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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Dec 30, 2018 11:30:42 GMT
Polonium has low melting point that makes it unusable (just for fun try cooling stock 103kW polonium RTG and see what it takes), AFAIK germanium-68 is non-vanilla.
If radiation is not an issue, you can just use cobalt-60, but realistically speaking, where will you keep your drones with cobalt RTGs and how will you service them? That the radiation magically disappears in game once you put your drones in even a flimsy 1mm graphogel bin doesn't mean that it would actually work this way IRL - this would give an entire new meaning to your crew of hard-boiled spacemen.
OTOH curium-242 is reasonably safe, has high melting point and wonderful power density.
I wonder if it would be feasible to have the cobalt-60 fuel pellets for a drone RTG stored separately in a radiation-hardened autoloader so that the RTG could be fueled and started right when the drone was readying itself for launch. Either that or for autocannon drones with lower power requirements you could rig up a miniature gas turbine that ran off of the same oxidizer and propellant combination as the drone to generate power. Or have a supercapacitor bank inside the vehicle and just passively charge the drones via induction. RTG is not a reactor and cannot be started/stopped. It just sits there decaying and producing heat/radiation.
That's the main issue with them, you can't just mothball them in an inert state, like you can unused reactors - they keep radiating, keep producing heat and keep decaying (OTOH being just a stupid lump of radioactive with thermocouple and coolant loop attached should really be reflected in the cost as they don't really require precision engineering). Launchers for anything with RTG in it should really require you to provide cooling for all the RTGs inside - likely actively heat pumped as radiating from a hundred or so drones at their RTG temperatures seems to be a non-starter, even with the cost of extra waste heat and energy for pumping.
Realistically, Cm242 powered fleets would likely require a tender with a small scale isotopic lab/isotope reprocessing lab + spare isotope for extended operations.
Fuel cells/generators seem like a good idea for low-powered applications, OTOH they will eat up your fuel fast, and you can make some really tiny RTGs.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Dec 29, 2018 22:28:32 GMT
I have decided to upload my heavy railgun I determined to be in holiday spirit. It's X-masy because it shoots lumps of coal 1kg amorphous carbon slugs at over 20km/s each 894ms at anyone I deem naughty, gifting them 200MJ of kinetic energy (almost 50 Ricks of blam) each - I thus named it "Santa". It is a bit on the large-ish and expensive side, but not heavier nor bigger than stock 13MW 1mm Turreted Capacitor Coilgun (which I recently ended up bolting onto my stock "Garuda" Dreadnought as it is actually less disappointing than 34mm heavy coilgun, and which I therefore consider borderline practical) and not that much more expensive, and it can actually track fast enough to keep the editor happy and warnings free. Keeping the rails from flopping about has proven somewhat challenging (I tried osmium as it is both strong, stiff and has low thermal expansion, but being so stiff it actually tends to explode from thermal expansion anyway, despite its strength - it is damn heavy too) so it isn't very accurate weapon (comparable with most stock EM guns, actually). Link:steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1607067371Pichurz:
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Dec 29, 2018 21:56:00 GMT
I'm stuck on overkill and can't build modules, but I'll try the flare thing.
No dice, just gonna redo the turret scheme.
IIRC blast launchers are orientation agnostic.
Put your longest range turret (not necessarily all of them but getting game to recognize the right one can be fiddly) at preferred orientation towards the enemy. You can also just slap stock 200kW 4mm railgun on your "towards enemy" edge (it has the highest exit velocity of all stock guns and is on fixed internal mount making it uniquely suitable for this purpose) and leave your turrets as they are.
Feel free to browse my stock module ship collection for inspiration (link in sig) if you get stuck on VO.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Dec 29, 2018 11:07:47 GMT
Bumpdate: Added some stuff about radially offsetting everything for fun and profit and reasonably sized ultra-heavy railguns.
Also a bit about lightweight and efficient long, spinal coilguns.
