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Post by linkxsc on Jan 5, 2022 17:22:17 GMT
>Ok, so is there a reason to use anything but APN?
In game, not much, unless you have a missile that's behaving oddly on APN (sometimes the game oversteers maneuverable missiles). If you're willing to do the micromanaging, 1 thing you CAN get out of building several "similar" missiles, with different guidance laws... is that after they enter combat in a swarm, APNs PNs and PPs will spread themselves out a bit as they approach the target. This can alleviate problems such as... enemy point defense lasers, guns, or interceptor missiles, striking 1 of your missiles, and neutralizing the whole swarm due to a chain reaction.
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Post by linkxsc on Jan 4, 2022 19:14:13 GMT
good point, it is true that most of our ship reactors are around 1500. But at 2500 flares become almost useless. Also, would laser not be more effective against a radiator running at 2500 as they are already close to melting down. Game flare model doesn't mind temperature, it worries about total thermal power being dissipated. So far as I recall (haven't played in a bit), a flare putting out 400MW at 1700k will mask a 200MW ship, even if it's radiators are tuned up to 2500k. Is this accurate to RL? Probably not, I've only worked with building a visual recognition program to guide a robot, not messed with thermal object recognition/guidance (outside of 1 experiment with a wiimote camera, but we aren't guiding missiles with those). But if I can guide a robot based on the optical shape of a target... doesn't seem a stretch to do so for a thermally guided unit. Especially given that many ships have a few easily idenfitiable "hotspots" of radiators, that it shouldn't be too hard to have your guidance "ignore" the new 1 floating off the the side at an odd angle. 1 thing the game severely lacks IMO is delayed action flares BTW. Our current flares start burning the second they are launched... there's no reason we shouldn't be able to put a remote detonator on them and detonate them 20-30 seconds after being launched. Consider the idea. Launch 1 large flare that burns for 10 seconds that travels away from the ship at a steady rate. VS 3 smaller flares (same thermal power, but 3.3 seconds burns), launched at different speeds at the same time. Missile approaches, trigger each as the last burns out, this could not only turn a missile, but make it oversteer away due to thinking it's tracking an accelerating target. Also for real ship designs, if they ARE relying on flares for defense like ingame. The though occurrs that the main fluid you use to pump heat into your radiators... is the same fluid you use for primary propellant. Thus in combat, with a missile incoming, the ship could route "cold" propellant through its radiators for a second to chill them, (waste heat instead is dumped into the propellant tanks) while setting off flares to increase effectiveness. As far as lasers. I don't think they'd offer much difference in combat whether your radiators are 1500K or 2500K, as the aim point is going to be an order of magnitude higher than that.
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Post by linkxsc on Jan 3, 2022 19:56:31 GMT
2) Further radiator issues. In real life, no radiator would be glowing red-hot like this unless it’s actually about to explode. Again, this is something I would ordinarily give a pass to, but there is discussion on the game website and blog about how lasers are accurate down to the spectral level, so this annoys me. It’s like you’re saying you have some MSFS 2020-level flight simulation but you have giant 150-foot cartoon propellors driving the aircraft. To be sure, space hardware can radiate glowing red (look at footage taken in orbit of radiatively cooled engine nozzles), but typically almost all of the radiation you want to be in the infrared, which would not be visible to the eye. The IR signature is overlaid with the visual one. So, you see the infrared overlaid with the color and shape of the ship. Which is why you can see the radiators glowing red-hot on high temp ones. Minor point, on many high temp radiators. Any of them operating above 770K will glow in the visible spectrum, starting as dull red through orange and yellow to white hot around 1500k (and most reactors I build put out ~2500k) Naturally if you have a lot of excess radiator surface, and good pumps to circulate coolant, then your larger radiators should equalize at a lower temperature than this... but as far as ships designed along the lines of those in game, they'll definitely be glowing in the visible spectrum. Though my personal addendum to issues with radiators. 1. Should take an awful lot of power to pump all this coolant around, esp for different systems at different temperatures/coolant types. But we get this for "free" in terms of electrical power (much like NTR gimballs/pumps) 2. For modules that can't be made "high temperature", and thus need a lot of low temperature radiators... we should have the option to build heat pumps in for some extra mass. Might sound like a waste of mass, but in many cases, for these low temp modules, pumping the heat into a higher temp range and then sending it to the radiators, would result in radiators small enough to offset the mass of the heat pump. 3. Really wish we could mount radiators flat on the outside of the hull, esp for low temp modules. And that 2 different types of radiators for 2 different modules could be mounted... in the same circle I guess, as eachother, without the game erroring about "interreflection" when the effect would be negligible for the ship.
