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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Jul 31, 2017 21:02:46 GMT
I did another quick test against a heavier laser boat with 6x1GW lasers, now priced at 180 Mc: designI created a 3x1 GW railgun ship that can take the laser boat down without dying with at least some reliability, priced at 105 Mc: designHere's a youtube video showing the three-gigawatt sandblaster removing the enemy's radiators, thus disabling it. Also featured in the video are the bizarre intercept effects that occur at high velocities. The combined velocities of the ship and the railgun's muzzle velocity give the projectiles a 40km/s velocity relative to the target, cutting travel time down to 25 seconds, giving very little time for dodging. Since the railgun is turreted, it can react to dodging fairly quickly. Moreover, the ship can survive around 10 seconds of lasing before it's disarmed, meaning that even if a ship were to dodge, it would have to be very agile indeed to dodge the corrected shots as well.
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Jul 31, 2017 19:07:11 GMT
But minor edits like this are moot when the cavity costs a whopping 7 Mc due to the lasing rod. About a thousand times what it should be costing. Well the long lasing rod gives it a lot more power per watt. At 1000km, it's 60 times more powerful than the 100MW laser used on your laser boat, so 6 times more efficient per watt. I wasn't too interested in having the best design credit for credit, I just wanted something that has a powerful laser.
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Jul 31, 2017 18:06:17 GMT
This only works because of terrible AI; it stops trying to dodge as soon as all enemies are dead (even if projectiles are en route). The acceleration would be more than enough to dodge conventional cannons if it actually tried. 10 mg 0 acceleration would move the ship over 700 m distance (more than enough to dodge everything) in 2 minutes. Here's a calculator.Also note that given the time to kill (seconds), the laser ship would be effective much farther out than 1 Mm, giving it even more time to dodge. As lasers scale up, it just becomes more favorable: a laser can be made that would theoretically be effective to 40 Mm while able to dodge projectiles from a 200 km/s railgun with an MPD, and cheaper than the aforementioned 200 km/s railgun. Finally, I could use a fleet of drones instead of a capital (drones are my normal way of doing things). You would not be able to score a mutual kill against the entire swarm. The AI handles drones even worse than this ship though, so it's quite hard to properly test against them. Well if we can ignore the game's shortcomings I could use a 40km/s sand cloud missile to destroy pretty much anything in the game for pennies, but the intercept mechanics stop working around 10km/s. The only reason I didn't use my 20km/s KE missiles was because it's so frustrating to try to get a proper intercept with high velocity vehicles. Another note on game limitations is the frame rate drops caused by high projectile counts. You could just make a 1-gram railgun with 60k rpm and fill the ~400m volume completely with bullets before your laser ship had time to shoot it down. But it's unfeasible because the game would crash before you'd get even close to the needed projectile counts. Even my 30x60mm cannon ships can crash the game if you're not careful to limit salvo lengths, and they only fire around 60 projectiles per second.
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Jul 31, 2017 16:25:03 GMT
I had a go against the laser boat apophys linked and I sort of beat it. That is to say, both ships died but mine had less people and credits in it so it's way more efficient The laser boat has practically no thrust, so I don't need to worry about dodging, which means that conventional guns can easily hit it even from 1000km away. My design. It's ~400kc cheaper and has one less crew than the ship apophys used. A few seconds into the combat. My ship died but it managed to squirt off a few hundred rounds before that. Now we wait. About a minute later, the bullets are still on their way. Getting closer though. And here we go. The laser boat died instantly since it has no armor. There's only a few broken pieces left of it.
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Jul 31, 2017 8:28:50 GMT
I updated my laser design with your recommendations, and made it roughly 10 times lighter and cheaper, and 40 times more powerful. This in turn reduced the size of the laser boat quite a bit, down to 320m length down from 800 or so from the previous iteration. The cost also dropped to 480 Mc, down from 1.5 Gc or so. Designs below. Since the missiles turned out to be not very effective against lasers, I switched to a quantity-based strategy. I designed a cheap and fast ship with a reasonable amount of armor and enough guns that even one ship can destroy the laser boat with some reliability. Design again below. The ship is cheap enough that I can get 13 ships against one laser boat and still have a slightly cheaper fleet. This time around I also started from a stationary position to give the laser boat the maximum advantage, since I'd have to spend an extra minute or so accelerating to the top speed. Accelerating towards the target. At ~700km, five ships are already down. They're picking up speed now though, so it won't be much longer until the remaining ships are at weapons range. A minute or so later the ships have made it to ~200km, and I opened fire. Only 5 ships remaining now, but they still have more than 100 60mm cannons between them, so it shouldn't be an issue. First hits land, destroying most turrets facing the attacking ships. This caused the laser boat to start rolling to bring more lasers to bear, causing much of the fired shots to miss. It does have over 2g acceleration after all. It only works for a few seconds though. The fire is adjusted quickly and the shots start hitting home again, quickly destroying all reactors on the laser boat. I still have 5 ships remaining, and one of them even has some dv left to fly home with! Here's what the surviving cannon boats' armor looked like. Pretty cannon bullet braid in the background is nice too. It does look like the vanilla 60mm cannon is more effective than at least my 1GW lasers, credit for credit. I'll try the design apophys posted later today once I get back from work.
