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Post by nerd1000 on Oct 21, 2016 2:39:43 GMT
Let's not get into dogmatic territory here. You're talking about tiny smartphone camera type sensors, right? How much power do you need to pop one? How quickly can CoaDE lasers perform a clean sweep over the hull? I think those questions need to be answered with numbers before anything else, and I think the answer to the second question is really "seconds if not less", especially for higher-powered lasers at longer ranges (when the beam is naturally wider-spread). The example I gave was just a crude thought. Additionally, how many sensors are you mounting? Are they literally all over the ship, covering the entire hull? How many do you need to get an accurate fix on the target? How are you armoring them and how does that affect the way your ship's armor is built? If the entire hull is covered then I wouldn't think this a negligible question. This, I think, is why a combat ship would not use wide band IR sensors when in combat range- instead you would use systems that can be protected against laser fire, e.g. IR sensors with filters that only allow one specific wavelength through or phased array radars. Also worth noting- for ranging by parallax to work you need the sensors as far apart as possible, so optimally the long range passive systems would be clustered at the front and rear of the ship and used to scan broadside, wheras in combat you want to be presenting your smaller frontal cross-section to the foe.
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Post by nerd1000 on Oct 19, 2016 6:06:11 GMT
So I made a thing. I think I'll try to make a <100 ton drone with it and some MPD thrusters More seriously, the laser rod is way too small diameter for 42.6 MW of 1064nm, 112GW/m^2 . (oh and the end mirrors won't take it either, dielectric mirrors please!) The thermal stress in the rod will probably shatter it as well. ("just" 11.6MW of volumetric heating to deal with.) Finally, can we have an incandescent lamp pump source please? (i.e. a black body) I think it'll make Erbium and Ytterbium doped lasers more viable. It also opens up the possibility of using a nuclear reactor's fuel rods as the black body pump source. I'd LOVE a nuclear pumped Nd:Diamond laser (A black body pumped laser is a common concept explored by the few researchers looking at solar powered lasers) I'd like to have a CO2 laser. They're significantly more efficient than the solid state types we use in the game currently (according to wikipeida they can reach inefficiencies of 20%!), so output powers could be much higher than what we get currently. Edit: That said, I did experiment with a 100% efficient 300MW black box laser. It wasn't as awesome as I'd hoped.
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Post by nerd1000 on Oct 18, 2016 12:38:19 GMT
Indeed, my railgun drones cut through it in no time- it looks like single rounds can be stopped quite effectively but hundreds of 1g pellets aimed at the same spot simply shred the whipple and the gel until they have no effect any more, at which point they easily punch through the main plate. Interestingly it seems that these very light, relatively fast projectiles can be easily bounced by even extremely thin plates, so long as the armour is sloped. The ship I was testing with (a modified siloship) had a battery of 4mm railguns I designed for point defense against drones and missiles- they needed many hits on each drone to kill it because often the 1g pellets would simply skip off the side. The drones were protected by a mere 1cm of sillica aerogel plus two spaced layers of 3mm alpha titanium aluminide each.
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Post by nerd1000 on Oct 18, 2016 0:58:57 GMT
In regards to A):In a matter you have already answered your question, you can stop a 30 ton rock with a 30 ton rock, Make it cone shaped or off a denser material and bang, sure the shrapnel might be even smaller, but a deflection works. In fact you would not even need to counter with another mass driver, you could simply fly a mass into the trajectory. Launch a few consequtive armour plates and viola! An impromptu but mobile whipple shield, slowing down any would be projectiles until it can be blasted to smithereens by normal flak rockets or coil gun rounds. This has the added advantage of the plates only needing to change alignment and orientation, where as your speeding projectile (if trying to avoid these plates) would have do drag all that consecutive momentum around. This all does assume a very destruction oriented approach to your target. And yes while being cheaper than ships, it is by far 1 dumber, unless you are strapping crew to these things, 2 slow and with only one very pre determined method of attack, and 3 Far easier to counter than a ship full of thinking breathing humans. Now in regards to B):
As a disgruntled peasant once said "Nique Napoleon!Il et un idiot pour prende tous les mervielle soldats francais entre le froi de Russie!" But seriously i think the idea of half a dozen battalions of troops is a bit overkill. Asymmetrical warfare will take precedent, and so fighting will more so be a matter of capturing and disabling vital systems like life support, power generation, etc. And yes while transporting 2500 men is insane i think we can all agree that nuking habitats to the point of sterility is a bit too far in the opposite direction. Once the enemy's primary infrastructure is crippled surrender or die are the only two options. Alternatively one could perhaps ransom the people inside, earning a profit without the need to cause severe damage. Other methods off the top of my head include offensive drills, in which you dig to within a few feet off the enemies colony and threaten to pop their dome/cylinder/whatever unless they surrender. Other methods could be irradiation of food supplies alone/farming sectors. This would