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Post by tangentialthreat on Nov 22, 2018 20:34:58 GMT
And when anything hits it, the explosive debris of the flywheel will bisected the ship.
Momentum wheels in larger turrets are a kind of unspoken energy storage, and should be bombs.
Nuclear reactors are generally not bombs IRL, but if you push them to be as hot and as light as ours and then throw bullets at them you should get some interesting results.
Fluorine microrockets should be bombs. Some of the capacitors should be bombs. Paper-thin radiators probably shouldn't stay on during high g maneuvers, and nukes should kill crews in calcium foil crew modules with radiation.
Generally CDE leans towards excess survivability, which is frightening because we're already flying rocket-propelled pinatas with armor literally made from tin foil and styrofoam.
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Post by tangentialthreat on May 18, 2018 7:01:02 GMT
It's tiny! Check out that 10 cm barrel and middling muzzle velocity.
Adorable! No engines, whole thing only weighs 3.6 kg.
And a 116 gram nuclear reactor, of which 100 g is fuel!
It has a big brother though.
I miniaturized a gun enough to fire it out of another, larger gun.
Gunception works really well against stock missiles because it still has adequate small-target killing power and this system can effectively switch targets faster than any other pure chemgun ever. Moving your point defense guns closer to the enemy is a massive bonus and is the only valuable lesson learned from this project. The rate of fire and sheer amount of dakka just dissolves armor piece by piece, and the primary bullets are still 3.6 kilograms moving at a respectable 2.05 km/s. Catastrophically increase the loader wattage if you want even more GPU-melting dakka overdrive.
There is one massive weakness that may be a bug. If the gunception primary fires while the ship is accelerating then secondaries tumble on exit, and it can never stop tumbling it has no thrusters. This makes it very difficult for the turret on the secondary to hit anything. You have to turn the ship engines off to really get the full effect and ensure stable projectile flight. Gun drones with fluorine/hydrogen rockets don't have this problem - design those and put them in blast launchers if you want something practical.
But if you feel you need gunception in your life, here is the Steam link.
Oh, and the game reliably crashes if you load a payload into a chem gun without it having any armor layer. Don't worry I gave it half a millimeter of graphogel.
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Post by tangentialthreat on Feb 6, 2018 9:34:38 GMT
CDE ships are set up to maintain their peak power output for months. Warship design starts with accepting that your baby is probably going to be dead, out of fuel, or victorious in a few minutes.
Surviving many kilowatts per kilogram for long enough is very possible if you're a household teakettle. Our NTRs don't melt because they are examples of open-cycle cooling. You start by using your fuel tanks as a heat sink, and if you have kilotons of mercury aboard for the MPD then you should be set for a while.
As desperation increases you begin throwing boiling coolant and fuel overboard. If you are dodging bullets and firing your engines full blast then that's okay because now you have a really great fuel preheater.
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Post by tangentialthreat on Jan 22, 2018 6:22:23 GMT
Isn't the extra 4.8 MeV in gamma rays?
Isn't this kind of bad?
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Post by tangentialthreat on Jan 8, 2018 4:13:23 GMT
Details about killing underground bunkers with nukes tend to be kind of scarce for some reason.
There is also no kill like overkill. If you're even thinking about this then subtle options like drilling a hole first or pouring foam insulation down the heat vents weren't seen as sufficient.
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Post by tangentialthreat on Jan 4, 2018 4:00:38 GMT
Project Rho on accelerationtl;dr if you're lying on your back on a cushioned couch you can survive short bursts of 30 g. And about AIs or uploaded crews... I've seen flawless targeting and navigation all done in a few kilobytes. Where humans (and human-like intelligences) thrive is solving unexpected problems. Stupid bots are only inhumanly good at games with defined rules. If you find a way to change the rules of the game then you can win. Otherwise any form of intelligence is just extra baggage.
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Post by tangentialthreat on Jan 3, 2018 4:29:24 GMT
One of the things we're missing is solid rocket motors, which would be a bit more plausible for surviving high acceleration.
Given the single-digit ballistic efficiency of most guns and the limitations of railguns I'm not convinced that firing a missile out of a gun is ever actually a good idea. The energy from missile delta v is usually higher than the energy from launch, and sometimes firing all missiles at once is much better than one at a time. I built gyrojet missiles anyway in CDE because it was cool. I have a private conspiracy that the military also approves and maintains certain weapons solely because they're cool and not because they're efficient.
