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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Feb 7, 2019 16:51:45 GMT
It's amusing how often the solution to a "something sits at the bottom of a deep gravity well and causes me displeasure" kind of problem is "drop crap on it until it stops". That is a long, long way to throw a KKV accurately, though I suppose the scale involved would make it equally difficult for the stellar laser installation to track the projectiles if they are small enough. Composition of the projectiles would also be a concern, I don't think a 1 gram kinetic slug punching a 1cm hole in a multi kilometer mirror is going to compromise it's effectiveness as just being a big reflective surface. Maybe a nuke, or a big cone of shrapnel? This is really just a question of effectiveness of detection and response times isn't it? Why wouldn't you make course corrections? And yeah, bursting your KKV in the terminal stage is definitely the way to go.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Feb 6, 2019 18:27:42 GMT
I don't believe in defensive orbits.
Hitting something (as in just achieving intercept rather than matching orbit and phase) is always cheaper than getting there, so technically you can always just drop a bunch of missiles or drones almost straight down by cancelling their orbital velocity around Neptune and bust a brain trying to figure out exact burns to achieve exact intercept at tens of km/s perpendicular.
When going places tends to take days to years busting brains is always going to be the more affordable and practical option than burning delta-v and drones/missiles don't need their return ticket - no one will get angry if you just drop them into Neptune after use.
If anything a defensive orbit would be the highest possible one, where you can wiggle your plane and apses cheaply.
Ok, for low-mass bodies low orbit might be a good defence as it allows physically hiding behind the body in question as the gravity is too weak to fix your trajectory if you don't want it to.
This is a bit outside the usual scope of the game but the more you go up in power levels the easier it gets to do perpendicular intercepts, because eventually the sphere of influence of your railguns and lasers become so large that it only really matters if you are on the same side of the planet as your target.
But on low, 'defensive' orbits: how would you go about attacking a stellar laser? Say your target is a pair of or small array of multiple kilometer wide foil mirrors in very low orbit of Sol using Sol's upper atmosphere as a lasing medium. Say this particular laser is on a scale where it has an effective range of something like 250 terameters (so Mars aphelion) with usable beam coherence and energy per meter squared. Say you've settled the Jovian system and the asteroid belt and you have a decade to develop a solution before a new array comes online and it becomes a serious threat. What do? It's amusing how often the solution to a "something sits at the bottom of a deep gravity well and causes me displeasure" kind of problem is "drop crap on it until it stops".
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Feb 6, 2019 6:55:18 GMT
On the Surface of Giants confuses me because while the station's weird, low orbit makes for a great defensive position (matching orbit quickly consumes a lot of dV, going the long way takes a while and gives time for reinforcements to arrive) plus being down low makes mining gasses from the atmosphere easier, it seems like a really bad location for a refuelling depot. You're sitting in a large gravity well in an out of plane (compared to most planets) orbit and most tankers don't have 1G of acceleration so you're going to burn a lot of dV just getting into position and leaving it. I don't believe in defensive orbits.
Hitting something (as in just achieving intercept rather than matching orbit and phase) is always cheaper than getting there, so technically you can always just drop a bunch of missiles or drones almost straight down by cancelling their orbital velocity around Neptune and bust a brain trying to figure out exact burns to achieve exact intercept at tens of km/s perpendicular.
When going places tends to take days to years busting brains is always going to be the more affordable and practical option than burning delta-v and drones/missiles don't need their return ticket - no one will get angry if you just drop them into Neptune after use.
If anything a defensive orbit would be the highest possible one, where you can wiggle your plane and apses cheaply.
Ok, for low-mass bodies low orbit might be a good defence as it allows physically hiding behind the body in question as the gravity is too weak to fix your trajectory if you don't want it to.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Feb 5, 2019 23:18:54 GMT
I agree... the orbital bullshit scenarios made me quit CDE and I only started playing it again after a year. And they almost made me quit playing again. Well, it's a space game. Set in space.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Feb 4, 2019 18:14:12 GMT
That's the point. They first need to make supersonic airflow subsonic, accomplished via intake geometry.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Feb 3, 2019 14:22:33 GMT
The main problem I have found with large conventional cannons is that it doesn't seem to matter how much armor you have or where the magazines are hidden inside the ship, the ammunition always finds a way to explode and blow the entire ship to smithereens. From my experience you either have to design the ship so that it can survive the explosion with maximum functionality intact, or you put the magazines somewhere they will only blow once the ship is dead anyway.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Feb 3, 2019 13:48:19 GMT
Technically a turbofan is just a turboprop with smaller and more numerous blades. And a duct.
