acatalepsy
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Post by acatalepsy on Sept 28, 2016 13:47:36 GMT
The thing I'm most confused about is how the missiles still manage to miss the enemy ship to the rear when that ship is dead in space due a damaged nuclear rocket.
As long as my missiles still have delta-V left and are homing in on the enemy ship, they definitely should not miss to the rear of the ship. In fact, if the missiles have sufficient delta-V in their tank, then their acceleration should be high enough to overcome any evasive maneuvering of the target ship, correct? You probably had some lateral velocity relative to the target when you did the initial intercept, and the missile seeker isn't smart enough to compensate for it. This is why evasive maneuvers that expend tiny amounts of dV are so effective at avoiding missiles. See the missile behavior thread for more discussion of this, well, behavior. Also, anyone know what the proximity delay detonation button does? Why would that be useful? Nuclear missile payloads have a set detonation range, which controls how far from their target they explode. But since nuclear missile damage is closely related to detonation range (the lower, the better), it can be worth it to delay if you think you're going to get a direct hit. I haven't experimented enough with them to say for sure whether it's actually useful in any particular case.
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acatalepsy
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Post by acatalepsy on Sept 28, 2016 13:03:15 GMT
Whats going on? once again stuck super hard and I feel like im beating my head into a wall. the orbit shows the flyby, just let me do it! I'm guessing that you are trying to do this with a ship that has low acceleration, and the intercept takes place deep in Neptune's gravity well. You can't do the flyby in time because, by the time you've completed the maneuver, you've passed the flyby point. My solution go this problem was to convert the privateer to a (light) drone carrier, and use a small number of much-higher-acceleration drones to conduct the final intercept. The same thing should work in principle with the sniper missiles, though you'll want to get an intercept rather than a flyby.
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acatalepsy
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Post by acatalepsy on Sept 28, 2016 12:55:21 GMT
I think the question of resistance to damage, especially laser damage (radiators, as far as I know, are essentially impossible to meaningfully armor against kinetics) is probably one of the key factors in the output temp/efficiency tradeoff. My current thinking is that maneuvers (ie, rolling) and redundancy are more important than armor, and you can drop armor and radiator thickness in order to include sufficient backups. But this is my completely unscientific wild-ass guesswork here.
In other news, I've been using diamond radiators to good effect, being reasonably lightweight and having excellent output for the very high temperatures I tend to run my reactors at. Since they're so related, thoughts on radiator design?
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acatalepsy
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Post by acatalepsy on Sept 28, 2016 12:43:50 GMT
So my views on how this shakes out are still evolving somewhat. My initial impressions of missile effectiveness have been revised upward; twenty to fifty flak missiles is a small price to pay for crippling any combat ship, as they tend to do if they intercept the target. Also, my estimations of laser effectiveness must be downgraded somewhat - my Advanced Gunship, firing its nine 60 MW lasers, could only take down twenty or so from a standing start. Also, heavy laser use largely precludes effective decoys.
On the other hand, there is still a great deal I'm unsure of regarding lasers. The unreasonable effectiveness of flak missiles against lasers is, I think, related to their tapering and wonder if the same interception logic that renders them capable of intercepting a maneuvering target also renders them vulnerable to laser defenses. Alternatively, a "buddy system" and mutual coverage might work just as well. I'm also still unsure about how lasers shake out in gun duels. My current experience suggests that they can do a great deal of damage from a long range, but this might be because their targets didn't properly armor their components or evade (roll). If lasers aren't as effective as I think in gun duels, then laser-centric defenses could become a mass tax for missile defense.
Finally, there are other PD options I haven't explored in depth yet, including drones, countermissiles, flak cannons, dedicated defense railguns, nukes (!) and more. I'm not willing to say we need decoys as a solution to missile spam just yet.
