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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Oct 20, 2017 12:10:40 GMT
Hyperspace Actual discussion of physics Pick one. In all seriousness, if you can generate some kind of warp field/wormhole/ without having energy beamed to you you are using antimatter or micro-black holes for power. If you have that, you can make engines that are absurdly powerful and efficient, making acceleration and Delta-V minor issues. 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.
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Oct 20, 2017 12:00:25 GMT
Submission 2, the Yaka. It uses no modded materials and is much more cost effective than the darkshard. One Yaka can kill a gunship in 95% of cases. How does it fare against the gunship laser? The armor layout looks like even the vanilla laser should be able to cook a single missile easily.
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Oct 19, 2017 0:40:54 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.
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Oct 16, 2017 14:14:00 GMT
A small correction to your formulas - your density for F-H seems to be far higher than it actually is. Since 1 kg of hydrogen and 18.8 kg of fluoride fit into almost exactly the same tank, you'd expect the density of F-H to be close to half of fluoride, but yours is around 95% of fluoride. The density I got for my calculator was 787 kg/m^3 which at least sounds plausible. Fixing the density should increase F-H costs a bit, since the tanks will be heavier as a result, but I don't expect to see huge differences.
Another note for tank mass ratios is that you can quickly check the mass ratio for an optimal tank in-game, since the ratio only depends on the propellant and tank dimensions. Your numbers for tank mass are pretty close to mine though, so again you probably won't see a big difference if you use the precise numbers.
I think your fuel mass formula doesn't take tank or armor mass into account right now. You can easily solve the required mass ratio for the whole ship from the rocket equation, as you did in your calculator. However, dry mass is not the same is payload mass. Dry mass should contain fuel tank mass as well as the mass of any armor and engines in order to give the correct required fuel mass. This means you'll need to solve for fuel mass in a linear equation that looks something like follows:
mass_ratio = m_wet / m_dry m_wet = m_dry + m_fuel <==> m_fuel = mass_ratio * m_dry - m_dry m_dry = m_tank + m_engine + m_payload + m_armor m_tank = a * m_fuel m_armor = f(v_fuel, v_payload)
I didn't bother with the increased armor requirements stemming from fuel tank volume, but factoring for just the fuel tank mass gives you some increased accuracy, especially for the lighter propellants. With heavy propellants with fuel tank mass ratios of >100, it doesn't really make a noticeable difference except at the extreme dv ranges.
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Oct 9, 2017 17:20:23 GMT
Intercept mechanics seem to work quite poorly in general. Intercept ranges vary wildly and ships seem to forget they have long-range missile launchers after one combat with the same fleet setup. Sometimes you can start combat already having passed the enemy, or with ridiculously high relative velocities. I've seen intercepts with over 100 km/s relative velocity using 10 km/s dv missiles. I really wish we could get a patch for these issues but it's starting to look like the game's pretty dead so I won't hold my breath.
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Oct 9, 2017 0:27:50 GMT
next patch never ever
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Oct 5, 2017 9:39:52 GMT
Just as an example, heres the exit wound of an "overpenetration" on a gunship from one of my M11 Micro Vipers: Sure it overpenetrated, but thats still significant damage, considering the thing only costs 29.5c. Considering that you could fire 33 of them for less than a kilocredit, any real ship would be crippled by the impacts. Beyond that, if guidance was sofisticated enough to allow distribution of impact points (witch it should be, since it weighs a kilogram), such a salvo would practically guranty a kill on a gunship (hell, 15 would be enough for that). KKVs do barely any damage after the first hit in a location though. This is especially problematic with missiles since they tend to hit the same point over and over again. Against gunships this rarely matters since the only reactor is exactly where the missiles will home. But against well designed ships, even dumbfire KKVs can take very long to disable a ship if the internals have enough redundancy and are protected by bulkheads separating the ship to different compartments. See below for a video showing this: The rocket launcher puts out 6.8 GW of kinetic energy, but it still takes a fairly long time to disable the ship, since the rockets do very little internal damage after the first few penetrate through armor. A flak or even HE warhead would help spread that energy more efficiently. Even if most of the kinetic energy is wasted by the missile disappearing, spreading it over a larger area can be more effective if you have far too much energy in your impactors.
