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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Aug 9, 2017 20:36:14 GMT
could we see the warhead design for the nuke? Here you go: link
Edit: the missile uses the thruster I posted previously, so this one: linkI made a pentane version of my previous engine to get a little better acceleration for my drones. I ended up with 700kn thrust and a 2550 g thrust ratio on a ~80 cm diameter design. Link to engine design below. design linkUsing those engines I made a cannon drone that can quickly accelerate to 13 km/s and uses a lighter version of the vanilla 60mm cannon as its weapon. They're not spectacularly efficient but it's a fairly cheap design that can take down most targets with ease, and the huge volumes of bullets they fire look very nice. Again design below. design linkHere's a youtube video showing them off. You can also see some nukes go full retard and chasing debris in there.
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Aug 9, 2017 8:43:43 GMT
With the grossly efficient engines I posted earlier, I was able to make a very fast single-stage missile that can carry a payload weighing around 100kg, and costs next to nothing. They'll reach ~17 km/s in a bit over 20 seconds, so they won't take forever to reach targets at longer ranges. I made versions carrying the same payloads as before, so 13kt nukes and cluster flak launchers. Below is a video showing them go. Design for the nuke:
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Aug 8, 2017 20:35:01 GMT
Here's a teaser to compare with the rocket posted above... Cheeky I also felt like doing some space opera after all my autistic optimization in the last few days, so I made a battleship and shot some vanilla ships with it. It does look quite pretty. Here's a close-up of the design: It's armed with some cannons and railguns, as well as a bit under 600 nuclear missiles. Here's a youtube video with all the pretty lights: Edit: here's a version with a 50-50 split between nuclear missiles and cluster flak missiles. The nukes have higher acceleration and more dv, so they arrive before the flaks and soften up the enemy nicely.
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Aug 8, 2017 19:11:25 GMT
Turns out making a capital that can survive the railguns with equal cost is pretty hard. However, since the drones don't have any side armor, they're very vulnerable to nukes. I was able to create a cheap nuclear PD missile that can reliably take down the railgun drones with far less cost. The drones can avoid some missiles with their higher thrust, but since the missiles are so cheap, the drones would need to avoid three or four salvos of PD missiles, any of which can fully destroy a single drone swarm. Since the dv difference between the drones and missiles isn't that big, the missiles should be able to beat the railgun drones every time before they reach the launcher ship. All of this points toward the fact that no single design is able to beat every other design. It does seem to me that all overly specialized designs have a cheaper hard counter that will beat them every time. Therefore the notion of a single dominant meta seems to be completely debunked. Instead the most efficient designs would likely be either single generalist capital ships or fleets of several specialized capitals that can each counter some specialized strategy. Missile design: Launcher ship: Youtube video showing the railgun drones getting rekted. Note that I had to do a stupidly slow intercept since the AI is too retarded to intercept anything moving faster than 500 m/s properly.
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Aug 8, 2017 7:51:38 GMT
Next gen engine for my capitals, using some of my newer mods... actually, hafnium diboride and zirconium diboride are still mods; is there a way for vanilla NTRs to achieve the same performance? Requirements were fitting into a 3x5m box, producing 2MN thrust with 4.5km/s exhaust, and having an I-220H beryllium chamber. Costs 10kc more than the nearest competitor! Heh. Here's a cheaper and more efficient NTR using only vanilla parts. 4 of these gives more thrust for less weight and far less size than your design, and has a higher exit velocity so it's more efficient too. Not sure about propellant density, but methane isn't too bad when it comes to that. I think the chamber throat is too wide on your design, causing it to be heavier and larger than it needs to be. Mine doesn't have a gimbal, but they're not that useful and I think I could fit that in as well without going over your design's efficiency, since my engine is so light. Edit: here's the engine I use for most of my capitals. I prefer going a little faster with my ships.
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Aug 7, 2017 20:17:30 GMT
I can verify that this happens. It looks like spinal mounted weapons don't take relative velocity of the firing ship properly into account. If tangential velocity is 0, they do hit pretty well.
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Aug 4, 2017 13:19:39 GMT
as one of them veers off, a salvo of sprint type missiles launch onto intercept before you can say vampire As a hard counter a few 1MW point defence lasers could just be slapped on. I guess you could put some anti-laser armor and a tiny railgun on the missiles to counter the laser?
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Aug 3, 2017 20:56:51 GMT
After further optimization, I can now beat three Deep Fryers simultaneously without losing a single drone using a carrier that costs 2.4 Mc and carries 15 of these drones: End of combat screen below. The drones took some damage but that seems to be because their tails are visible behind the armor due to multiple targets. Perhaps a swarm of laser drones on a scatter order would work best against this strategy, since you'd need a wider plate to block lasers coming from a wider angle. The slimmer hull and armor made from PTFE reduce the cost enough that I can add more fuel and make the drones go 19 km/s, giving a generous 41 km/s projectile velocity for the railguns. This is so fast and efficient that I don't think even a high-g ship that dodges constantly would be able to beat it, at least when limited to the same cost bracket. You'd need an acceleration of around 10 Gs to avoid shots fired at 500km, and the drones should be able to survive quite a bit closer than that as well, since you have to sacrifice credits to engines and/or armor. Armor doesn't help much either when laser mirrors would still shatter to the first hit they take.
