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Post by omnipotentvoid on May 22, 2017 13:58:30 GMT
Depends on the capacity you want. The reactor that loads the capacitor is large and heavy. Beyond that, 100000 rounds of railgun ammo can be loaded for every missile. Beyond this railguns allow for specifically tailored projectile mass, velocity and spread. I don't know that much about NEFPs, but if they're being used to project high velocity shrapnel, I don't see many situations in which they would be more effective than railguns. --edit: with reactor, I mean infrastructure behind the railgun: rails, reactor capacitor barrel reinforcement an structural components. Well, I see it as the invention of the Panzerfauste and the Bazooka. Small, cheap, handheld weapons that can take down a tank. You can build more than thousand of them for the cost of one T-34, not to mention the training and manpower you save. Sure, tanks still had a role. Even today, where a tandem-charge TOW missile can take down a multi-million dollar tank in the hands of even regular soldiers, tanks remain relevant. The thing is, the overall objective of the blog, is to introduce an interesting dynamic scifi writers can take advantage of in their settings. If handheld HEAT warheads were never invented, the only thing that could take down a tank is a big gun. As armour thickens, you need bigger and bigger guns and eventually the battlefield is a boring, empty place where the best tank is the biggest tank. The same happened in previous Purple vs Green discussions, where is was assumed that the only way to take down a big honking laser-equipped warship was to use an even bigger laser with even longer range. Play it out and you have a boring battlefield with bromidic battles between battleships blasting each other to bits. Introduce the NEFP, and suddenly you have a viable second weapon you can use to break up the stalemate. Thats exactly what I meant by "I don't see many uses". They probably won't be viable as mainstay weapons on main combat ships that have the reactors to power decent weapons. However, small ships may use them to have a decent chance against heavier armor. That being said, I'll reiterate what I said on the High-Explosive Shaped Charges thread: Latest MBT armor is highly resistant to HEAT warheads and the main reason they're still effective is that most modern conflicts see the use of older equipment. This is also the reason tandem warheads have become so prevelant. On thanks without modular armor, it is bassically impossible to upgrade the base armor, so upgrade kits are added. The most popular of thes is ERA armor bassically just bolted or welded on to the base armor plates. These can easily stop HEAT warheads, but don't increase weight to much. Tandems are the response to this. |
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Post by Enderminion on May 22, 2017 18:28:46 GMT
with tandem charges rendering heavy armour worthless APS is used to stop HEAT before it explodes... which means the only way to beat heavy armour is with a big effing gun
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Post by thorneel on May 22, 2017 20:02:39 GMT
with tandem charges rendering heavy armour worthless APS is used to stop HEAT before it explodes... which means the only way to beat heavy armour is with a big effing gun Or a big enough IED. Or a large enough (not-handheld) missile. Or a cluster/antitank shrapnel bomb. Or a tactical nuclear weapon, if you're desperate enough. Or enough Molotov cocktails, if things really go wrong. Or (in a few decades maybe) a directed microfusion charge, if you have a spare μg of antimatter. Or a powerful enough laser. Or a orbit-to-ground kinetic round. There are still options other than a big enough gun, even without handheld AT weapons. Also handheld AT weapons are still useful against lightly armoured vehicles. The obvious tactic with both NEFP and CH here would be to use them on a Hydrogen Steamer, against unsuspecting targets. However, depending on details, a Steamer missile bus or a Steamer warhead may not be able to get quite close enough with zero chances to be detected. Suddenly, the tired, old,ridiculous but Fun! trope of Submarines in Spaaace! becomes relevant again. Sort of. Another imperfect analogy is anti-ship missiles like the Exocet. |
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Post by Enderminion on May 22, 2017 21:42:52 GMT
