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Post by AdmiralObvious on Apr 10, 2017 21:23:59 GMT
my school computer does not have CDE (we are not allowed to install ANYTHING) Nonsense! You clearly haven't been trying hard enough. Pretty much everything the game has can be run off a flash drive, presuming you don't run the steam version (if that's even possible, I play via steam). Back when I was in high school, I sort of wound up "dueling" the systems administrator at school by running a Minecraft server through the school Internet, with its glorious 1 GB/s download rate and 5 GB/s upload rate. He/she kept finding it and shutting it down, and me and some of my friends found a different system to host it on. Till they eventually disabled Javascript completely on the systems. We had that server running for 6 years (this school combined middle and high school). (I've not even mentioned the funny synchronization error the server kept having for a year cuz my friend tried to DL GTA 3 onto one of the systems.) |
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Post by Enderminion on Apr 10, 2017 21:48:43 GMT
I've been working on getting my ships up to snuff and further optimizing components, and as part of that, have been developing my own series of missiles (drones will come after as I miniaturize components). What's resulted is a series that I hope will be a viable workhorse for a variety of situations. I developed these at about the same time I displayed the new Virgils but decided to take them back to the drawing board in order to give them narrower cross-sections, as I'd originally given them thrusters with huge gimbal angles that led to very fat bottoms (the original Runnerman was nearly a right isosceles triangle). I quickly figured that this was adding a lot of armor mass and strikeable area without a sufficient return in turnabout time to justify it.  This is one of the failures I decided not to go ahead with, but it still displays the general form and construction of this series. The general body is composed of several stacked tanks of various dimensions to ensure a slowly sloping profile, with a single very high TWR thruster (if anything, I'm wondering if it's too high given the acceleration of some of these), and a specially lightened payload (ie, using the solar system standards doc, though I got the 5.4 Megaton nuke to within a hair's breadth of the standard all on my own). To save mass, armor is pretty thin all throughout with the exception of the tip of the missile, which features a very thick layer of boron to defend the guidance module and payload; this also creates a space between the outer aerogel and inner shielding. Nuclear Gyrojet II  The gyrojet was not hard to improve upon - just switching the nuke with a lighter version yielded a dramatic enough increase in performance to justify it, and some tweaks to the drive and switching from nitromethane to ethylene oxide improved delta-v by another two-thirds. I'm sure I could have further improved this by switching to bipropellant or using a nuclear drive to really make this go places, but decided to stick with this in order to keep the spirit of the original missile; cheap, simple, and easy to maintain. While definitely not a great missile by any span of the imagination, it's still a super-lightweight nuke that could be delivered in huge quantities.  The Bratman is the main close engagement missile. Delta-v is not great, but it's very light and has good acceleration, enabling it to be fielded quickly and in large numbers which should make sure some hit the target.  The Dartman is the lower threshold for doing serious damage (and for the record, the N is to distinguish its use of nuclear drives, as the original version was Methalox, before I figured that the nuclear drive did not actually add that much cost). It has a much stronger payload and better delta-v, while maintaining the great acceleration. In practice, I suspect the N2 will end up much more useful than the N1 - even accounting for exponential growth, I'm not sure how that much mass made so little difference.  Absolutely no prizes for guessing how the naming convention popped up; this one was allowed to keep the referential title since it most closely resembled the real-world weapon (in size and yield, not mass). In role, it's an intermediary between the Bratman and Dartman - heavier and much more potent than the former, but much cheaper and smaller than the latter.  This was supposed to be the Slenderman series (named because they were thin even initially - the others needed tweaking to look like this), but the Dartman ended up performing the same job with much less mass so only the best of that group was kept. These heavy missiles are meant to be capital ship killers, delivering a massive multi-megaton nuke to close range where destruction is inevitable. The Slenderman is a ranged platform that can strike from significantly farther, and uniquely amongst these missiles, has two gimballed thrusters for redundancy.  The Runnerman was meant solely as an experiment in whether solely kinetic missiles could be effective, doing damage through their own impact without a payload. What resulted was both extreme delta-v and acceleration, enough that these missiles could be used as interplanetary weapons without any form of delivery vessel - both versions could SSTO all by themselves, and the Runnerman Long would still have enough delta-v to reach Venus, Mars or the asteroid belt while still keeping candle to spare. They would also shine in close combat, seeing as their absurd acceleration would let them close the distance with little time to be shot down. There doesn't seem to be a whole breadth of missiles in this thread save for discussion of micro-missiles, so I'm wondering, how do these qualify? well now that I'm home, ADD A POINTED TIP and more laser armour, Daimond coated A-carbon with Aramid Fiber backing is fine for kinetics and lasers and you don't need much, Strip that Boron, no need for kinetic armour on such small targets. also I prefer burn times >30 seconds |
