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Post by omnipotentvoid on Feb 13, 2017 20:02:38 GMT
At massive distances, having a tiny engine pushing a few mg of thrust in random directions every 4 hours would likely suffice. It doesn't matter if your drones watch every change, by the time it's relayed to your ship and you fire, we still have a very long time of flight. During that long time of flight, the few mg burns in random directions would result in a miss, OR force you to blanket a very, very large area. I actually hadn't thought of that, thank you for pointing it out. I'd still say that there a point where the expenditure of a bit of amunition is worth the dV the enemy is forced to use to avoid incoming and "potentially incoming" shots, but this does cut down on my expectation of engagement ranges significantly. I still think they could be up to an order of magnitude greater than currently though.
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Post by omnipotentvoid on Feb 13, 2017 19:29:23 GMT
They didn't teleport, they just bounced of each other in an almost perfectly elastic collision (about 5m/s of relative velocity lost if I remember that incident correctly). Their armor was damaged and most of their tanks ruptured, but each ship was still hundreds of tons and with only a few centimeters of armor, they should have crumpled on impact not bounced of each other. So damage seemed to be calculated as a localized kinetic event... To even begin to accurately model deformation, a lot more detail/design/control would have to go into the structure itself of the ship. True, but that needs to be done anyway. The current damage calculation works great for small light and fast projectiles. High mass projectiles at high energies, on the other hand, don't seem work at all.
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Post by omnipotentvoid on Feb 13, 2017 19:23:52 GMT
Ships specifically armored against light kinetics should actually be able to withstand a lot of sandblaster punishment. (I'm actually testing armor atm A payload-abusing railgun firing near 200 km/s has over 20 MJ of energy per shot. That's an extreme example, sure, but armoring against this is more or less futile. I'm rather interested in the armor scheme you would use to defend against 50 km/s sand coilguns. Multiple wippel shields and ablative armor layers in front of decently strong main armor backed by spall shielding and none cylindrical armor profiles. To be clear, this is for capitals only, drones will always be cheese before the sandblasters. Nothing can withstand sandblasters (even the terrestrial kind) indefinitely, but you can certainly build armor capable of withstanding a few thousand or tens of thousands of 1g 20MJ shots. Thats the problem with high KE, low momentum shells. To kill something, you have to move stuff to were it's not supposed to be. Damage, be it by ablation, plasma shock, spalling, rupture, fragmentation or deformation, basically boils down to: stuff isn't where its supposed to be any more. For example, the fact that a 9g piece of diamond plate that is meant to be attached firmly to the inside of your ablative armor is now embedded in your gunnery chiefs chest, or that the barrel of your railgun is slowly spreading out as a cloud of plasma, tends to be good indication of damage (this is meant to be sarcastic, is there an agreed upon way of expressing sarcasm here?). Of course, displacing matter away from the surface of armor into space is going to less effective than displacing it, say, into the crew cabin. KE is easy to transform into other forms of energy, especially heat, and most of the energy of high KE, low momentum projectiles tends to be wasted on shocking projectile and armor into plasma that expands outwards and emits light. Momentum on the other hand requires velocities to be conserved to some extent. Over all, a heavier projectile with the same KE will tend to move more material, and thus cause more damage, than a lighter one. This is true as long as the heavy projectile is still traveling fast enough, that the damage doesn't spread significantly across the armor (a 10g 20MJ projectile will do more damage than a 1g 20MJ projectile, but a 10¹⁵kg projectile will be moving so slowly at 20MJ (0.0002m/s) that the armor will simply absorb the impact).
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Post by omnipotentvoid on Feb 13, 2017 18:54:07 GMT
Well recon drones would be more for target identification. Because you already have a lot of information even with the extreme range sensor net. So you start the engagement with good assumptions. The precise little details don't matter much until the terminal phase of combat when seconds matter. So launching hundreds of recon drones for a close look isn't that useful unless they are supporting a kinetic package, which begs the question of why the sensors cannot be on the kinetic package. (Kinetic as in weapons, including laser and nukes) Read childrenofadeadearth.wordpress.com/2016/07/20/sensors-and-countermeasures/If you haven't already. Things like "there is no GPS in space" is exactly what I mean. Why not? If I'm going to send 50 drones against a capital fleet a few are going to be destroyed. If their expendable, why not launch a few that maintain constant distances from the enemy capitals in order to make my missiles and weapon targeting better? If from a distance it is hard to tell the difference between flares and a ship, send a drone to take a closer look. Drones are expendable and information is a resource worth expending them for The reason you wouldn't sacrifice recon drones as KKVs or missiles in general: there is value in having multiple observing drones. Further more, a few drones can be used to target, theoretically, as many projectiles and missiles as you have to fire, making the advantage the give versus resource cost fairly viable. Additionally specialized recon drones can have more advanced sensor systems and reduce noise produced by the drone itself by designing it specifically for the task, thus making it more effective at its job.
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Post by omnipotentvoid on Feb 13, 2017 17:50:10 GMT
They didn't teleport, they just bounced of each other in an almost perfectly elastic collision (about 5m/s of relative velocity lost if I remember that incident correctly). Their armor was damaged and most of their tanks ruptured, but each ship was still hundreds of tons and with only a few centimeters of armor, they should have crumpled on impact not bounced of each other.
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Post by omnipotentvoid on Feb 13, 2017 17:32:15 GMT
True, but to laser frigates crashing together at 100m/s is not something I expected to be almost perfectly elastic.
