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Post by nerd1000 on Oct 14, 2016 5:54:24 GMT
I think the main problem with half-armoured layouts is their vulnerability to nukes. All it takes is one bomb going off beside or behind you to fry everything, so what you really need is a 'compromise' design with thermal armour all around but the ballistic armour concentrated on one side.
Aside from that concern, I really like your half-saucer concept. it combines extreme sloping of the armour with plenty of surface area for mounting weapons, without compromising the safety of the radiators like my saucer design does (though I should note that the purpose of that design was to look like a stereotypical UFO, not be super combat effective). I think the saucer layout especially lends itself to fixed weapons- being short and wide helps your turn rate, so you can get your weapons on target more efficiently than a long skinny ship, and the saucer armour shape is most effective if you point the edge of the saucer at the enemy.
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Post by nerd1000 on Oct 14, 2016 3:42:26 GMT
I dub this one "the traffic cone" Looks rather heavy. Did you consider making the barrel longer/thinner and reducing propellant burn rate? Might save some mass.
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Post by nerd1000 on Oct 14, 2016 3:39:15 GMT
If only I could set that exit temperature just a bit lower... On a side note, we need the ability to set fuel masses for RTGs to the gram range. Currently super small reactors are taking over for ultra low cost drones. pity we can't make gas core reactors or RTGs, eh?
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Post by nerd1000 on Oct 14, 2016 3:33:48 GMT
IRL thermocouples are HIDEOUSLY inefficient- you'll see around 5% efficiency from a modern semiconductor based device, the only reason we use them at all is their lack of moving parts means they need no maintenance. So outside what is possible in-game due to our optimistic thermocouple performance, a brayton cycle turbine may be the only option for high powered spacecraft (unless you like using football field sized radiators to dump 95% of your reactor's heat output into space).
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Post by nerd1000 on Oct 14, 2016 1:21:35 GMT
If we were using fusion or antimatter reactions for power it would make more sense to simply vent the resulting superheated plasma/exotic particles out the back through a magnetic nozzle. Isp would be even higher than a MPD thruster, with far less need for radiators.
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Post by nerd1000 on Oct 13, 2016 8:05:24 GMT
16.6ms reload time corresponds to 3600 rounds per minute, a rate of fire somewhere between single barrel revolver cannons (which manage around 2500 rounds/min) and gatling style cannons (which can exceed 4000 rounds per minute without too much trouble). I think it's believable when you consider the low mass of the rounds fired by most in-game conventional guns- the stock 33mm cannon fires a 5g DU 'coin' wheras the A-10 Thunderbolt's notorious GAU-8 'Avenger' 30mm rotary cannon fires 395g steel slugs with a DU core (admittedly at around 1/3 the velocity).
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Post by nerd1000 on Oct 12, 2016 4:45:07 GMT
Personally I just made a tanker with a stupid amount of delta v and a striker nuke missile. Tricked the game into letting me start with it as a drone. And then got the orbit right and intercepted with three of these and just dumped the nukes in the stations face from point blank range The drones did not survive but the station didn't either! I also had a station with some crew on it that stayed around the starting planet. I replaced the stock privateer's missile launchers with a launcher for stinger drones modified with 32mm turreted cannons. To get the drones on target I waited until I was lined up with the plane of the station's orbit then burned retrograde until my periapsis was close to neptune. I then burned prograde at periapsis to put myself on a highly elliptical orbit, performed an orbital inclination change at apoapsis, launched my load of 5 drones and maneuvered the drones to intercept. The 32mm cannons did the rest.
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Post by nerd1000 on Oct 10, 2016 13:35:52 GMT
We were fools... We fought ourselves... We made ourselves weak... Then they came... As you can see, I have created alien flying saucers (with rapid fire 10 km/s coilguns and 13MW green lasers). Performance isn't great compared to a 'sensible' ship design, mostly because there's no way to cram more fuel into that big empty gap around the outside. On the plus side, the disc shape means that the armour is well sloped and the engines are completely hidden inside the hull (It's alien technology, don't question it). I also made a 1.6km diameter mothership that could carry 50 saucers, but the game crashed when I tried to load it into the sandbox .
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Post by nerd1000 on Oct 10, 2016 11:21:05 GMT
Updated the 1GW reactor with a version lighter by 4 tons. Yes, but can you up it to 1.21 gW? Only then can we go back in time and defeat our enemies before they were ever born. "Come with me if you want to live." "Great Scott!"
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Post by nerd1000 on Oct 10, 2016 4:13:01 GMT
Honestly just a large launch of nukes would destroy that whole fleet with ease. The ai are not good at that but with around 20 high yield nuke on missiles that'll kill them. I mean just command detonate the nukes when they are close. That fleet will be dead. keep in mind that the current nuke design mechanics are... dubious at best. You can use totally impractical fissionables (Pu-238, seriously?) and get way more fusion fuel into the core than is anywhere near reasonable, which means that nuclear missiles will generally be pretty small compared to what is practical IRL. As a point of reference, the stock 27.5 mT 'Devastator' nuke has a yield:mass ratio similar to the B41 nuclear bomb, which had the highest yield:mass of any nuke built (a little over 5 mT per tonne of bomb). The difference is that the Devastator is a simple boosted fission nuke, while the B41 was a complicated 3-stage Teller-Ulam design. The US government implied that they could build a bomb with double the performance of the B41, but even taking that as a guide there are plenty of custom nuke designs that are totally out of the realms of possibility (consider your own 190kg 4.5mT warhead from the pocket nuke showcase). A nuke salvo will still barbecue those ships with ease, but you might need more missiles and a bigger, more expensive missile carrier than is currently the case. An amorphous carbon whipple shield and a layer of aerogel insulation would also go a long way to protecting against nukes for only a small increase in weight and cost.
