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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Feb 26, 2018 20:33:55 GMT
And hardness, and toughness. But as we aren't calculating endurance loads (heavens forbid, half the railguns in the game would rent themselves asunder in a short burst of fire if endurance were considered) and barrel wear doesn't exist (Also something that would be a much larger problem for railguns than conventional)... both of those tend to not matter quite so much. And they also don't seem to matter much for penetrating targets either at least as implimented. (Using hard tungsten projectiles doesn't seem to show any notably better performance over soft aluminum shots) At the usual railgun projectile speeds, hardness matters much less than momentum. Chemically powered guns should, of course, make use of armor piercing properties. One more thing for the list! At typical railgun/coilgun velocities the impact details vary between resembling firing a squirt gun into a pool of liquid and firing a nitroglycerin squirt gun into a pool of liquid. Mechanical properties no longer matter.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Feb 26, 2018 20:08:52 GMT
I tried to model our fusion rockets using the NTR module rather than the combustion rocket module, which allows more interesting designs. You can vary the amount of reaction mass fed into the engine, allowing higher acceleration designs without having to create a new chemical reaction. And, as a nice side effect, no more touchy fusile monoprops.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Feb 26, 2018 20:05:02 GMT
I am still not seeing it. In-game tanks are pill shaped and from geometry it would be obvious that the closer the tank to a sphere the more efficient it is at storing its contents (barring further considerations such as wanting to then pack those tanks in a big armoured sodacan, but those don't affect tank's own mass ratio), so the closer to the spherical, the better mass ration. Unless it's something to do with slosh baffles and water hammers, elongated=effective is plain wrong. It has to do with the pressure of the fluid and hoop stress of the tank. Smaller radius (i.e. more curvature) is better at withstanding internal pressure. A sphere has the most volume to surface area; this leads to it having less curvature than a cylinder of the same volume, and so it needs to be thicker to withstand the pressure. The increased thickness overwhelms the raw surface area savings and causes the sphere to have a worse mass ratio. It would be nice to have toroidal tanks; those should be right by the ultimate limit for an extended cylinder, since the end caps disappear into each other. Ok, but I would still like to see some sources - the claim is extraordinary and requires corresponding standard of evidence. Also, there has to be some cutoff point where losses due to volume to surface ratio exceed gains from reduced stresses.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Feb 26, 2018 18:50:05 GMT
we already have those, but the EMP effect from nukes is not modeled into the game Probably because nuclear EMPs as we know them are dependant on atmospheric effects. AFAIK nukes in space only give off X-rays, neutron radiation and fission fragments. Edit: almost forgot Earth's magnetic field! Plus anything space-worthy needs to be rad-hard anyway. idk, but I feel like the bubble would have to cover the entire ship or it would collide with stuff Bigger on the inside... We are shaping spacetime after all. I wonder if it would be possible to sculpt self-replicating entities into the geometry of the spacetime itself - nothing says FU like making the entire offending universe incapable of supporting anything resembling normal matter because of spacetime eating gray goo. I might have gone a bit Greg Egan (or at least Jacek Dukaj) with this one... Extendable MELEE weapons. Yeah, you heard me. Like a collapsable, micron-thick sheet of some sort of advanced nano-material that extends to three times the length of the ship and when it flies close by the enemy, it slices it in two! Does it count if you mount them on a gun fired or blast launched payload? (Or a blast launched payload fired by a gun/blast fired one...) I've had certain... successes in that regard.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Feb 26, 2018 5:34:16 GMT
Hi, new to the forum, I just reopened the game for the first time since 1.0 and now all of my old designs (and it seems like the designs here, at least the 1 gig powerplant) no longer work. Did I just plug in some values wrong? It's telling me the rods are overheating. Are any of these compatible with the current version? With each version there have been less exploitable loopholes in the simulation (like supercoilguns sneering at conservation of energy). At some point mandatory safety margins between nominal module usage parameters and materials failing catastrophically were also introduced. In effect many older, hyper optimized designs won't work any more (this even includes some core modules - for example, 286mm coilgun is no longer with us - it laughed in the face of physics, but physics laughed last, it seems). AE catalogue has been updating to reflect those changes so make sure to grab the newest version.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Feb 25, 2018 16:48:51 GMT