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Post by tangentialthreat on Jan 3, 2018 2:31:55 GMT
There are NEVER enough nukes. Okay so actually the loader wattage is set super-low because at max fire rate the screen just turned solid white and the game crashed. Each projectile is Apophys's 100t nuke plus the new weapons fuse wrapped in some totally unnecessary antilaser armor thrown at about 3 km/s. The above screenshot is the *From Orbit* heating three of jtyotjotjipaefvj's bongos towards a steady orange glow. Part of what makes nukes so viable is that a near-miss is still a hit, and AIs miss a lot. Acceleration seems to play a big part in the AI's ability to score hits early, which is why this ship is designed for an implausible 8.11 g dry. As a side note, due to some oddities of how the game models nukes it doesn't seem there's much benefit to designing a ridiculously huge gun to fire 10 kt nukes vs the 100t footballs. Micronuke spam is the way to go. The concept also makes a neat defensive weapon against swarms of smaller drones and micromissiles. Here's the schematic. And, uhh, maybe don't download it if you have seizures because your screen will repeatedly flash white while in use.
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Post by tangentialthreat on Jan 2, 2018 16:43:50 GMT
I wish those were in the game too, and I believe nukes would be terrifyingly cheap with no price controls, but the best death-threats are ones that cost you pennies to implement. Now the hard part would be hostage rescue or capturing a specific humanoid alive. You have a few minutes between exposure to space and permanent brain-death, so you might just start ripping the ship apart with explosives and atomic-powered anime cyborgs to rip the walls off. I've played enough games with SWAT in the title to be somewhat optimistic about breeching and clearing a room before everybody without a suit dies, especially if you have futuristic murder-bots helping you. Anyone you want to keep goes in a large Ziploc baggie, like a Walmart goldfish. What I don't see happening is capturing both the ship and the crew fully intact. I also like to think that the people saying MAD and logistics would stop sane people from doing much conflict in space are correct, although making humans stop trying to destroy eachother will probably require a couple of paradigm shifts and some significant edits to what it means to be human.
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Post by tangentialthreat on Jan 2, 2018 8:05:06 GMT
Neutrons kill everything.
You could threaten to turn on your gigawatt NTR near an enemy ship. Surrender now or everything dies of neutrons. Also lithium-6 foil is unrealistically effective in-game.
You irradiate the fanatics and you also irradiate their machines. Sophisticated circuitry and sensors are corrupted at the atomic level. The mechanics of this are rather opaque (even by CDE standards which is part of why it's not fully in the game yet) but radiation strongy favors older chips where individual components are larger. In the real world it took many, many attempts to get an exploration robot into Fukushima without losing processors or cameras.
Neutrons don't stick around that long either. You'll spawn some activation products but in a few hours or days at the most it will be safe to board. Beware mechanical traps, and malicious but stupid steakknife roombas controlled by 1980s chips. Radiation-hardened murderbots are hopefully only a small part of the target ship's mass fraction and you'll win eventually.
The downside is that many of the ship's systems are dead, but the air handler might have been programmed for revenge anyway so cooking its brains was a good thing. You just get a hull, some fuel, and a lot of scrap computers and high-nitrogen fertilizer.
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Post by tangentialthreat on Jan 1, 2018 6:34:31 GMT
What about turret armor? No whipple shields allowed here. I've had some success with aramid or boron fiber, but still occasionally lose a turret on the spacehulk.
I've noticed that my hull armor is nearly invincible to stock railguns, but rounds can fly through the holes left by destroyed nosecone turrets. I have an 8mm VCS radiation shield/firewall between the turret-heavy nosecone and the fuel tanks to catch stray bullets. This is heavy but fairly effective.
