters, hence it has no effect on the processing load outside of the module editor. I'm quite sure the simplification for railguns is either due to unknowns or to reduce game development time, or both. It may be added sometime in the distant future, or when/if the dev team expands. The current railgun geometry as displayed is actually nonviable. It is one solid barrel of metal, which would short circuit at its base. Rail geometry dictates the shape and strength of the magnetic field generated. Certain shapes could be used to allow for different accelerations along different parts of the barrel, say, to counteract material weakening due to heating. Calculating the magnetic field of a barrel with such a complex shape as the projectile moves along it is not easy and the game probably doesn't allow it because a) it would probably take a long time to calculate the parameters needed for combat and b) implementing such a simulation would be incredibly difficult to implement, probably being beyond the scope of a project like CoaDE. My point is that sensors would need to be simplified to some extent in order to be implemented, as do all systems.
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Post by omnipotentvoid on Feb 18, 2017 7:12:33 GMT
I think the idea of simple flare decoys being effective is pretty unconvincing. Any simple discrimination logic would rule them out in most scenarios... Doesn't take a genius to figure out new sources of heat that suddenly appear traveling perpendicular to the target are decoys. I think by now it's apparent there's no way to handle sensors from a physics ground up approach and do it justice. An essential part of game design is choosing what are the meaningful decisions a player makes... For example, one laser frequency doubler is clearly the best choice and no knowledgeable player is going to pick another in any normal circumstance, so why bother giving a bunch of false choices? My approach would be to simplify sensor (and jammer) design to just the critical trade-offs - weight, size, cost, power, etc and leave it at that. Make some assumptions about this sensor fusion and data link stuff (as the game already does with command guidance) or it'll never end. Don't all systems in the game use assumptions and simplifications in order to simulate them in a way that doesn't fry our computers? As far as I can remember from researching rail guns, rail geometry is incredibly important to the calculation of the force applied to the projectile. The game doesn't simulate this, rather it assumes a rail geometry for which the equations are known/simple and uses them. I imagine implementation of sensor systems would be similar: assumptions are made so that the calculations that the game has to make based our input parameters are simple enough that our computers can handle it.
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Post by omnipotentvoid on Feb 17, 2017 21:10:50 GMT
I think that at the ranges we're discussing a rudimentary sensor suite would be somewhat necessary; I mean, my missiles are already designed to engage at 1 Mm and close at 14 km/s from a standing start. At those velocities and at that range it would take a shipboard command suite about 7 milliseconds to receive information from the enemy ship (e.g. its thermal signature, its location relative to the ship, yadda yadda) by which time my missile has covered a full hundred meters of space and might've missed a high-gee jinking enemy ship already. And frankly our guided munitions are probably going to be smaller (since hopefully we're going to get smaller propulsion units fingers crossed), are engaging at longer ranges, and are going to be traveling faster, making that issue worse. It can work at longer ranges and still be relatively dumb with command guidance. Lets say you spit out a thousand little buggers with an initial command to set up into a pattern and which part of the pattern it is in. The Kdrone doesn't need to know where it is, it doesn't need to know where the other kdrones are, the kdrone doesn't even need to know where the target is. It just needs to know its own name and what direction it is pointing so that it can recognize what commands it needs to follow and be able to complete them. Think of it like a shotgun, but you can steer the pattern and make it whatever shape you want. How dumb the projectile can/needs to be would depend on the purpose of the round, the sensory equipment deployed by the fleet already and the tactical situation. For instance, having several drones deployed to form a positioning system would allow for direct guidance