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Post by AtomHeartDragon on May 21, 2020 15:25:06 GMT
Ok, now for more detailed analysis: I start off by sending groups of missiles that hit the enemy fleet in the back in this case at the fastest speeds I can manage with my dV. The flaks are going at 1.4km/s and nukes at 600m/s because otherwise they just run out of dV when in combat and get disabled: - As I detailed above, this is not true. You first use your fleet's delta-v to achieve good high-velocity intercept, then launch your missiles and just give them a gentle nudge early enough.
- Optimally you should split them into groups and stagger them (which you seem to have done correctly). Note that the point of stagger is to avoid missiles killing each other and to allow them to retarget rather than overkilling one ship. If your salvo doesn't even make it to the target splitting it up only makes things worse.
- The bottom line is that your missiles are both too slow and too empty, and the way to ensure they aren't is accelerating them with you ship's engines using ship's delta-v while they are still sitting inside their ammo bins.
Seems ok. You shouldn't be evading missiles specifically if they're flaks and you have decoys, but if you happen to dodge them while dancing enemy drones out of dV - all the better. Because they're arriving slow, empty and with significant perpendicular velocity component: - They are unlikely to even make it to the target because they have a lot of perpendicular velocity to cancel out, and little delta-v to do that, limited time before they will have missed, and to make things worse, as they come closer parallel velocity is decreasing and perpendicular increasing.
- Thanks to flak bug stock flaks won't even get to do damage below 2.1km/s and your intercept velocity and delta-v left don't add up to at least that number even if you don't subtract delta-v needed to get velocity vector on target (because of perpendicular velocity).
- Since your missiles need to cancel significant perpendicular velocity component they will be oriented more or less sideways towards enemy lasers exposing cylindrical flanks rather than highly sloped nose armor to enemy laser fire making burn-through times much shorter.
The whole situation looks more or less like below: (Situational diagram brought to you by severe Dia abuse) And since missiles did nothing to take out the Laser Frigate your Stingers are essentially dead on arrival. - Most likely they don't. Game just stops drawing tracers if there is too much firepower flying around. You'd see their guns still firing if you zoomed close enough and the bullets are still there, even though invisible.
- Note that the higher your intercept velocity (and the higher your intercept velocity compared to gun's exit velocity), the more point is there to ignoring range (because distance doesn't really matter, what matters is the time to target, effective range is a bit of a lie), and the more damage do your guns do (but also they are stopped by Whipple shield more effectively - which shouldn't matter with high ROF weapons that chew up Whipple shield in an instant). It is also easier on your computer.
- And of course they get ripped apart by the Laser Frigate. That's what it does. That's what it's for. And that's why you absolutely need it dead or at least incapable of firing before your Stingers get there.
Target ship prioritization can get wonky.
Anyway: - You should have sent the beam drones before Stingers (before or after first missile wave).
- Given that Beam drones have very weak lasers with poor range (but you should almost always ignore range with lasers, since it's essentially free), you should concentrate fire on enemy modules that beam drones can reasonably take out - aluminium crew radiators are a good bet, both carrier and frigate have those. 10x 400kW long wavelength (IR) lasers don't really stand much chance against 1x 100MW short wavelength one with 7 spare turrets in straight staring contest.
Most likely by orbital craft's 33 and 60mm BRRRRT!, though Laser Frigate can also dish it out.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on May 21, 2020 8:53:20 GMT
I'm trying, but like I said it doesn't seem to be working on my end. I start off by sending groups of missiles that hit the enemy fleet in the back in this case at the fastest speeds I can manage with my dV. The flaks are going at 1.4km/s and nukes at 600m/s because otherwise they just run out of dV when in combat and get disabled: Then I start evading missiles and drones for a bit: Then my missiles reach the enemy and do absolutely nothing: Then I send in the drones: The drones fire for a second or two and then stop shooting while the enemy rips them apart even though I tell them to ignore range: Beam drones somehow kill the empty carrier that they weren't even supposed to be shooting at because I told them to shoot the laser frigate: Now I only have my main ships left and I can't engage with the enemy directly because they would just get shredded, again. And that might actually be useful. I'll try to give you more detailed analysis later on today, but so far: - I can already tell you that you are not intercepting fast enough with missiles, but you shouldn't use missiles' dV for that - use your capital fleet as first stage, it has more dV; missiles should only give a short burn early to gently push them off and let them build distance to arrive well in advance of the main fleet. "Well in advance" means enough time to let you squeeze all the other missile salvoes and drone fleets in there.
