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Post by Durandal on Oct 28, 2016 13:27:56 GMT
I don't know the limits of the engine, but I believe qswitched mentioned ground based defenses at some point in the blog. I know he's got a lot on his plate right now, but wouldn't it be interesting if at some they were implemented? I could see them able to be targeted by specialized reentry warheads or troopships, with intercept vectors on the body's surface. As you pass over a tight enough orbit, your ships could go into a combat zone against them where this would take place and incoming fire would be a threat.
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Post by Durandal on Oct 28, 2016 13:16:11 GMT
When designing kinetic kill missile. Is it better to make the kinetic slug long and thin to penetrate or wide and thick to impact as much surface as possible? My main KKV doesn't use any sort of slug at all, just ~20 g's of a fuel tank and engine hitting the target. I've got one design I'm tinkering with that uses the smallest reactor I've got which allows me to mount radiators. I made the radiators tungston, 30-cm by 1 meter if I recall, and added 6 of them in a radial pattern. A hit from a few was enough to kill a gunship easily. A good hit tore a gunship in half. Don't have screens atm but it was inspired by pic related. I mounted the radiators closer to the engine however to avoid messing with the CoG too much. It did make almost double the cost of the missiles, and cut into their acceleration and Dv. I think wth a smaller reactor and better optimized radiators it might be more effective.ย
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Post by Durandal on Oct 28, 2016 13:07:48 GMT
I've been having very good performance from a two-layer set of graphite aerogel. 50 cm with a 6 cm space followed by another 50 cm. I've had it above a main armor belt of Van-Chromium Steel, I've had a 2 cm layer of boron above it, lots of different combos, but the 50-6-50 layer of graphite aerogel seems to work well against a lot of stuff. One ship I tested with only had the 50-6-50 layer on top of of a 6mm layer of amorphous carbon and it was able to survive a sustained fire long enough to maneuver away.
Tested against both stock gunship fire and against improved weapons some of which are based on player designs.
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Post by Durandal on Oct 28, 2016 13:01:11 GMT
I'm pretty sure it's a bug. Mind you, when your projectiles start plaid-shifting at ludicrous speed they're not really effective at all from a launcher that has to be manually fired.
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Post by Durandal on Oct 28, 2016 6:08:03 GMT
I've shot 3kt warheads from a launcher at something like 40kps before. Borosilicate glass is some funky stuff.
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Post by Durandal on Oct 28, 2016 0:44:27 GMT
Do it enough and you get a feel for what works. Yeah, not exactly scientific. Actually, I think that's just about the definition *of* scientific.
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Post by Durandal on Oct 28, 2016 0:42:35 GMT
Can't you just use more efficient engine like 20 of them together or is that still not enough? How heavy is that ship by the way? Oh it just weighs in at 2,800,000,000 kg and has 20 Decane 3.58km/s 551MN NTRs. ย It is really a silly ship that cost an insane amount and has no use but I really like messing around with it with the assumption that cost and mass and delta v are no issue and as it stands I have the max amount of decane thrusters and I really do not want to ditch more of the very little exhaust velocity I have left. ย So not really needed for any other type of ship but it is needed with this level of ludacris. As it stands it has .4gs of acceleration 31.8 second turn around time and 28.2 second roll about time but I want more Make it a broadside ir a saucer layout and add ALL the thrusters.
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Post by Durandal on Oct 27, 2016 19:39:45 GMT
Yeah seriously I have tried using some ion engines and they don't produce any really usable amount of thrust for orbital maneuvers. They just take far too long to accelerate anything which means you need to do a whole crap load of orbits to get to the one you want. Really duel engine set up is pretty great though. Have main engines that are low efficency but high thrust and have other engines with the same fuel that are more efficient for orbital maneuvers outside of combat. How do you arrange them? Combat thrusters on the rear, orbital thrusters on the side (assuming a needle/conventional layout)
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Post by Durandal on Oct 26, 2016 16:44:31 GMT
I *finally* managed to get an intercept wth a high-Dv drone last night launched from a highly modified tanker. It was a manual intercept as Ross described, tweaked and fiddled with the thrust vectors until I got the automatic intercept. Note I said "intercept", not kill. Ive redsigned the drone into something better able to kill at angles without turning, hopefully I can test it tonight. The current unit had maybe 3 seconds of flyby time before diving into Uranus. *edit* Kill confirmed
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Post by Durandal on Oct 24, 2016 23:56:08 GMT
snip My experience so far is that missiles hold an extremely dominant position, and armoring against them tends to prove futile.ย So ship armor and that armor's layout is rarely relevant at all. I have some ideas about CWIS drones that I'm still waiting to try out. I do hope we get multilayer eventually.