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acatalepsy
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Post by acatalepsy on Sept 28, 2016 5:14:18 GMT
I've been having some fun with nuclear reactors. This design, you'll note, is much less massive, much less expensive, has a higher outlet temperature (good for more efficient radiators), less radiation, narrower profile (for shadow shield, if it's even necessary), and produces a more than three times the power...at the cost of nearly halving efficiency, and putting out a staggering 1.61 Gigawatts of waste heat. You're not gonna be hiding anything packing one of these babies with a Nitrocellulose flare, that's for sure! Still, that's a metric shit-ton of energy to play with. If you've already resigned yourself to lighting up every IR sensor in a parsec, why not go all in? Throw in a 150 MW, 10mm railgun? Why not? Giant death lasers? Yes, please. It's based mostly on this design, by Tuna-Fish. The internals of his and my designs are available by following the links. Tuna's comments were thusly: "If I increased the output temp even more, I could have made it even better to the point of needing just a single radiator, but I wanted to keep output above 60MW to fit my legacy designs, and once I accidentally hit 666MW thermal, I had to keep it for entirely juvenile reasons. Other findings is that you can min-max the reactor size to be really tiny by increasing the neutron flux, this makes the reactor nice and light, and radiation shielding very cheap. Also, the best thermocouple I could make work at high temperatures is definitely Tungsten/Tantalum. Can anyone make any power at all out of any carbon electrode (diamond, graphite, etc)? I feel like there should be a reason they are in the list, but they just produce no power for me. Also, I think there are a few bugs in this screen and the laser design screen. Thermocouple thickness has the opposite effect that it's mouseover hints at, and thermocouple stress is computed between input and the melting point of secondary loop fluid, instead of input and output as it should (even if there is a carnot cycle of some kind going on there, it should be to the vaporization point, not to the melting point). On laser design screen, you get to pick cooling fluid entry temp, and after this gets heated in the cavity, the outlet temp is the cavity temp. This means that the cooling pump does not matter -- you can just pick your starting temp so it doesn't melt the cavity. Instead, the input temp should determine the outlet temperature, and the cavity temperature should be higher than this, the difference depending on how good a pump you have." Can anyone do better, or even better than that, do comparable better and manage to have some efficiency?
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acatalepsy
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Post by acatalepsy on Sept 28, 2016 3:49:39 GMT
I didn't say the USTF were innocent (unless you thought the initial video constituted an endorsement of Stalinism somehow?). I implied that maybe the military-political clique that your character seems to be a part, and now the military forces you command were...probably not exactly the good guys in this conflict? Like every group of power-hungry elites that, whatever their fears and justifications, don't justify their actions in the slightest? Let's go with that one.
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acatalepsy
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Post by acatalepsy on Sept 27, 2016 20:25:07 GMT
They were comfortable with life, they knew they were winning and they wanted to succeed. It is easy to point to president mom and admiral daughter and say "look there is dah bad guy" but if anyone is to blame it is the several billion Martian, Lunarian, Ceresian, etc I feel like on the scale of "people to blame for things", Isoroku Yamamoto, Hideki Tojo and Prince Konoe go much higher on the list than, say, Sei Itō (to pick a random novelist from a history book I'm reading, whose reaction to Pearl Harbor was quoted as being "A fine deed"). The "we just want to be safe and prosperous" crowd didn't actively refuse diplomatic negotiations, lie constantly about the cost of war, and plan from the beginning to commit atrocities, you know? A body of people can be complicit in causing a war through acquiescence, but not as complicit as the people planning to actually start the war - especially when acquiescence is acquired by deceit or creation of a fait accompli. And it doesn't make your part in the war any less damning.
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acatalepsy
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Post by acatalepsy on Sept 27, 2016 20:19:23 GMT
I look forward to seeing how the guns get broken next I'd be more worried about the armor-penetrating, ship-killing 100km death ray lasers. More when I get home and have time to test it for myself rather than hearing second-hand.
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acatalepsy
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Post by acatalepsy on Sept 27, 2016 19:37:59 GMT
If there was anything I found unrealistic about the enemies, it was that they kept assuming that you were this poor deluded fool tricked into commanding an invasion force that's coming to murder them - rather than being among the chief architects of the war effort. It's a necessary framing for the game, maybe, but it feels more than a little surreal.
Also, there's all kinds of social pressures that could result in war, but at the end of the day it's very clear that the thing is a project of the high command - the upper echelons of the military and political elite - based on a policy of deception, hostility, paranoia, and distrust of the civilian population. It is classist, cynical, and above all power-hungry. I think you're not getting the extent to which all of this is transparent rationalization and post hoc justification. Every military regime sells their battle as a necessary war of survival. Every war criminal tells themselves they're just doing what is needed in war, and that when it's over, they'll be the ones writing the history books.
