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Post by blothorn on Oct 7, 2016 7:25:35 GMT
That goduranus?! And we have a third FTD player around here somewhere...
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Post by blothorn on Oct 7, 2016 7:15:13 GMT
Drop tanks have been a frequent request.
The big drawback of single-sided ships is that ships get nuked a lot, from all directions. Also, you become very vulnerable to envelopment. Do not assume that your enemies are particularly tightly clustered, or all planar. I suspect some measure of asymmetric armor is optimal for most ships, but do not rely on it too much.
The big problem I would see with laser tracers is finding ones that can survive launch--railgun slugs, I believe, tend to get fairly well melted, and the bases of conventional projectiles are subjected to high heat and pressure from the explosion.
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Post by blothorn on Oct 7, 2016 2:56:38 GMT
I have not fully thought this through, but I would think that the impossibility of cooling a spacecraft without a visible heat source is relative to the background---if you are only emitting background levels of radiation your net emissions of heat are zero. Variability of the background does give you a bit of room to play with (particularly at single-pixel distances); I suspect the big question is "how much".
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Post by blothorn on Oct 7, 2016 2:48:42 GMT
I think that it is hard-coded that nukes fail to detonate post-collision. In any event, I would not care to calculate the length of crumple zone necessary to cushion a 3km/s impact to any meaningful extent.
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Post by blothorn on Oct 7, 2016 1:01:41 GMT
Yes, if you are willing to exploit the AI to that extent, you can just throw a nominal warhead and remote control together and dupe the fuses for about 12kg.
But while that sort of min-maxing may be the cheapest way to exploit the game's present fuse and intercept mechanics, I do not think it very insightful into what would be possible if AI and fuses could be given a modicum of intelligence.
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Post by blothorn on Oct 7, 2016 0:31:18 GMT
I would classify the AI's sending an entire launch of missiles against a single drone a bug--the smart policy would seem to be to kill the drone with a small number of missiles and continue the intercept with the rest.
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Post by blothorn on Oct 7, 2016 0:06:21 GMT
Very pretty. But can they actually take down an equal-to-superior number of missiles before they reach the drones? My experience is that you can reliably stop missiles with drones, but not without losing the drones (if facing nuclear missiles)--and trading drones for missiles is not going to end well in the long run.
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Post by blothorn on Oct 6, 2016 18:18:10 GMT
Yes---for 1g@35km/s, a 100% efficient 1GW railgun should fire once every .6 seconds. At 50km/s, every 1.25 seconds. I suspect that at that rate of fire, residual inaccuracy prevails over muzzle velocity.
Not to mention that the integrator bug is giving unrealistic acceleration; if it were fixed achieving those velocities would require a much larger gun.
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Post by blothorn on Oct 6, 2016 6:34:53 GMT
As noted elsewhere, almost all rockets use onboard power generation, rather than external power. (That said, I am somewhat surprised that the generator is assumed without being explicitly modeled.) As far as power for electronics---I like to think that my 1kg control module gets me a battery; it is certainly not getting me sophisticated computing!
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Lasers
Oct 6, 2016 5:52:24 GMT
Post by blothorn on Oct 6, 2016 5:52:24 GMT
Some thoughts from messing around with different materials: * I cannot get tolerable pumping efficiency out of anything but Nd:YAG and titanium sapphire (and ruby, to a lesser extent; need to see if its high wavelength can overcome poor efficiency). * Molybdenum is noticeably more reflective in the shortwave IR band, but between the higher diffraction of longwave lasers and the poor pumping efficiency I am seeing for those gain media, it seems better to go with Nd:YAG or titanium:sapphire and swallow the bad reflectivity. * I wonder how clear a choice between efficiency and intensity is---is it sometimes better to put out more power over a larger area when, for example, trying to melt a thermally conductive radiator?
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Post by blothorn on Oct 5, 2016 21:05:55 GMT
Almost all rocket engines, I believe, run some sort of turbogenerator to run their fuel pumps. It seems natural to extend this to the reaction wheels, although I do believe that a check that the engine has enough power to run them is missing.
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Post by blothorn on Oct 5, 2016 20:10:08 GMT
Note that aerobraking is usually done in very high atmosphere--if you dip deep you will lose too much velocity to get back out. Very thin atmosphere (the accessible portions of which are superheated plasma due to the passage of a spacecraft at very high velocity) does not seem promising for large-scale collection.
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Post by blothorn on Oct 5, 2016 20:06:23 GMT
A single well placed missile with a nuclear warhead would wipe out the radiators anyways, and nukes are ridiculously cheap. You can get a 100kt by 41 kg one for 2 kc, or go overkill and spend 93 kc for a 100 Mt one that weights less than 10 tons. While that is true most missiles in game are still dumber than a sack of rocks if duped properly, and if they have to be launched in close there is no shortage of super guns to tear missile ships to pieces, not to mention now thanks to the improved laser designs micro nuke rounds are also quite vulnerable. Nuclear missiles are hard to dupe--you do not need them to just miss, you need them to miss by 150+ meters if you want to save your radiators. That takes not only a heat decoy but a rather hard burn to get away from the decoy (or a very high-velocity decoy launcher). And my understanding is that lasers were falling behind silica aerogel. (And remember that with regard to armoring drones, you likely do not have a capital ship with a 100MW laser to provide backup.) That said, my general impression is that if your drones get into a fight with nuclear missiles they are going to lose; missiles are just too cheap. Avoiding that matchup is primarily a matter of tactical-map strategy. It is more of a concern once drones are engaged with their target, but then a long-ranged drone can get useful damage in before missiles have time to arrive.
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Lasers
Oct 5, 2016 19:05:29 GMT
Post by blothorn on Oct 5, 2016 19:05:29 GMT
I would actually expect that optimization by weight would favor relatively low-powered lasers with exceptional optics. Particularly if you believe in armored radiators with 2N redundancy, they can considerably outmass the laser itself. On the other hand, better optics means larger sizes, particularly of the turret itself--which means more vulnerability to railguns.
And yes, I have put a fair amount of effort into high-temperature lasers too and have not come up with something remotely effective. I would probably rejoice at an 2000K laser at only half the efficiency, but the falloff from silver/aluminum is steep indeed. (And I have gone up to green; for reasons that I expect would be clear if I knew more about laser optics, the Nd:YAG worked a lot better than titanium:sapphire at the Solar Flare's 1.5m width.)
Edit: doing some research, it seems tungsten (I recall that being the high-temperature non-transparent mirror choice?) is a decent reflector of IR. (Gold and copper become good reflectors somewhat earlier, but do not afford much melting point advantage.) Molybdenum should be better, but I do not recall it being an option.
Edit 2: And Osmium is supposedly an excellent reflector of UV, but I am fairly certain it is not an option.
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Post by blothorn on Oct 5, 2016 16:30:15 GMT
That is a good point about the fusion fuel density.
I think the armor held up decently--the railguns (1g@13.1km/s, RoF tuned to avoid violating physics) managed few or no complete penetrations, but got a number of radiator/turret kills. Still not certain what to do to prevent that--the difficulty of armoring things outside the Whipple shield was a major driver of my pursuing missile/drone warfare.
The Hailstorms (5g@2.71km/s) did better--a large number of penetrations outside the citadel, knocking out several engines and causing one complete mobility kill. No evidence of citadel penetrations. That is probably actually the best result I have seen against those guns; low-velocity kinetics really hit hard.
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