The problem with that approach is that the radiators of the lasers themselves get really huge really quickly, due to the low temperature. I keep trying to build lasers that can run a little hotter, but silver is just too good compared to all the other reflective materials. I wonder if something can approach it at some other wavelength than the V/UV I usually build at.
Rather than capping the max velocity, maybe just have a hard cap on fire rate, so that total fire rate is max(current computation, coilgun_module_power/kinetic_energy_of_a_single_shot). No more superguns that output more power than they should, no more complexity in implementation.
Reinforced carbon-carbon is also terrible against lasers, see first post on this thread. A much better relatively cheap material would be graphite or boron.
Quick question- how do you get a custom payload as an option to be fired from a cannon? All the times i have made a payload it does not show up in the options after i save it, only the generic HE , flak, the 2 nukes and the 2 decoys options.
The word payload is used in two places. It means a module type in module designer (of type flare module, nuke module or explosive module) and a ship type (one with remote control and no engines) in ship designer.
To mount your nuke on a coilgun, in ship designer make a new ship of type payload with that nuke, remote control and armor.
I felt like finding one good material wasn't good enough, so I wanted to test materials similar to it in some ways to find what is it that makes it good.
My tests were done with a heavy missile, 100m/s intercepts, facing one active 100MW laser.
2mm basalt fiber
37s, 42s, 38s
baseline, repeatability tests
4.3mm spider silk
~0s
This one popped instantly. I had to verify that there in fact was armor.
1.9mm ceramic oxide fiber
17s
4mm liquid crystal polymer fiber
5s
4mm aramid
>65s
one missile got through
4mm para-aramid
2s
This result I liked, as para-aramid is very similar to aramid, with one major difference. It mas massively better thermal conductivity.
After this I went straight to the best thermal insulator in the game. This stuff:
56mm silica aerogel
>65s
all missiles got through
28mm silica aerogel
>65s
all missiles got through
14mm silica aerogel
>65s
4 missiles got through
10mm silica aerogel
>65s
1 missile got through
4mm silica aerogel
41s
Silica aerogel is not just a little bit better than everything else, it is by weight ~15 times better than basalt fiber. A layer that will easily protect against most targets is very cheap and light. I see little point in armoring missiles with anything else, and a 20-mm layer makes any missile pretty much laser-proof, except against ridiculous amounts of lasing power. It seems we got it all wrong, what you want is a thermal insulator. I do question it's physical ability to defend against lasers in real life on the basis that lasers can pretty much shine through it.
I tried to make the smallest one possible with >10kt yield.
If you want to shoot a lot of them, you can cut the cost to 800c by switching to Pu-239 and adding enough inner explosive to make it go critical, it adds 900 grams to the weight.
IRL, U-238 fissions from the 14MeV neutrons created from tritium-deuterium mix. That is, it is unsensitive to thermal and normal fast neutrons but once the energy per neutron goes up >10MeV, it fissions.
Because NTRs get much more mass efficient as you get larger. THey're also rather low thrust for a given weight, which makes them terrible for high-impulse missions like short range missiles.
Also, thermocouple efficiency/strenght is backwards. According to the tooltip, thermocouples should become less efficient but stronger as they are made longer -- currently, the opposite is true.
That's the line bringing coolant from the radiators back to the reactor, which is outside the reactor itself. It's pegged to the melting point of the coolant, though - this might be a bug.
I am fairly certain that this is a bug. It's notable because the thermocouple stress is computed based on this value, not the radiator temperature, and this makes a few thermocouple options unusable at high reactor temperatures as they cannot be made strong enough to not shatter with the bogus 2800K dT, even though there should only be 300K dT between the reactor and the radiator.
It sacrifices the high output temperature for efficiency, but if I am doing the math correctly it only needs about 10% more radiator area (and 1100K gives you more material options, or a considerably larger overhead for resisting battle heating). You can cut the price down to ~850 kc by replacing the thermocouple with tungsten/nickel chromium iron, but they are a poorer thermal expansion match so efficiency drops a bit.
You are not doing your math correctly. Just as an example, these two ships are identical, except the one on the left has one of your efficient 268MW reactors, and the one on the right has 4 of my "screw efficiency, 2700K or bust" 67.5MW reactors. Both ships produce ~270 MW of power, and both ships have the minimum amount of (identical) radiators they need to cool their reactors.
Note how the one on the right has less than one tenth of the radiator surface than the one on the left. This is despite producing more than three times as much waste heat. Efficiency is useless, radiator temperature is what matters.
What makes radiator efficiency so important is that they are either ruinously expensive to armor, or easily the softest spot on your spacecraft. Requiring so much less radiator surface gives you additional options in armoring it like hiding it behind a frontal bulge, and allows you to overprovision your requirements by several times, making your ship much more durable.
Not to mention that the radiators themselves, even without armor, are actually kind of expensive. Your version has 430 tons of radiators over mine that cost an additional 7.7Mc.