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Post by omnipotentvoid on Feb 13, 2017 17:24:05 GMT
Ship collisions look like bouncy balls hitting each other. It looks so weird that I suspect that the ai avoiding collisions is as much qswitched avoiding people seeing collisions as it is realistic. All that was missing to completely ruin it is a "boing" sound effect every time two ships collide.
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Post by omnipotentvoid on Feb 13, 2017 17:20:11 GMT
Easy I realize I know little about the functionality of detection equipment. I was actually hoping to learn about a bit more in depth in this discussion (without getting sidetracked constantly, which tends to happen when I simply look something up). That is why I stated it was a question in thread tittle. However, sensory data is one of, if not the most, important things in tactics. In fact, on tanks, the targeting system is the most advanced technology on the whole tank. The reason missiles are used on ships is that they can acquire targets beyond possible effective gun range. Even in infantry, technological advances has mostly been made in sensory and informational equipment. Take drones for example: the technology was effectively retrofitted to be armed. Their primary use is still reconnaissance in a strategic and situational awareness in a tactical setting. With such a major factor missing from the simulation, I can't really think of the tactics displayed in the game as realistic. It's like saying: lets make a tank simulator, but make all the guns handle the same way.
Based on my knowledge, I'd expect fleets to engage in the following way: - Fleets launch recon drones in order to enable long range targeting for capital ships and increases situational awareness. (well before engagement)
- Hunter-killer drones and missiles are launched to find and destroy the recon drones. (well before engagement)
- Interceptors are launched to intercept hunter killers (well before engagement)
- Missiles and drones are deployed to engage the enemy capital fleet and drones/missiles the enemy have deployed, this continues throughout the engagement. (shortly before engagement)
- Capital ships open up with main batteries at long range with rate of fire reduced to maintain maximum accuracy. (upon engagement)
- Maneuvers are executed if incoming shots are detected on time.
- Drone/missile fleets clash.
- Surviving drones engage capital fleets, secondaries and PD weapons engage drones and missiles, primary battery focus on enemy capital fleet
- Secondaries engage when the enemy capital fleet enters range, continues dodging begins
- Closest encounter: PD weapons intercept missiles and drones, secondaries use saturation fire to guaranty damage, primaries target important modules.
- Capitals stop launching drones in order to preserve ammo for possible follow up encounter, secondaries continue saturation fire, primaries switch back to targeting entire ships.
- Capitals leave effective secondary range, dodging is back to when incoming rounds are detected.
- Primary guns are out of range, engagement ends
- More recon drones are launched in order to improve targeting, search and destroy against enemy recon drones
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Post by omnipotentvoid on Feb 13, 2017 16:31:22 GMT
So what would it take to have the damage model from something like beamng drive? Deformation such as in beamNG drive wouldn't work well for this game. Deformation occurs on so many different energy levels/ velocities and with so many different parameters for material properties in the game that the system would be utterly inadequate. You could derive a new system from beamNG drive, but you'd probably have to build a new game engine to do that properly and relatively bug free.
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Post by omnipotentvoid on Feb 13, 2017 16:07:06 GMT
At some point the projectile is a small moon and your choice is to land or get out the way. For less dire kinetics I recommend anti spalling armor linings and redundancy of modules and ships. Let the heavy shots go right through but keep the affected area small. Consider the difference between three long fuel tanks in parallel or three squat fuel tanks stacked along the main axis. (Assuming broadside) If you can avoid being ripped in half and survive module loss without receiving a mission kill you might buy enough time for the other guy to die first. Letting the heavy shots get through may not be as clean of a hole as you think. Broadside hits on laser frigates were getting kills by destroying crew modules despite never hitting them. Even wippel shields tend to have holes larger than the bore radius would imply, suggesting armor fragmentation, damage from the projectile/plasma shocking into plasma in an explosive way or some other such effect. The projectile has so much energy an momentum that, either by fragmenting or exploding, the armor that is hit still damages the ship in some major way.
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Post by omnipotentvoid on Feb 13, 2017 13:56:24 GMT
Take some absurdly strong materials forged in cartoon/anime worlds! They might even sustain against these projectiles! Well, according to the game, anything thats 10m thick will stop at least a few dozen of these shells.
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Post by omnipotentvoid on Feb 13, 2017 13:30:17 GMT
That makes me kind of sad. I kind of wanted to make a duel nuke launcher to crush a ship between the blast from pressure created from surface ablation. Oh well.
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Post by omnipotentvoid on Feb 13, 2017 13:23:15 GMT
Is it possible to change the maximum values allowed in module design? I'd like to make a railgun this long to see what it could do. The max values are probably in the root code somewhere, but at your own peril, et cetera. I assume I'd have to decompile the code? How would I go about doing this? I currently don't have access to visual studio right know or anything other than notepad++ right now.
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Post by omnipotentvoid on Feb 13, 2017 12:30:19 GMT
Is it possible to change the maximum values allowed in module design?
I'd like to make a railgun this long to see what it could do.
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Post by omnipotentvoid on Feb 13, 2017 12:16:03 GMT
Thats odd. It seems to work for everyone else. And I do use the current version (unless a patch dropped in the last 4 hours). Who else tried it? Who is this "everyone else"? Please produce the screenshot, that would make everything clear instantly. Sorry, I meant other people in the thread like ( caiaphas), who had said that they tried it out. I was a little to unspecific and I apologize for that.
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