to the target with minimal hardware on the projectile itself. Offboard sensory packages close enough to tell in which way the enemy is thrusting would further improve the accuracy. Allowing drones to guide the projectile also reduces signal travel time, making targeting even more precise. This would allow projectiles to be small and dense, improving damage inflicted. The amount of munitions that can be guided in such a way may be limited by the processing power of the packages. Also such dispersed sensory systems may be easily disrupted by attacking its constituent parts. In the absence of offboard sensory packages or the like, the projectile must be guided by the firing ship or its own guidance/sensor systems. The latter has the advantage of being fire and forget, as well as being capable of achieving high hit rates. The downsides are large more expensive munitions that may not do as much damage, as well as possibly being limited in acceleration and thus velocity. The former requires area saturation, thus using more ammunition, and requires the firing ships processing power. It does allow for smaller, cheaper projectiles though. Beyond that, some active targeting systems may be of use in the terminal phase of approach. This would only be true of slower moving projectiles/missiles, but switching to active targeting when on terminal approach would invalidate flares completely and may allow more accurate targeting of subsystems. Over all I'm most interested in seeing what diffuse sensor nets could do in conjunction with munitions with limited guidance. On a different note, I've continued testing of the rail gun vs the coil gun against heavier armor. In doing so I've found a way to get more consistent encounters (1.44Mm every time with TtCA of between 20h and 5d), so I'm redoing all tests including the weaker armor one. Against the heavy armor, the coil gun is getting significantly lower TTKs than the sandblaster, despite firing at about 4 times its in game accurate range. I'll post the final results as soon as I've completed the tests.
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Post by omnipotentvoid on Feb 16, 2017 21:58:22 GMT
I think any gun intended for use at very long range will necessarily fire guided projectiles. Even if velocity dispersion out of the barrel is zero, there's some uncertainty in the position of the target and in orbital mechanics predictions. But that doesn't necessarily mean gimbals and turbopumps and fuel tanks. A li-ion battery and electric solid propellants could do it. That actually solves (almost) all the problems of long range KE weapons, provided you can track your targets. In an attempt to bring the thread back towards what I initially intended: I still think the whole target acquisition, targeting and gun laying is to simple. The technology is to complex and important to simply ignore and the none trivial effectiveness of different strategy/tactics involving targeting, target acquisition means that simply assuming a type of targeting (as is currently in the game) oversimplifies things.
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Post by omnipotentvoid on Feb 16, 2017 21:52:31 GMT
See like ok, this thread went off topic, but like i had fun, so i mean do you guys think this is requires any locking or moderation cause i think this is still GENERALLY relevant on the grounds of: 1 Science discussion 2 does not involve a completely foreign to game topic(Hey lets talk about dinner!)3 seemed in good spirits. I'd say almost all threads on this forum will eventual drift towards something about weapons in space. In serious discussion threads about some specific subject it would probably be best to lock the thread (say a discussion about supercooling of certain materials in the science section drifts off to a discussion about laser efficiency). Threads like this are fine to wander and some of the discussion that arise from this are quite entertaining.
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Post by omnipotentvoid on Feb 16, 2017 18:32:40 GMT
How would a heat charge act in space, I probably should have asked that first, being liquid metal I imagine it would disperse in vacuum Roughly the same as an NEFP, just non-nuclear charge so it'd be weaker. That depends on how you defined the "formed" in explosively formed projectiles. The liquid metal jets formed in HEAT and most modern EFP or SC warheads is point focused and disperses rapidly after the focal point if it isn't inside some medium that prevents it from expanding (say tank or ship armor). Naturally, EFPs that remain solid avoid that problem.