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Jul 30, 2017 22:33:43 GMT
I've seen people mention lasers being totally overpowered a bunch of times on these forums, so I wanted to try my hand at taking down a ridiculously powerful laser boat. First I made a laser boat with 6 1GW lasers that I designed ages ago. I'm fairly sure they're not as good as they can be, as I didn't find laser design too interesting, so I gave the target a generous amount of extra credits to compensate for any inefficiencies. My first instinct was that a fast cannonboat should be good enough against the lasers, but I quickly discovered that the lasers were able to drill through them before they made it under the 500km mark, so I'd have to do something a little smarter. Here's the laser and target ship designs: The first design that kind of worked was a ~10km/s dv ship with two 1-gram railguns shooting with a big spread pattern and 60k RPM, firing 17 km/s bullets. That did kind of work, but it didn't have enough firepower to destroy the radiators that were behind the target's hull. Besides, 1-gram railguns feel boring to me, so I went for a combination of high-dv missiles fired from a high-dv ship with a good amount of 60mm cannons for destroying the radiators if the ship manages to close the distance. Here's the design for the ship: The missile is a 3-ton design with 13 km/s dv and a very high thrust, giving it a 20s burn time. It has cluster flak launchers to create a radiator-killing sand cloud, as well as a very powerful KE impactor, with 300kg dry mass moving at ~20km/s at impact when fired from a moving ship. I figured that the laser boat would be dead if even one of the missiles made it through, or if the ship got close enough to use its 60mm cannons effectively (and without crashing the game due to high projectile counts.) The missiles turned out to be too weak to survive more than a few seconds of laser fire each, but with 40 missiles, that was enough time the lasers weren't melting the cannon boat for it to close down to 300km, 30 seconds away from closest approach. At that point, I activated the cannons and watched the game slow down to around 10 seconds/frame, but the game never crashed. After the cannons had fired for 10 or so seconds, I had lost all cannons facing the laser boat and the cannons went silent. By that point they had fired around 18000 rounds that were now on their way to the laser boat though, so I was hoping they'd do their job. And that they did. The laser boat lost all radiators in the single frame (or rather, second) the first rounds hit, and it was quickly turned into swiss cheese by the sustained fire. My ship still had some crew modules and generators left, so it was still techically alive even though it had lost all fuel tanks and most of its guns. The cannonboat did live, and the laser boat died, proving that lasers aren't really the best thing you can get. Laser boat getting peppered by cannons. Disabled missiles flying past it in the background. Laser boat armor post-combat. Riddled with bullet holes. Cannonboat armor and status post-combat. Still a bit alive.
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Jul 30, 2017 15:29:17 GMT
Or one unguided one. If you're going fast enough, you don't need guidance in combat to hit.
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Jul 30, 2017 15:22:13 GMT
I've run into some strange physics bugs as well with my 23km/s dv missiles. A ~20km/s intercept with a practically <1 m/s perpendicular velocity often turns into a 28km/s (more than the dv of my missile, mind you!) relative velocity at combat start, with several km/s perpendicular velocity, causing the missiles to miss completely. The worst case I witnessed was a whopping 108km/s intercept, that ended with my missile turning into what looked like a cloud of plasma with no debris once the target fired its measly 13 MW laser. It looks like high-velocity intercepts are not very numerically stable when transitioning to the combat screen.
