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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Mar 25, 2018 9:01:48 GMT
𝕭𝖔𝖔𝖒𝖈𝖍𝖆𝖈𝖑𝖊 Can we use modded explosive for this challenge? If yes the challenge would be much more plausible due to the OPness of these modded explosive compare to those stock explosive Eh, you can always pre-accelerate your bullets with your engines if you need more oomph or shorter time to target. You don't need to contend with Mm lasers in campaign and those would be the most problematic here. Admittedly limiting yourself to core modules in Vesta could pose some challenges here - partly due to missile fleets and siloship's engagement range (both because having to shoot down fleets of nukes point-blank with CIWS is scary and because Ms Overkill is an asshole and likes to park any missiles you have missed appointments with in weird orbits, making aggressive intercepts less viable), partly due to sheer amount of lag 60mm produces.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Mar 24, 2018 20:28:45 GMT
Seems like an interesting challenge. Guns have a few things going for them - they scale down to low power and up to large payloads very gracefully (and you can make some *very* interesting payloads if you can go large) and can easily provide huge volumes of fire. Plus, if you find exit velocity inadequate, you can make up for it with sufficiently aggressive intercept. Sure, guns against highly optimized laser stars would be insanely tough, but against stock designs they should do. What about putting weapons on shells? I reckon that blast launchers or even powered ones are very much in this challenge's spirit, but what about putting turrets on engine-less shells? I have a more or less self-stabilizing PD shell with pistol-sized turrets (and a nuke). Sounds interesting. I would love to see that. I honestly think that the turrets are going to be more effective than the nuke if you get the initial velocity to be high enough. Try putting the turrets (3-4) as far behind the center of mass as possible (without blocking their line of fire) - if the shell approaches the target drone swarm nose first, any torque resulting from asymmetric recoil will cause the turret causing the torque to lose line to target and the turrets on the opposite side to apply torque in the opposite direction. Not the most reliable stabilization, but with tiny, fast tracking turrets it should be more than enough for a lifetime of a cannon fired nuke.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Mar 24, 2018 17:52:45 GMT
Ships will lose power generation even if they still have functioning reactors with radiators if they lose the reactor(s) that were placed first.
Case: A small ship (around 1kt) with two 1.04MW reactors (stock), one near aft, one in the nose, and two rings of 2x20 TiC radiators (also stock) x3 and x1, respectively near aft and near nose. Ship consistently loses power generation when the aft gets cut-off by gunfire separating propulsion from the surviving section and destroying/sepearating the rear reactor.
No significant spin or crew killed notifications after the event, but the surviving section shows as white despite having intact crew module, turreted weapons and powerplant.
In general the logic deciding when a ship (of any kind) has been mission killed in combat is grossly overzealous.
Edit: I think it has more to do with ships' bisection than just losing reactors, but either way it's bad.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Mar 24, 2018 17:35:50 GMT
Launched ships/munitions don't unfold radiators when launching - they are already fully unfolded.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Mar 24, 2018 11:45:45 GMT
AtomHeartDragon Thanks for playing through and sharing your thoughts. With Steam Workshop support nowadays, I could very well add (and take submissions/suggestions for) core module ships to replace the vanilla fleets with ease, along with custom AI, and share it all as one download. IMO core module only overhauls of core ship types, conserving delta-v, budgets and overall idea would make a good start. I can (and actually like to - apart from engines) work with core modules, but typically end up with things that are very different from stock designs (more effective, though), more crowded, and suffer a bit from variety pack syndrome. I would love to see Sentinel used in a mission, if only because it's an interesting concept, but the joke here is that at very high intercept velocities in orbit roboteching is not just possible but inevitable. Basically, you have two ships firing their guns while also passing each other at velocity that exceeds or at least is comparable with their weapons' exit velocities. To even hope to score hits they must lead each other by significant amount and, obviously, both are leading in the opposite direction. This means that there is inevitably going to be a large angle between the direction a ship fires in and direction it is fired upon from, which is not-very-fun if all your armour faces the same direction as your main battery: (Not that it would help much against barrage of combustion gun or large coilgun heavy slugs travelling at over 30km/s anyway.) Maybe a Phalanx or an Escort Carrier used defensively would work - a screen of drones setting up a blanket of defensive fire? Aww. I will drop it then (and restore my own backup of levels.txt) - was fun while it lasted.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Mar 18, 2018 19:32:22 GMT
Ok, my own 60mm variant seems to hit the CM when aiming for its radiator, but it's a bit faster and slightly less accurate - OTOH the accuracy shouldn't matter if the trajectory extends through the CM at some point.
In general, if wanting to actually just shoot the depot to pieces up close and personal retrograde intercept seems to be the optimal solution - if you manage to match orbits properly you get multiple free passes in quick succession in case you don't succeed the first time around and you don't have to waste deltav or risk dipping into Neptune when trying to phase an orbit this low.
My preferred solution is to burn to fling my fleet up, near or beyond the orbit of Triton when crossing the depot's orbital plane, plane change around apoapsis to match depot's orbital plane retrograde while braking to fall way down towards Neptune, manually burn at periapsis to circularize as much as possible, then let the computer match orbit once it is easy. Then keep flying by and taking potshots until successful.
