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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Jul 17, 2017 21:45:21 GMT
I really like how thin ships with low-profile radiators look. I ended up with this design when creating a launch platform for my 60-meter long heavy missiles. It has the added benefit of being quite hard to hit at range too, so it's double useful! Edit: tested the missile against a hardened target with a 20cm VCS whipple shield, here's the outcome: Entry hole for the missile is right in the middle, surrounded by the square cluster fragment pattern. Some of the fragments penetrated the 20cm steel layer too, but I guess that's to be expected with a 6 km/s collision velocity and 3.6 tons of fragments. The missile itself left a smaller exit wound as well, so at least parts of it made through a total of 40 cm of steel, plus 2 40-man crew modules.
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Jul 17, 2017 21:30:09 GMT
I think spread angle would be a better factor for determining range for heavy guns. Since they're supposed to be used against big targets with low acceleration, dodging is not a real issue. A 3 km/s gun can easily hit targets over 100km away provided they have low enough acceleration. This allows railgun designs such as this (fitting in the heavy category): It can easily penetrate a whipple shield with a 20cm maraging steel liner due to the ridiculous fire rate and projectile energy, provided you can get the turret to focus on a single point, such as when aiming at engines through a ship's nose. I'm not sure but the ~1m long projectile might contribute towards penetration efficiency too, at least it should decrease plasma shocking on whipple penetration. Below is an image of a ship with the 20cm steel armor getting cored in less than half a second at ~180km range (after the projectiles eventually arrived at the target of course.)
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Jul 17, 2017 15:27:56 GMT
You don't need to use the automatic flyby to intercept fleets. Just plot the course manually and you should be fine.
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Jul 16, 2017 22:41:15 GMT
Can we pretend this is a railgun? (or rather have a category for conventional guns?) They tend to get far better energy output per second due to more efficient loaders, and accuracy is not as strictly bound to the projectile velocity as the game claims, since very few designs can pull high-g maneuvers. Also high projectile masses are way more fun than 1-gram railgun #13214.
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Jul 16, 2017 22:15:57 GMT
You can't put the blast launcher on a turret though, so the conventional gun is likely the best option if you don't want to put on some thrusters on that nuke.
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Jul 16, 2017 22:02:12 GMT
I came up with a way of getting cluster flak bombs to spread fragments evenly on a more controllable area. I think I've seen these kinds of patterns before so someone else might've done the same thing, but either way here's my version. The basic idea is that instead of a fragmentation warhead mounted directly on a missile, I place several blast launchers on the sides of the missile. This way I can get an even pattern of frag warheads that are perpendicular to the target, meaning each warhead's fragments will cause a line pattern when they hit the target. When combined with several rows of warheads and multiple launchers, you end up with a fragmentation pattern that's more uniform and more easily controllable in size than you'd get with plain old flak missiles. Launching the submunitions, you can see the even pattern of the frag bombs here: Fragments hitting the target. Far more uniform spread than you'd get with several flak missiles Fragments that missed the target, you can see the pentagon pattern caused by five radial launchers now that the fragments are further away. Note that the target lost power and crew due to nearly all radiators getting destroyed by the fragments. There wasn't a single penetration through the armor, only the radiators took damage. The fun thing about using blast launchers is that projectile size controls the spacing of launched warheads, since the next cell will launch as soon as the previous one has cleared the launcher. This means that you'll only need to control the launcher engagement range and launch velocity to create a pattern of your liking.
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Jul 16, 2017 17:14:35 GMT
Did the third-last (maybe) campaign mission today, where you need to destroy two fleets around Neptune. It looks like extremely fast intercepts with conventional cannon spamming ships are the most efficient way to kill pretty much anything. The first enemy fleet after ~10 seconds of combat. Gunship and Corvette both dead within a second of the first shots landing. Intercepting the second fleet took some maneuvering since I was wooshing past the moon at several km/s heading retrograde of their direction. (Trajectory is projected to the enemy fleet's frame, it wasn't quite that bad relative to Neptune) Here's the ship design in question.
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