On my side I would love to see the exact armour scheme and internals - I assume that individual layers are partial because getting this sort of sensible delta v with extensive full armour scheme is a non-starter.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Feb 23, 2018 19:36:40 GMT
I believe Nuclear Salt Water, as in the Uranium Salt Water rockets. Water with a high proportion of dissolved uranium salts, such that with careful pumping and nozzle design you can propel your ship with a continuous criticality event. This is generally considered to be kind of nuts, but the creator (name of Dr Zubrin, IIRC) thinks it's a practical method for space travel. Squirting this at someone would not be a way to endear yourselves to them, naturally. Fun bit of trivia: StanisΕaw Lem described NSW soakers in his "Eden" back when he wrote it in 1958. I don't remember enough details to determine if the ship itself was an NSWR, but if it was, then he would have beaten Zubrin to this idea by a fair margin.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Feb 22, 2018 20:49:34 GMT
Regarding deuterium: Apparently it penetrates less into metals, but the difference isn't that pronounced. You can also store and separate heavy water first, but that merely means you'll have to store deuterium/HD that is only slightly less problematic than normal hydrogen, plus get through the trouble of separating heavy water from bulk quantities of water - still seems like far more expensive option. Diamond isn't that hard to make, just very energy intensive and slow. See chemical vapor deposition. You can feasibly coat things in a layer of diamond as thick as you like. Large-scale manufacturing and cheap heat/electricity (like solar concentration in space) would bring costs down significantly. Ok, I defnitely didn't expect CVD to work for diamond given that it's merely metastable in anything resembling normal conditions - I would have expected leisurely deposition at low to moderate pressures to just form graphite or some other allotrope instead (I definitely do feel better about my diamond armour layers and barrel bracing/armour/heatsinks now). Carbon is everywhere, no problem with that. Still, at this point we have both RCC and diamond that are grown slowly while being fed a lot of energy. There is still no reason for RCC to be significantly more expensive. AFAIK tankage is best made of VCS. As for engines, as much as I love them compact and hot, they'll graphitize when made out of diamond. Also, A 10 GW reactor and giant laser and hundreds of missiles cost peanuts, and what breaks the budget is... an armor layer of aramid fiber. I think that summarizes one of the key problems with the economy system rather well.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Feb 22, 2018 8:02:42 GMT
I think this is simply an oversight in terms of stock pricing which might need a cost override, since it's almost impossible to find a single contiguous piece of diamond big enough to make an armor plate on a spaceship, let alone an entire nuclear reactor casing (and that's not even mentioning decomposition of the diamond once heated). Precisely. Most diamond is microscopic particles and good luck making anything with properties anywhere close to to what we have in game from them. Abundance should be abundance of usable form and making diamonds is going to be tricky because of pressures involved. Meanwhile, making RCC, while not exactly straightforward, isn't nearly as extreme for spacefaring civilization. Chemically deuterium and protium (standard hydrogen) are pretty much the same thing - bonds and all, because chemistry is almost exclusively determined by the electron shells, the volume occupied by nucleus is approximately nil compared to the whole atom and gravity is negligible at those scales (you'd probably need somewhere like surface of a cooled down neutron star to experience things like gravitochemistry). There are some minor chemical differences because the difference in mass is so extreme for a pair of isotopes, but they only really matter in very fine-tuned chemical systems (heavy water isn't good for you) - unless I get very concrete papers explicitly saying otherwise, from storage tank's perspective regular hydrogen, deuterium and hydrogen deuteride are going to be the same nasty crap seeping everywhere, leaking out and making cracks in the process. Meanwhile to have deuterium you need to first gather or make vastly more hydrogen and store it, then isolate deuterium and also store it. To have hydrogen deuteride, you first need to have and store deuterium, make the right deuterated chemical with it, react them with the right regular hydrogen containing chemical and store the result (which is also a kind of hydrogen). Yes.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Feb 21, 2018 19:02:23 GMT
