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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Jan 8, 2019 7:08:07 GMT
I have some stuff that definitely qualifies as heavy, but practical railguns: - slinging slugs (monolithic, not payload + armature) in 0.5-4.4kg range, at velocities in 10-20km/s range
- manageable rates of fire in 150-1004ms range (charging the gun for a minute only to miss or at best blow out a redundant propellant tank and skiff-sized chunk of armour on the opposite side kind of misses the point, even if the latter looks impressive)
- good turning rates
- a bit on the heavy-ish side but in-line with some of the stock stuff you could still consider practical
- spread lower than most stock EM guns
- thick-ish turret armour
But guess what? - The most interesting ones don't fit the mass bracket
- Graphogel bracing seems to be the only way to make such a weapon workable because our barrel armour needs to be monolithic and required mass of anything else would be prohibitive
- Because of how momentum wheel thickness (and thus mass) is determined you need a workaround in the form of thick layers of extremely lightweight materials for making practical heavy turrets
- And most importantly, because otherwise excellent diamond or amorphous carbon (or even aramid) barrel armour simply breaks those weapons with heat expansion stresses - again, barrel fins, truss, or even splitting barrel shroud into different layers performing different functions (passive/active cooling mantle, bracing, armour, cooling radiators) would help a lot. Moderate velocity sandblasters don't really care, trying to not stress the rails into pieces when firing kg range shells at 10-20km/s is actually somewhat demanding and doesn't like compromises.
- While they have lower spreads than all but few practical stock EM guns, they have lousy ranges against small targets, because it's simply hard to keep barrel from whipping about with forces involved.
I also have an actually lightweight, but long spinal coilgun firing 30 1kg slugs per second at around 7.5km/s mark and around 90% efficiency, accurately, but there is no spinal weapon category at all.
Bummer.
(I also experimented* with a non-gun unguided, unpowered** kinetic payload system mountable that can shred a gunship from about 70km mark, but it's rather contrived and has NO accuracy whatsoever against small targets.)
*) Actually I was mostly tuning my guided and powered high-velocity torpedo- and MLRS suitable for tiny ships. Working with dumb launch means minimizing the effort needed on part of a torpedo or missile salvo.
**) It does include rocket engines but they only work for about 1-1.3s before actual shot, helping the launcher clear manoeuvring launching ship, they don't even aim the thing - this is done with nose-mounted guns on ship itself.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Jan 6, 2019 12:22:30 GMT
I agree that COADE interface is more streamlined than it can afford to be and it hurts usability. Still, if it's any consolation, you can get really good at eyeballing your orbital manoeuvres with a bit of practice.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Jan 5, 2019 11:53:31 GMT
The Beryllium in CMP is an advanced(and still realistic) version of original Beryllium. For the alloys file thing, I think I actually just too lazy to put them in the right file. Shouldn't all the changes to vanilla materials be reserved for separate packs, with CMP kept as clean as possible (you pop it into the game and have guarantee that NO designs you already have change)? FgdfgfthgrSo, will you be cleaning beryllium and any other vanilla materials out of the pack as well? Maybe make a material fix pack and bundle them together with graphitizing diamond?
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Jan 4, 2019 16:24:26 GMT
To me, it seems most sane for everyone who might leave the rotating hab on a daily basis (of which there shouldn't be many) to be in skin-tight mechanical counterpressure suits at all times, meaning all you need to do is put on your helmet and wait for the airlock to cycle. Clothing can be worn on top if desired. You'd probably want to avoid that whenever possible. Mechanical counterpressure is difficult do do properly, may lead to all sorts of health problems if not, and is by no means convenient either way. I would have everyone in those in combat or whenever major penetration would be otherwise likely (actually, I would also have air out while in combat), but not all the time. While there is no point to pressurize whole ship, having separate centrifuge implies you want some non-spinning parts for whatever reason. For combat situations having your centrifuge rotate at all is a grade A insanity. Not only is it going to kill your manoeuvrability with gyroscopic effects, but it is also going to mess you up really badly if damaged in combat. If you have a pile, energy is effectively free and waste heat is something you need to deal with anyway, so energy losses are not much of an issue - doubly so if you can channel the aerodynamic effects to do something useful, like drive parts of your ventilation system. You really don't need to spin up and despin rapidly, so you don't need huge flywheels, or might use electrical propulsion for that (or tethers, or electromagnetic tethers, etc), and you definitely don't want to be tumbling all the time in combat.