If your missile delta-v and parallel component of intercept velocity don't add up to at least 2.1 km/s (assuming no perpendicular component at all) flaks won't even be effective, and nukes need to approach fast as well or frigate will burn them. - Second, perpendicular velocity needs to be close to 0; >300m/s is a lot, missiles need a lot of delta-v and time to compensate for that. They are unlikely to have former because they are stock missiles with crap delta-v, causing them to disable themselves, and they might not have enough of the latter, causing a miss.
- Third, intercepting slow with drones is not necessarily the best strategy, it just trades off hitting power and accuracy for multiple attack runs. It actually becomes THE worst strategy if you haven't taken out enemy lasers. If your Stingers intercept and enemy frigate is still alive and active, you are having a bad day.
- Fourth, Ceres isn't terribly massive but you can still use Oberth effect to save a little delta-v.
you can refer to the screenshots I posted earlier ITT for example intercept parameters.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on May 20, 2020 23:48:22 GMT
Okay, serious question: I asked for help, why is everyone immideately going hostile? Could it have something to do with you failing to provide information that would let others solve YOUR problem? Repeatedly, on repeated explicit requests? Hmm... Probably not. I guess it's just everyone but you being an asshole, then.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on May 20, 2020 23:34:13 GMT
But you have a time for the forum trolling. Nice. If all you want to be is rude and condescending then I'd rather just block you. Protip: You will quickly run out of people willing to help you that way.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on May 20, 2020 12:11:52 GMT
Did you checked that all the ships had engine control e.g. engines were not disabled, crew module radiators were functional and CMs were powered? Also, perhaps you had a fixed-thrust-vector ships that were relying solely on RCS to turn themselves?.. Obviously RCS has to be functional on such ship for being able to orient itself for burn. If I was you... And I amn't. But if I was, then I'd keep splitting the fleet in halves to pinpoint the problematic ship{s}, and dance from that. No offence, but tough events are taking place in this tough game, so you need to toughen up yourself, too, and keep working on solution. OTOH good thing that you're not in command of said fleet IRL, 'cause they only have one chance to make it right, with their actual meat locked inside these slightly radioactive tin cans. p.s. I confess that I forgot if damaged rad.shield could also cause this. IRL it surely should, as you do not want to make that NTR critical knowing it'll fry you. The ships have never engaged anything in that run, they had dV, but the game would not let me make any sort of maneuvers. Also that's a little hurtful. Show me anyone who beat any of these missions on the first try. Why the first try? Also, it is you who seems to have very unusual problems, so the burden is on you to let US help YOU. That includes making sure you have done everything to identify and tackle the problem yourself which you don't seem to have done. We are not tech support, we are not getting paid for this, we are just bunch of guys (And possibly gals/other) who really like this game and are willing to share our experience and lend our problem solving skills to various internet randos so that they can also experience the best parts of CoaDE (maybe create enough buzz to get spiritual successors made?).
The bottom line is: ALL you get here from us is an extra, you are not entitled to ANYTHING - nice packaging and shiny sugarcoat the least. If you're in such a struggle, just shoot a video and experienced players will explain your mistakes in details. That would take less effort than guessing what's wrong. I have no tools to do this. Then acquire tools, or use the next best thing - screenshots - but then you need to make sure to document everything meticulously.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on May 20, 2020 12:01:12 GMT
I will be very grateful if you describe, how disposable drone tanker can help you achieve 100km/s+ dV for NTR fleet on its way to invasion. Because I see absolutely no advantages in comparison with staging except a possibility to maneuver between fleets. You don't need to engineer staging into all ships in the fleet (advantage over vertical staging and horizontal staging), you have the extra propellant carry itself (advantage over horizontal staging AKA droptanks) AND you have flexibility regarding the amount of extra delta-v carried.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on May 19, 2020 21:43:26 GMT
You've just re-invented staging. Such a drone is just a fuel tank which could be attached to a ship, but with its own engines and control systems. It's a more flexible form of staging, just like tankers.
I'd divide delta-v into 4 tiers: - Crewed tankers - meant mainly to resupply fleets, crews complicate use for staging but can accompany fleets to resupply them between battles.
- Drone tankers - meant to accompany fleets and be discarded when spent providing nearly arbitrary amounts of extra delta-v without structural considerations of normal staging.
