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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Aug 23, 2018 21:55:44 GMT
That only assumes that you're grossly outperforming the enemy No, it only assumes that engagement ranges will be extremely long compared to the relative velocities between ships. In-game, you can easily deal a significant amount of damage out to a few Mm's of range, using either railguns or lasers. There's no way to close that distance cost effectively quickly enough to make use of pincer maneuvers or anything else to do with maneuvering really. Any curvature in your trajectory will increase your already strained dv requirements significantly. In reality, lasers would be even more powerful, with ranges reaching out to tens or hundreds of Mm's. With enough power, you'd hit light lag limits before running out of effective range on your laser. With ranges like that, small-scale maneuvering like rolling to face enemies can take days and you'll still have plenty of time. And if we're talking about real tactics, lateral thrusting would be far more important than rolling. That will actually let you avoid projectiles completely instead of just aligning your armor optimally. Spending dv isn't any cheaper around deep gravity wells. It just means you have to burn a lot of propellant to make the intercept in the first place. There's nothing stopping you from doing fast intercepts in flatter space. I don't see the benefits of rolling really. A sharp nose will be both more durable and easier to manage, and you will also always be able to bring all guns to bear on the enemy.
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Aug 23, 2018 12:32:13 GMT
This is not Top Gun: Space Edition. Unless you insist on using grossly unoptimal designs, this is literally the only maneuver you'll need in any situation ever: But as they approach you have to orient out of the pitch/yaw plane... That just means your guns are bad. If anything gets that close to you, you'll be dead no matter what you do against a well-optimized enemy. At under 100 km, the enemy will be free to use conventional guns or coilguns that go straight through any amount of armor, or lasers reaching intensities in the GW/m² range, which means the plasma cone it generates on penetrating your armor will punch a hole several meters wide through your internals.
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Aug 23, 2018 12:09:09 GMT
This is not Top Gun: Space Edition. Unless you insist on using grossly unoptimal designs, this is literally the only maneuver you'll need in any situation ever:
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Aug 23, 2018 10:39:44 GMT
No roll control recommended? OMG that's a death sentence to my doctrine. My partially aormored broadsiders have to roll exactly, otherwise they're living wrecks. Anyway thanks for the info, now I'm gonna be stuck at the corner and crying... No rolling doesn't prevent you from using broadside designs. You can use reactors and radiators as counterweights for the armor. See here: This design can orient itself just fine, works exactly as the previous one.
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Aug 23, 2018 10:05:16 GMT
It looks like giving your ship any roll control is a mistake, the steering AI can't handle that many degrees of freedom. Just stick with ungimballed thrusters and keep your center of mass (almost) exactly at the long axis of your ship and you should be fine. See here for my test: Ship design which might work straight out the box: RCS test.txt (5.23 KB)
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Aug 23, 2018 9:15:49 GMT
Why do you have a hundred random armor materials mixed together? I use a simpler setup with (out to in) whipple shield, graphogel stuffing, pressure wall and finally a spall liner. That's significantly lighter and more effective than a monolithic plate. And out of curiosity, if that is the case, why not simply arm modern tanks with guns that fire heavy slugs, rather than one that fires APDS rounds? Low velocity, high mass rounds with some guidance on it would easily smash through the armors of modern vehicles, if what you say is true, right? APDS rounds still aren't that fast, the mechanics for penetration aren't that different from slower rounds. The transition to cratering starts happening around 2,500 m/s IIRC. And regardless of that, increasing muzzle velocity increases effective range as well as makes hitting moving targets a lot easier. There's little benefit to using lower muzzle velocities if faster projectiles are an option.
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Aug 21, 2018 0:09:13 GMT
If anyone has uberweapons they'd like me to test against, post them here. I'd prefer stuff that doesn't freeze up/crash the game. I can't use Apophys' railguns that fire flak rounds for example. They fire for 10 seconds and then my game is a slideshow. Here's two copies of AE railguns but lagfree due to not using payloads, and a third one that has a projectile that's bigger than a grain of sand. 100 MW 50 km s 1g Railgun.txt (960 B) 1.0 GW 200 km s 1g Railgun.txt (959 B) 400 MW 20 km s 25g Railgun.txt (939 B) The bigger guns have some spread so you might want to add more graphogel on the barrels if you need accurate fire.
