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Post by nerd1000 on Feb 21, 2017 2:45:26 GMT
The bug you wilfully exploit, despite the issue being explained to you many times, permits that broken weapon to fire 1667 rps. The true capability of a sandcaster is likely to be well below 100rps (And I have some doubts about the realism of even that proposition) The same principle applies to heavier shot fired from coilguns, where rates of fire should often be below 1 rps sometimes significantly so. The M61 Vulcan cannon used by most US fighter jets fires at 100 rps (6000rpm). Of course it is a 6 barreled gatling gun, and a similar multi-barrel setup might be needed to get such a rate of fire from railguns or coilguns too.
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Post by nerd1000 on Feb 20, 2017 10:13:17 GMT
Weaker material gets blasted in plasma expanding in all directions before the main penetrator hits the armour, I assume the stronger material can survive the plasma shock wave mostly intact. ___ _-_ _-_ _-_ _-_ thats what I mean by APCR where _ represents weaker material and - represents stronger material At extremely high velocities, crossectional density is more important than strength. This makes APCR a good choice. The hard, dense inner core of the projectile can be long and thin (thus high cross sectional density) without sacrificing the bore diameter needed to accelerate the projectile in a reasonable barrel length without something breaking. Of course this is only the relevant if your enemy has strong armour. in COADE we generally use small caliber 'sandblaster' pellet guns because nobody has enough armour to survive 5,000 pellets that all hit pretty much the same spot at 30 km/s...
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Post by nerd1000 on Feb 9, 2017 13:02:08 GMT
AFAIK This is actually because your ship only outputs heat in proportion to the amount of energy it's using when it's in fleet view. If you do the same thing in battle while your ships are shooting at the enemy you should see the figure start to rise.
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Post by nerd1000 on Feb 6, 2017 2:01:10 GMT
As I understand it, firing a laser beam at the primary mirror of another laser that's aimed at you would focus the incoming beam down into the guts of the laser and severely damage it. Obviously Children of a Dead Earth ignores this issue and simply relies on lasers piercing the turret armor, but I've been thinking: doesn't this make lasers self defeating? No matter how large and powerful your laser is, your enemy can always defeat it with a smaller and lighter one by simply firing first, ensuring that you cannot open the shutters over your mirror without risking having your beam generator fried.
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Post by nerd1000 on Jan 29, 2017 8:26:29 GMT
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Post by nerd1000 on Jan 3, 2017 3:40:44 GMT
A quick calc shows ~3.8MJ/shell of muzzle energy, so about 2GW would be enough to make the gun compliant with conservation of energy. The resultant efficiency would be an optimistic 64%. The host ship already has a 1GW reactor, increasing to 2GW wouldn't be a big change. Well, to be fair, I think there's a hard-cap of 50% efficiency right off the bat because of equal and opposite reactions. But yeah, the accelerator efficiencies aren't the ONLY things rotten in the state of Denmark, the reactors are crazy if most likely in a less easily provable manner. Reactors are crazy because you can operate every component 1K below its melting point with no loss of strength, no safety margins are required and thermoelectrics are insanely efficient. If you cap your core temp at 1300K and choose a thermocouple that's only 5 percent efficient the doom lasers become a bit less viable.
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Post by nerd1000 on Dec 26, 2016 0:10:05 GMT
I like my nice looking designs, though ;_; It's a freighter, not a sleek warship. If it doesn't look like an industrial site, you're probably not optimally designed. With mpd it makes sense to put the crew module and thrusters at the rear. That way you can tumble end over end for artificial gravity without two different 'up' directions.
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Post by nerd1000 on Dec 9, 2016 4:41:07 GMT
Given the dominance of doom lasers, armour IS still viable- but only if the engagement takes place at ranges where the lasers cannot burn your armour plate away in a fraction of a second. Our laser cannons are generally capable of continuous fire, so there's no reason not to be zapping enemy ships as soon as they're close enough for your aiming system to get the beam on target.
That means longer engagement ranges- perhaps many Mm, rather than our current 1mM limit.
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Post by nerd1000 on Dec 4, 2016 5:59:21 GMT
This. You can see that it is so by increasing the pumping of the inner turbo; the temperature at which the warning gets thrown rises. This is the reason you cannot cut as much mass from the inner turbo as from the outer one when optimizing. The actual temperature of core components is indeed a hidden value. But you can be sure that on all of my reactors (both 2500K and 2400K), it is within one or two degrees of U-233 dioxide melting temperature. The temperature displayed on the left is thermocouple hot side temperature (which apparently can be up to 510K higher than the cold side without cracking for tungsten-tantalum). Actually, I believe the inner core temperature is actually: Which in this case is literally RIGHT about to melt everything down, but requires another notch off the pump speed to actually get the warnings. This is in my experience anyway. This actually raises an important question: Would any of our high temperature reactor designs be viable in real life? With such incredible operating temperatures the structural strength of most internal components (even if they aren't melting) must be severely reduced, quite possibly to the point where the forces from coolant flowing through the reactor would be sufficient to deform or break them. Then of course we strap such a reactor to a ship that can accelerate at over 1g on full fuel... Perhaps the stock 1200K radiator temperatures are much closer to what is possible from a real life engineering standpoint.