- Drop tanks (on warships) - meant to extend the range of warships, facilitate long range combat orbital maneuvers or get ships into CQB. Most likely popped once shooting starts, so use them or lose them
- Internal tanks - actual combat maneuvering delta-v reserve. Protected by armor.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on May 19, 2020 14:36:14 GMT
Simpler way would be just selecting all ships and asking them to perform minor reorientation. You can easily split off those that didn't turn. Still the dV price - albeit relatively small - is there, and my OCD won't allow that. Splitting the fleet in halves will force you to rely on up to log 2n automated join maneuvers performed by the AI - that's probably more expensive and will likely mess your schedule up something fierce. [laughs in standardized components and flat-panel polygonal hulls]
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on May 19, 2020 12:11:19 GMT
You get bigger part of your propellant exposed and vulnerable to a random hypersonic sand grain. This is not an issue if you are not planning to fly somewhere else after combat or spend most of your propellant preliminarily, but in any another case it is undesirable to risk large of your dV this way. I'm not sure it's a good idea to be planning to fly anywhere after getting into shooting fight. Alive & in stable orbit seems like a pretty good outcome already. And if you still have propellant, tanks, engine(s) and crew you can always cut off pieces of your ship to lighten it up. Anyway, it really depends on how much delta-v you are exposing this way, and you really want to burn the delta-v in droptanks first and will likely maneuver before shooting starts. Of all ship's components the propellant is by far the most problematic and self defeating to armour so deciding NOT to armour a fraction of your propellant seems like a valid option. Droptanks occupy an intermediate niche between tanker and internal tanks. Tankers get you between battles (and carry out logistic operations), droptanks get you into battle, internal tanks get you around during the battle. A transferable tank tanker would be an attractive way of solving the problem of replacing droptank delta-v. Instead of pumping propellant from built in tank (or even a droptank) into a warship, you'd just detach the tank from a tanker and hang it onto a warship. You'd still need some pumping to replenish internal tanks, but tanks are tanks are tanks so it would actually be lighter solution to transfer one whole tank than to pump the same amount of propellant between two. Huge armour mass budgets and distributed CMs suggest otherwise. The game generally doesn't have consistent warship doctrine or doctrines, and that's the problem. My sub-kt ships on which it's genuinely hard to add survivability features have better overall survivability than stock ships and that's not for the lack of trying. That's true. Stock ships generally have a lot of survivability features that are hard to make work or require significant sacrifices, but lack much cheaper and effective ones that would actually prevent the ones they do have from becoming pointless - weakest link and all. Spreading CMs along ship's long axis adds significant constraints on agility and only helps if the ship hasn't been cored along long axis, had all external modules shot off or lost power generation. Adding heavy armour doesn't help if ship is reduced just to its armoured volume by enemy fire. Meanwhile distributing power generation or adding backup power is cheap and doesn't hamper ship's performance. Adding additional weapon systems, especially light and low power ones like conventional cannon CIWS is pretty much free as well. With high thrust engines propellant doubles as armour AND force multiplier for your guns and missiles, and so on.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on May 19, 2020 10:50:19 GMT
Also, perhaps you had a fixed-thrust-vector ships that were relying solely on RCS to turn themselves?.. Obviously RCS has to be functional on such ship for being able to orient itself for burn. That's Ceres, you're limited to predefined stock fleet and everything in there turns using gimbals, so no. Simpler way would be just selecting all ships and asking them to perform minor reorientation. You can easily split off those that didn't turn. Note, komo , that game has a bug that makes it show damaged engine as functional, so that's the simplest way of spotting such issue with large drone or missile fleet. Delta-v cost is negligible and it beats visually inspecting all engine bells for damage (which may be some minor penetration or ablation). Very much this. For my own designs I build-in heavy rad-shielding into reactors themselves (both power and NTRs), though that's mostly to eliminate shadow-shields as layout consideration. It should also make fleet maneuvers easier, especially in combat. Servicing too.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on May 18, 2020 23:09:38 GMT
What generally happens is I run out of missiles and drones That means you're doing something wrong. Given that your ships aren't built for direct engagement, while enemy's are AND they have missiles and drones left, that shouldn't be surprising. Your commands won't help if the intercept is botched. Homing should suffice. Drones need to be given broadside order. Fixed gun drones like Stingers need to be oriented according to the firing solution - they need to lead the target just the right amount. Only broadside does that with fixed guns. Nose forward aims your drone directly at the enemy so it won't be aiming where its bullets need to be for the enemy to run into them. Homing tries to make the drone collide with the enemy, so it also doesn't work. Because you need to approach fast on the right trajectory to hit the target. Your missiles need both delta-v and time to make corrections as they start at laser's engagement range. Did all ships in your fleet have delta-v? Did all have working engines?