Carbon is truly the element of gods.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Dec 28, 2018 10:12:54 GMT
I would still love to see CDE receiving some more polish - there are still some rather dire bugs to be fixed (all sorts of replicable crashes, multi-capacitor EM guns, etc.), obvious improvements that shouldn't be prohibitive to implement and things like multiple intercepts that should also be implementable and are likely to transform the metagame completely. A full fledged campaign (free or as purchasable expansion) for veterans, that starts somewhere around gas giants missions in terms of complexity and difficulty and only gets harder, with as complex scenarios as CDE can possibly support would be most welcome as well. I am personally hoping that someone, somewhere makes a sort of cross between CDE (more advanced technologically, but only enough to fuel the premise, still striving for realism as much as possible), Frontier/Pioneer/Elite (hopefully there can be some sort of plausible premise), and Space Engine (huge universe full of beautiful, beautiful space p0rn). Or CDE and the X series by Egosoft. Or CDE and GalCiv. I listed Frontier/Pioneer as they at least make an effort to get their physics right (with the exception of holy Homeworld and Nexus I refuse to acknowledge the existence of space games that don't even try to honour the physics in gameplay).
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Dec 27, 2018 17:49:29 GMT
Polonium-210 is a low performance, low cost alternative to Curium-242. If radiation isn't an issue (such as on low powered drones with conventional cannons), germanium-68 is a much more cost-effective solution than curium-242. Polonium has low melting point that makes it unusable (just for fun try cooling stock 103kW polonium RTG and see what it takes), AFAIK germanium-68 is non-vanilla.
If radiation is not an issue, you can just use cobalt-60, but realistically speaking, where will you keep your drones with cobalt RTGs and how will you service them? That the radiation magically disappears in game once you put your drones in even a flimsy 1mm graphogel bin doesn't mean that it would actually work this way IRL - this would give an entire new meaning to your crew of hard-boiled spacemen.
OTOH curium-242 is reasonably safe, has high melting point and wonderful power density.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Dec 27, 2018 15:22:31 GMT
This is a thread for all sorts of non-obvious tricks to make your life easier in the lonely void of CDE. Things like designing your stuff to not impact performance much or working around various limitations of the editor. - Turret/Gimbal momentum wheels try to fit outside of cylinder circumscribed around whatever is mounted on the gimbal (for whatever reason). Even though you can't manipulate their shape and size directly, you can make them thinner and thus lighter by, for example, increasing the thickness of your barrel armour (which is effectively free if it's graphogel).
- Non-capacitor EM guns can be continuously fired simultaneously despite exceeding powerplant's output IF their firing time is short enough to allow them fire in turns. It will work even at high rates of fire, with firing times much shorter than engine's tick. So, for example, you can put a huge battery of 60MW coilguns on a single 60.4MW TEFR and have them all (sand)blast away.
- When using payload or anything else with limited useful duration that doesn't mount ordnances, you can mount a tiny flare on it with burn time adjusted to your expected expiry date. When the flare burns out the object gets deleted preventing your computer from getting clogged with thousands of spent munitions hurtling aimplessly through the void. You also get payload tracers of sort. You can also dispose of unwanted stuff by putting fuses (and self
destruct charges) on it or setting override timer on ordnances if it has any. - Putting fuses on flares prevents them from confusing your own missiles/ordnances.
- If using blast launchers for high velocity launches, you can make staged/telescoping ones to achieve noticeably better mass efficiency (do mind the cost of that UHMWPE fiber, which happens to yield the lightest blast launchers of all vanilla materials) or to prevent multiple barrel blast launcher from destroying itself via recoil on first launch. Telescoping launcher means simply creating an intermediate payload consisting of a launcher and remote control.
- Combining multiple types of missiles on a single intermediate launch platform may be advantageous in terms of personnel required.
- You can combine multiple telescoping launchers with the same exit velocity without collisions by putting launch cap of 1 on any but last stage launcher - intermediate launchers will clear themselves on launching (via recoil) so they will act as mutex. Note that this will reduce rate of fire with multiple parallel launches.