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Post by Zerraspace on Apr 10, 2017 22:03:56 GMT
So... did I get anything right?  Low burn time is a consequence of the really high accelerations and was a deliberate choice - the more time the missile's out there, the more time it has to get shot, so I want it to spend as little time out as possible (and if it can hit the target really fast, all the better). I figured slanting would come up. T he idea with the layer there was to protect the payload, but more importantly, intercept shots since most should be at head if the missile is pointing towards the target. What kind of thicknesses do you suggest - and isn't boron a good compromise against both lasers and kinetics (insofar as any one material can, at any rate)? |
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Post by Enderminion on Apr 10, 2017 22:53:31 GMT
Diamond coated Amorphus carbon is good combo defense, when slanted, 10km/s 1g railgun rounds have trouble penning, if you rejigger bi-chem-fuel tanks and add a "spall liner" of aramid or rubber (p-aramid is better at spall linning but worse at lasering) you can get missiles that can handle lasers just fine while surviving kinetics. My longest range kinetics have a range of ~30-40Km aganist my missiles but because they have a travel time and like targeting the same missile until seconds before impact I don't consider kinetics a big threat to missiles, I use them to cleam up leakers that made it through nuclear interceptors, drones, and lasers, thats enoguh of that tangent. Diamond coated A-carbon is good because diamond is hard and has a high melting point and will transfer heat to the even higher melting point A-carbon which is still strong, diamond is also coundutive of heat spreading the lasers energy out, reducing damage
their is no reason not to slant armour as its sill there if you slant it so it will still protect your payloads, slanting increases effective thickness and reduces penatration of projectils, as well as increasing spot size aganist lasers reducing damage from them
I will say more but dinner is being served and I just ran a mile and a half so I was a little tired wrighting this
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Post by Zerraspace on Apr 10, 2017 23:08:53 GMT
I did have that slanting in mind when building these, which is one reason I went back - to increase the taper - but the issue started when it came to the tip. That's an extra length that needs armoring, so there's extra mass you have to invest in which is only useful if struck from the right direction (you don't care if the empty space created is penetrated, though admittedly, the head getting penetrated is most relevant for missiles... but that same argument supports the idea of using a head plate). The head plate is right against the part, no extra length or cross-section involved, and strangely seems to require much less extra mass. I'm not sure what's going on there, but while changing where it started delta-v and mass wouldn't jump except at certain percentages, like 20% and 40%, nothing happening in-between, which let me go really thick without apparent consequence. On the other hand, it catches onto the slanting immediately - taking away the boron and adding a 50 cm spacer to the Bratman (this spacer meshes perfectly with the rest of its profile) shaves a full km/s of delta-v off, and that particular missile didn't have a lot to spare.
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Post by samchiu2000 on Apr 11, 2017 1:03:42 GMT
why? is it because its only 36cm across? Because it's a BUG!!! |
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Post by AdmiralObvious on Apr 11, 2017 1:10:44 GMT
It's generally at this point considered to be a "best practices" sort of thing to have the nose of the missile pointed in some way or another. Granted you've got the smallest surface area to target on the front, sloping increases survival of missiles by somewhere into the +50% range when hit head on, and as Enderminion said, it significantly helps against lasing damage. Making a solid frontal buffer, while a good idea usually pails in comparison to an equally thick piece of sloped armor. Remember, you don't have to armor the entire missile with the spot of armor on the front, if you wanted, you could limit the armor to the front nose piece, and in most cases get more efficient armor for weight versus a flat bulkhead. Basically, you can make it use less mass for the same amount of effective armor. |
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Post by Enderminion on Apr 11, 2017 1:44:15 GMT
Flourine-Hydrogen has the highest exhaust velocity of all chem-fuel propellants so you really should be using that, also single engine flat nosed missiles have issues with lasers coring them
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Post by dragonkid11 on Apr 11, 2017 9:38:45 GMT
I prefer using O2H2 chemical rocket because it, well, make more sense than using fluoride which is very volatile and harder to find.