I would imagine safety concerns to be very important if you are running with minimal crew (because monkey tax) and the nearest replacements are a year away. Meanwhile two of your ships had their combat efficiency drop by half ever since their main battery is manned by one-armed gunners, one started to handle like a freighter (due to one handed tactical pilot) and one has been close to mutiny ever since the (allegedly essential) cook stuck his head into the joint. Accidents do happen and once you cannot reduce the accidents below the threshold you need via training, you need a redesign. I agree, but mind the gap. Nearest reserve crews are not a year away.
You are also likely to have more tanks than space warships in any case.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Jan 4, 2019 11:01:45 GMT
Had a thought. If you wanted specifically to not use the axis as the access hallway for whatever reason (perhaps a hundred(s) of meters long spinal railgun is in the way.) You could achieve matching velocity with the rotating section of the ship with a sort of 'radial elevator' or train. Just a room with safety doors on a track that accelerates to match rotational velocity with the relevant part of the craft. This could be done either externally as an airlock or internally inside the pressurized volume as AtomHeartDragon suggests. If this was a military ship they probably wouldn't even bother with the safety concerns, in modern main battle tanks you very much can be caught between the turret basket and the turret ring and have a limb eaten by 'the turret monster'. I'm guessing there have been studies done that show that it's safer for the crew to make the vehicle as compact of a target as possible then it is to invest the mass of increased internal volume that it would take to engineer a safer system, or at least more combat effective if not safer. If the rotary part of the centrifuge was internal, and running on tracks on the outside edge instead of being suspended from a bearing at the center then the entire 'overhead' volume in the center could be non rotational access way from 'in front' of to 'behind' the centrifuge. Please excuse my arbitrarily assigned directions. I would imagine safety concerns to be very important if you are running with minimal crew (because monkey tax) and the nearest replacements are a year away. Meanwhile two of your ships had their combat efficiency drop by half ever since their main battery is manned by one-armed gunners, one started to handle like a freighter (due to one handed tactical pilot) and one has been close to mutiny ever since the (allegedly essential) cook stuck his head into the joint. Accidents do happen and once you cannot reduce the accidents below the threshold you need via training, you need a redesign. IMO, it would be simplest to do this hallway joint in vacuum, to avoid the generated wind that AtomHeartDragon mentions (and also to allow the rotating section to stick out far from the ship in some designs, to get 1 G with very low RPM). Note that no fluids can be piped between the ship & the hab with this construction, only brought across in tanks. So they will need separate plumbing systems (and separate air if the joint is in vacuum). Keeping vacuum between parts people need to to regularly move between is an awful idea. Not only it will require suiting up every time leading to inefficiency and cutting corners, but it will also cause air losses every time system is cycled. It's much better to just deal with some extra power requirement and waste heat, possibly using it to drive ventilation as well, it's even better to just sidestep all problems by spinning up the whole ship. If you do want internal centrifuge (enclosed in pressurized volume), small one could be conventional one, with access through or near hub. Large one could be a train or moving floor riding in a toroidal tunnel. Accessing large one could be done by a succession of moving walkways at safe relative velocities. Yes, it would waste some space and add some complexity, but you ARE already making a separate centrifuge so that is a foregone conclusion.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Jan 3, 2019 23:51:35 GMT
I would either make an internal centrifuge completely enclosed within pressurized volume (there will be energy losses from aerodynamics!), or spin the entire craft, with possible exception of unmanned de-spun platform(s) for stuff you wouldn't want to be spinning. Fun variants of spinning the entire craft include tumbling pigeons (just needleships tumbling end over end with only minimal engineering considerations needed for artificial gravity) and ships/modules tethered together to make very large centirfuges with very modest means.