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Post by linkxsc on Aug 4, 2020 18:49:45 GMT
Bit late to the discussion but my university has a fully 3D (robotic) welding arm that does additive manufacturing with normal steels and it can add to the side and underneath a surface. So seeing how it can act against gravity, I suppose the concept would do just fine in zero-G. I've seen videos online of similar setups for titanium, not sure what those use but the ones tor welding steel simply melt a wire under a protected atmosphere. Wire gives pretty coarse results though, several mm definution sizes, rather than the molecular precision required in CDE. Sudden thought that hits me. I own a few plastic FDM printers (a couple ender 3s, cr10 and a couple others). A can they work when placed on their side or upside down (mechanically I can't see a problem. but layer adhesion and etc might be an issue). And could this help when printing specific overhangs that can't be produced normally? Could one, say mount the whole printer in a jig that rotates, and when doing certain features, will rotate the whole unit to a proper angle such that gravity will help out.
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Post by linkxsc on Jan 23, 2019 1:16:52 GMT
Actually, it's kind of an interesting case, because it does seem that it would be indeed recoilless, in the sense of a classic "kick" - because you're accelerating the projectile along a circle. What it does is cause your firing platform to spin in the opposite direction, and that is your "recoil". A bit counterintuitive, but that's how it should work. When the object separates, it isn't by an application of force, but by removing the centripetal force. That said, I'm not sure if this "rotational recoil" would be any easier to manage than normal one. Of course, if you manage to keep the pellets spinning in their track once accelerated, the time of launch and the acceleration can be separated in time, which might help with that. Either way, if I throw a 1kg projectile 1km/s to the right, yes there might be some changes in rotation of my whole ship, but my whole ship is also going to accelerate some amount to the left.
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Post by linkxsc on Jan 21, 2019 18:54:18 GMT
While yes it is a very real concept, the max muzzle velocity of this type of weapon is quite low, on par with conventional cannons, while being significantly more complicated to build and use.
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Post by linkxsc on Nov 17, 2018 17:14:03 GMT
I'm going by the flywheels used in turrets. The tangential velocity of those things gets to be insane.I built a 25-cm turret and figured out the diameter of the flywheel from there. I then figured out the circumference and RPS when it was spinning at the highest safe speed. Wasn't sure if it was a reasonable design but the high max speed suggested it might be possible. I'm still coming up short on the math. Mind showing your work?
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Post by linkxsc on Nov 17, 2018 5:05:45 GMT
>VCS flywheel can easily reach greater than 9km/s rotational velocity at the edge.
That seems a touch high. When I calculated it way back I was getting ~1400m/s for VCS. What... equation are you using to calculate this? And I believe the term you're looking for is tangential velocity or linear velocity, expressed in m/s (rotational velocity, or angular velocity is the number of degrees per second, rads/s, or rpm)
>Disadvantages: Mechanical complexity. Large size and high mass.
Why? Launch velocity in this case is actually independent of the diameter of the wheel being used to launch (assuming the wheel is spinning at yield or ultimate stress limit) A 10mm wheel will do just as well as a 1000mm wheel. Guess the motor would be pretty heavy as they scale poorly with small reaction wheels.
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Post by linkxsc on Nov 12, 2018 4:13:56 GMT
>Ok, but what I'm trying to do is evade fire like this but also have every gun on the correct side of the ship to fire, reducing the mass of having extra guns on both sides of the ship and mitigating the need for non laser armor.
Sadly the AI really isn't suited for this style of combat and obviously has some issues.
>For whatever reason it decides to about-face from a heading leftward of the default camera perspective to rightward of the default perspective.
I blame this on the fact that 1 single ship in a fleet, the ship is assumed to be on the "right" and that "to the right" is the direction it should maneuver when scattering. Perhaps you could abuse this knowledge, if the ship is to fight alone most of the time, put the armor and weapons on the other side?
>I've changed from extruded turrets to non extruded turrets which seems to have constrained how far it rolls but not enough, it's willing to sit 70 degrees off of intended armor presentation profile.
The smaller the firing angle the better. I think you can get down to ~45 degrees
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Post by linkxsc on Nov 12, 2018 3:08:04 GMT
>Problem being with the broadside order is it doesn't thrust enough to actually move out of the way of incoming fire effectively enough to warrant broadside configuration instead of needle configuration
Well, the goal of a broadside config isn't necessarily to evade fire (at least given the game's limited AI) it's to make sure you can focus all your armor in the correct direction, while having a large area for mounting weaponry.
>When given move or scatter order which was my original intent it rolls to face the unarmored, unarmed side towards the enemy.
Sounds odd. Have you tried putting a move order in the other direction and seeing what happens? Does the craft roll like this when you make a move order that basically goes straight ahead?
>Additionally when given the broadside order again after a move or scatter order it only turns just enough to bring one weapon system to bear, which isn't enough to bring all 30 weapons or to present the correct armor profile to the enemy.
Sounds like a bug in the broadside command... is it possible that all the weapons "could" point at the target, but are being blocked by the adjacent weapon?