- Lightweight ephemeral launch platform can be very effective way to emulate parallel mounted MLRS in gun-range combat without exposing flattened face with explosive launchers directly to enemy fire. To prevent it from falling behind launching ship equip it with short burn rocket motor, to prevent it from recoiling back into launching ship (you can skip this with single launchers), you can mount additional blast launcher on its back firing heavy, ms range fused flares (also creating cool visual "backblast" effect) with limited velocity (think <200m/s) and triggered exactly the same as the main one. Aiming launch platform can be achieved by mounting spinal weapon on the launching ship with similar exit velocity to the effective velocity of the launcher (it might take some practice but you should be able to achieve almost uncorrected trajectories and hits even with lateral velocities exceeding 1-2km/s, do note that the gun needs to have the highest effective range on the ship). You can dispose of spent launcher with timed self destruct charge.
- (No Trigger) fuses can be used to fine tune missile armour shape. They are light enough to not matter, but unlike spacers can be easily manipulated manually. This probably exploits discrete nature of the armour model, but you can both minimize the mass and maximize the sturdiness of the armour.
- Polygonal armour can be used to implement ungimballed roll thrusters. Just put overlapping rings of thrusters near the edges, generating opposite torques each. Alternatively you might try experimenting with flattened armour or different symmetry of armour polygon and thruster group.
- Radially offset long spacer can be used to make pointy nose while using spinal weapons. Length and positioning of the spacer might need to be fine-tuned, you might also need some radially offset wide spacers or small components to further adjust the shape.
- Low velocity weapons can fire from behind armour bulge if the lateral velocity is high enough.
- You can aim blast launchers with reasonable accuracy by mounting them in parallel with fixed gun with same exit velocity.
- "Drone" with aimed (see above) blast launcher makes a good, non-spoofable alternative to a missile and may use more interesting payloads (see below). It is also less susceptible to kinetic PD due to its trajectory. It might need some initial kick towards the target, though, and will try to avoid direct collision.
- Long, thin, dense radiators make good kinetic projectiles approximating continuous rod warheads, and creating widespread hull damage.
- You can hide ordnances in blast launchers to avoid premature detonation.
- Curium 242 makes a good, energy dense (if somewhat expensive) RTG fuel if you don't want to make horribly radioactive cobalt bombs for whatever reason. It is well suited for backup RTGs and stuff like that. Note that realistically it wouldn't work for long-term application due to limited half life.
- Backup RTGs are a good way to prevent your ships from being killed by total power loss. they can cluster around CMs and mount multiple small, redundant radiators, while being able to provide enough power for CMs and possibly conventional gun CIWS, without requiring any dedicated personnel.
- Backup power source can allow high powered designs to use low powered (and thus lightweight) flares effectively. You just need to scram the reactors, fold their radiators and avoid firing engines.
- Multiple spinal guns can create quite effective shotgun effect.
- Even though they are seen as disposable munitions, drones are well suited for hardening through multiple redundancy, as they don't really have bulky obvious single points of failure like CMs or warheads.
- Putting a nuke and flak warheads on a single missile, then detonating the nuke with camera centred on the missile cause flak explosion to be teleported inside enemy ship. Seriously, don't do it, it's a bug. If you want flak and nuke in a single package, consider blast launched submunitions.
- Short or delayed detonation can make your nuclear missile a KKV as well. Well guided swarm of small nuclear missiles can achieve penetration first and then nuclear detonations inside the hull.
- Orienting broadside can be valuable if you cannot prevent penetrations anyway, for example by missiles, as it reduces the risk of your ship being gutted.
- Reactors can be split into multiple group, reducing the risk of reactor kill by missiles.
- On the contrary, CMs should be kept as close as possible to the centre of mass if you want to achieve any sort of manoeuvrability.
- Large propellant tanks WILL kill your crew if penetrated, especially if the CMs are located in the heavily armoured nose-cone, far away from ship's centre of mass.
- Payload based heavy railguns can achieve gentler accelerations heavier feasible projectiles by weighing down the armature with non-conductive payload.
- If you want to make a heavy (think kg range) monolithic armature railgun, consider using worse conductor with good mechanical properties for your armature - amorphous carbon should do. This will have similar effect as weighing down your highly conductive armature with a payload.
- Around anything heavier than a belt rock, remember your orbital mechanics - especially generalized bi-elliptic transfer.