with tandem charges rendering heavy armour worthless APS is used to stop HEAT before it explodes... which means the only way to beat heavy armour is with a big effing gun Or a big enough IED. Or a large enough (not-handheld) missile. Or a cluster/antitank shrapnel bomb. Or a tactical nuclear weapon, if you're desperate enough. Or enough Molotov cocktails, if things really go wrong. Or (in a few decades maybe) a directed microfusion charge, if you have a spare μg of antimatter. Or a powerful enough laser. Or a orbit-to-ground kinetic round. There are still options other than a big enough gun, even without handheld AT weapons. Also handheld AT weapons are still useful against lightly armoured vehicles. The obvious tactic with both NEFP and CH here would be to use them on a Hydrogen Steamer, against unsuspecting targets. However, depending on details, a Steamer missile bus or a Steamer warhead may not be able to get quite close enough with zero chances to be detected. Suddenly, the tired, old,ridiculous but Fun! trope of Submarines in Spaaace! becomes relevant again. Sort of. Another imperfect analogy is anti-ship missiles like the Exocet. lasers fall under big gun for this purpose, again bombs and missiles can be taken out by APS before they get close and the launcher can be shot down, APS systems are not heavy either, IEDs are mines and as missile standoff range increases APS range increases as well, somebody throwing a molotove is asking for a face full of claymore, and you try to sneak an AM bomb threw APS fields of fire it just has to miss or blow up early, to ensure a kill with AM, tactical nuclear yields are needed and then you might as well use a nuke or drop K-rods |
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Post by apophys on May 22, 2017 22:03:02 GMT
At an average 1kW/kg from reactor to radiator through all the components required for a laser weapon, a gigawatt beam would require an investment of 1000 tons. This 1000 ton weapon would maintain a 10mm/s penetration rate in Aluminium at about 25000km, using a 40m wide mirror and 400nm wavelength.
With current CoaDE simulation, a drone using a gigawatt of electricity for a laser effective at 25 Mm can be made to be around 100 tons mass. No mods and no limit editing required. (41.2 m diameter mirror & 266 nm wavelength. Intensity 29.5 MW/m 2 at 25 Mm; not sure how that translates to your metric of aluminum penetration.) Here's the design file: 1 GW 25 Mm Drone.txt (4.59 KB)  From my builds, laser ships scale roughly linearly for range compared to mass. A terawatt laser ship I made recently (with limit increases) has 10 Gm range and 59.1 kt mass. So yeah, with this data, the Casaba-Howitzer doesn't look that great. |
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Post by matterbeam on May 22, 2017 23:45:24 GMT
Just to be clear folks, I realize that this is a Children of a Dead Earth forum, but please take my statements and data in the context of science fiction in general. I try to describe the concepts to remain valid all the way from retro 70's Scifi to the softest edges of hard SF in the far flung future. With that in mind, we can generally state that a Casaba Howitzer will always be relatively powerful but short-ranged compared to a laser weapon, and you'll always be able to cram enough NEFP warheads into a cargo bay to rival a big laser in terms of mass/cost over destructive capability. So, responding to apophys , if we applied the materials and nuclear technology used to construct that laser drone to a NEFP, then I can easily see the warhead approaching a 25TJ/kg limit and extracting between 20 and 50% of that energy in a projectile. A 50kg near-maximum-energy-density fusion warhead might produce about 1PJ of energy and propel a 5kg metal plate to 3% of the speed of light. The drone, according to this calculator, can go through 10mm/s of aluminium at 10000km. An equivalent technology-level NEFP can cross that distance in just over a second and deliver enough energy to vaporize a crater 48 meters deep in solid steel. |
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Post by AdmiralObvious on May 22, 2017 23:49:55 GMT
