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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Feb 19, 2018 17:58:17 GMT
I could get SE to run on Wine on my laptop, albeit with some texturing problems. Windows PC is a safer bet, but since it's free, there is no harm in trying.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Feb 18, 2018 19:57:28 GMT
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Feb 18, 2018 19:55:42 GMT
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Feb 18, 2018 19:53:22 GMT
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Feb 18, 2018 12:23:17 GMT
BTW: What is a good standardized measuring stick to pit your ships against? I'm using gunship, but obviously you can do better than that - except without making it clear to others what are you talking about. I also suck at armour. My Deep Fryer is being used as a standard testing laserstar. Examples: [1] [2] [3]It was made for, and won, last summer's 5 Mc tournament: childrenofadeadearth.boards.net/post/26597/threadImage of stats: Code: Ok, this thing is scary. It may not seem like *that* much, but when you realize just how many you can field with this kind of mass and cost - and have them all blazing - it becomes downright terrifying. And it doesn't even come with particularly objectionable material use (other than ablative radshields and MPD electrode material - I don't think it would be up to task, but MPDs are tiny and whatever could be done to make them work wouldn't change the ship that much... ok the reactors look unrealistic as well).
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Feb 18, 2018 10:45:39 GMT
You have to be pretty thin-skinned to get mad over that. It sounds more humorous than insulting to me. I find it amusing as well, it's just my job to point out the obvious, obviously. At first I wanted to object, but then I looked at the nick and - at the risk of outstepping my own competences - well, yeah. There are a lot of potentially cool materials that are neglected because "muh hoboships!" This is the part I have problems with, the term hoboship it's not the most smooth but well, the part 'because "muh hoboships!"' is just mocking other players however benign one can assume the term hoboship to be. - The term is concise and I have seen it used in other places (steam workshop where there is series of "hobo %ship_type" spacecraft optimized for low cost)
- No one in other places seems to mind, for example RPG players don't seem to have any problems when someone refers to adventurers in general as "murderhobos"
- The term was used half-mockingly, but in a rather lighthearted manner - I had my ships called "art" but even though I'm not sure if it wasn't done mockingly, I don't care nearly enough to raise this subject, conversely there have been much harder (and personal) rubs on this forum that were seemingly taken in a stride.
The bottom line is that there is no point getting your anything in a twist over someone's perceived tone on the net. It's easy to misinterpret, easy to overreact and if someone is a genuine asshole out to insult people they'll make sure they get through to you if you miss it at first.
Mass minimalization is just a fancy term for cost optimization Only when using the same materials. I've never seen anyone performing cost optimization using Ni-P microlattice, basalt fibre or RCC. Anyway, building a ship is multivariate optimization, and ideally you should strive to push as close to mass (because of industrial output and logistics involving in injecting an invasion fleet into desired trajectory and then into orbit at destination), cost (duh) and manpower (not implemented, but fairly critical) budgets as possible. If you churn out hoboships to the point where you saturate mass and manpower budgets, while barely scratching the cost one, it means that you could potentially have made much more powerful and durable ships, presumably conserving more of this manpower and mass (and presumably not having people do absolutely everything to avoid getting stuffed into a potassium can hotglued to an engine pumping fluorine into raging inferno contained in paper-thin diamond shell - slowly graphitizing when in use - using lithium turbopumps). Meanwhile cost optimization has been done to death, buried, excavated, beaten some more, excavated again, resurrected, shot dead and beaten again past the point of liquefication. Other sorts of optimization? Not so much. And as a result there are tons of interesting materials (and potentially designs relying on them to be effective) virtually untouched because they are expensive.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Feb 17, 2018 19:51:55 GMT