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Post by Zerraspace on Apr 11, 2017 9:40:30 GMT
For a variety of reasons external to gameplay itself, refuse to ever work with anything remotely involving fluorine. That stuff is a storage accident waiting to happen, and you’ve got to wonder where it’s coming from. For similar acquisition reasons, I’m tetchy about hydrogen deuteride and decane, but have mostly accepted the latter – if you have access to methane, you can produce all the other hydrocarbons industrially from a similar mass. Now, I can’t experiment on actual effectiveness of the missiles, so I'm pretty much stuck with guesswork from the editor and observations of the channel. Here’s what I got from a brief foray in switching up armor to demonstrate what I was saying above, alongside a link to the relevant album (it's imgur, but I posted the data below anyway): imgur.com/a/mb5qENo boron:Wet Mass: 128 kg Dry Mass: 28.1 kg Delta-v: 4.64 km/s TWR: 25.5 Default Armor (1 mm AC, 5 cm Boron on top 10%, 5 cm Aerogel): Wet Mass: 129 kg Dry Mass: 28.5 kg Delta-v: 4.60 km/s TWR: 25.4 Increase Boron covering to top 20%:Wet Mass: 129 kg Dry Mass: 28.5 kg Delta-v: 4.60 km/s TWR: 25.4 Top 20%, increase thickness to 15 cm:Wet Mass: 130 kg Dry Mass: 29.5 kg Delta-v: 4.52 km/s TWR: 25.2 No boron, 50 cm spacer:Wet Mass: 134 kg Dry Mass: 33.9 kg Delta-v: 4.20 km/s TWR: 24.4 From this cursory analysis, slanting does not appear to be mass effective in this situation relative to super-thick heads. To get an effective thickness of 5 cm out of the 1 mm of amorphous carbon, assuming a strike parallel to the main axis, it would have to be tilted 1.15 degrees off the normal. Keeping the current profile, the Bratman (88.5 cm in diameter) would have to be 22 meters long (as opposed to 3.44 as it is now), giving it a surface area of 30.6 m2, which for 1 mm of amorphous carbon and 5 cm of graphite aerogel, translates to 77.2 kilograms of armor, which would about triple its current dry mass and pretty much decimate its mobility (delta-v, acceleration and turnabout time, all of them). But... this feels off. Boron has the same density as amorphous carbon, and even considering the narrower profile at the top, I’m pretty sure 5 cm across the top 20% should count for at least double the current thickness and mass of amorphous carbon across the whole body, and the amorphous carbon is so much denser than the graphite aerogel that even a unit area of 1 mm weighs significantly more than 5 cm of the latter (2.1 kg/m2 versus 0.425 kg/m2). So I decided to check further, and things got curiouser and curiouser: Increase 5 cm Boron covering to top 20.1%:Wet Mass: 136 kg Dry Mass: 36.1 kg Delta-v: 4.06 km/s TWR: 24 Am I the only person this feels off to? At this point, I had a hunch and decided to check: No boron, aerogel with 5 cm spacing:Wet Mass: 128 kg Dry Mass: 28.1 kg Delta-v: 4.64 km/s TWR: 25.5 No boron, aerogel with 15 cm spacing:Wet Mass: 130 kg Dry Mass: 29.5 kg Delta-v: 4.52 km/s TWR: 25.2 That corresponds exactly with 5 cm and 15 cm of boron. The extra mass is coming entirely from the aerogel having to cover a larger area, and if I had to guess, the mass of the boron itself isn't being calculated below a certain threshold. Gist of all this is, one way or another, my missiles need re-engineering. Back to the drawing board... |
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Post by Enderminion on Apr 11, 2017 11:24:37 GMT
Zerraspace, there is a bug with partial armour, in some spaces, it's, massless
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Post by dwwolf on Apr 11, 2017 11:30:53 GMT
Yep it only counts every full 15 to 20% of length as mass.
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Post by Zerraspace on Apr 11, 2017 11:48:49 GMT
Alright, good to know. In light of that, all versions of the missile have been redone to take away the boron head, feature more diverse armor with an anti-spall layer, and of course, pointy tips (don't you know, missiles must be pointy): Bratman Dartman Fatman Heavy Missiles Runnerman As might be expected, the smaller missiles got hit the worst, while the biggest ones didn't even feel the change, but in all cases it seems like the final product remained functional. I ended up swapping some propellant tanks to reduce how much empty space was needed, and the Runnerman Long ended up getting one tank less because the final tank was adding dry mass faster than delta-v no matter how I placed it. I also had to fix a couple of my ships to handle the longer launchers. I've got to see about an alternative to the aramid fiber though, at least for the smaller missiles - that stuff is expensive, almost doubling the price of the Bratmen (the megaton missiles don't seem to have noticed). |
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Post by Enderminion on Apr 11, 2017 12:50:08 GMT
nitrile rubber, and PTFE are good laser armours as well, PTFE is better in equal thickness compared to Nitrile Rubber, the rubber is better in equal mass, both are worse then aramid by ~half
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Post by newageofpower on Apr 11, 2017 14:42:16 GMT
I've got to see about an alternative to the aramid fiber though, at least for the smaller missiles - that stuff is expensive, almost doubling the price of the Bratmen (the megaton missiles don't seem to have noticed). The cost of large nukes (due to fissile expense) greatly exceeds everything else on an optimized missile. |
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Low burn time is a consequence of the really high accelerations and was a deliberate choice - the more time the missile's out there, the more time it has to get shot, so I want it to spend as little time out as possible (and if it can hit the target really fast, all the better). I figured slanting would come up. T