Just to be clear folks, I realize that this is a Children of a Dead Earth forum, but please take my statements and data in the context of science fiction in general. I try to describe the concepts to remain valid all the way from retro 70's Scifi to the softest edges of hard SF in the far flung future. With that in mind, we can generally state that a Casaba Howitzer will always be relatively powerful but short-ranged compared to a laser weapon, and you'll always be able to cram enough NEFP warheads into a cargo bay to rival a big laser in terms of mass/cost over destructive capability. So, responding to apophys , if we applied the materials and nuclear technology used to construct that laser drone to a NEFP, then I can easily see the warhead approaching a 25TJ/kg limit and extracting between 20 and 50% of that energy in a projectile. A 50kg near-maximum-energy-density fusion warhead might produce about 1PJ of energy and propel a 5kg metal plate to 3% of the speed of light. The drone, according to this calculator, can go through 10mm/s of aluminium at 10000km. An equivalent technology-level NEFP can cross that distance in just over a second and deliver enough energy to vaporize a crater 48 meters deep in solid steel. While that's completely true, the drone is almost 100% reusable (assuming we ignore nuclear material disposal/replacement over time). It'd primarially depend on how easily you can access nuclear material. The typical NEFP is going to take up much more than the long term consistency of a laser. |
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Post by apophys on May 23, 2017 2:39:49 GMT
Just to be clear folks, I realize that this is a Children of a Dead Earth forum, but please take my statements and data in the context of science fiction in general. I try to describe the concepts to remain valid all the way from retro 70's Scifi to the softest edges of hard SF in the far flung future. With that in mind, we can generally state that a Casaba Howitzer will always be relatively powerful but short-ranged compared to a laser weapon, and you'll always be able to cram enough NEFP warheads into a cargo bay to rival a big laser in terms of mass/cost over destructive capability. So, responding to apophys , if we applied the materials and nuclear technology used to construct that laser drone to a NEFP, then I can easily see the warhead approaching a 25TJ/kg limit and extracting between 20 and 50% of that energy in a projectile. A 50kg near-maximum-energy-density fusion warhead might produce about 1PJ of energy and propel a 5kg metal plate to 3% of the speed of light. The drone, according to this calculator, can go through 10mm/s of aluminium at 10000km. An equivalent technology-level NEFP can cross that distance in just over a second and deliver enough energy to vaporize a crater 48 meters deep in solid steel. Note that the lasers in-game are not supremely high tech: they have terrible efficiency due to gain medium and gas options being limited. My example has 3.91% efficiency. This could certainly be improved upon without much/any change in mass (in fact, the radiator requirement would decrease). With a hypothetical 25% efficiency and 77 nm wavelength (achievable in-game with modded Ce:LLF lasers), that calculator tells me the 10 mm/s aluminum benchmark sits way out at 89 Mm distance. Free-electron lasers should extend that range further when/if they get modeled. Reactors also have room for improvement, since I'm not using ceramic-encapsulated liquid uranium pebbles. TL;DR: The theoretical limit of a NEFP is not comparable tech to the example I provided. Regardless, I was comparing to the plasma Casaba-Howitzer, not to a NEFP, and I doubt that NEFP projectiles can be made accurate enough to hit a target 10 Mm away or more. |
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Post by samchiu2000 on May 23, 2017 9:50:06 GMT
Now we just need to convince qswitched that the efficiency of the Casaba howitzer is 85% before adding this monster into the game since most equations we need are here  |
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Post by dwwolf on May 26, 2017 10:23:24 GMT
Just to be clear folks, I realize that this is a Children of a Dead Earth forum, but please take my statements and data in the context of science fiction in general. I try to describe the concepts to remain valid all the way from retro 70's Scifi to the softest edges of hard SF in the far flung future. With that in mind, we can generally state that a Casaba Howitzer will always be relatively powerful but short-ranged compared to a laser weapon, and you'll always be able to cram enough NEFP warheads into a cargo bay to rival a big laser in terms of mass/cost over destructive capability. So, responding to apophys , if we applied the materials and nuclear technology used to construct that laser drone to a NEFP, then I can easily see the warhead approaching a 25TJ/kg limit and extracting between 20 and 50% of that energy in a projectile. A 50kg near-maximum-energy-density fusion warhead might produce about 1PJ of energy and propel a 5kg metal plate to 3% of the speed of light. The drone, according to this calculator, can go through 10mm/s of aluminium at 10000km. An equivalent technology-level NEFP can cross that distance