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acatalepsy
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Post by acatalepsy on Sept 27, 2016 18:17:44 GMT
It's a bare bones survivalist war as seen by the people instigating it, people who actively sabotaged and resisted any attempt to diplomatically settle issues out of fear that the civilian government (minus President Mom and her supporters) might do something crazy like, well, decide to not pick a fight with the other system superpower based on nothing but paranoia. I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that their perspective is gonna be a bit warped here.
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acatalepsy
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Post by acatalepsy on Sept 27, 2016 17:42:55 GMT
And I believe that missiles with some degree of spectral seeking/behavioural discrimination (I think spectral seeking got some attention in the blog). I suspect that details are still classified, which tends to exclude tech from the game, but here it seems fairly jarring. I think that the reasoning about chaff vs. flares is that while they are both very effective, flares are more expensive for any decently hot ship. I see the point of missiles not in actual destruction (although you can achieve it against the unwary) but in creating a threat that forces the enemy to spend mass to counter it. (And I suspect that you can beat the AI by sending 1-2 missiles at a time until they run out of flares. A smarter opponent would trust his point defense against such small waves, so it becomes a question of whether you can overwhelm his point defense with a wave of missiles massing less than the flares he would need.) The problem is that, in order for missiles to create a threat that forces the enemy to spend mass to counter it, the missiles need to actually be a threat. Right now, they aren't and can't be. They can't be because they can't hit the target if the target spends even tiny amounts of effort evading, they can't penetrate even small amounts of point defense in limited numbers, and can be suckered by cheap decoys if the target doesn't feel like spending the ~50 m/s necessary to evade. The amount of mass you spend in (ineffectual) missiles is so much more than you could possibly force your opponent to waste, that it's better to just not include them. In order to be a threat, missiles need to be able to zero their lateral velocity, at a minimum.
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acatalepsy
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Post by acatalepsy on Sept 27, 2016 15:09:04 GMT
For what it's worth, I have actually used these and not encountered any issues. I've actually had some losses this way, especially with larger drones. Seems safer, especially since, well, it's not like you're doing anything else with that power, right?
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acatalepsy
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Post by acatalepsy on Sept 27, 2016 15:05:58 GMT
I did do some research on heat sinks. The single-use nature heavily dissuaded me from persuing them further, given that you'd need very large "ammo" stores of coolant, costing a lot of one-off mass and volume. On the plus side, they could be hidden entirely within the spacecraft. It seems to be a highly requested feature though, so it would definitely be a prime candidate for a future update. Heat Sinks would be a godsend against missiles because they usually have short engagement windows and home on IR, so being able to retract them even for a minute or two would improve a craft's survivability by a lot. Not just against missiles; any relatively quick (hundreds to thousands of m/s) combat pass benefits from the ability to retract radiators to protect them from combat damage for a few minutes. I try to make sure I have redundant radiators so I can retract at least some of them in combat to prevent their being sniped by high speed drone passes or long range laser fire. Also relevant: The ability to retract any radiators that are pointing towards the enemy
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acatalepsy
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Post by acatalepsy on Sept 27, 2016 14:39:37 GMT
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acatalepsy
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Post by acatalepsy on Sept 27, 2016 14:12:16 GMT
Not necessarily. First, there could be a 'Validate Design' button that you click once you've made the changes you want so that it didn't recalculate each time. Second, while you're in the module editor, the game isn't simulating anything else, so it might be the case that even with a smaller time step for the integrator, real-time simulation wouldn't slow the game. I prefer the second option, but it would come down to how much time would be needed to simulate the results each time. I mean that I think it's already done this way - the calculation of weapon properties is done only in the designer. But I can see how decreasing the size time step in the designer would rapidly become a problem; even while doing nothing else, it could absolutely grind to a halt. There are various options for how to do detailed integration while still maintaining usability, but all of them require sacrificing some amount of clarity and usability IMO. My preferred solution would be to keep the "cheap" estimation, then run a detailed integration in the background after changes have been made (and have a spinning icon or something to let the user know that this was happening), then update with the 'real' result, but how workable that is only one person can say for sure. I think in general you'd want to try to detect and compensate for boundary conditions, but anyone who had done simulation and modeling can tell you what kind of rabbit hole that can turn out to be.
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