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Post by nerd1000 on Oct 2, 2016 15:57:31 GMT
Even more broken: NuclearThermalRocketModule 4.18 km/s Heavy Water Nuclear Thermal Rocket ReactorCoreHeight_m 0.15 NuclearReactor Coolant Heavy Water Moderator Diamond ModeratorMass_kg 1 Fuel U-235 Dioxide FuelMass_kg 1 FuelEnrichment_Percent 0.97 ControlRodComposition Boron Nitride ControlRodMass_kg 1 NeutronReflector Diamond ReflectorThickness_m 0 AverageNeutronFlux__m2_s 1.7e+020 ThermalRocket ChamberComposition Boron ThroatRadius_m 0.02 ChamberWallThickness_m 0.0013 ChamberContractionRatio 4.6 NozzleExpansionRatio 15 NozzleExpansionAngle_degrees 11 RegenerativeCooling_Percent 0.24 Injector Composition Lithium PumpRadius_m 0.3 RotationalSpeed_RPM 24 GimbalAngle_degrees 0
246kN in a 9.6kg package for 2.54k TWR - doubt you can get that with a chemical engine. In any case, designing a NTR for TWR is basically getting as much heat as possible from your reactor, then passing as much coolant as possible through it so it doesn't vaporize itself, while using as lightweight of a pump as possible for that task. The design uses heavy water as reaction mass in order to collect as much heat as possible from the reactor per unit of mass flow. The higher propellant density and full dissociation of the water into hydrogen are just a bonus. A not-so-obvious choice here for the pump material is Lithium. At the pump's scale stresses aren't that big of a concern, and you're not pumping reaction mass at temperatures hot enough to melt it. The reactor is a pretty interesting one. 1kg of diamond as moderator, 1kg of U-235 dioxide and 1kg of boron nitride for criticality control. The U-235 isotope is used instead of the cheaper U-233 because it needs less total reactor mass to attain criticality. The moderator here has as function mantaining the reactor working for longer; this allows it to output 514MW over just a bit over 6 months, which wouldn't be attainable using 2kg of fissiles and no moderator. The rocket engine chamber and nozzle use boron, which fits in a sweet spot spot between RCC(which can't withstand the chamber pressures used) and Diamond(which although doesn't need regenerative cooling to be used is heavier than this design requires to attain optimal TWR). Its chamber was sized to fit the reactor - Any smaller would make it not fit, whereas any larger would cause the reactor to be less efficient. On a side note, a way this design could be made lighter would be by inserting control rods to make the reactor go supercritical instead of removing them so you can save in moderator mass, though i haven't had success in designing a high-temperature design that can do this in less than 3kg of components. EDIT: seems like methane is also a good choice of fuel that i didn't initially consider, though this might depend on how much space you're willing to spend on fuel tanks - heavy water is about 3 times as dense. I've gotten TWRs of 2.95k by adapting the engine above to use methane, and this can probably be optimized to 3k. You made a water pump from lithium? IRL your pump (and a portion of the incoming water) would turn to lithium hydroxide and hydrogen gas shortly after the inlet valve was opened, evolving quite a bit of heat in the process. CODE needs a materials compatibility mechanic. No alkali metals with water, no hot carbon in contact with hydrogen, no fluorine with, well, practically anything really- so on and so forth. Otherwise we'll keep seeing designs that are literally impossible.
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Post by nerd1000 on Oct 1, 2016 10:43:43 GMT
Why do you use copper shrapnel? Part of an attempt to reduce cost of the ammunition - for my standard drone, about 2/3rds of the cost is ammo. Later, I noticed the ammo cost isn't due to the tungsten I've used before (and am now using again), but due to the magnetic metal glass (originally 230g per bullet; I've reduced it to 75g in my current version). You can also use the Nickel Iron Molybdenum (or whatever it is) material that the stock 286mm coilgun uses as its ammo. Way cheaper than MMG, though performance is of course a bit lower.
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Post by nerd1000 on Sept 30, 2016 11:24:01 GMT
I'd also like to have options for burst distances longer than 10000m. My 15 km/s flak coilgun needs more spread to get hits on maneuvering targets.
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Post by nerd1000 on Sept 30, 2016 11:07:01 GMT
If I make a coilgun payload from a magnetic material it should interact with magnetic field of the cannon firing it. This doesn't appear to happen atm- you can make a payload entirely from iron and add it to your coilgun, and there will be no change in any parameters other than lowering muzzle velocity due to higher mass.
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Post by nerd1000 on Sept 28, 2016 13:04:50 GMT
For a start, all radiators should be in the same plane if possible. This gives maximum efficiency, plus you can roll to minimize their profile against incoming gunfire.
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