- Retrograde intercepts can be surprisingly fun and effective. Note that many designs, especially all the stock ones, don't deal with high velocity intercepts well, and high velocity intercept makes weapon exit velocity secondary to projectile mass and rate of fire - it is part of what makes drones effective.
- Consider making composite whipple shields - superhard coating on top of ductile metal can be quite effective at bouncing off hypervelocity sand and most superhard materials also happen to be refractory ceramics, so they will allow your whipple shield to tank nukes quite well. If z-fighting puts you off, consider adding 1cm spacing in between.
- In addition to possibility of forcing verniers to mount on the outside of the hull by using partial armour and forcing thrusters in general outside by using high gimbal angle, you can force main thrusters to be mounted outside the hull by radially offseting them. You can also combine external and internal mounting of engines.
- required hull width when mounting weapons/engines at either end of the ship is determined by the size of individual cluster, not total number of mounts. This allows much narrower hull shapes by splitting up radially offset weapon/engine clusters, although it may end up with some protruding outside and being exposed to enemy fire. Mostly external blast launchers might reduce damage from ammo explosion somewhat.
- Radially offset weapons and engines reduce the risk of coring by not providing handy targets in ship's axis.
- For railgun armatures more conductive is not always better - if you want to make a heavy, non-payload railgun (think kg range), mediocre conductor (such as amorphous carbon) can make such design work at semi-reasonable mass and cost, while an excellent one will tear itself apart as all the capacitor's charge passes through it.
- Similarly, long spinal, non-capacitor coilguns (remember that you can arrange most of your modules around possibly >100m coilgun/bundle of coilguns) can benefit from light, yet stiff amorphous carbon coil and can be made very light (basically just long, thin coil with thick layer of graphite aerogel around it to deal with beam deflection).
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Dec 27, 2018 13:51:58 GMT
Currently reaction wheels try (for whatever reason) to fit outside of the cylinder circumscribed around the barrel (*with* barrel armour) which is actually shown on the turret diagram.
This can be gamed to yield thinner, more lightweight wheels (and then make them out of osmium) by simply making the barrel (or injector, for that matter) thicker (which somewhat explains odd gimbals mass math), but it would make more sense to be able to freely adjust wheels' diameter, thickness and inner diameter (if not 0, it means ring shaped wheels) within the bounds of what can fit in the turret.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Dec 27, 2018 12:22:32 GMT
Does it happen when hitting the tanks with payloads/KKVs?
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Dec 26, 2018 16:08:51 GMT
I am personally hoping that someone, somewhere makes a sort of cross between CDE (more advanced technologically, but only enough to fuel the premise, still striving for realism as much as possible), Frontier/Pioneer/Elite (hopefully there can be some sort of plausible premise), and Space Engine (huge universe full of beautiful, beautiful space p0rn).
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Dec 26, 2018 12:52:33 GMT
I recently bought the game and finished Vesta Overkill mission today. I have now 3 missions left until the end of campaign. You actually have 5, and while VO is the most (in)famous one for its challenge, the missions afterwards are arguably more fun as they require combat AND extensive orbital manoeuvring in deep gravity wells, while VO can be cleared with just a station with some launchers tacked onto it built specifically for this mission (also, VO lags like hell because of Cutter firing its 60mm cannons indiscriminately). Well, unless you have some fully realized ideas for a custom campaign (I don't but would be happy to contribute designs and individual mission ideas if you do), the best way to use level editor is unfortunately hoping that someone makes a good (and working) custom campaign. Fun with ship editor is easy - you have some cool concept and then try to make it, later to test it in the campaign and/or sandbox. Module editor is more difficult, because tweaking variables is a bit dry. You can still use it to make components for your custom designs, or implement complex payloads/missiles/drones and their launching method, although I must admit that recently I have made some fairly interesting (as in the biggest is in 200MJ range, with 1kg slugs) heavy railguns and their guided nuclear/kinetic/flak derivatives. I have also started dabbling in a conversion kit of sorts - components you could just swap into a stock module design and have them work right away. For me a lot of fun is designing what I perceive as cool ships, typically highly manoeuvrable ones, often trying to squeeze the most out of stock components - for example I can currently do Vesta with a 4kt 100% stock module corvette (NOT a mission specific ship, it has mission envelope in line with stock designs and, with some extra drop tanks matches stock Corvette in terms of mission envelope, cost and mass budget) without launching any missiles or drones on intercepts; I have a 100% stock module gunship and frigate equivalents that can take on stock counterparts at 10:1 numerical disadvantage, etc. - or limited power - I have recently made a bunch of custom ~700t skiffs with power in 800kW range equipped with direct fire missile/torpedo launchers that can lay waste to large numbers of much heavier ships; some time ago I have also made a stock powered drone (roughly Hellfire equivalent, but at half the cost) capable of soloing a Gunship. I have also created a bunch of much stronger rough equivalents to stock designs using stock modules. I also like making stupidly high velocity intercepts* and having a lot of dakka** happen but I am easily amused. Oh, and gratuitous overkills***, mustn't forget gratuitous overkills.