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Aug 19, 2018 14:08:08 GMT
I reworked my previous design since nuke cannons don't really work with a nose armor design. Switching to a full broadside setup and removing any extra frills while focusing on nuke cannons makes a far better design. The result is a simpler and more aesthetically pleasing ship that also has a lot more nukes. And I'm sure there won't be any question whether the nukes are useful to the design this time round. The auto railgun is on the ship only to make the combat starting heading correct - without it, broadside order would result in only two of the four cannons being able to fire. Test video against a gunship: Ship export: Hive But Not Shit.txt (2.09 KB) Design screenies spoilered: External view: Internals: Angled cannons to enable broadsiding with the narrow arc:
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Aug 19, 2018 9:27:28 GMT
Well, by looking at people here, I don't think they nearly care about having N-body physics for celestial bodies nor kool graphikz as much as its 'realism' and physics and maths. I do because N-body physics is a kind of realism and physics and maths, besides, if I play a non-fantasy game set in space it might as well be actually set in space and actually non-fantasy.
I do care more about that stuff because engineering inaccuracies are a given as engineering is a finicky business, OTOH Newtonian mechanics is going to hold as long as we stay outside relativistic regime.
It's just that a lot of people have too much Vesta in their heads - shellshock probably .
Regarding accuracy issues, what I would absolutely love is CoADE going open-source, but it's not my decision to make (also do consider that almost *any* one person project code is likely to induce copious eye bleeding if unleashed on unsuspecting coding community).
Like I said, I will be picky when I can afford it - so far the count of space combat sims with aspirations to pedantic realism is 1.
Based on trawling through the game exe, the code seems to be at least structured quite nicely. So maybe the source itself is also readable, who knows? On the other hand, adding mod support at this late a stage is likely going to be an enormous rewrite so I doubt it's going to happen.
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Aug 16, 2018 19:50:23 GMT
You don't need tags if you never publish anything.
Although I'm half-tempted to start using a [jtyotJOTJIPAEFVJ] tag.
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Aug 15, 2018 12:41:12 GMT
Clever, but the specs call for designs benefiting from nuke cannons, not just minimizing damage from fielding them. Also, at least 4.02km/s delta-v - maybe try wrapping drop tanks around the junction and see if you can fit in under 10.00kt? Also, Gunship is by far not the only target you could use the ship against, it's just that it's a convenient measuring stick and combat trials assume no drone cover (I know that battle carriers usually benefit immensely from going into battle with accompanying drone screen). Finally, not to nitpick, but your drones wouldn't be able to squeeze from ammo bin to the launcher. Turns out turning laser ablation cap back on makes the nukes actually reach the gunship despite lasing. I also added two more fuel tanks and moved the drone launcher to the front section, although I imagine some type of drone feed tube could also have been employed to get them to the launcher. Updated design: Hive 2.0.txt (2.24 KB) More screenies: Design: Design internal: Nuke cannon shoots down frag missile wave: Fast intercept, broadside and some rolling and we get two nuke cannons to work on the gunship: First shots are hitting, doing a bit of damage. The lancer drones are also doing their best. Eg. nothing. Nukes start landing: More nukes, and 60mm cannons start going through the ship thanks to melted whipple shield. Although they would still go through it without the nukes. But I'm sure they helped a little. Ded gunship: Damage received: 0 fuken damage. No lancer drones were damaged either. The Gunship spent all its time firing on the nukes so it didn't shoot at anything useful. I guess they're nice decoys at least.
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Aug 15, 2018 12:06:00 GMT
For certain values of "works" - it definitely won't be going anywhere. Could use more delta-v, otherwise it looks like better credit expenditure than Hellfire. 7 out of 10 drones are still totally fine. That's better than any stock design can do after 20 Devastators. I'd say 20 Mc worth missiles doing 1-2 Mc worth of damage due to armor works pretty damn well.
