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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Aug 22, 2017 18:39:31 GMT
Many targets to track: Stationkeeping burns aren't every few seconds, and are only small nudges. Contacts will either burn briefly at predictable moments (how chemical rockets and NTR make an interbody trajectory) or gently for extended periods of time (Hall effect thruster or plasmadrives). Stationkeeping is both gentle and brief, and has a limited impact on trajectory. You use stationkeeping to maintain your orbit, not to fly like an aircraft. And using a laser rangefinder on a contact is only necessary when acquiring the exact trajectory of that contact. The broad course and range can be estimated by the thermal camera's. Lasing a contact at long range might be perceived as a threatening gesture, as you're implying you're acquiring a firing solution. You might use a laser rangefinder (or radar) during docking though. We're talking about combat uses here though, right? You wouldn't want to glide along your orbit without burning in combat, you'd need to constantly change your trajectory or you're going to get hit by enemy fire. Besides that, you could deploy inert submunitions (eg. nukes with a simple proximity fuse) very stealthily. If the carrier just drops the munition and changes trajectory, you wouldn't be able to detect such a projectile using IR, since it'd be very close to ambient temperature. Radar might not be useful in long-range combat but I'd certainly see it being used for point-defence targeting, for example. In CoaDE, such submunitions will immediately get zapped by lasers at 1000km, but I don't think that's very realistic, especially not with just passive IR.
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Aug 20, 2017 13:04:58 GMT
I noticed the same thing with my PD nuke designs. The 100t-nukes don't cause chain reactions when the missiles die, but they also don't seem to kill anything unless it's a direct hit. I changed to a 1kt design, but that causes all of the nukes to explode the moment the first one does.
I did however make the neat observation that packing the nuke into a minimalistic blast launcher prevents it from going off too early. If the blast launcher is disabled, it just makes a tiny explosion that may disable some fuel tanks on the same drone but won't affect other drones in the same salvo.
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Aug 20, 2017 11:11:16 GMT
The game apparently detonates the flak rounds on impact or closest approach. But because they are traveling very fast (50-200 km/s, depending which gun of mine you use), the physics ticks have some visible spacing, and the game detonates them slightly before impact (which is perfect for spreading damage). Yes, this means that the particular detonation settings on my flak are irrelevant. Well that's disappointing to hear. Adding RCs on the nukes means that lasers will target them as well, which means they need to be armored pretty heavily to survive. They also seem to lag quite a bit more. I guess nuclear projectile guns are pretty much useless. Speaking of your flak railguns, have you noticed that the armature doesn't cause any stress (more precisely, internal pressure) on the rails? I noticed this when trying to replicate your railgun with a solid slug, and would have to make the barrel at least ten times as heavy to compensate for the actual pressure the projectile would impart on the rails. It seems that only the 0.15-gram payload causes stress for your railgun, which I would consider a fairly big exploit. Here's a comparison of my railgun clone with or without the payload, with the same total projectile mass. Without the payload, internal pressure jumps by a factor of ten or so. Payload: linkno payload: link
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Aug 20, 2017 1:56:00 GMT
IR or visible light wouldn't be able to see submunitions deployed from an intersect trajectory though, would it? You could have drones zigzagging and deploying submunitions from varying trajectories. The dark, cold munitions wouldn't be easily detectable even if you could track the drone perfectly due to exhaust fumes. I can still see radar having its uses.
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Aug 20, 2017 1:39:03 GMT
I'm pretty sure nukes are more efficient kilo for kilo. It's enough to get the missile close enough instead of a direct hit you'd need with a flak warhead.
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Aug 20, 2017 1:19:36 GMT
I did some testing with laser drones. I modified the AE 100MW laser from deep fryers to be a bit lighter and smaller, and dropping intensity down to 6 MW/m². The lighter laser allows for a very agile drone when you put some NTRs behind it. At 3.6g acceleration, the drones can easily beat even the 50 km/s railgun build I posted previously. In the few tests I ran, the railgun train wasn't able to land a single hit before it died. The drone isn't probably the best efficiency you can do credit for credit, but that doesn't matter much since my counter costs pennies compared to just the laser turret on the drone. Drone design here: linkThis points towards close-range weapons being the only viable counter against laser drones, at least ones that are this agile. Since they can dodge anything at longer ranges, you have to close the distance to be able to hit. You could probably do it with gun drones, but I feel like I've done them to death, so I went for the nuclear missile approach. I designed a dirt-cheap missile that comes with a 103t nuclear warhead and has a ~10 km/s dv. It's so cheap that you could put out around 1500 of them for every laser drone, but I went with 200 against 15 since that seems to be plenty. The missiles have a lightweight anti-laser armor cap, which allows them to survive lasering for a good while, so huge amounts of the missiles should be pretty much unstoppable for lasers at this price. I also made a booster stage for the missiles that accelerates up to 10 km/s and then fires a bunch of the nukes from a 3 km/s muzzle velocity blast launcher, giving the missiles a starting velocity of 13 km/s. Adding ~7km/s to that, we get a cruise velocity of 20 km/s for the missiles. This means the lasers have about a minute to shoot at the missiles, and then they die in nuclear fire. Missile design: linkMissile bus: linkMy test case was 15 laser drones versus one missile bus, with the lasers being worth roughly 2 Mc, whereas the nuke bus costs only 1.22 Mc. In this latter test I got a faulty intercept velocity of 22 km/s but the nukes worked fine on an earlier test with the more usual 10 km/s speed as well. Only about 40 missiles died before reaching the drones so it's not that relevant. You could easily just add in more missiles if it looks like they're not getting through. Start of combat screen: linkMissiles getting closer. 20 down so far: linkMissiles hit, killing all laser drones pretty quickly: linkI'm pretty sure missiles like this are a hard counter against most laser designs. You'd have to invest a lot of credits to the laser drone's agility to be able to dodge these missiles, and there's no way lasers could take down this many missiles. You could field around 27,000 missiles against a single Deep Fryer and still come a bit lower on the price tag. Heavy armor might work against these, but I haven't really paid much attention to nuke damage before so I'm not sure how doable that would be. Either way, heavy armor can always be countered with KKVs or heavy cannons if nukes don't cut it, so that's not a final solution to the problem either.