Also my current hull armor, optimized by random guessing:
5mm Spider Silk (innermost) 3cm Nitrile Rubber 2.5mm VCS 50mm Graphite Aerogel 2.5mm VCS 50mm Graphite Aerogel 1mm Aluminum 1mm Diamond (outermost)
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Post by tangentialthreat on Sept 18, 2017 7:53:54 GMT
Escaping Saturn with a hybrid mercury MPD/RP-1 ship is fun. It's a pity you can't dump the 3 kilotons of mercury overboard before doing Vesta Overkill. Flying it in combat is nail-biting because you need to change direction and toggle thrusters constantly to conserve fuel and not instantly turn to Swiss cheese. The range and acceleration are high enough that speedtanking works. Retrograde flybys where you never get very close are great. The missiles are mostly there to distract and destroy lasers. Lasers will prioritize the missile spam and stop trying to burn through your paper-thin hull before it's too late. I was really hoping 25 grams at 42 km/s would one-shot ships. It doesn't, but combined with the PDCs it works well enough. Fully compliant with all treaties on nuclear nonproliferation and autonomous weapons systems. No mods. steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1137991954
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Post by tangentialthreat on Sept 9, 2017 17:44:33 GMT
After a long time of being frustrated at poor homing accuracy in any missile I could put out, I finally managed to make a missile that can reliably hit moving targets even when they're not launched from a collision course. I'm fairly familiar with homing AI, having written a few of them myself, so I have a fairly good grasp of how they should fly and what variables to use for that. In my previous designs in CoaDE though, I have always used missiles with either one gimballed thruster or several without a gimbal, which seems to be a bad idea with this game's homing AI. Since the AI can't plan for velocity changes caused by turning burns, it usually just ends up oscillating on a close enough trajectory, unless you put the damping stupidly high, like it is on all the vanilla RC modules. To circumvent this issue, I designed a missile with a single fixed-mount main thruster, as well as several extremely low-powered thrusters used for turning. Additionally, I made the thrusters use different fuels (methane for the RCS thrusters, hydrogen deuterium for the main one) and kept the burn times of both fuels close enough so that even if the RCS thrusters ran on full power for the whole flight, they wouldn't run out of juice. The low-powered RCS thrusters placed symmetrically ahead and behind the center of mass mean that the missile can turn with almost no linear velocity change. And this allows me to drop the dampening factors for the homing behaviour extremely low, which results in very high accuracy. The result is a homing behaviour that first burns off all tangential velocity relative to the target, and then turns head-on and accelerates as fast as it can afford while maintaining the collision course. This kind of trajectory is quite robust and can land solid hits even when launched from a ship with several km/s tangential velocity. Below are the missile designs as well as some images from a test combat I did. Missile design: dl.dropbox.com/s/e2fwt2zmixflxbr/20170824214926_1.jpgRC module design: dl.dropbox.com/s/xz82ai53ux2tmiw/20170824214934_1.jpgStart of combat. The launch ship has ~5 km/s perpendicular velocity but that's fine. dl.dropbox.com/s/47168a75h5jnrem/20170824214538_1.jpgMissiles start burning sideways to kill the perpendicular velocity: dl.dropbox.com/s/9n6roe645c1lbwt/20170824214555_1.jpgOnce that's done, they turn towards the target and burn some more. This makes a nice curve of missiles heading for the target: dl.dropbox.com/s/r4ftmc7eq9l678v/20170824214649_1.jpgThe first six missiles got lasered, but the seventh missile is a direct hit. dl.dropbox.com/s/hom99mrckayq9x8/20170824214704_1.jpgIn fact every single missile after that hits as far as I can tell. Even after the ship is in pieces, they keep hitting the largest piece: dl.dropbox.com/s/26bqvs97ac6lywc/20170824214738_1.jpgFinally, here's what little remains of the gunship: dl.dropbox.com/s/kxpiybkcrehbok8/20170824214806_1.jpgI tried this and fired 40 missiles at a laser frigate. Only one hit. The other 39 *flew through the massive hole* made by the first missile and came out the other side fully functional. The factors which lead to missiles wobbling in flight or not seem pretty random though and very small changes to the design did not have the same results.
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Post by tangentialthreat on Sept 7, 2017 23:24:50 GMT
Interestingly, the most popular commercial products for blocking neutrons (besides lots of water and concrete) seem to be mostly HDPE laced with boron. About 90% attenuation at a thickness of 20cm if their websites are to be believed. Of course, in CoaDE that burst of neutrons would probably make all our carefully balanced reactors go supercritical! That would still be dozens to hundred of times the radiaton needed to send an healthy adult into coma in seconds. And then die from the damaged nervous system within hours. They make [million rad CPUs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAD750) although Wikipedia also claims that 5,000 rads worth of neutrons is sufficient to kill a typical CPU through lattice defects. None of the computers on COADE ships are obviously fast or particularly smart so they probably lean towards older, tougher designs. Older architectures are more resistant to microscopic damage. The cheaty way would be a box of these things in a smallish but meter-thick wall of borated polyethylene. Protecting humans is harder. A vanilla 35 crew module goes from 121 tons and 2.66 Mc to 605 tons and 25 Mc when surrounded with 1 meter of UHMWPE ignoring the 5% boron. Each 20 cm effectively removes a decimal place so this will reduce an instantly fatal 500,000 rads to a mere 5 rads, which will not even cause headaches. Some insects can survive 100,000 rads so maybe with genetic engineering of the crew... Our crews survive 40 g acceleration too so maybe they're already posthuman genetically engineered cyborgs or brains in leaded jars. However I think these are supposed to be authentic humans or something close and it would be neat to get messages like "#4 railgun temporarily disabled, operator is busy drowning in vomit" a few minutes after being too close to a nuke flash.
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Post by tangentialthreat on Sept 7, 2017 5:37:37 GMT
I sort of want a replica Sprint ABM. Neutron bombs to damage microprocessors and send cores critical remotely got funding and were test-fired.
Maybe you can counter it with a meter of borated HDPE. Or build a laser and shoot the missiles down from 200 miles away. Deep down I just like the idea of nuking everything - don't judge me.
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