The main issue with this notion of mass vs cost optimisation is that all cost optimisation ships already shave off as much mass as possible. Rather i think the point that is more worthwhile and fun to play/test is dont shy away from experimental and crazy(albeit expensive) material design as it can yield interesting results. I for example once made a hundreds of millions of credits ship simply by wanting to use that one weird element that makes the armour green. I think the nice thing with cost optimisation is that fundamentally if you are testing ship AX10 vs ship BX1 and only mass is focused on it does not equal out very well. For me cost optimisation has been first and foremost always about how trying to specialise entire single ships to counter enemy fleets was fun but made for some Frankenstein bastardisation of any form of regulated ship doctrine. Instead say Ship B is 10$, this meant i could optimise 5 2$ versions of ship A and see how that works out. My main gripe with cost optimization is that, in a game essentially dedicated to modelling what would and wouldn't work in space combat and modelling large number of materials for this purpose, it injects a layer of arbitrary assumptions and renders half of those materials impractical. Even base on solar system abundances some prices are dubious at best - I don't think deuterium or hydrogen deuteride are any easier to store than plain hydrogen (and it will take some serious citations to convince me otherwise - deuterium IS hydrogen, after all, and while it does differ chemically from normal hydrogen more than most isotopes do, it's not like those extra neutrons will catch on tank's atoms to prevent penetration and resulting leaks and embrittlement, or anything like that), so both are going to be VASTLY more price-y than plain old H 2; similarly, I don't think RCC - which can already be produced in bulk - is going to be cheaper than bulk quantities of diamond. Meanwhile mass is completely non-arbitrary so it makes more sense to try to find out what's the best thing you can make out of given amount of stuff. Another good, non-arbitrary criterion is manpower - while the specifics of what should be considered necessary crew are not agreed upon, there doesn't seem to be much doubt regarding what needs crew and ships generally need a somewhat balanced set of components. It seems both more fun and more interesting considering game's stated purpose to first try and build the best thing possible (per given finite quantity of material) and only then economize.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Feb 20, 2018 20:17:11 GMT
Real barrels aren't made from monolithic materials, there's no options in-game for different forgings or heat treatment, or work hardening. Or taper, or barrel fins, or multibarrel assemblies, or...
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Feb 20, 2018 19:54:36 GMT
Still having problems if I also prioritize some modules on non-priority targets.
Also, I would rather have my lasers help Michael Bay the Siloship and Cutter, and only then worry about Stingers and Hellfires.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Feb 20, 2018 19:29:34 GMT
Well, a railgun's EM field can't really tell armature from rails either - all that really keeps rails from bending outwards or flying apart like a grotesquely large, electrically powered flak is their own sturdiness and barrel bracing.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Feb 20, 2018 19:10:52 GMT
- Added oxygen MPDs. This gives a second option for a realistically-cheap propellant that you can get everywhere in the system. OH, no you don't.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Feb 19, 2018 19:45:33 GMT
In other words, DRM is largely counterproductive for games, and a waste of effort for music. And I could bet a fair amount of money that the effect varies as follows: - Smaller/indie games (like CoADE) gain proportionally more from the effect (they can reach much more players through added publicity than lose through piracy) than big and widely hyped productions (that may even lose sales)
- Good games, especially unexpectedly so (for example sequels to failed or at least controversial part in their respective series), can gain a lot, while bad games (especially unexpectedly so) may lose out
It seems that those who profit the most from DRM are big studios that play it safe (no ambitious but risky experiments) and often push crappy shovelware and, of course, DRM makers. Do we really want to benefit those at the expense of ambitious, independent and undiscovered game devs?
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