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Aug 15, 2018 1:00:30 GMT
I built a 10GW (~1GW/m^2 at 30Mm) laser and there seem to be some "issues". For a start, the laser will do absoulutely nothing unless its withinabout 9-10Mm. Secondly, on the side of the ship it hits (at 7.5Mm), it only makes small holes spaced roughly 5m to 10m apart while the oposite side more or less ceases to exist. The game doesn't calculate the laser beam after 10 Mm, it really does cease to exist after that range, the part about the opposite side... weird, but it seems like the vaporized material creates an effect similar to a blowtorch burning through the ship? CDE simulating ablation and plasma has been speculated for quite a while. Based on looking through the game exe, some sort of plasma cone is generated once a laser penetrates armor. I'm not sure what exactly happens there though. As for the sparsely spaced small entry holes, that's due to the turret wobble size being quite huge, and laser damage being applied only 30 times per second. So what looks like a continuously wobbling spot at 100 km looks like a spot jumping randomly about at 10 Mm. Not exactly a bug, but a limitation of the slow simulation update frequency.
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Aug 14, 2018 23:12:51 GMT
Made one that can kill a Gunship without suffering any significant damage. Losing nuke cannons is a benefit really, so the ship improves as a result of the fight! Good luck making one that uses the nuke cannon though, since the lasers instantly zap all nukes before they get anywhere close. You'd need to shoot the lasers off first, but at that point you've basically destroyed half the Gunship already so using nukes is basically worthless. The nuke cannons are housed in a separate nose cone that only holds drone ammo bin and refuelers, which should be empty by the time you enter combat anyway so nothing of value is in there. There's a second sharp nose behind that protecting the important bits, which means that no armor is lost over any vitals when the nuke cannons go off. The armor is thick enough to handle a Gunship firing on it basically indefinitely. I suffered no penetrations during the minute or so of my test run. The drones act as a nice distraction too, drawing fire from the autofire railguns and 60mm cannons that deal the actual damage. Using it is simple enough - pop out drones, burn about half the fuel, refuel drones, burn some more and enter combat with the drone fleet still attached to your Hiveship. Put drones on broadside, Hiveship on nose forward so it will stop spinning once the nuke cannons blow up. You should come in fast enough to get the 60mm cannons within firing range fairly soon. Once that happens the Gunship will be riddled with holes and you'll win. Design and combat test screenies: Design. The dv is a bit shit but you could add more droptanks if you really wanted to. This is enough to keep up with the drones anyway, so more won't be too helpful. Post-combat damage list: Post-combat Gunship view: Edit: design export: Hive 2.0.txt (2.35 KB)
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Aug 9, 2018 19:28:22 GMT
Diamond is a poor anti-laser armor due to its high heat conductivity and transparency. PE is the best you can do in vanilla where ablation cap decides laser performance. With the cap modded out, a-carbon is most effective at absorbing heat. Heat conduction or armor cooling down is not modeled, so thinking about them isn't helpful. Uhm you first said that diamond is a poor anti-laser armor due to it's high heat conductivity and the said that heat conduction isn't modeled into the game... I'm confused... Is diamond transparent to infrared? Why would it's heat conductivity be bad against a laser? (It would help spread heat in a larger area so that AC can absorb more of it). What is PE? What is ablation cap? The game has a very simplistic model of laser ablation where the laser penetration depth is decided by its thermal diffusivity or transparency, whichever allows higher penetration. Ablation is applied the instant a laser hits and there's no long-term simulation of heat transport mechanics. This means that every material has a point after which increasing laser intensity no longer affects the amount of ablated material, usually called the material's ablation cap. Diamond is both an excellent conductor and transparent, meaning its ablation cap is in the range of several gigawatts per square meter. Polyethylene (PE) is the material with the best ratio of ablation cap to cost and mass, with a maximum intensity of just 4 MW/sq. m. That's why it makes the most effective anti-laser armor. Other options are Aramid Fiber, with the best mass and thickness efficiency, and Selenium, which has the best performance per credit.
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