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Jul 27, 2017 17:57:11 GMT
Testing my 22 km/s dv cluster missiles against a hard target with 20cm VCS armor. The cluster flak as well as the HE cannons were able to penetrate the armor quite easily. There's more hole than anything else left of the armor after 10 missiles, 3 of which missed the target and didn't collide. Front armor: rear:
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Jul 26, 2017 23:38:58 GMT
I came to the realization that my old missile was not fast enough. Therefore I've improved the design further by adding drop tanks and more fuel in general, as well as a more powerful engine, and more rows in the cluster flak launcher, bringing the fragment mass up to 36 kg, and dv to 22km/s. With the improved impact velocity, the cluster frags vaporize a good 50-meter long portion of the target Gunship entirely. This has brought the cost up to 30kc per missile, but on the other hand 10 are enough to shred pretty much any ship in one hit.
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Jul 26, 2017 20:58:59 GMT
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Jul 26, 2017 17:31:16 GMT
I did some improvements to my missiles. I changed the engine from a Fl-H combustion rocket to a methane NTR, allowing for a better dv as well as a denser propellant, which means further dv improvements due to a smaller surface area that needs to be covered by armor. I also changed the expensive nuke blast launcher into a 30mm rapid-fire turreted cannon that fires 20-gram HE rounds. This lets the missiles (or drones?) pepper the target with some moderate damage-dealing rounds (that are traveling at ~13 km/s mind you) before the cluster frags and the KE impactor hit. These changes cut the price of one missile down to 6kc from 48kc, while arguably increasing their effectiveness, at least against larger targets. Below is a video showing their effectiveness against a Gunship, as well as a picture of the missile.
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Jul 24, 2017 22:52:11 GMT
I got frustrated with dealing with missile homing and flares, so I made a missile that can work wonders with just a high-speed intercept from the system view. It only needs homing for larger swarms or when launched from combat view, which also works as long as the enemy doesn't pop flares that can mask their signal. It's a multi-purpose design with nuclear, cluster fragment and KE penetrator payloads. After a 4-5 km/s intercept, the missile will coast to 40km, where the front-facing 3 km/s 1kt nuke blast launcher will fire. Due to the high intercept velocity, using a nose forward order guarantees a hit within 100m of the target. This nuke is most useful in salvos of >5 missiles, since the nukes will be fired in a ring formation and detonate on all sides of the target, cooking all of its surface area evenly. This will ensure that any lighter guns or radiators will be fried before the missiles reach the most effective PD range. After the nukes have fired, the missiles must be changed to homing behaviour, unless you only fired one missile. This will guarantee that the missiles will collide with the target, and will maximize the cluster frag warheads' effectiveness. At 1 km, 20 5 kg cluster warheads will be deployed in a grid pattern. This ensures an even spread of fragmentation along the target's hull and if the missile misses the target, the wide spread of the frags still occasionally does some minor damage to it. the 100kg fragment mass means that pretty much all radiators will be gone with a good hit, and lighter (that is, under ~10cm of VCS) armor will be turned into swiss cheese. Finally, the missile has 300kg of dry mass moving at ~6 km/s, which makes for a significant KE penetrator. If the nukes and frags fail to penetrate the target, the missile's hull will do that every time. When tested against a target with a whipple shield on top of a 20cm VCS layer with a spall liner, the missiles penetrated the armor both entering and exiting the ship. The heavy armor that doubles as a KE penetrator also means that the missile is close to immune to PD weapons. At best my ship with PD railguns was able to destroy one nuke launcher out of a salvo of six missiles, and even that missile wasn't completely disabled. Below is a youtube video showing the missile's performance against the target ship with 20cm VCS layer, as well as more detailed images of the target ship and missile. target ship missile
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Jul 19, 2017 23:47:56 GMT
Since nobody else has attempted this, I'll post my attempt (with some corners cut regarding the criteria since it would've gotten tedious to run it against a billion different fleets, plus drone lag was pretty painful as is.) I originally wanted to use 60mm cannon spam for this since it has turned out to work in these types of underdog scenarios before, but they weren't quite effective enough to take down a full fleet in one pass, and they require so much armor on the ship that I wasn't able to kill it either. So I had to change my plan to using a range advantage to kill all the ships before they had a chance to touch my more fragile ship. As I noticed that 60mm cannons are quite good at point defence, I thought railguns must be even more so. So I designed two railguns for the ship: A 100MW, lighter point-defence gun with high firerate but lower penetration as missiles don't really carry any noticeable armor. I ended up with a 2g projectile, 11.7 km/s muzzle velocity and 1.5 ms reload time, with practically 0 shot deviation. The ship mounts 6 of these, and can take down missile salvos or ridiculous amounts of drones, as you'll soon see. (the images link to full-size versions to prevent this post from being 90% pictures) A 200MW, heavy railgun for taking down armored targets. 