I am currently on my first playthrough of the Children of a Dead Earth campaign, and I've been stuck for a while trying to create my own ship class to win Vesta Overkill with. What I term the Chaser-class Orbital Combat Craft is the culmination of many a trial and error. I can use 4 of these in Vesta Overkill. It's a frontal-engagement boat with 4 stock 13 MW railguns. It only has enough power to fire 3 at once but I added the fourth for redundancy. I found that having multiple small and cheap spacecraft was a better way to go about solving the mission, each with a strong armor scheme to help it stay survivable. The huge disk you see in the middle of a ship is a radiation shield I used to try and protect the radiators. The armor scheme I devised to protect against nukes and kinetics. Since the ship is an OCC I didn't bother giving it much Delta-V, but adding 4 600-t drop tanks boosts its Delta-v, which is the variant I have here. That's actually a very respectable delta v, especially, for such a specialized, defensively oriented design. Why not full cone on the front? Anyway, I'll post my own core module design that has proven quite successful and can quite comfortably solo Vesta just siting there and waiting for intercepts, without launching anything of its own (although not without some micromanagement): It actually has a bit of a turbulent history, as it first started off as heavily modified laser frigate (back in the previous version) to beat Main Belt Extraction (which became my quick and dirty test scenario), which quickly got modified to carry a redundant array of diminuitive coilguns (core 60MW sandcasters, about 15 at first) on the nose, use partial armour and MethLOx RCS, then, with newest patch, got full armour back again, pentagonal armour, failed to beat Vesta, (which I beat using another one of my ships mixed into half of the default fleet - doing poorly, and only making it through zombieship trick, as I ended up with my gutted custom ship and mobility killed missile schooner IIRC left), got extensive weapon and engine overhaul, roll thrusters, NTR based RCS and recently conversion to hexagonal armour (at which point it could already beat Vesta without substantial effort). I have then created re-corified version of that by replacing everything with core components while keeping everything I learned - while much less effective it turns out to still be able to sit out Vesta by itself although if doing particularly badly (read: losing too many point defences and getting a couple of Devastators blow in its face point-blank) it may end up looking a lot worse for the wear. If doing well, it should survive without penetrations or damaged internal components, with only some damaged radiators and turrets. Some notes: - Ship is built for nose forward configuration, but also agility - in some situations it may pay off to switch to broadside or use scatter for a few seconds and then back to nose forward.
- If using anything but nose forward it needs to conserve RCS propellant by manually toggling RCS - without RCS it will drop to around Gunship's performance.
- The armour is relatively thin, but the ship can easily tank some fire in nose forward orientation without taking damage. Alternatively it can sidestep things like incoming drone barrages (at the expense of oxidizer reserves).
- The RCS system consists of pairs of rings on the aft and nose that can apply the same amount of torque in opposite directions. On the nose, where there was no room for two rings at the same offset along axis four rings were used with middle two rotating in one direction and external two in the opposite one. Main engines are still gimballed so RCS is not required for manoeuvres, it merely allows much faster ones.
- RCS system also includes 18 MethLOx "afterburners" augmenting forward acceleration.
- Small decoy launcher may look like a complete misunderstanding on something with such heat signature, but the ship comes with auxiliary power RTGs that can keep the crew cans and the complement of 60mm CIWS powered, so the reactors (all 5 of them) can be shut down and their radiators folded for massive reduction in signature.
- Flak coilguns are mostly manifestation of my longing for some proper, heavy calibre cannons, but not wanting to mount slow, heavy, expensive, inaccurate and easily destroyed (read: useless) 32mm coilguns. They can still be used as laser baits or for triggering incoming nukes and in a situation when they actually get to hit something, they will pack some punch.
- I am not sure of if missile blast launchers are worth keeping TBH, but at least they don't cause reorientations into vulnerable positions.
- The ship is built with variety of armament and flexibility in mind, it may need some micro and can't fire everything it has at once.
- OTOH it can fire a lot of stuff and can benefit from aggressive intercepts (but not around Vesta as it may leave some missile fleets unable to catch up in orbit)
- The crew requirements are hideously large due to large amount of equipment.
- The crew compartments are mounted close to centre of mass, while the reactors are split into two groups one near the nose and one on the aft - ship can survive some nasty spins (like after getting slapped by devastators).
- Ship is built to fit into Main Belt Extraction budgets and to have serviceable delta-v (better than Gunship) - non-core variants have MPDs to extend their range, stronger NTRs and NTR rather than MethLOx RCS, but I had to strip this all out when corifying the ship.