put pressure on them to leave. Contamination of water supplies, hallucinogenic drugs introduced to the air circulation. etc. In response to A) You are missing two parts of the argument; one limitation of accuracy against the incoming projectile is worse than shooting at a planet (smaller target with a less well known orbit/trajectory), and two is you have a time-limit to stop it; the person lobbing these at you doesn't. Furthermore, did you notice how much you are expending to stop just one of these? Rockets and guidance systems to make a mobile "whipple shield", missiles, etc. You very likely have way more than one on the way. If they're more expensive to stop than they are to deploy then it still makes some amount of sense from a harassment standpoint. And if you miss one? Well, that settles the matter In response to B) That's actually a smallish Brigade (which is the smallest operationally deployable element anyway; you don't really deploy individual Battalions), and still probably an optimistic force size for seizing full control of a colony the size of Themis. But we'll go with it. I'm genuinely curious to see if a ship could be designed for a reasonable cost (both upfront and operationally) with that mission in mind. I don't know that you'd need full crew modules... I'll have to see what the mass requirements would be when I have some time to do some more research. Transport ships capable of carrying 800 - 900 Espatiers each doesn't seem like they'd be completely out of the realm of reason or possiblity... for A) If we assume the incoming projectile is a 'dumb' 30 tonne rock or metal slug we don't actually need to intercept it at all, because our rock has a mass driver and mass drivers have recoil. All you need to do is consistently fire your mass driver (loaded with cheap regolith) in one direction, nudging your asteroid out of the projectile's way. If, on the other hand, it is a missile with the ability to perform course corrections then you would need to hit it with a small cheap missile at a long distance, destroying its guidance systems and either forcing a miss or allowing you to employ the aforementioned mass driver recoil trick to dodge it.
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Post by nerd1000 on Oct 17, 2016 11:21:58 GMT
Obviously they're absent from the game (odd given the dev is called Qswitched...), but how would a pulsed laser differ from the CW type lasers we use currently?
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Post by nerd1000 on Oct 17, 2016 4:30:50 GMT
High density is always desirable for ammo, as denser rounds will take up less space in your ammo bay and tend to penetrate armour better. For a conventional cannon I'd typically use Tungsten, Osmium or Iridium. Tungsten is the toughest and will probably give the best performance on impact (Osmium and Iridium are brittle and may shatter) but it costs more than the other ultra-dense metals. If I was on a tiny budget I'd probably go for iron, as it has acceptable properties and is quite cheap.
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Post by nerd1000 on Oct 17, 2016 4:25:47 GMT
Yeah, I noticed this a couple of days ago. The only time my missiles will proximity detonate is if they overshoot the target. On the bright side, all of my nukes are exploding inside the enemy ships when they hit! But now all of my point defense missiles are worthless... Yeah, I'm new so I don't know that I'm NOT doing it wrong, but in the retaking Ceres mission, I could not take out the enemy drone fleet with waves of nukes (10 at a time) or flak. Would just fly right by. Now I COULD take out their missile swarms but not for the right reason. My nukes wouldn't detonate but I think HIS missiles would track mine and run into them for kinetic kills. Dunno. Indeed, all missiles are heatseekers and thus during encounters they will home in on the biggest heat signature, even if that heat signature is another missile. On taking out drones: you need to use megaton range nukes and manually detonate them. This will generally fry the radiators but leave the hull intact- thankfully destroying the radiators disables the drone's gun (note that the AI will attempt to use disarmed drones as kamikazes, but they usually just bounce off your armour). A better option for dealing with the Stinger drones on the retaking Ceres level is to use a couple of beam drones from your support carrier (IIRC you have one in that mission). 2 of them can kill an entire Stinger squadron with no casualties so long as you fly off to the side at the start of the encounter to stop the Stingers getting an easy shot with their cannons. Best results can be had by targeting the Stinger's 33mm cannon- your lasers will heat up the cannon's ammunition magazine until it explodes, destroying the drone. Player designed drones are a different kettle of fish- a thin layer of silica aerogel armour will render a drone almost immune to lasers, so beam drones are useless, and your best option is either drones with turreted railguns or very large nuclear weapons.
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Post by nerd1000 on Oct 17, 2016 4:06:07 GMT
If transparency proved to be an issue you could probably suspend particles of some other opaque material in the aerogel... but that would change the material properties (it would at least make it denser).
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Post by nerd1000 on Oct 16, 2016 7:11:21 GMT
Assuming the body you're defending doesn't have an atmosphere the best way would probably be a surface based mass driver. Inhabited asteroids and moons are likely to have one anyway, as it would be a cheap way of shipping bulk goods around the solar system. In a defensive scenario you simply load different software and catapult buckets of regolith towards incoming enemy ships- the ensuing cloud of hypervelocity sand and gravel would really ruin an invading fleet's day.