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Post by Durandal on Oct 24, 2016 23:27:48 GMT
One thing that's worth pointing out on needleship survivability - its predicated on an ability to point it's armored front unerringly at the source of incoming fire. That's all well and good, but what happens if the enemy has more than one source of incoming fire? One broadside versus one needle might be in favor of the needle...but fleets usually have more than one combat spacecraft. Not to mention missiles and drones deployed on off-axis attack vectors. Broadside designs have a lot more freedom to maneuver at and near the point of engagement, and even a few kilometers separation in the opposing fleet could make things very bad for a group of needleships. True, but I've found the opposite to be just as true. A broadside ship, when faced with multiple hostiles, can become just as quickly envoloped even with superior manuverability at close range. And an unarmourned flank much more vulnerable than a needle's flank. I've been messing around more with "standard" conical ships lately. TheyRe more versitile than a pure broadside or a pure needle I'm finding.
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Post by Durandal on Oct 24, 2016 21:20:15 GMT
This would be really nice! As it stands I use a Mk#.# system for all of my ships and missiles by duplicating the ship or missile then renaming it. I really like being able to go back and look at what my ships started off as and then developed to. So I would definitely love the ability to rename my engines and everything else! Not only would it be nice to see progression but it would be amazing if we can name things the way we want to and it would make it much much easier to share designs with others. I do the same thing with the "MK-xxx" system. I used it in another game I played for years, Star ruler, and it's very fun being able to go back and review player-generated designs to see the evolution of a particular class of ship/system.
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Post by Durandal on Oct 23, 2016 21:47:26 GMT
I did an experiment today with a 3kt missile with two 10x12 pills of Beryllium Oxide topped by a 12x14 pill of Tungston. See attachment.ย Attachment DeletedDetonation range was set to 100 m. The results were inconclusive. Most of the missiles seemed to punch through as KKVs, but a handful seemed to detonate resulting in a small pinhole on one side of the target and a massive "blowout" on the other. Blowout as in most of the opposite side of the hull was just gone with all modules in the area destroyed.ย Not sure this is from the a missile "tumbling" while inside the hull or if it's an actual effect from the detonation. Hopefully qswitched can resolve the fuzing issues soon.
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Post by Durandal on Oct 22, 2016 16:31:16 GMT
Borosilicate glass apparently has an resistivity of 10^-12 ohms, i guess it's some sort of superconductor. Yeah. Try using it as a forcer in a launcher.
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Post by Durandal on Oct 21, 2016 13:44:34 GMT
I think I may try to build one of these "assault ships" tonight. I'd assume it would be a large carrier, loaded up with smaller landing ships. What sort of weight ratio would you expect for equipment/supplies/troops? What's the smallest deployment unit for a landing ship? Do we need to landing ships to be atmosphere-capable so they're utilitarian or do we build them mission specific? Gamewise, has anyobe tried using a remote control and a crew compartmentry on the same ship? At work so I can't test it. Here's a rough new design for a mass troop transport. It was just a test to see moving a battalion of soldiers in terms of cost and expense. Not too bad over all, had enough Dv left over to mount a cannon for light defence.ย View AttachmentThis is more for mass ferrying in the invasion fleet portion of the group, as for the assault ships some of myย favourites are the Vaygr infiltrator frigates and their boarding pods, nice insulated little boarding ships that could fly to various points on the target body and bore into the crust or hull to unload troops. Toughly armoured and fast with a somewhat disposable nature.ย View AttachmentView AttachmentVery interesting. I didn't get around to building a troopship (retrofitted the gunship to forum-specs instead). So that would be the main transport during the long haul to the target and the the "landing ship" as well? I agree on light armoring and minimal weaponry. I was thinking the "long haul" ship itself would be based on the passenger liner. There is precident for military forces using civilian ships as transports, and the passenger liner has a "crew" capacity if 2000 people, so around what I believe would be "regiment" sized. One thing I found disappointing was that we can't edit cargo bays (yet). These would be needed for supplies, equipment, provisions, ext, but they may also contain armored vehicles for fighting on a (extra)terrestrial servface. They may need prefabricated bases as garrisons. All of this would quickly swell to be a massive target. Therefore the ship would be designed as a rear-action vessel to be screened by escorts at the Orbit-head. The ship would have minimal armor to prevent a lucky drone from killing the invasion force in their bunjs, and maybe light PD missiles/weapons. Beyond that I'd see it as being fairly defenseless. But my idea would be for a regiment sized troop transport with the associated cargo holds and landing ships. The landing ships themselves would be similar to the Rosen-Ritter assault ship. (Much love for LoGH). I envision a versitile, company-sized boat able to get to a target quickly to deploy it's troops and to be able to get back out again. How that may work on a body with any sort of gravity (Jovian, Martian, ect) might require a more specialized craft, but for rock-raiding I see them as working. Light armament, heavy armor for the size, high dV.
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