This approach allowed to me to beat the mission with custom 11kt methane tanker and 1kt conventional gun monitor while spending only 12.2km/s (leaving them in nice, stable orbit with 3.29 and 4.48 km/s still in tanks) - it took full 3 days, though, due to initial far-flung bi-elliptic manoeuvre.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Mar 17, 2018 23:12:38 GMT
On the Surface of Giants: The Methane Depot is now defended by a Sentinel. I thought of using the Laser Station for this but it wouldn't be a consistent threat since it lacks all-round weapons coverage and stations can't reorient to face incoming opponents. Unfortunately Sentinel doesn't seem to work particularly well for this mission as it's extremely orientation dependent and, like all core ships, it's relatively sluggish. Given that the mission is set in extremely low orbit around a very massive body, even careful, prograde intercepts will typically still yield closing rates measured in km/s and full head-on retrograde intercept (which seems to be by far the best option) will result in a flyby at around 37km/s. Ability to quickly and accurately put a dense stream of kinetics in attacker's way seems like a must for defenders here. Also, the AI should ignore range, since it's meaningless at velocities involved.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Mar 15, 2018 23:26:18 GMT
I got to closest distance 54 m, intercept velocity 3.78 km/s, yet I've got the same problem..there are some modules which I cannot prioritize and missiles just pass through without seeking the target. Time window is still 10 seconds which is not enough with stock cannon to destroy very much. I saw in gameplay videos that the crew module could be targeted, and in a few shots it was done. With something less accurate than stock 60mm targetting the crew module radiator should do the trick, not sure if it will work with 60mm cannon.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Mar 15, 2018 23:15:58 GMT
I am definitely having fun with this mod (just beat the propellant depot mission, I might need to backtrack to Ceres, as I beat it before installing it), even though it broke my favourite quick testing scenario by drastically reducing fleet budgets. If you mean core-module-only designs that would be good as enemies, then maybe. A tiny high-acceleration ship carrying the nuke cannon might be funny. Core module ships or even overhauls of core ships sticking to the same concept, budget and maintaining at least as good vital parameters (deltav, acceleration, etc.) could definitely be made more interesting and deadly than what we have in game although some core modules (nuke cannon, HE cannon, 34mm heavy coilgun, etc.) make it hard to find any legitimate use for them, apart from bundling them up with bursting charge and sending on an intercept with hostile fleet.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Mar 15, 2018 18:52:16 GMT
Seems like an interesting challenge. Guns have a few things going for them - they scale down to low power and up to large payloads very gracefully (and you can make some *very* interesting payloads if you can go large) and can easily provide huge volumes of fire. Plus, if you find exit velocity inadequate, you can make up for it with sufficiently aggressive intercept.
Sure, guns against highly optimized laser stars would be insanely tough, but against stock designs they should do.
What about putting weapons on shells? I reckon that blast launchers or even powered ones are very much in this challenge's spirit, but what about putting turrets on engine-less shells? I have a more or less self-stabilizing PD shell with pistol-sized turrets (and a nuke).
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Mar 14, 2018 19:24:12 GMT
RIP
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Mar 13, 2018 22:16:54 GMT
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Mar 13, 2018 21:47:50 GMT
Does anyone have a reasonable approximation of W54 (or whatever is the smallest known nuclear device) they could share?
I'm on a quest to purge my armoury of Holy Hand Grenades.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Mar 11, 2018 17:52:18 GMT
You make a long radiator, as thin and narrow as limits.txt lets you - preferably out of osmium, but you may want to experiment with different materials if you want, for example some extra length at the expense of destructive potential or really need to make your rod lighter. My current rod is segmented, 5m long (so a pair is 10m) and made of osmium. You stick a pair of those on the tinniest dummy RTG you can make - this is your projectile (and it is already quite nice thing to mutilate ships with if you put it in a fast firing turret). Since you will be sticking it in a blast launcher which you will then want to make as flat as possible, you may want to wrap it in thin, but slightly spaced layer of whatever to bloat the cross-section and improve the launcher's aspect ratio (essentially a blast launcher sabot) as you will want to put your launcher on a payload. The launcher itself should be relatively minimal - around 1g of explosive of your choice wrapped in whatever works - I recommend UHMWPE fiber as it seems to be the lightest option (launchers don't expose wall thickness but it's there and varies for different materials). 1km should be a decent ballpark estimate for engagement range at typical gun/blast velocities. You can put this launcher, rearwards, on a simple laser-resistant shell if you just want to mutilate ships with rods, but prefer to fire them from clustered spinal cannons or blast launchers (without fairing the rods will collide, start tumbling and spread - unless you specifically aim to create a giant cloud of death you might want a more focused solution), but for a true explosively launched unfolding annular rod of death experience, you will want to put those launchers in pairs along the payload's axis, rotated so that each pair creates a pair of opposing edges of a polygon of your choice (since a pair cannot self-intersect this avoids collisions unless something nudges the whole arrangement). Since you already have a relatively heavy payload, you can spice it up with some juicy filling - flak, nuke, forward launched penetrators or all of the above. If you go for nuke and put enough forward launched mass on it (or launch the nuke itself backwards) to let the rods get ahead of it, you might be able to inject the nuke into the ship through the opening created by the rods and flash it from inside, but I never had any conclusive success with that. Serve by firing out of a cannon or blast launcher (missiles with blast launchers never seem to work as intended for me).
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Mar 11, 2018 11:46:50 GMT
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