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Post by omnipotentvoid on Feb 16, 2017 18:25:23 GMT
You can stop the 5 ton, 1.5TJ slugs with less than 10m of nitrile rubber, if that makes you feel any better. Most of the energy they have seems to vanish on impact. Doesn't even leave glowing craters in the rubber. Hypervelocity slugs have a tendency to obliterate itself against the shockwave of the front layer of the slug and top layer of armor vaporizing each other. You can end up making a shallow crater instead of a hole. If that projectile was completely annihilated in its own schockwave, should release the energy of at least a few hundred tons of tnt. 10m of nitrile rubber shouldn't withstand that. Additionally, the immense impulse of the round must be conserved, so the armor must absorb it. If it can't, the armor will rupture or shatter, regardless of what happens to the projectile. Even if it can, the impulse must be spread, causing more deformation than a high KE low impulse round and thus making a deeper crater and causing more structural instability. Further more, Armor and projectile are vaporized in similar amounts. If the projectile is significantly more massive than the armor it must pass through, not all of it will be shocked into plasma (because not all of the projectile will hit the armor before it is no longer capable of resisting the impact), thus allowing it to penetrate. The reason the 1.5TJ/5t slug does little damage is because armor is bugged. This is clearly seen by the impact marks it leaves, that make clear that it shatters before hitting the target. This might be because the game calculates kinetic damage on a point based system, rather than area, which doesn't work for 20m diameter slugs.
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Post by omnipotentvoid on Feb 16, 2017 16:52:31 GMT
Google's Deep Mind, in recent months, outcompeted and crushed a human Weiqi champion. For reference, Weiqi, also known as Go in Japan or Baduk in Korea (I think), is an ancient (1000 BCE), incredibly simple, yet incredibly deep game which just flatly cannot be brute-forced calculate all paths to victory played. There were some calculations to that effect, though I forgot where. It is what one would call above the complexity level of chess. Played on a 19 by 19 board, two players alternative turns playing down their pieces (black or white). The pieces do not move. Pieces which are totally surrounded on all sides are captured and removed from the game; but destruction is not the goal of the game. Rather the end goal is to win the game by having as much controlled territory as possible by the end of the game, which is basically when both players decide "Yeah, looks like we can't really move the borders much of anywhere." The big news here is not that Google's Deep Mind AI managed to beat a world Weiqi champion. That alone is impressive enough, considering the fact that it is still impossible to brute force calculate all solutions, and Weiqi AIs before this were so pathetic as to be unable to defeat even a novice at the game. The terrifying news is how Deep Mind did it. In particular: - Using innovative and completely unheard of stratagems and playstyles to crush its human opponent. For reference, this is a game people have been competitively playing for over three thousand years. The AI made significant novel innovations in the very playing style of this game, starting with moves normally derided as utterly stupid and pulling off complete victory from it in a way that demonstrated that it was planned from the start. In other words, it is smart, capable of recognizing patterns, and above all - creative. Or so I've read. I play Weiqi, but I get crushed by said novice AI . - Having literally zero pre-programmed knowledge about the game. The creators of this AI didn't build it to play Weiqi; they built it to learn and adapt to the task it is to do. The creators of the AI had no idea what the AI was doing; they had to hire a Weiqi expert to reinterpret the AI's moves to the AI developers themselves.In other words, it's not built to crush Weiqi, it is built to do your job. - Its decisions are opaque. If I remember correctly, it is a "neural network" type of AI. In other words, utilizing nodes and connections between these nodes in a way reminiscent of actual brains. It's not an obvious if-else branching method, or as least as far as I've read. We can understand how and why these AIs function, but ask for "what's the code for making this move"? and the best we can do is point at the entire AI. Also, it's not being run on any particularly unique hardware. I do recall that such AIs tend to be run on graphics processing units rather than CPUs because GPUs perform calculations very similar to those needed by the AI a lot, but otherwise it's not exactly new and novel hardware that allowed the AI to do this. So yeah, there's that. www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUbqykXVx0A Video for reference. Deep mind is a neural network capable of learning to solve discrete problems incredibly well. The reason the "problem" of tactics cannot be solved easily by a computer, is because it isn't a discrete problem, but rather class of problem. A tactical encounter would be a discrete problem. To elaborate on your example: the beauty of the human brain is not it's ability to find an optimal solution to playing the game on a 19x19 grid, but rather its ability to adapt in such a way that it can play reasonably well on an arbitrarily sized grid. Look into computational complexity theory for more details. To summarize what is relevant here: self learning AIs (in this case specifically neural networks) are capable of finding highly efficient solutions to specific (discrete) problems given enough tries. In combat, when the effective "size" of the problem (and perhaps even the complexity) is arbitrary and you have only limited tries (only one most of the time), no known modern computational technique can achieve anywhere near the capabilities of a human. Essentially you need a true AI that is faster than a human in order to replace them. Deep mind is far away from being a true AI.
