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Post by blothorn on Oct 2, 2016 10:36:48 GMT
Some more scattered results on turrets: unturreted guns use the barrel (naturally). Turreted guns seem to use the turret armor, *not* the gun---I got about the same time from an amorphous carbon barrel and bismuth barrel on a turreted gun (and other experiments rejected the hypothesis that both runs were turret-capped).
Testing on a fairly large turret (2.3m, weight equivalent of 10cm of amorphous carbon armor) and the stock 300MW laser: thermal conductivity is still bad---diamond went as fast as anything else in the test and the best results thus far were from polytetrafluoroethylene, by a fair margin. But there are still some oddities; silicon dioxide did quite badly, despite having quite low conductivity and decent heat capacity. Best armor tested thus far that can make a pretence of kinetic resistance is amorphous carbon, as expected, but polytetrafluoroethylene may be an interesting choice for drones (if my drones survive lasers long enough to be hit by kinetics, I am overjoyed).
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Post by blothorn on Oct 2, 2016 10:04:58 GMT
Probably the bug with 0-thickness reflectors; bump it up one click.
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Post by blothorn on Oct 2, 2016 9:33:06 GMT
It has nothing to do with material---I am just using Ferretic Stainless Steel to make it more resistant to barrel sniping. It turns out that all barrel materials have the same properties; you just need to increase power for less conductive materials to offset losses from resistance. Even some of the ceramics are viable for shorter barrels (as the relevant ones have poor yield strength). Of particular note is titanium diboride, which may be more resistant to lasers than any of the metals.
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Post by blothorn on Oct 2, 2016 3:42:56 GMT
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Post by blothorn on Oct 2, 2016 2:36:42 GMT
Bother. It is annoyingly difficult to make coilguns that obey physics...
(And it is worse than that, since it is also firing a 9kg payload.)
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Post by blothorn on Oct 2, 2016 1:44:26 GMT
You might be better off firing it out of a conventional cannon if it's that small. At 8.5km/s?
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Post by blothorn on Oct 2, 2016 0:26:08 GMT
Of curiosity, why carbon-carbon? Despite its low density, it has poor shear and tensile strength (and is not all that cheap).
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Post by blothorn on Oct 1, 2016 23:39:11 GMT
I have thought about that--by setting output temperature very high (try tungsten/tungsten-rhenium and go up to 3000K?), you can even put out a lot of heat without a lot of radiators. The problem is that your decoy is still expendable, and I have not made a sufficiently compact reactor to compete with flares.
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Post by blothorn on Oct 1, 2016 23:36:04 GMT
Hm. In my experience nukes tend to heat up just about everything, which makes thermal conductivity less relevant. On the other hand, I usually deliver nukes at a rate of about 8 a second.
Joker, the solution to high-velocity projectiles is always Whipple shields (with good enough armor behind them). As I understand it, for best effect the shield needs to be strong enough to cause complete disintegration of the projectile, but beyond that point additional mass is bad (because it impacts the armor too), until it starts to meaningfully resist penetration. Once you cause disintegration, a greater standoff distance spreads the force over a greater portion of the inner armor. It seems to follow that you want some sort of balance between shield and main armor; you want anything large enough to pass through the shield mostly intact to also pass through the main armor, but also anything that is broken up by the Whipple shield to be stopped by the main armor.
Of curiosity, how repeatable is that effect against other armors? My offhand guess is that either you have found the magic projectile for that armor that penetrates the Whipple shield mostly intact, and then completely penetrates the inner armor (while disintegrating), or you are causing mass spalling off the back of the armor (a lot of the ceramics have poor tensile strength, which makes them quite vulnerable to spalling. But that situation is heavily armor-dependent; a stronger shield would break it up enough for the armor to handle, and weaker armor would lead to intact penetration.
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Post by blothorn on Oct 1, 2016 19:55:56 GMT
I know, for weapons testing I just keep throwing guns on it, and for whatever reason I think I shall have a use for the old ones...
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Post by blothorn on Oct 1, 2016 19:28:30 GMT
Nice pointer on the Silicon Nanothermite/Calcium combination. I had given up on the nanothermites because I could not find a delay composition that worked with them. Taking inspiration from that design, I can shave 0.89kg from my 10kt-class nuke, which translates to an extra 0.21km/s: (A note on Pu-238---I am launching these in front of 18.2kt of nickel iron molybdenum, which makes optimizing the cost of the nuke a false economy. On the other hand, I have a 5.94km/s, 103kt missile that costs 5.63kc; nuke coilguns are not very cost-effective (but much lighter, and tend to hit their target better).
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Post by blothorn on Oct 1, 2016 2:48:09 GMT
If your payloads do not detonate, they create a rather impressive amount of map clutter, causing considerable lag (not to mention interface distraction). In almost all cases, it would be nice if they just went away after battle.
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Post by blothorn on Oct 1, 2016 1:02:16 GMT
Interesting. I made a payload consisting of a flak bomb and no control module and it never detonated, even on direct impacts. Meanwhile, a frigate after having been visited by 7.42 Mt of nukes: This is probably a lot heavier than it ought to be...
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Post by blothorn on Sept 30, 2016 23:31:32 GMT
You win by disabling the ship and lose by killing the crew; since killing the crew also disables the ship, it tends to spawn both success and failure messages (with the success being spurious).
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Post by blothorn on Sept 30, 2016 22:44:57 GMT
Keep in mind that in this case, ablating 4mm of basalt fiber took a reasonably efficient 100MW laser about a minute at ranges below 30km (and most of my kills on the nonconductive armor missiles never breached the armor; they waited until the missile had past and shot through the opening for the engine). It is not that conductive armor is pointless in concept, but that the actual balance means that when intensities are low enough for conductive armor to work effectively, the same weight of nonconductive armor will likely last an entire battle. The one catch is that a barrel is going to be the weakest link, and conductive armor might help sink heat from it.
That said, I agree about the poor options for turrets that combine low conductivity with kinetic resistance. (A lot of the fibers look great--basalt, para-aramid, and ceramic oxide, at the least--but for some reason you cannot use them on turrets.) I think the best bets are probably ceramics and some of the low-conductivity metals. Being able to put composite armor on turrets would be nice...
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