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Aug 19, 2017 22:53:43 GMT
I guess you could do this for bipropellants. H20 to H2 and LOX should work. Just add in one part of LOX from a separate tank and you can have a 1:1 propellant ratio as well.
You'd probably have to have some buffer between the electrolyzer and thruster though, it might be difficult to electrolyze water fast enough to fuel a rocket.
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Aug 19, 2017 22:43:24 GMT
I know that, but putting a 1kg rc on a 700-gram nuke is a bit of a waste. Apophys's flaks somehow work without any RC, so I was wondering how that works.
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Aug 19, 2017 22:23:56 GMT
Sensors would be baller. Some uncertainty in enemy vector sensing would probably make long-range combat a bit less effective. Having all combat happen at 1000 km is a bit boring.
Better homing would also be nice to have, as well as more stable orbital velocities at high speeds and high accelerations.
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Aug 19, 2017 20:57:10 GMT
I've had issues with getting detonators to work with cannon-launched payloads. I assumed you'd just have to place a control module to make it work, but I recently noticed apophys's flak guns detonate on time even without a remote control module. So how do you make explosives detonate?
More specifically, I have a 100t nuke I'd like to use as a point defence payload but it just doesn't seem to co-operate. I tried different activation and hard ranges, thinking the projectile either would miss by too much or have time to collide with the target before detonating, but even with a 50-km activation range my nukes just punch through gunship armor instead of detonating. While that does work for gunships, it makes for expensive projectiles and doesn't really help against missiles since they tend to be harder to hit. Any ideas what I'm doing wrong?
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Aug 18, 2017 23:22:15 GMT
So I started thinking that there's no reason the same train design shouldn't do well against laserstars as well. I stripped most of the useless things like missile launchers and swapped out the guns for apophys's 50 km/s flak ones since they're pretty small and should be good enough against the unarmored laser boats. This brought down my train's price to 26 Mc, meaning I'd have to kill 11 laser boats to match price. And that's what I did. Ship design: Enemy fleet: Start of combat Shots are halfway through. No significant damage yet, just a few small holes in the hull. Almost there. A little bit of ship has come off but that never hurt anybody. And the lasers have kicked the bucket. And the train is (nearly) undamaged! What a champ! First time I was able to kill fryers using a warship instead of drones. This also points toward laser drone swarms being beatable, since that's what 11 deep fryers essentially are.
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Aug 18, 2017 22:13:12 GMT
While fiddling around with other things, I ended up making this old gun, that (sort of) fits into the heavy conventional guns category I guess: It's not all that special by itself but when you mount it on a ship going 6 km/s, you can push projectile energy up to 20 GJ. And that's not even the top limit of what you can do, since the gun isn't all that heavy. The ship I tested it with has six guns, pushing out 240 GW worth of projectiles with just a piddly 3 GW power generator. With the starter velocity, it can make this kind of work from cyborg's heaviest (I guess?) armor: Every single shot punched through both sides of the ship and destroyed everything inside as well. The best thing is those holes look like actual bullet holes, which is definitely a big bonus.
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Aug 18, 2017 20:34:09 GMT
I made a 600mm, 400kg round conventional gun with a muzzle velocity of 1.1 km/s. When fired from a ship moving at roughly 6 km/s, giving projectile energies of roughly 20 MJ, it seems to behave just as you'd expect it to, that is punching through a Gunship's armor on the first hit. Maybe there's some variable that's missing here? Because I don't see any unexpected behaviour on my specific case.
Edit: wait I mistyped that, I meant to say 20 GJ, not 20 MJ. It's not a pea gun after all.
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Aug 18, 2017 16:10:29 GMT
I improved my previous design by changing to a 600mm conventional cannon with a 400kg projectile and 1.1 km/s muzzle velocity. Thanks to the high dv and high acceleration, I can get the ship close enough on a fast intercept that it can fire a fairly long burst of 400kg rounds moving at ~8 km/s, and still dodge most of the return fire. It's a bit expensive (~70 Mc) compared to optimized designs, but at least it's something fun and unique. I always wanted to get a viable design that can punch a meter-wide hole through a ship with a single hit, and now I do. Plus, can survive battles with armor that is literally just a bit of aluminum foil, which is a bonus. Ship design: linkCombat video:
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Aug 17, 2017 18:59:08 GMT
They did get a few hits in. I guess the misses are probably due to the ship turning thanks to the homing order. At least that's what I had in mind when giving the order.
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