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Post by nerd1000 on Oct 16, 2016 2:48:15 GMT
I've got a railgun drone design that fires a 1g tungsten pellet at 3.5 km/s (deliberately nerfed from 4.2km/s to avoid violating conservation of energy, though they're probably still impossibly efficient). I originally designed them as 'fighters' to intercept missiles and drones but I'm yet to find a capital ship armour layout that can hold off a squad of 15 of them, even for a couple of seconds- if you target a module for focus fire they'll cut through 1cm V steel whipple+ 14cm boron armour like it's made of cheese. And they do that for a mere 46.7kc per drone... They're actually so good that I'm contemplating removing all kinetic armour from my designs and relying on a combination of maneuver and point defense with high yield nukes to hold them off. Lasers are no use because a simple 1cm layer of aerogel buys the drones more than enough time to get in range and open fire.
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Post by nerd1000 on Oct 15, 2016 14:00:42 GMT
A lot of modern aircraft mounted cannons collect the cases and either dump them in a storage bin or return them to the magazine, as it is rather difficult to eject a shell case into mach 2 airflow without it subsequently colliding with the aircraft. I expect any space based warship would do the same- not much point fighting over low Titan orbit if your civilian ships won't be able to use it for 1000 years afterwards. Hmm i guess, it's still a ton of brass to haul around, compared to how simple and effective caseless ammunition would solve the problem. Indeed, though currently there are many unsolved problems with caseless ammo that mostly preclude its use.
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Post by nerd1000 on Oct 15, 2016 1:11:26 GMT
captinjoehenry, RA2lover, I think I will combine both your ideas, in a light, stripped-down missile boat. And yeah, cuddlefish. I think something that makes a bit more sense for a propellant depot that skims methane would be a highly elliptical orbit with a very low periapsis. How do you call that on Neptune? The problem is less the low apoapsis/periapsis and more the fact that it is a polar orbit. Inclination changes are almost always very expensive dV wise, and the rest of the Neptune system is roughly in line with the ecliptic, so why put the station in a polar orbit? I completed the level with a modified version of the privateer ship, equipped with drones rather than missiles. The drones had enough dV that I only needed to get my privateer into a elliptical orbit with the right inclination before launching them. The drones encountered the target at a very high velocity- so fast that the stock stingers couldn't aim at the station before they'd blown past it. I modified them with turreted guns, which fixed that problem.
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Post by nerd1000 on Oct 15, 2016 0:49:31 GMT
I know it is not too much of an issue in game but casings would also be a Kessler syndrome nightmare, you are practically creating copper kill clouds with that many projectiles. A lot of modern aircraft mounted cannons collect the cases and either dump them in a storage bin or return them to the magazine, as it is rather difficult to eject a shell case into mach 2 airflow without it subsequently colliding with the aircraft. I expect any space based warship would do the same- not much point fighting over low Titan orbit if your civilian ships won't be able to use it for 1000 years afterwards.
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Post by nerd1000 on Oct 15, 2016 0:43:18 GMT
I mean, I don't think broadside-armoring has to rule out the possibility of having thermal armor extend around the engine side, as Nerd1000 suggests. As for armoring radiators, that's entirely true, and something a friend brought up with me as well. I've seen people using clusters of smaller radiators around the circumference of the ship, which is neat. But why not have radiators integrated with the ship's armor as well? It'd certainly be less efficient, sure -- half of the heat will be going back into the ship -- but you can armor the radiators at no extra cost of mass, and they don't stick out prominently into space. I dunno how to solve the engine problem without better materials or having an armor wall that constricts one's gimbaling though. Heck, maybe we could use combat heatsinks in the midst of battle. Now if only we had heatsink parts... Here's a question: do we really want to maneuver while under nuke attack? It isn't really practical to build a ship that can out accelerate a missile anyway, so maybe the solution to the engines getting fried would be a set of shutters that can close over the nozzles and retracted radiators, allowing you to 'button up' shortly before the nukes reach you. Another option for the thrusters would be replacing the bell type nozzle with an aerospike nozzle, as they are much easier to protect with armour and do not present a direct path for radiation to reach the reactor. Assuming that we only want to button up for a short period we could employ open loop cooling, using propellant as coolant and venting it overboard through nuke resistant exhaust ports.
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Post by nerd1000 on Oct 14, 2016 13:15:18 GMT
Another thing that seems to be very helpful is a whipple shield with more than one layer. I was messing around with the armour on the stock gunship, and I've found that thinning out the main armour layer and adding a second whipple shield layer between the original one and the main armour greatly reduces the damage caused by pretty much any kinetic gun (even the slower bullets fired by stinger drones). A gunship with armour changed to 5mm Amorphous carbon -> 1000mm gap -> 5mm boron carbide -> 500mm gap -> 570mm boron -> 100mm spider silk easily outlasted the stock one- in fact it only seemed to start taking internal damage when the second whipple layer was essentially destroyed. The second layer degraded much faster than the first layer- the first layer only gets small holes in it from incoming projectiles, while the second whipple layer gets enormous chunks blasted out of it.
Interestingly the improved protection seems to be reduced if you use regular boron instead of boron carbide.
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