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Oct 3, 2017 14:20:15 GMT
Just a small note: I've found that payloads are pretty useless for anything but anti missile/drone use. When a payload detonates, the rest of the missile simply vanishes. Since the missile itself generally weighs many times as much as the payload, the missile hitting a ship will generally do far more damage than the shrapnel from a flak warhead. As for nukes, small nukes aren't really capable of causing critical damage against anything other than non armored ships. Over all (as far as my testing shows), any flak missile has been more effective as a KKV and effective nukes tend to be fairly large an expensive. For small anti ship missiles KKVs are the way to go. That depends a lot on the way the ship is built. You can put all your big radiators over empty hull, which makes missiles target the non-critical part instead of crew modules or reactors. The vanilla ships just happen to have radiators right on top of reactors. This is especially apparent on the gunship from a side approach, where usually the first impacting KKV will disable the whole ship since the only reactor is where the missiles home in on. Frag missiles have the benefit that the fragments spread damage over a wider area of hull, tend to spread around inside the hull and at the very least will destroy the radiators they home in on. KKVs tend to just make a tiny entry and exit hole and rarely do any significant damage when impacting over empty hull.
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Sept 30, 2017 0:33:51 GMT
So I took my 750kc gun deployer design a bit further and turned it into a missile that carries 60 of the 125mm gun platforms. I also added small thrusters to the guns so that they can compensate for recoil and change between targets more quickly. A single 750kc missile can take two gunships in succession. Even though each gun only has 50 rounds, it's still enough to completely destroy two gunships. The gun platforms are fairly durable too, especially since the RCS thrusters can keep the front aligned towards the enemy. They can't really take kinetic hits, but against lasers they have a few cm of diamond barrel armor, plus some PTFE behind the gun to protect the ammo bin and control systems. Design for the missile and gun in spoilers below. Youtube video showing the guns do their thing. I also noticed that running windowed capped FPS to 30 for no reason, so now I'm back to a steady 60 when there's not much going on.
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Sept 29, 2017 22:25:57 GMT
Here's a design utilizing conventional guns. It fulfills all the criteria as well: 5.02 km/s dv, 749 kc cost and it has two 17mm machine guns that do nothing. However, its main armament is two gun platform launchers that shoot out a total of 16 125mm gun satellites that can quickly chew pretty much any armor. With 360 RPM, a 1 kg slug and approximately 3 km/s impact velocity after taking into account relative velocity to the target, they pack quite a punch. The generous dv on the launcher ship allows it to flee combat before going into the enemy's weapon range, which means it doesn't really need to be armored at all. Designs for everything below: Combat video: For points I got 1 kc * 0.02 km/s * 283,000,000 Mc = 5.66 megapoints. Sadly this design is about 10,000 times worse than my previous one. Just goes to show you that missiles are really efficient.
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Sept 29, 2017 16:43:46 GMT
Woa... time to re-optimize all my railguns :/ Sidenote: creating that many objects per second might be asking for issues without a technically clever solution. You can already get your game to freeze by having a bunch of drones with max RoF guns so it's not really going to change anything. You'll just have to be more careful with your designs.
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Sept 29, 2017 9:01:32 GMT
Here's a pretty neat gun if you want to use conventional guns. 2 km/s with 940g bullet, 9 shots per second for 22.3 kc and 2.8 tons
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Sept 27, 2017 15:48:25 GMT
Just think of the lag when every drone would launch 35 missiles per second. It wouldn't be fun.
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Sept 25, 2017 21:28:58 GMT
I managed to create a fairly efficient design. It has a good acceleration, enough dv to hover for 2 hours 30 minutes (assuming you can pulse the NTRs quickly enough, otherwise it would be closer to bouncing rather than hovering) and a decent armament. It also has two tons of armor, with a layered design of two hard layers with spall liners and a good deal of space between them. This allows it to ignore small arms and maybe resist a few hits from a lighter warship railgun as well. Against lasers it might survive a few moments, but that wasn't a main concern. Designs for tank and missile: It has 2 10mm machine guns with HE ammo to take down infantry and unarmored targets, a 42mm autocannon that packs a decent punch with 600 rpm, 100 grams per round and a 2 km/s muzzle velocity. Finally, it has a rack of 25 micromissiles with a dv of 2.5 km/s and a 4 kg shrapnel warhead for taking down groups of infantry or even warships when enough of them are fired at once. With a bit over 50 kc a pop, they're not too expensive, and they pack a formidable punch. Here's a video of a tank battalion (20 tanks) taking down a gunship, while losing only 4 tanks. 280 Mc for 200 kc is a pretty decent tradeoff. If that's not a good demonstration of their power, I don't know what is. Stats: Mass: 2.86 t Cost: 53.9 kc dv: 937 m/s acceleration: 1.18 g radiation hazard: ~10 mW floating time: 2h 30m Edit: I managed to improve my design and as a result I was able to destroy a gunship with just two tank platoons, or six tanks. The price went up a bit since I added some diamond everywhere to make the weapons, missiles and the tank itself more resistant to lasers. 61.6 kc isn't too bad if just six can destroy a Gunship though. Here's the updated design:
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Sept 25, 2017 17:19:48 GMT
To clarify, do we want to maximize or minimize the radiation hazard? You wouldn't need guns if the reactors can melt everyone within a hundred meters in seconds.
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