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Post by linkxsc on Nov 11, 2018 16:47:13 GMT
Give it the broadside order and it should... unless it has a single engine, then she has no roll control.
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Post by linkxsc on Nov 8, 2018 17:11:41 GMT
Going back to the "mount the engines ventrally" thing. I did give that a try, and it did work overall. It turned quickly, and it dodged most shots relatively well for hypervelocity kinetic duels too. However, it had a few major issues. First, I was forced to use chemical rockets, since he craft was heavily exposed to the radiation of any NTR I tried to use, and adding extra shielding to said NTR brought down the deltaV to an unacceptable level (for what I was doing). You can't add ventral radiation shields in this game, and they're cheaper, by a long shot than trying to actually use a decent neutron reflector. Second, it required quite a lot of tinkering to actually get both engines in line, and balanced with center of mass. Fortunately both engines had a relatively high gimbal angle (I pretty much didn't armor the side with the engines) so it offset the imbalance, however minor it was. Third, this format can cause problems with weapon targeting while dodging incoming shots, though I think that's more of a game issue than a real life issue. This really messed with any "nose mounted" guns I had, even if they had a turret. I ended up using the ship in the conventional "broadside" manner, and it did overall very well, once you factor in that I had no armor on the back (double on the front), and the thing died to any remotely close nuke flash as a result. Well, issues 2 and 3 are largely game problems. IRL you wouldn't be tinkering with a "move laterally" button. And you could shift fuel around in tanks as ballast to balance the craft's COM. Similarly the targeting system ingame is really really not prepared for something like this, but it's the kind of thing we could likely manage IRL. On the first problem... Add proper shielding to the engines? Try resistojets? Reactor power is pretty cheap, and larger reactors scale better than smaller ones. Resistojet rockets themselves are fairly lightweight for a given thrust power. Could technically stick them all over the place, and only power the ones on the side needed. Course resistojets do appear to be borked right now (coil radius does literally nothing.)
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Post by linkxsc on Nov 8, 2018 1:41:27 GMT
Course this just makes me think. Instead of your ship's engines being mounted inline with the long axis... why not have them mounted facing out the ventral direction. Now your main engines can still dodge, but they can evade fire with less deltaV (a ship can easily be over 200m long, but only 30m in diameter. Quicker to move 30m up, than 200m ahead) See here: wiki.eveuniversity.org/NaglfarMinmatar had this shit thought out years ago
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Post by linkxsc on Nov 7, 2018 18:30:02 GMT
Laserstars: Sounds similar to the "orbital defense platforms" I see in many sci-fi series. Turn them towards the planet, and they can fry people below. But I guess you could also turn them outward to fry incoming ships. Broadside ships: But if they're designed to fire broadside, aren't they presenting an enormous target cross-section to their opponent? Wouldn't a Needleship be superior thanks to its much smaller profile to the enemy? What advantage would a Broadside ship have? The main advantage of broadside is that you can use the main engines to dodge (in theory perhaps a needleship could do this, but the game engine doesn't support it very well and the mechanics are in fact somewhat awkward), and you can hide at least some of your big, fragile radiators behind the body of the ship itself. Also, a needleship may have issues actually getting all its weapons placed in such a way they all have line-of-sight forward. Another good, more recent thread with a nice variety of designs (albeit all relatively small ships) and screenshots is here: childrenofadeadearth.boards.net/thread/3376/challenge-750-ton-wondersCourse this just makes me think. Instead of your ship's engines being mounted inline with the long axis... why not have them mounted facing out the ventral direction. Now your main engines can still dodge, but they can evade fire with less deltaV (a ship can easily be over 200m long, but only 30m in diameter. Quicker to move 30m up, than 200m ahead)
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Post by linkxsc on Nov 7, 2018 16:17:26 GMT
>What would a real-life space warship look like?
Dunno. As others have said, the game is a bit of a starting point to think about it. But the game also has a number of limitations in its simulation, how you can design a craft can be laid out, armor scheme, weapon design, physics. So do not take it at face value of "All ships are going to look like this".
Even over the dev cycle of the game, the creator has had to go back over his initial assumptions on things, like say armor design. Convex hulls. Initially thought to be the most mass saving. But often being heavier than a concave hull. Circular crossections seemed to be optimal... but the prevalence of spike noses, and their slopes increasing effective armor leads to... well how can we slope the side of the hull of a ship. Which leads into "Well hexagonal hulls sometimes gain a bit of mass... but that extra 15% armor thickness when the ship is rolled the right angle does help out quite a bit. Also in some cases, you save mass on armor, because the flat areas aren't curved. Also IRL this would be a hell of a lot easier to manufacture... and more reasons"
Personally I see another major shift in "what works" for the playerbase if we could stack modules in lines, rather than in rings. And stack modules of different types together. There's so much that could be done.
We the guys in the civil war when the ironclads just had their first encounter at Hampton Roads, speculating on what battleships would look like in WW2.
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