Vesta, decent outcome:
Edit:Can handle Vesta with hard campaign mod as well.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Feb 17, 2018 16:42:00 GMT
Seriously, though, other than exploiting insane corner cases most folks on these boards probably play the game more as intended than myself. I'm just in for plausible space battles and cool ships. Still, I do hope to coax at least few into exploring both lower tech engineering (not relying on cheap and light multi-GW power) and what can be done with right, rather than cheap materials - I'm interested in the results. Well if you're trying to get other players to explore things that you are interested in how about avoiding things like: There are a lot of potentially cool materials that are neglected because "muh hoboships!", hell even RCCs main vice is that it's hideously expensive Insulting people is not a good way of convincing them to join you. Pray tell where have I insulted anyone?
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Feb 17, 2018 13:36:40 GMT
It's likely simplified due to armor plates having a wide variety of possible shapes. There's curved plates, flat plates and triangular plates at least. Flat surface area * depth is a convenient simplification, and it's fairly accurate if you assume a capital ship will have no more than a few cm thick plates. You'd also have to take the more complex shape into account in damage modeling, otherwise the mass of damaged armor would not match the accurately computed mass of the armor plate. That's why calculating on per poly basis should be good approach - frustum is delimited by flat surfaces and a simple shape to calculate, the game already has to deal with polys, and it would make mechanics and presentation reflect each other exactly - hence WYSIWYG.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Feb 17, 2018 11:48:16 GMT
Why not just take frustum of each poly (or filled part of a poly) of a layer, calculate its volume exactly, accumulate and get exact mass from computed volume? Would be the ultimate WYSIWYG too.
(That's for in-game calculation to replace the current, faulty one.)
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Feb 17, 2018 11:41:29 GMT
Barium salts (Green- not in the game) Is Barium Nitrate not a barium salt?It's not I don't know why I didn't google it first. It is and it should burn green - slightly pale, yellowish green. In general many colours - both tracers and bulk material, seem really off - alkali metals, although there is really no sane way of using them in any structural capacity, should also look metallic and lustrous, especially in space environment.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Feb 17, 2018 11:33:40 GMT
I think a collection of observation what is important and what works good in which capacity would be especially valuable for potential armour materials (not just complete armour setups - we have a thread for that, but individual materials and their potential niches plus individual properties and their value and pitfalls for use in armour), because for other application we can at least get immediate feedback from the editor.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Feb 17, 2018 9:12:17 GMT
So use Nickel Phosphorus Microlattice for everything? There are a lot of potentially cool materials that are neglected because "muh hoboships!", hell even RCCs main vice is that it's hideously expensive Meanwhile, physics stays constant and I don't expect, say, osmium to suddenly get lighter if everyone starts using it to armour their ships.
Physics reigns supreme, COADE is built with full reverence to this fact and we really should all be building featherweight ships rather than hoboships. Physics is a bitch, he don't reign over me! If I want to make my armor out of light osmium, I will. See here: Yeah, about that - partial tiles really do need to be rounded up at all times (as long as they are rounded to begin with).
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Feb 16, 2018 18:41:55 GMT
Your opinion of: "People who are not playing the game like me are wrong." has been noted. Well, if they weren't wrong they would be playing just like me, duh. Seriously, though, other than exploiting insane corner cases most folks on these boards probably play the game more as intended than myself. I'm just in for plausible space battles and cool ships. Still, I do hope to coax at least few into exploring both lower tech engineering (not relying on cheap and light multi-GW power) and what can be done with right, rather than cheap materials - I'm interested in the results.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Feb 16, 2018 11:52:58 GMT
The economy is by far the sketchiest part of COADE: - material pricing is often dubious - for example deuterium and hydrogen deuteride being cheaper than hydrogen is plain wrong and even with unlimited and precise additive manufacturing I doubt we will be able to layer bulk quantities of diamond we just can't now cheaper than RCC we can already produce in bulk quantities.
- Relative lack of engineering expenses is off as well - armour, which is just dumb layers of material is currently by far more expensive than precision made weapons and engines.
- Then there is the fact that economy is fluid - once there is sufficient demand for something that can be manufactured, someone will find a way to mass produce it cheaply, OTOH if the demand is for natural resource, it will get more expensive
Meanwhile, physics stays constant and I don't expect, say, osmium to suddenly get lighter if everyone starts using it to armour their ships. Physics reigns supreme, COADE is built with full reverence to this fact and we really should all be building featherweight ships rather than hoboships.
Just saying.
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