Dividing your craft, including pressurized volume, into rotating and non-rotating parts seems like just giving yourself a bunch of engineering headaches for no adequate reason. It's like trying to make a mecha when a tank would do.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Jan 3, 2019 18:44:48 GMT
Regarding putting ships combat capabilities to the test, remember all those woes about Ceres and Vesta? Remember how people complained about the "learning curve becoming a learning cliff"? That's what "putting ships combat capabilities to the test" was like. The thing is, the virtual arms race happening on the forums has left all stock ship designs too far behind. There are enough cookie cutter builds or just simply great designs on the forum to make beating the crap out of stock ships not a challenge at all. I keep thinking it would be better if the campaign didn't allow you to roll out new ship designs on a whim. Nor do I find it particularly realistic. A hard campaign mode with optimised versions of the stock designs and doubled enemy fleet sizes (while retaining the original mass/cost budget for the player) would be awesome for the combat missions. I wonder if anyone would still be willing to go with that. At the very least I do have some stock module designs approximating particular stock design's mission and budget envelopes. They could also be converted to higher-powered designs easily enough. Scenario editor should have option to mandate things like: "Your fleet needs to include a missile carrier that, once all enemies are defeated, is still alive, capable of maneuvering and launching, with at least X amount of missiles with Y yield warhead and Z amount of deltaV." (Giving freedom for user to design their own missile carriers, while still mandating a specific number of specific capability missiles still available as a victory condition.) Aka: Why doesn't Admiral Overkill just dump a load of missiles all over us at Vesta - she's got orders to save some for once you're dead. I would definitely love to see any programatically testable victory and loss conditions to be allowed in COADE's missions. If you ignore travel and logistics, then medieval battles would take place between stationary castles. CoaDE is designed to simulate space warfare, so your designs need to be able to perform adequately for space combat and at the same time be effective spacecraft. And this is the reason why I am not particularly fond of Vesta. For me the missions afterwards are all more interesting because they combine combat and orbital mechanics, although they could use higher combat difficulty. Vesta is just a 0.5Mm rock with ignorable gravity well and you can build good enough stuff with just stock modules to not actually have to pay attention to it being there (although clinging to low orbit and making life difficult for Voitenko's fleet is definitely a fun way to do it).
Also, it's interesting to see how many people found On The Surface of Giants mission frustrating, given that it is relatively straightforward if you just keep in mind your orbital tricks (generalized bi-elliptic transfer, mostly), especially if you are willing to intercept retrograde.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Jan 3, 2019 11:10:38 GMT
That's why 4mm 200kW railgun is the best choice for stock broadsiders - it has by far the best range due to high exit velocity and it is not turreted. I didn't even try that since I figured no turret would mean it would never be lined up and firing unless I gave it a long time to settle on a target, which would give them a long time to light me up. Plus all the guns would have to be mounted in one spot or you'd risk not being able to put them all on target. I think strikers are just better given the tactical options we have to work with.
Nvm, you meant using just one to force it to face the right way. That does mostly work. It's a little hack-ey for my taste though.
I would go with 5 away from vulnerable targets and along ship's midline, as this is what can be handled by one gunner at the gun itself isn't going to put a noticeable dent in your mass budget.
It's not the best weapon, due to low rate of fire and somewhat lacking accuracy at maximum range (it's on par or better than most stock EM guns, but with higher range and low rate of fire it becomes somewhat inadequate - turreted version with more power would already be better than most stock guns), but you can hit with it on your broadside, and it will also force longer range engagements which is good if you intend to dodge.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Jan 2, 2019 19:57:30 GMT
Odd, broadsiders are usually good at dodging. Maybe you suffer from the fact that whichever thruster you added first are considered to be your ship's rear? Deleting your resistojets, saving, then re-adding them (if you want, stock RJs are pretty pointless) might fix that. My sincerest condolences for your CPU. I threw them out in 3 waves, the 400 missile launch was a little laggy but it really only had to work once. Anyway the issue wasn't the ship dodging, it was keeping the radiators away from and the guns toward the enemy while dodging. I tried letting the AI dodge while using broadside, and I tried manual move commands. If I had been able to tweak my turrets to only have a 20 or 30 degree firing cone the broadside command probably would have worked well enough, but of course I couldn't edit modules at that time. That's why 4mm 200kW railgun is the best choice for stock broadsiders - it has by far the best range due to high exit velocity and it is not turreted.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Jan 2, 2019 14:36:16 GMT
That did fix the original problem, but because of broadsiders' dodging problems Odd, broadsiders are usually good at dodging. Maybe you suffer from the fact that whichever thruster you added first are considered to be your ship's rear? Deleting your resistojets, saving, then re-adding them (if you want, stock RJs are pretty pointless) might fix that. My sincerest condolences for your CPU.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Jan 2, 2019 11:53:55 GMT
@qswitched Possible quick and dirty hotfix to this, formation disruption, horrible lag, and droptanks-bouncing-inside-the-hull-breaking-stuff issue would be preventing detachment of droptanks during combat.
