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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Nov 18, 2017 22:39:13 GMT
I doubt if a missile can survive 4000000 gee of acceleration They're made of strong space-American steel, they can handle it
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Nov 17, 2017 23:47:10 GMT
Conventional guns tend to work far better with heavy payloads. You can get around 2 km/s and a decent rate of fire for fairly cheaply.
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Nov 17, 2017 16:11:38 GMT
A late reply, I know, but here's a WIP of the various ship designs I've had in mind. In the novel, this style of ship is referred to as the "Foss-Gaughan Pattern." Was Foss-Gaughan a Dark Eldar by any chance?
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Nov 14, 2017 22:05:23 GMT
The pictures you linked aren't showing up for me. Mind rehosting/recreating them? I tried this approach but presumably didn't tinker with it enough to bet good results. The best I ever managed was several lines of projectiles dispersing too fast, too early or late, and with large chunks of space left open. On a related topic, I also looked at missiles with a nuke and a frag payload with either the nuke launched ahead or the frag launched behind such that hopefully the nuke softens the armor and the frag pierces it, but my results with making that work properly have been even more disappointing. Looks like dropbox is down. Here's an imgur version: You can find an exported design a few posts down from the post I linked. You need to allow the projectiles three frames for them to properly leave the blast launchers: on first frame, the blast launcher triggers, on the next the projectiles are spawned and only on the third frame they start traveling out from the launcher. So you need a trigger range of about 10% of your relative velocity to get good results. This gives you between 0 and 1/30th of a second expansion time for the submunition ring, which translates to around 0-10 meters for my round.
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Nov 14, 2017 20:22:43 GMT
Single-shot blast launchers facing sideways do the job quite well. They deploy in a ring simultaneously so you get a nice spread pattern that's easily controllable, and the launchers are still pretty light and cheap. You might want to up fragment mass to around 100 grams though, otherwise the exit velocity is going to be too high for most use cases. See here for more info: childrenofadeadearth.boards.net/post/29531/thread
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Nov 12, 2017 11:27:25 GMT
This is the best I've been able to come up with: It's a 1.15 GW 10 ton reactor with a rather low outlet temp of 1800k ,but an exceptional efficiency of 33.9% due to its Graphene/ Pyrolytic Carbon thermocouple. Its based off of the stock 542 MW reactor as I'm terrible at reactors for now. It only costs 178 Kc which is exceptionally cheap for a reactor of its power output as far as I can tell. Also only puts off 3.44 GW of heat which is also pretty low. That's pretty neat, though somewhat limited by the low exit temp. I think you should be able to go higher by switching to Hafnium-Carbide control rods, it should give you some 200 K more in reactor temperature tolerance. I ran your reactor through a radiator calculator I made and yours still loses out to the AE 1 GW reactor in radiator area due to how strongly surface temperature affects radiator power output. The AE 1.01 GW reactor needs ~2900 m² of radiators to stay cool, whereas yours needs ~5700 m². You still have a lower heat signature, but at 3.3 GW you might as well not bother thinking about that. Maybe the higher efficiency would be useful on lower-power reactors, allowing ships to have a few MWs of power while still having a low heat profile to avoid missiles. My calculations and a link to the calculator in spoilers below:
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Nov 6, 2017 15:57:03 GMT
Are you sure spending so much energy on heat pumps makes sense? If the reactors work at 16% efficiency doable in-game, even at 2500K exit temperature the radiator footprint for the reactor is going to be pretty big, and the extra 1.75 GW in power production is going to cost quite a lot of money and mass as well. It might make sense to stay at lower temperatures even if that means the laser radiator has to be bigger. Of course, the fourth power of temperature in radiator efficiency might mean higher temperature is always better, but I wouldn't blindly assume so without checking. It should be fairly simple to choose optimal output temperature for the laser while taking into account the added mass from reactors and radiators needed to run the heat pumps as well as the laser itself. Seriously, I am not talking about any of the ingame lasers with their nicely high output temperatures. Contrary to what player-made lasers like Apophys ones makes you believe, arc lamp pumped lasers are actually horrible, not just efficiency, but beam quality and mass are also horrible, and something like 800K 100% frequency doublers even though real life state of the art frequency doublers achieve 88% at 25°C just make matters worse. Room-temperature radiators? Cryogenic radiators? 600K radiators with M² of 5.7? Either CDE stock lasers (ok not that bad) or heat pumps, take your poison. I think you missed my point. I'm saying that when you use heat pumps, the choice of output temperature affects power requirements, therefore affecting how large radiators your reactor needs. Based on a quick test using CDE 16% efficiency reactors, it seems you get minimal radiator area close to 1200 K output temperatures after pumping, if you use the laser in your example (1 GW power, 100 MW waste heat, 100 K exit temperature) Here's the calculator I used: google drive link
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Nov 6, 2017 15:36:08 GMT
What figures did you use for specific power? How did you get that M2 beam quality factor? My understanding is that fibre optic lasers regularly are able to produce diffraction limited lasers (M2=1). You also need to get total internal refraction within the tube. This might be harder to do with shorter wavelengths. I look into some figures to share with you for electron beam accelerators. 10kW/kg Laser elements, 1kW/kg Heat pumps. Wikipedia, Luke Campbell and product information for commercial fiber lasers. Apparently only in theory, and a bit of pessimism doesn't hurt either. That would be nice from you, beam quality is often related to operating temperature of lasing elements, if my laser in its entirety runs at an average of 100K would I achieve diffraction-limited beams? Based on a 90% SRF Klystron and 99.9% Recovery Linac I would get 900MW Laser energy from 1GW, 100MW waste heat which has to be pumped to 1500K using 1750MW of power, wall-plug of roughly 36% and apparently difffraction-limited beams with frequencies as low as there are efficient mirrors/lenses for it. Are you sure spending so much energy on heat pumps makes sense? If the reactors work at 16% efficiency doable in-game, even at 2500K exit temperature the radiator footprint for the reactor is going to be pretty big, and the extra 1.75 GW in power production is going to cost quite a lot of money and mass as well. It might make sense to stay at lower temperatures even if that means the laser radiator has to be bigger. Of course, the fourth power of temperature in radiator efficiency might mean higher temperature is always better, but I wouldn't blindly assume so without checking. It should be fairly simple to choose optimal output temperature for the laser while taking into account the added mass from reactors and radiators needed to run the heat pumps as well as the laser itself.