in just over a second and deliver enough energy to vaporize a crater 48 meters deep in solid steel. Note that the lasers in-game are not supremely high tech: they have terrible efficiency due to gain medium and gas options being limited. My example has 3.91% efficiency. This could certainly be improved upon without much/any change in mass (in fact, the radiator requirement would decrease). With a hypothetical 25% efficiency and 77 nm wavelength (achievable in-game with modded Ce:LLF lasers), that calculator tells me the 10 mm/s aluminum benchmark sits way out at 89 Mm distance. Free-electron lasers should extend that range further when/if they get modeled. Reactors also have room for improvement, since I'm not using ceramic-encapsulated liquid uranium pebbles. TL;DR: The theoretical limit of a NEFP is not comparable tech to the example I provided. Regardless, I was comparing to the plasma Casaba-Howitzer, not to a NEFP, and I doubt that NEFP projectiles can be made accurate enough to hit a target 10 Mm away or more. They arent quite like projectiles....more like tight cones. The aiming requirements are basically the same as for any fixed gun. |
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Post by samchiu2000 on May 26, 2017 10:35:54 GMT
Fair enough. To extend the thought, how efficient are (N)EFPs vs other kinetic energy weapons. Railguns firing rounds in the gram range at >60km/s at hundreds of rounds a minute are highly feasible and can be made ~40% efficient. What advantage does (N)EFP have over these guns? The 1 kiloton yield NEFP warhead masses less than 100kg and can drive metal plates up to several hundred km/s. How many NEFP missiles can you fit inside a spaceship if you removed the reactor, generator, radiator, rails, ammo and structural support for the railgun? How about a ~10 ton nuke version NEFP? After all it is possible with some modding on limit.txt, and maybe it will allow a NEFP with hyper high projectile velocity~ |
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Post by Kerr on May 26, 2017 16:59:15 GMT
The 1 kiloton yield NEFP warhead masses less than 100kg and can drive metal plates up to several hundred km/s. How many NEFP missiles can you fit inside a spaceship if you removed the reactor, generator, radiator, rails, ammo and structural support for the railgun? How about a ~10 ton nuke version NEFP? After all it is possible with some modding on limit.txt, and maybe it will allow a NEFP with hyper high projectile velocity~ The main problem of the "old" NEFP's is that the expansion velocity is relative to the temperature of the filler material, by just scaling down the 1kT NEFP (21,25%) you'll still need a plate weighting 217 kg having a velocity of 9km/s. If we assume there is a unknown constant that allows lighter liners without vaporization then we just scale down the liner mass until it fits. At 21,7kg the projectile will have a velocity of 28,5 km/s. If we now also decrease the efficiency to 5% the velocity will decrease to 13,8 km/s with 2,1GJ of KE. Using a cratering formula the depth of impact in boron is 36cm (Completely excavated, the shockwave will continue and produce spalling in the rest of the armor.) |
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Post by bigbombr on Jan 11, 2019 20:01:28 GMT
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Post by airc777 on Jan 11, 2019 21:48:21 GMT
I feel like there's plenty of tech that we have real world functional devices for case studies before we start adding nuclear shape charges. For one multi stage fission implosion devices would be great,Tsar Bomba and Castle Bravo being the obvious two tests to point at. Nuclear pulse propulsion and casaba howitzers would be cool though if the math supports it.
If I wanted to do a laser with a nuclear lamp I think I'd just park a pair of kiloton mirrors in low orbit over the sun. What are you going to do? Build a bigger laser? Try to destroy the mirrors with micro missiles? Wait until the laser runs out of fusible material?
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Post by cipherpunks on Jan 11, 2019 23:47:54 GMT
Octol, a mix of TNT and HMX. Octol has a detonation velocity of 2000m/s That is not so. Octol is said to have detonation velocity in 9400 m/s range. Actually, there are 2 formulations: - 70% HMX (Octogen) + 30% TNT
- 75% HMX (Octogen) + 25% TNT
It is not clear to which one OP is referring to. As a side note, somehow I'd like to see composition C4 modeled, and even more so - 77% RDX (Cyclonite) + 23% TNT warhead-optimized mix called Cyclotol. |
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