35 gram round with a capacitor that gives 17.4 km/s muzzle velocity and 120ms reload time, with very low but not quite zero deviation to preserve barrel weight. It's not extremely effective for killing things but it has a good range and you can have a lot of them on one ship. The ship ended up with 6 of the PD railguns, and 18 of the heavy ones, with 2 1GW generators and a generously-sized radiator array. It's powered by a pentane NTR giving 3.7 km/s dv and a whopping 21.9 mg of acceleration (but who needs acceleration when you can stay at 250km and have the best point defense guns in the system, right?) There's also one light missile launcher to give me a 300km engagement range, as well as to serve as a distraction for enemy lasers at the start of combat. I thought they might've been useful for damaging enemies too, but looks like the homing AI got confused with so many ships and none of them hit anything. Since my ship isn't the cheapest you can get, the enemy fleet has to be pretty big too. I bent the rules a bit here and put in a little bit of everything to save time on repeat engagements. Besides, having any more drones in a combat would be seriously annoying framerate-wise, since already I was hitting 1-4 fps in the worst bits. After swatting down a few drone and missile swarms sent my way, it was time to do battle. My cunning plan was to sit still in my starting point and hope that I'd get everything killed before they had a chance to fire back. At 300 km, the enemy was unable to return fire, so I was pretty safe as long as their drone swarms or lasers didn't get to me. Luckily solar lances are made of tinfoil and died fairly quickly, first one after maybe ten seconds of firing. They really are a poor design. By now, there were a whole bunch of drones in the air and some of them were showing signs of getting closer, so I turned on the PD railguns. They worked quite well and looked good doing their jobs as well. A good while later, maybe 30 seconds, my missile swarm arrived and managed to score 0 hits as far as I could tell. The railguns had chewed up one gunship and a hiveship by this point though, so things were looking pretty good. I was trying to focus on the fleet carrier, since it seemed to be the most eager drone sender in the enemy fleet and my framerate was looking a bit worrying at this point. Sadly, the carrier didn't agree with me and just refused to die for a really very long time. Here you can see it full of 9mm railgun holes but it's still limping along. After the fleet carrier and the last gunship died, I only had one empty support carrier and a whole bunch of drones left to kill. They were making their towards me and were already close to the 100km mark, so things started to look a little worrying. Luckily the PD railguns did their jobs well and only a few railgun drones managed to get shots off. With the support carrier and final drones dead, my invincible flagship was victorious, with only some minor scratching on the hull paint and one missing radiator. Now all I had left to do was to kill the flagship with a far cheaper ship. I chose a stupidly heavy KE missile with some added shaped fragmentation to do the task. The target ship has too slow acceleration to effectively dodge the missile, and its point defence isn't very effective either since there's no way to stop the fragments, deployed as far as 30km away from the target, from hitting the ship. They were able to destroy the missile hulls so thoroughly that they missed due to a fuel tank breach throwing them off course or just got atomized the hull in one case as far as I can tell. That's not a huge issue though since the 3.6 ton fragment mass can easily shred the target to pieces. My missile carrier has eight missiles and two launchers, as well as some guns thrown in for the look of it. It also looks very sleek with the thin design and flat radiators, which is a big plus. The first missile managed to hit the target straight on the nose, disabling most of the PD guns but very little else. This was a good thing though, since it meant the later missiles would be able to get closer before deploying their frag warheads. The second missile got intercepted by the target's KE missile launcher by a salvo it managed to launch just before the first missile hitting and destroying the launcher. I wasn't too worried though, since without the missile launcher and with most PD guns gone, I'd have plenty of opportunities for landing solid hits with the remaining six missiles. It turns out I only needed the third one to score a very thorough kill on the target. I got very lucky with the fragment pattern, and with the target turning sideways, and managed to destroy both generators and all 4 crew modules with a single missile. Below are both internal and external views of the target directly after the hit. So, that fulfills at least the spirit of the challenge, if maybe not the letter of it. A 370 MC ship destroying a fleet of 1.6 GC and gets destroyed by a 21 MC ship.
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Jul 17, 2017 23:32:36 GMT
20cm is bulk armor, wipples tend to be less then 5mm thick It has a 1cm diamond whipple with 2m spacing, then 20cm of VCS followed by 1cm of aramid fiber with no spacing for a spall liner. I guess I was a bit unclear there.
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