Also, I don't know how important it is for bare workability of an engine, but supersonic jet engines (regardless of their exact type) tend to have complex intake geometry to deal with the supersonic flow they encounter.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Feb 3, 2019 9:52:01 GMT
I'm not saying those huge guns have to be firing slugs. What matters for a space gun (and what most hard SF writers miss) is the mass of the projectile, not where it comes from. It could shoot nukes, fragmentation rounds, whatever fits in the barrel, really. Indeed, one things I was trying to make was a gun that would shoot heavy rounds that would fragment into several large pieces a long distance from target, to maximize hit probability. A simple frag round didn't work, but I didn't try with blast launcher-based submuntions (that said, now I don't think it'd be particularly effective). Unfortunately, my only gun capable of shooting something like that turned out to only work because of a bug and had an abysmal rate of fire, anyway. So yeah, I know designs this big get problematic. I was wondering if anyone ever found a way to deal with that. Launcher based submunitions can be very effective on an unpowered payloads (on powered ones you have the complications of payload thinking that it is a drone). I think jtyotjotjipaefvj 's is the master of this technique (check out screenshots thread for examples), although I have made some effective stuff as well. You can make some very effective (possibly unphysically so, but it only makes plane-sized holes in stock-like armour) continuous rod emulation using long, thin radiators too to go with that.
Of course, once you add nukes, it's no longer pure kinetics, and once you add engines it blurs the lines between a gun and launch system with a bit more kick.
In fact, you can use hi-powered blast launchers aligned with guide gun to hit targets with massive payloads.
You can also use more complex setups, like electrical launchers launching blast launchers (possibly with backblast countermass, and short burining motors to keep them alinged with launching ship), telescoping blast launchers and so on.
I currently have an MLRS that launches salvoes 30kg missiles at over 4.4km/s (that's muzzle velocity), accurately at target (when slaved to a nose mounted weapon);
similar kind of setup, except firing unpowered kinetic cluster artillery (horribly laggy and possibly ineffective against agile targets, but can wreck gunship unrecognizable at around 60km mark, despite lack of guidance); and slightly simpler (same setup, but single tube without telescoping or backblast countermass) launcher deploying torpedoes (single-use quasi-drones deploying aimed, but unpowered warheads up close) up to around 0.5t in mass.
An individual launch (school) bus for all of those is typically around 2t, although the mass travelling to the target is of course much lower. They are also not EM based as chemical propellants perform better at this point.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Feb 2, 2019 17:34:24 GMT
I thought this thread was supposed to be about weapons that are at least somewhat practical. It was. Those extreme designs are OK, I suppose, but by this point I suspect we're far beyond the model's limitations. Especially considering they're all payload launchers, as I said I'm not quite sure if physics of those are accounted for properly. TBH, I'd really like to know if there are any huge kinetics on the other end of the scale. That is, "school bus launchers" with 1T+ payloads. That's something I've never been able to get to work. For sandblasters, increasing velocity is pretty much a matter of making your barrel longer. I'd like to see a gun that can throw 1T projectiles at combat-useful speeds and rates, while not blowing up from heat. The main problem with k-slugs above several kg is that they really fall behind well constructed payloads of similar size in terms of destructive potential. Cannons slinging above a few hundred kg also get increasingly problematic.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Feb 1, 2019 22:19:24 GMT
VCS is good if you want minimal bracing to stave off beam deflection, but is very springy so your long coilgun will be flopping about like a slinky - good luck with your accuracy, unless you layer your graphogel really thick. If you do layer your graphogel thick, then AC will actually be lighter and stiffer.
Do note that you don't want to make capacitor-based CG out of AC, but for continuous power ones it's really worth considering. It also works for very heavy RG armatures.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Jan 31, 2019 22:38:25 GMT
I made a decent coilgun Comparison to similar AE needler: Well, the railgun is actually aimable.
You could make your CG, or preferably a whole bundle, spinal.
You could also try AC coil. It might need some extra bracing possibly nullifying mass advantage, but AC is also very stiff, which allows for superior accuracy.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Jan 31, 2019 18:08:14 GMT
I thought this thread was supposed to be about weapons that are at least somewhat practical.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Jan 30, 2019 23:06:44 GMT
OTOH for the cost and mass of one gun you would be able to pump around a 100+ of rtg-powered mancan+gun skiffs that will be more than enough to counter it (the gun tags one, is minced by the rest before it can recharge). Porque no los dos? A po angielsku nie można?
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Jan 30, 2019 17:47:25 GMT
With some mild limits editing (increasing barrel length and armor thickness) you can make far faster guns too. Without changing the barrel length, you don't have enough space to keep the stresses low so I doubt you can do it very effectively at least. These types of guns have the additional benefit that lasers have a hard range cap of 10 Mm. Once your range is noticeably above that, cost or mass don't really matter that much since no laser star will be able to retaliate. OTOH for the cost and mass of one gun you would be able to pump around a 100+ of rtg-powered mancan+gun skiffs that will be more than enough to counter it (the gun tags one, is minced by the rest before it can recharge).
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Jan 29, 2019 18:02:58 GMT
If an AI manages to devise a winning strategy for countering drones with manned capitals, will it speak for or against AI supremacy?
Asking for a friend.
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