Hi all,
first I'd like to apologize for the wall of text , but I'm so exited by this simulator that I can't help myself
.
I have to admit that I'm a high delta V fetishist. This probably comes from a few campaign missions that in my desperate attempts to avoid the enemy drones I was stuck on strange trajectories going nowhere and without any hope for ever reengaging the enemy.
When I finally unlocked the design of ships I was hell bent on using designs of around 10km/s and had to make a few sacrifices. First my ships were going to be gigantic and my acceleration is going to be pitiful. And then the armor...
First attempts were shot to pieces - had to use around 3cm of armor and for a big target like this and that wasn't working.
Then I switched to heavier partial belts around the crew compartments and sometimes the reactors. That was working better but I was getting high angle penetrations from beyond the armor belts that were depressurizing the crew compartments - not very often but consistently enough for it to be a problem. And without any method of adding internal armor, that would probably have been too heavy anyway, I decided to just stick everything essential in one place (the bow) and to hell with the additional radiation shielding. Also added the weapons there because the enemy tends to shoot at them and it makes sense for you to want it to be shot at your best armored part. The "relatively" final design looks like
this . Keep in mind that I'm just starting to experiment with different armor materials and I'm not exactly sure that this is optimal material wise. Vanadium steel is just the first material (besides depleted uranium) that was able to survive a frontal hit with a salvo of flak missiles on my armor test ship.
This was for the partial armor , I guess is nothing new , but from what I've seen most of those designs are first completely unarmored on the other parts and never try to pack everything in one place with the intention of specifically making the enemy shoot there.
My next steps were weapons related.
From the start those ships were going to be missile/laser/rail gun combinations, the intention was to disable/soften the enemy fleet with missles , then close to 100 km and finish what you started with long range rail gun fire.
The first step was to try to increase the range of rail gun engagement significantly with higher muzzle velocity. The result was
this baby. It started as a copy of the 8mm rail gun , I decreased the weight of the projectile from 15 grams to 10 , decreased the radius a bit and changed the material to prevent it from melting. It worked like a charm. Muzzle velocity almost hit 12 km/s! I'm getting consistent hits at ranges of up to 200 km. At 100 the cone of projectiles has twice smaller radius than the 8mm stock rail gun. By the time the range shortens less than 50 km all my enemies are tumbling wrecks without any radiators and engines, with overheated or non functioning weapons and helpless crews. It sure isn't penetrating very well the armored hull , but that doesn't really matter much if the ship is disabled.
Then the missiles
. I wasn't happy with nukes, but I had quite the respect for flak warheads, so decided to ditch the nukes in favor of two new types of flak missiles - fast, sprint, unarmored one and a heavy dedicated ship killer one.
The
first is the dedicated defense missile - high acceleration almost 26 G with a respectable delta V. For the moment I'm not happy with its
warhead I wanted a lot of fast shrapnel but I think I went overboard a bit with this. For the moment the missile does work against other missiles and drones but I found that since I have a lot of them (they are small) and with 26 G they tend to penetrate the point defense very easy I tend to use them outside of their intended role. So I'll probably take a step back with a more multi-functional warhead.
The other one... I think I fell in love with it
. The starting point was the sniper nuke missile- high delta V large missile, but I wanted more armor and higher acceleration. So it got a little big. Just a little
.
The warhead is extremely devastating. I was testing this one against a combined fleet of relatively hard targets - a fleet carrier , two gunboats and a fleet of the small laser ships... the salvo was from 40 missiles. The lasers got half of them but at the end the cloud separated in two groups and just went through the gunboats.
So... this is it , sorry again for the wall of text.