Then proper systemic fixes for each of those problems could still be found, but be no longer urgent. Currently droptanks on AI ships are nearly gamebreaking, and on own ships (where you can uncheck jettisoning) a huge nuisance.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Jan 1, 2019 0:13:31 GMT
I have a series of similar RGs, mostly slower (at 10km/s), ranging from 0.5 (but capable of somewhat automatic fire) to 4.4kg (1 shot per second), all around 20% efficient (though I haven't pushed any others).
At these scales, with with lightweight aerogel barrel bracing, overheating becomes a serious concern for a railgun and multi-barrel mounts become actual solution to existing problem rather than fashion statement.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Dec 31, 2018 18:48:56 GMT
Using amouphous carbon for heavy railgun seems interesting, I will try that out later. Though I'm not sure in what situation will you use a long spinal coilgun since long range tends to not be a best friend with spinal weapon. How about 1kg MMG slug at >7.4km/s 30 times per second in less than 50t and 4x4x125m bounding cylinder (for 1GW weapon)? Performed some further exploration of this subject. If you merely want a working spinal coilgun, you can in fact make a lighter and thinner one using VCS or even Os for the coil - AC is much lighter than either, but not as strong and required graphogel bracing adds up.
However, if you intend to actually be hitting your target, VCS is disappointing because it is just going to be springing around, while Os with minimal bracing still doesn't exactly shine. Once you layer enough graphogel to keep your fire focused, it can also support AC coil against beam deflection - AC which is stiff AND much lighter than either VCS or Os.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Dec 31, 2018 11:20:44 GMT
Using amouphous carbon for heavy railgun seems interesting, I will try that out later. Though I'm not sure in what situation will you use a long spinal coilgun since long range tends to not be a best friend with spinal weapon. How about 1kg MMG slug at >7.4km/s 30 times per second in less than 50t and 4x4x125m bounding cylinder (for 1GW weapon)?
Also, I have recently came to a realization regarding attitude control - with spinal weapons or homing for collision, front mounted verniers are your friend.
When trying to point at specific target gimbals or rear verniers push you sideways and away causing the new orientation vector to miss the intercept and forcing you to turn more.
Front mounted verniers push you towards the target making your orientation vector intercept the target earlier.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Dec 30, 2018 11:41:23 GMT
I meant the stock ships - I suppose one can build a ship that has huge number of reactors - it probably requires custom modules? I dunno, when I tried to build a faster going MPD ship I did not have much success. I have an abortive attempt at laserstar using stock stuff and xenon propellant. It doesn't seem to work well.
With custom MPDs and reactors the main issue seems to be pumping gigawatts into at most dinner plate sized thrusters - I do expect this kind of power density to cause... interesting engineering problems CDE's equations for MPDTs aren't really equipped to deal with (even stock MPDTs are way beyond any existing applications AFAIK). OTOH you could reasonably plaster the entire rear of your ship with more reasonable MPDTs - huge arrays of redundant components shouldn't really have maintenance costs scale up like they currently do.
For just moving around solar system, with required infrastructure in place, you should look into beamed propulsion. If you aren't fighting or venturing into great unknown, you might as well leave your bulky powerplant back home.
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