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Post by omnipotentvoid on Feb 16, 2017 15:27:11 GMT
Tactics and strategy aren't problems solvable by computers, belonging at least to the complexity class of chest and probably being a few steps higher in the hierarchy of complexity. Given no major change to computational architecture on a theoretical level (basically: quantum computers, or any other form of processor architecture won't solve this problem either, you need a different architecture for the principle of problem solving), humans will still be more adapt at tactics and strategy than computers, requiring crew to do this. I guess somebody forgot to tell Google's Deepmind that... I don't follow?
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Post by omnipotentvoid on Feb 15, 2017 20:27:09 GMT
But venting my opponents brains into space via railgun leaves me with a greater ability to reason, thus winning me a fight measured by ability to reason, does it not? Why limit yourself to railguns? A pistol would do, efficiency is important in space and you only need to vent the brain, so nukes and the such would be wasteful.
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Post by omnipotentvoid on Feb 15, 2017 20:11:59 GMT
Did you mean stand 100 Km apart, turn the reaction wheels, and sandblast? Not far enough. 1 Mm.No railguns, no nuclear hand grenades. The real civilized space captain fights with REASONS!!! But venting my opponents brains into space via railgun leaves me with a greater ability to reason, thus winning me a fight measured by ability to reason, does it not?
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SIM
Feb 15, 2017 20:00:35 GMT
Post by omnipotentvoid on Feb 15, 2017 20:00:35 GMT
Islands of 'stability' mean that the halflife is sufficiently long that our scientific instrumentation can confirm the nuclei exists before it decays. Mononuclear, monoatomic armor would be similar to neutronium in density. Non-Neutronium forms of degenerate matter has similar issues; it is extremely unstable under most conditions. I specifically didn't mention how hard it would be to stabilize these forms of matter. To our modern understanding of physics manipulation, containment and stabilization is essentially impossible. There are a few uncertain areas modern models that could hold the key to these problems though. The ability to easily and accurately manipulate the quantum states of large quantities of particles may make it possible to stabilize DM. At the same time, complex macroscopic arrangements of subatomic particles may be stable. The reason this isn't looked into much, is that the computational requirements are so far beyond what is possible today (or may ever be possible). This is the reason I brought up islands of stability and tetraneuetrons.
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SIM
Feb 15, 2017 19:22:15 GMT
deltav likes this
Post by omnipotentvoid on Feb 15, 2017 19:22:15 GMT
Update on my research:
Looking into neutron stars and neutronium, I've come to some interesting conclusions. The most important of which is that neutronium isn't the only, and not even the most likely, SIM like material. The most promising materials are various forms of degenerate matter and giant atomic nuclei. There's also the possibility of nuclei like particles made entirely of neutrons (like the tetraneutron), that might have some interesting properties. However, to little is known on them to even begin guessing at these properties (like, if they actually exist or not). Here are my conclusions thus far:
Degenerate matter is matter hows properties are defined by quantum effects that arise from the extreme pressures/densities that it exists at. Basically, quantum mechanics does not allow certain particles, specifically fermions, to come to close together. Thus any compressive force would be met with an opposing force. The dominating force in degenerate matter is the one creating the extreme compression required to make matter degenerate (usually gravity). If this force is removed, degenerate matter generally decays violently. As for material properties, degenerate matter behaves like a super fluid. The exact properties depend on the fermion the DM is made from (for instance EDM acts like a solid (?)), the properties of electron degenerate matter being relatively well understood, while neutron degenerate matter is less well understood (its equation of state being unknown). Other forms of DM are purely theoretical and even less well understood. The density of degenerate matter (being its most important one) is generally known or well estimated: EDM has an average density of about 10⁹kg/m³, while NDM has an average of 4*10¹⁷kg/m³.