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on May 18, 2020 15:32:36 GMT
I was talking about missiles destroyed by laser fire before their final burn. I think this is due to heat dissipating by missile before finally being destroyed. Additional 13 MW laser brings much more than +13% of damage. 13MW laser is noticeably (although not dramatically) more efficient than 100MW one. Plus, you have 3 of those on Cutter. Then you have decoys contributing to missile orientation changes and running them out delta-v, AND you have two ships so now at least one is no longer shining straight at pointy nosecone. If ablation reaches the cap, you also have up to 4x more ablation with 4 lasers, although that's technically cheese.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on May 18, 2020 11:57:01 GMT
The frigate was taken down by flaks The truth is much more trivial. On high-speed engage flares have no time to fly far away enough to make Carrier safe, and it suffers splash damage a lot. True, that's the method you need to use to gold Interamnian Incident, and that's with flaks. I have, but I assumed Strikers on laser frig. Anyway, non-redundant aluminium radiators are the best idea ever. It is outclassing (seriously, 2.5kt gun range solo with reasonably designed, not one-off ship) but it only highlights how crap are stock designs. I think the AI now alternates between targets and you can mount many more effective kinetics than good lasers so you can actually take out multiple enemy munitions in parallel. Lasers are definitely worth having as PD, but not having multilayered kinetic PD (possibly supported by nuclear and drone/missile based PD grid) is a mistake. Decoys? Having multiple PD ships also prevents enemy missiles from only exposing their best armour profile. Cutter also has 60mm cannons as it's last line of PD.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on May 18, 2020 9:12:13 GMT
Sooo... What exactly are you doing? Maneuvering until the drones and missiles run out of dV, then launching my missiles fast and drones slow. And what exactly happens and how it goes wrong? How exactly do you imagine anyone will help you if no one knows what is happening in your game? We are not sitting beside you staring at your screen. Make some screenshots or a video, or at least describe in detail what you're doing, what is happening and how it doesn't work. Some points: - Save your delta-v against enemy missiles. Decoys can handle them just fine. Only worry about drones.
- Use your capital fleet's engines to create a decent velocity intercept, flaks alone don't have delta-v to make an effective run against even undefended target (due to flak bug), they need to have >1km/s velocity to begin with. Nukes don't care about closing velocity much (unless you set warheads to delayed and use them as KKVs first, nukes second), but they won't last against enemy PD if coming slow. High velocity also makes decoys less effective.
- Optionally send beam drones in first, concentrate on melting aluminium radiators (on frigate and carrier) to deprive enemy crew modules of cooling and cripple their PD (effectively taking out flares and laser). If you used beam drones rather than delta-v dance to deal with enemy drones it can be the same fleet.
- Hit the enemy frigate with flaks or mixed flak/nuke fleet (say, 20+20) fast enough so that missiles are coming in fast with nearly full tanks (if you separate early after the capital fleet builds velocity even small burn can put a lot of distance between your missiles and launching capships). That should take out frigate's reactor and kill the ship (and with it its laser AND railguns). Nukes may also melt aluminium radiators if there are any left and cause additional damage. Unless you do mixed missile/drone fleet, you need to take out enemy laser before you intercept with Stingers, else they will die quickly.
Remember that when it comes to directly impacting something (say, with missiles), parallel velocity is your friend, perpendicular velocity is NOT your friend.
- Hit the enemy fleet with Stingers. Unless something has gone VERY wrong and frigate still lives, concentrate fire on enemy decoy launcher as you want to make your missiles effective again (decoys can spoof all the ships in enemy fleet but Laser Frigate) and its explosion is likely to cause additional damage, killing the ship. As secondary targets concentrate on any explosive modules on orbital crafts (launchers, cannons, don't bother with engines as they are highly redundant and RTGs and are very small, so you are unlikely to achieve power generation kill either), and, if carrier is somehow still alive, on its weapons and engines.
- If something is still alive, series of missile intercepts should kill it.
- If not, you still have your capital fleet with its railguns and 60mm cannons (remember to broadside, neither of your ships is built for nose forward) barrelling down...
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on May 17, 2020 8:17:50 GMT
Thanks for the advice, but I'm still having trouble with it after a couple more days. I'm not entirely sure if it's the game or just me being that incompetent. It's depressing. Sooo... What exactly are you doing?
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