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Post by nerd1000 on Dec 1, 2016 11:42:19 GMT
I had the idea that you could replace the reactor with a NTR and use the propellant (ejected without an nozzle) as the heat emitter to save cost/mass on those big radiator arrays. It sorta worked- I got more power for far less cost. Sadly I think the game doesn't count your superheated propellant as a heat signature (the displayed heat signature from my >7GW reactor was 800kW) and the NTR I built consumes over 2 tonnes of propellant per second, meaning that for a measly 10s burn time you need more than 20 tonnes of water in each decoy
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Post by nerd1000 on Nov 21, 2016 6:34:47 GMT
- Postulate one magic tech and abuse it. Figure out some sort of spooky action at a distance system that allows you to transfer force/momentum to physically objects. Don't explain how it works, because it's not possible as far as we know. Then you can use said force fields to create artificial gravity (aka paragravity) by just pushing everyone to the deck of the ship; you can use it to deploy hundred kilometer sheets of droplet radiators that will allow you to radiate to your heart's content even in combat (because the droplets will be moved around with force fields and won't be lost to space as you accelerate); it will allow you to create compact fusion reaction chambers for propulsion, power, and other fun applications; you can also use them as force fields (through in their case it's more of pushing projectiles and beams away and deploying mobile armor against lasers). This sort of momentum exchange also the structural stress on the hull to be evenly distributed through these force fields, which gives you more artistic license in terms of making ships look distinctive (no longer are you limited to making fuel tank skyscrapers). BRILLIANT! I've already come up with some applied phlebetonium for that idea. One is an element discovered from the manipulation of strange matter that allows for force manipulation. Limitations set for it include that it will disintegrate outside of a special chamber (almost like a sort of spherical supercollider), meaning that it is completely impractical for kinetic weapons, requiring a reactor for power. If too much energy is fed into it, it becomes volatile and either crumbles apart or melts. Not sure what to call the thing. "Witch Engine" sounds cool. Or the "RAGE" (Repulsive Adhesion Generation Engine). Maybe consider the culture of the civ that uses or invented the tech to come up with a name. If they're rationalist, highly scientific types who don't have much time for spirituality I'd go for some kind of dull acronym, wheras a civilization that is more spiritual (perhaps they even came upon the tech by accident and don't understand how it works) might use a more magical sounding name. Of course you could also do some lampshade hanging: how about calling it something along the lines of Momentum Alteration by Gravitational Imposter Creation, or MAGIC?
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Post by nerd1000 on Nov 20, 2016 10:29:48 GMT
Try using 'Tantalum Hafnium Carbide' in your next test. I don't know how to make super lasers like you do, but I'd almost bet that this material could handle them... It only works on low power lasers. The reason for this is that the Tantalum Hafnium Carbide has very low specific heat, so when the laser hits it the material will heat up very quickly. The high melting point allows it to dissipate heat by radiating it away, but any powerful laser can put so much power on such a small spot that the Tantalum Hafnium Carbide can never radiate away enough heat to remain solid.
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Post by nerd1000 on Nov 8, 2016 13:29:29 GMT
Well, silica gel is no longer the strongest thing against laser. Time to search for a new laser armor. I'm having good results with alpha titanium aluminide. It seems to last the longest in my drone swarm versus 5x 1GW green laser dreadnought tests, though those lasers are optimised for a large spot size to melt off aerogel- the aluminide might not fare so well against high intensity lasers.
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Post by nerd1000 on Nov 8, 2016 12:15:43 GMT
The real cannon appears to have a tapered outer radius on the barrel- I don't think CoaDE models this, instead it has the gun barrel the same thickness over the entire length. That might explain the increased weight.
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Post by nerd1000 on Nov 8, 2016 12:10:10 GMT
I've noticed something a bit odd with weapon spread: As you can see, the bullets are not randomly distributed within their weapon's spread cone- instead they are all at the edges, indicating that every round is fired with the maximum possible deviation from the aim point, in a random direction. Is this correct/intentional? As it is this means that no weapon can hit its target until the gun's spread cone is smaller than the target's cross section, which obviously puts a significant limit on your effective range even when the enemy is flying on a very predictable course.
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