Lastly, you can search for any thread with "challenge" in the title on this board and have a go at that. I am not really a fan of mods, CMP is mostly ok, but still has some minor dubious stuff, future materials/fusion/graphememe anything is basically attempting to do stuff way out of bounds of CDE simulation, and also a bit like modding blasters into a WW2 war game. There have also been tournaments where people submitted designs and had them fight each other, but lack of multiplayer and AI limitations hamper meaningful comparisons a bit. Nice, I like the use of orbital manoeuvring and high velocity intercept. When I first unlocked ship editor, I never looked back to the stock designs. My first (and a bit of a flagship) design was modified Laser Frigate equipped with a lot of 60-100MW coilguns as primary weapon, which quickly grew to Gunship size and was first used to beat Main Belt Extraction (I have later beat MBE with default fleet, but it felt very ineffectual). Over time it gained, then lost partial armour, Methane-Oxygen "afterburners" and vernier thrusters, gained concave, polygonal hull (changed base polygon twice), changed armour composition several times, was redone several times, customized, then restockified, and rebuilt over 2 patches. It is now known as "Dragon" class gunship, available in several flavours, and is the Gunship equivalent that can chew 10 Gunships at once I mentioned above. But going to Vesta, I first beat it with a custom 6kt frigate (I since then scrapped and replaced, although it wasn't a bad design) mixed into remaining 7kt of default fleet (I think Missile Schooner, Beamcraft and carrier). I didn't really go well, as I lost the carrier, my frigate got gutted, missile schooner got mobility killed, I managed to stupidly get Beamcraft killed as well (IIRC after I sent it to finish off mobility killed Cutter), and in the end finished it thanks to zombieship trick (remote control modules installed on my frigate) - gutted, de-crewed frigate controlled from tumbling schooner, flying around shooting things (I no longer use zombieship trick as it is arguably cheese, but it still felt quite intense). This included moping up orbiting Devastators as well. Hope you don't mind me using your thread to pimp my stuff, but it is a good example of how I have fun in CDE. *) **) ***)
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Dec 25, 2018 10:57:46 GMT
From what I have observed it happens when the ship is launching missiles the moment it is intercepted - it then ends up with multiple overlapping missiles embedded in launcher (possibly in multiple launchers). The moment the collision is detected (which tends to be "immediately" although I have seen custom missiles actually launching this way, appearing as a single missile with unnaturally bright exhaust plume, and only colliding a while after) there occurs a free trip to the fun town - especially with Devastators each packing 5t of boom, which makes sillyship especially fun-prone. More details here: childrenofadeadearth.boards.net/thread/1661/module-problem-carrier-modules-destroyYou can also troll the sillyship into launching flares with Devastators still halfway in the launchers by firing missiles or homing onto it for some extra fun, although it falls under "kicking them when they are down". From this post you might get an idea I'm not a fan of Devastators. You might be correct.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Dec 22, 2018 21:57:16 GMT
Updated the OP with some insights - mostly about coilguns.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Dec 22, 2018 20:20:06 GMT
...I don't think it is supposed to work like that:
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Dec 12, 2018 20:42:18 GMT
My Windows did updating and restarting today and apparently the game now works. I suppose there was some kind of issue caused by an update being in progress. Ah, the wonders of OS-as-a-(dis)service.
Have fun playing, then!
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