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Nov 3, 2017 13:21:42 GMT
This is the best design philosophy anyways. I beat most of the campaign using ships armed with 30 or so 60mm cannons. Sometimes More Dakkaism isn't as good as BetterTech TM, as shown in real life back in the 19 th century as nations try to get themselves advanced weapons over saturating the enemy with swords and spears. Sword and spears don't count as dakka though, so it's natural it didn't work.
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Nov 3, 2017 11:16:17 GMT
I believe that many people would convert to More Dakkaism in response to this challenge. This is the best design philosophy anyways. I beat most of the campaign using ships armed with 30 or so 60mm cannons.
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Nov 3, 2017 0:56:26 GMT
You can get rid of the randomized banner by disabling javascript. I don't think it hurts any relevant functionality either, so you don't lose anything. nevermind it breaks spoiler tags
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Nov 3, 2017 0:50:29 GMT
Conventional guns firing heavy slugs mounted on hypervelocity drones are pretty much the best thing you can do. It's cheap and can punch through a meter of steel armor without costing too much. Against stock ships you don't even need much armor since the lasers are pretty bad and their guns are useless against drones.
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Oct 26, 2017 19:15:53 GMT
It doesn't apply to bullets, probably due to performance concerns. It just tries to avoid collisions other ships (so ships, missiles, payloads and so on.)
If you make a cannon that fires payload projectiles, you can see ships try to dodge them. It's not too smart though, it tends to just accelerate into a single direction meaning the dodge prediction on guns and especially missile homing will perfectly predict hits. If it dodged on a random path it would be a lot more useful. The only real use is to get your drones to avoid collisions with each other and capital ships.
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Oct 23, 2017 19:07:21 GMT
Finally found a good design for autocannon canister shot. It deploys so close to the target that only one round has shrapnel out at a time, meaning there is no major lag, but it still creates a good spread pattern for removing ships. What actually is that bizzare spotted object? It's the bullet. It's covered in single-shot blast launchers that trigger at 200 meters, each firing a 250-gram slug exiting at a bit under 200 m/s. Since they fire so close to the target, this gives you a varying spread pattern of around 20 meters, depending on how fast the projectile was fired and with some randomness to the size due to the trigger happening at different distances. As far as I can tell, the game checks whether or not the blast launcher is in range 30 times per second, and fires it if it is inside engagement range. The projectile only gets spawned at the launcher on the next frame, meaning you want at least 2/30 seconds of time for the projectiles to clear your bullet, preferably a bit more to get a larger spread. A good rule of thumb seems to be to set engagement range to 10% of expected impact velocity since that gives you a bit of an error margin for different intercept velocities. You can then adjust the exit velocity of the blast launcher to control the size of your spread pattern. At 200 m/s exit velocity and around 0.1 seconds of travel time, my canisters should create patterns of up to 20 meters, depending on just how close to the target they trigger, and that seems to be what they do. Earlier, I tried using just few tens of meters as the engagement range to give me a spread size of a couple of meters, but this does not work since the projectile covers more distance in a single frame. I would rarely see one of them deploying the slugs but even then the projectiles didn't have time to spread enough, since they spawn with a one-frame delay. Here's the design export of the cannon, along with some screenshots of the thing in spoilers below: linkCannon: Projectile: The blast launcher has just a one-gram explosive charge and a 200m engagement range set to target ships.
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Oct 20, 2017 13:15:26 GMT
Although if we're writing fiction and not a technical report, we can pick and choose details that make for interesting stories instead of focusing on every last detail of what would happen in the real world. Not all scifi needs to be autistically hard, even though it's nice to read those kinds of books now and then too. "...The stuff I'm working on is something that's realistic but at the same time and of equal measure something that will inspire engineers, physicists and scientists." -sbrant. I am pretty sure that he want's to make a (semi?)hard sci-fi story. Still, saying that just because you have hyperdrives you can't have limited resourcers is a bit silly. You can plausibly work around the issue by handwaving hyperdrive tech as using some method that doesn't require practically infinite amounts of energy unlike the current understanding of hyper drives. After that you can have fusion torches and hyperdrives in the same setting while remaining internally consistent.
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