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Aug 2, 2017 22:58:36 GMT
After some more tweaking I managed to beat the laser star with just ~2Mc worth of drones, including the carrier. I only lost 3 drones out of 15 used. You can see the test run here: I switched to a Boron Nitride radiation shield for the front armor plate, as it seems to offer quite good laser protection and doesn't cost or weigh too much. I wouldn't be surprised if there are better materials for that, but this seems to work well enough. A 31 cm thick plate can keep the drones alive until the projectiles hit home, and the drones cost "only" 114 kc a pop. I also placed the rail guns in front of the armor cap to make the design completely exploit-free, at least as far as I can tell. They should be able to handle armored laser boats well enough too, although the railgun might need some tweaking to make it more accurate in that case. Mobile targets might be a little more problematic, though that should also decrease the laser boat's wattage per credit, allowing more drones to be used against it. Design .txt here, now with tagged modules to avoid conflicts: Laser removal lamp export.txt (7.54 KB) Here's a better picture of the drone, in case you just want to see the layout in a better light than in the video:
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Aug 2, 2017 21:49:53 GMT
I did a quick test with a 1.7m thick diamond radiation shield, and it looks like the drones are effective even in a completely legit loadout. The shield brought the combined price up to 11 Mc though, so I'll need to do some further testing to see how cheap I can make them. Here's an image showing one surviving drone. The turrets aren't even protected by the shield, but they still survived fine with their own diamond armor.
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Aug 2, 2017 16:55:59 GMT
I managed to improve my previous design by quite a bit. I changed the conventional cannon into a 10 km/s 4gram 1MW railgun, meaning the target gets less time to dodge. I also slimmed the design down by switching to methane fuel and making the drone longer. This cuts down on head-on surface area, which means the armor cap should be lighter too if I switch to a design that doesn't use the partial armor exploit. Another improvement is the increased acceleration, which means that I no longer need to do a high-velocity intercept at the start of combat. Since the drones reach 12 km/s in 18 seconds, they can start stationary and still reach full speed before they've suffered any significant damage. The launcher can field 20 of the drones for ~2Mc, and the drones are durable enough that I didn't lose a single gun when destroying one Deep Fryer. I'm pretty sure 20 drones could kill 4 deep fryers simultaneously without major losses, since the 4 railguns would each target one laser boat. Here's an export of the design: Laser removal lamp.txt (6.89 KB) Picture links of the designs if you don't want to try it for yourself: dronelauncherThere's a design-name-appending tool linked from this thread: dedup/renamer you may find useful for exports. I'm on Windows so I don't feel like trying to make that work. Maybe I'll make a windows version at some point, that seems like a useful tool to have.
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Aug 2, 2017 7:59:00 GMT
I will need to try to beat this with lasers now. Can you provide the *.txt file here? Here you go: New Spacecraft 7.txt (7.64 KB) A lot of the modules have generic names so you might run into conflicts though. Do note that the drone design as presented makes use of a partial armor bug: your 2 meters of frontal diamond is almost not counted for cost and mass. A 4.69 m radius, 2m thick diamond rad shield is 10.5 Mc. Also, you would probably get better armor cost-effectiveness with selenium; that would be 1.25 Mc for the same size. I'm not sure if it would be durable enough without using the armor exploit. I guess I could try to make a version that can carry the radiation shield dv-wise while staying cheaper. I'm also fairly sure that NTRs would make the laser star pretty much immune to kinetics. You wouldn't need much dv to survive one battle, and you can get acceleration in the several g range quite cheaply. With a target that agile, you'd need an extremely fast missile with high-velocity railguns at the very least to have a hope of hitting.
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Aug 1, 2017 22:36:38 GMT
Can you even get the AI to do fast intercepts reliably? Also, I'm not sure if you can get it to ignore range that far away. I don't really feel like learning how to mod AI behaviours just to test that. Besides, I don't think dodging will do much since the laser boat needs to be head-on towards the target to fire and has a 60s turnabout time, so it can't really dodge while also firing.
As for the manual staggering, I was thinking it would be more effective at hitting the laser boat if it did try to dodge, but that didn't turn out to be necessary. Also, you could up the ammo count a lot without affecting the ship's performance in any relevant way.
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Aug 1, 2017 22:01:50 GMT
So you're shooting... through...the 2m cap of diamond armor... Something about that doesn't seem feasable but I can't quite place my finger on it... You could easily install tiny holes in the plate for bullets to pass through, I'm sure it's totally fine.
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Aug 1, 2017 21:23:00 GMT
This thread seems more appropriate for continuing my anti-laser ship posting so I'll use this from now on. Apophys previously said that my win against his laser star was moot since my ship died before any bullets hit home, rendering my clear victory invalid. I was also a little unhappy with the near-draw result, so I created a ship that can take down the laser star without any losses. My first idea was to use a drone, leaving the launching ship intact and therefore I could claim to have won the fight in a very obvious manner. However, after some tweaking, I was able to create a drone that can destroy the laser boat without dying itself. The secret lies in its two meter thick diamond armor plate that covers only the nose of the ship. It provides a thick enough obstacle for the laser that the drone can empty its ammo bin without losing too many cannons, and can survive until the laser ship is torn into bits by the cannon fire. The full package costs a whopping 10 kc less than apophys's design, meaning that it would've been the better choice even if both the ship and launcher died in combat. However, since both the drone and the launcher survived, there should be no question of which design is the superior one, hopefully finally proving that lasers are not the only good weapon in the game, as some people seem to think. Below are links to both designs. dronelaunch platformHere is a youtube video showing all the exitement of waiting for two minutes for bullets to hit a practically stationary target.
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