As an armor material, DM would be highly interesting. Its huge densities make penetrating or ablating it almost impossible. A kinetic penetrator might have to displace thousands of tons of DM just to penetrate a plate a few micrometers thick. Ablation hits a similar problem as thousands of tons of material would have to be ablated to penetrate (if ablation of DM is even possible). Further more, the super fluid properties of DM mean that any damage is almost instantly repaired by flow. Micrometer thick plates/layers are impractical though, because of their huge weight. Thickness of viable layers would be around the diameter of small atomic nuclei. Such thin layers may still be extremely effective if ablation is impossible. Similarily, DM can't be shocked into plasma, so the armor must be penetrated to damage the target. Even armor this thin would still be extremely heavy, even without any gear to stabilize it, likely making it impractical. A more viable use of DM would be as an explosive. NDM decays violently according to the wikipedia article and EDM as found in white dwarfs seems to be capable of exploding violently as well. Quark degenerate matter or QCD matter may be even more powerful. These materials could have explosive energy densities beyond that of hydrogen M-AM explosives. Using them as explosives would also make containment easier, as the stabilizing equipment would contain the DM, rather than the DM containing the stabilization equipment.
It may be possible to create atomic nuclei on the scales that might make them useful as armor or projectiles. Islands of stability are believed to exist where super massive cores are stable. This and additional phenomenon, like the apparent (limited) stability displayed by tetraneutrons due to resonance, may make complexly shaped stable or metastable macroscopic nuclei feasible, if accurate manipulation of subatomic particles becomes possible. Armor made from one or more MNi would have similar properties to an atomic nuclei, being extremely dense and highly durable, however predicting (any) properties with current theories is basically impossible.
If anyone here knows how to calculate or estimate material properties from particle size and attractive force, it may be possible to add approximations of these materials into the game.
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Post by omnipotentvoid on Feb 15, 2017 16:32:30 GMT
Or, more to the point of space, "Rogue System" the DCS of space I recall videos of that game... (For me)There's just something tactile that's missing with modern gaming and interfacing with that level of detail. Wandering further off topic: Makes me wonder what the gunnery or astronavigation consoles look like that our crewmembers are using... They likely aren't looking at many of those consoles. Both targeting and navigation are very sensitive things that may both require extreme reaction times and extreme accuracy, which humans aren't really capable of. Mostly you'd be looking at info screens and diagnostics readouts to make sure the algorithms and components are working correctly and a limited user interface to tell the ship what you want it to do. There will be manual overrides, but they will be rather limited in their GUI since their meant as a backup, rather than a way of navigation. Perhaps you'll find some more advanced stuff on private ships, whose owners are piloting/gunner geeks, with true manual control fidelity for personal sport rather than efficiency. The only consoles that are truly necessary (where humans can outclass computers) are tactical and strategical interfaces. Tactics and strategy aren't problems solvable by computers, belonging at least to the complexity class of chest and probably being a few steps higher in the hierarchy of complexity. Given no major change to computational architecture on a theoretical level (basically: quantum computers, or any other form of processor architecture won't solve this problem either, you need a different architecture for the principle of problem solving), humans will still be more adapt at tactics and strategy than computers, requiring crew to do this.
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Post by omnipotentvoid on Feb 15, 2017 16:11:56 GMT
If a projectile is big enough (20M certinly is) then wouldn't a laser blow it to bits? The projectile does this already itself. Upon hitting a target with armor thicker that a few millimeters it seems shatter just before impact, losing most of its energy. As for using a laser. You're talking about tracking a few thousand fragments of unknown size and velocity. Thats the beauty of such a large projectile: realistically, something is going to hit you.
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