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Post by Durandal on Jul 28, 2017 19:00:19 GMT
Meanwhile, I'm over here designing the absolute dumbest concept I can think of. I present to you, the Trireme: [snipped pic] Secondary armament consists of a battery of conventional cannons, but the primary armament is simply a massive vanadium chromium steel nosecone for ramming anyone dumb enough not to get out of your way. [snipped pic] Basically, it's a manned KKV, because, well, why the hell not? It's horribly finicky to use because the default crewed homing command uses such naive guidance, but when it does actually hit, it's hilarious. Needs giant osmium radiators. Wait, does that work? Why don't I already have that on my KKVs? I do believe this concept was touched on back around November. Theyre cool, but I imagine mass-for-mass blast launched frags would be more effective. |
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Post by madmike on Jul 30, 2017 3:17:12 GMT
Meanwhile, I'm over here designing the absolute dumbest concept I can think of. I present to you, the Trireme: [snipped pic] Secondary armament consists of a battery of conventional cannons, but the primary armament is simply a massive vanadium chromium steel nosecone for ramming anyone dumb enough not to get out of your way. [snipped pic] Basically, it's a manned KKV, because, well, why the hell not? It's horribly finicky to use because the default crewed homing command uses such naive guidance, but when it does actually hit, it's hilarious. Needs giant osmium radiators. Wait, does that work? Why don't I already have that on my KKVs? Just tried that, basically using them as "blades" to increase my effective ramming surface area.  They seem to have really odd physics. Normally when I ram with my nosecone, my ship essentially bounces off while taking a significant chunk out of any ship not covered in literal meters of VCS. When I hit with the "blades", though, they seem to pass through. On softer targets, they just vaporize things - I actually managed to completely remove a Gunskiff from existence, not even leaving any debris. But on targets that I wouldn't normally penetrate (like my hulk here, essentially a floating piece of amorphous carbon and aramid fiber), physics kinda loses it's shit. Immediately after I took this screenshot, my (visibly intact) ship pinged off into space at about 5km/s more than my closing velocity, simultaneously killing my crew. Note that this was 5km/s more than our combined speeds, so effectively created energy from nowhere. ...I should patent this as a perpetual motion machine.... |
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Post by samchiu2000 on Jul 30, 2017 5:14:06 GMT
Needs giant osmium radiators. Wait, does that work? Why don't I already have that on my KKVs? Just tried that, basically using them as "blades" to increase my effective ramming surface area. [Photo] They seem to have really odd physics. Normally when I ram with my nosecone, my ship essentially bounces off while taking a significant chunk out of any ship not covered in literal meters of VCS. When I hit with the "blades", though, they seem to pass through. On softer targets, they just vaporize things - I actually managed to completely remove a Gunskiff from existence, not even leaving any debris. But on targets that I wouldn't normally penetrate (like my hulk here, essentially a floating piece of amorphous carbon and aramid fiber), physics kinda loses it's shit. Immediately after I took this screenshot, my (visibly intact) ship pinged off into space at about 5km/s more than my closing velocity, simultaneously killing my crew. Note that this was 5km/s more than our combined speeds, so effectively created energy from nowhere. ...I should patent this as a perpetual motion machine.... It seems that the game have some odd mechanism to deal with capital ship collision... |
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Post by madmike on Jul 30, 2017 6:35:57 GMT
It seems that the game have some odd mechanism to deal with capital ship collision... I could be wrong, but I think the issue lies mostly with radiator collisions. Physics only seems to break down when the radiator impacts first. |
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Post by bigbombr on Jul 30, 2017 8:43:04 GMT
It seems that the game have some odd mechanism to deal with capital ship collision... I could be wrong, but I think the issue lies mostly with radiator collisions. Physics only seems to break down when the radiator impacts first. All high mass impacts seem wonky AFAIK. |
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Post by samchiu2000 on Jul 30, 2017 13:22:57 GMT
madmike I just made my own version of manned KKV and i used a stock methane depot as a target, and the result is weird... My manned KKV did destroy some tanks of the depot, but yet didn't kill it. What's weird is that my manned KKV bounces off with a velocity of 804 KM/S AND IT'S TUMBLING AROUND LIKE CRAZY AND MY CREW ARE NOT DEAD YET!!!
That's WEIRD... and i hope qswitched will fix it or i just can't forgive myself to use something like this for the sake of REALISM!
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Jul 30, 2017 15:22:13 GMT
I've run into some strange physics bugs as well with my 23km/s dv missiles. A ~20km/s intercept with a practically <1 m/s perpendicular velocity often turns into a 28km/s (more than the dv of my missile, mind you!) relative velocity at combat start, with several km/s perpendicular velocity, causing the missiles to miss completely. The worst case I witnessed was a whopping 108km/s intercept, that ended with my missile turning into what looked like a cloud of plasma with no debris once the target fired its measly 13 MW laser. It looks like high-velocity intercepts are not very numerically stable when transitioning to the combat screen.
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Jul 30, 2017 22:33:43 GMT
I've seen people mention lasers being totally overpowered a bunch of times on these forums, so I wanted to try my hand at taking down a ridiculously powerful laser boat. First I made a laser boat with 6 1GW lasers that I designed ages ago. I'm fairly sure they're not as good as they can be, as I didn't find laser design too interesting, so I gave the target a generous amount of extra credits to compensate for any inefficiencies. My first instinct was that a fast cannonboat should be good enough against the lasers, but I quickly discovered that the lasers were able to drill through them before they made it under the 500km mark, so I'd have to do something a little smarter. Here's the laser and target ship designs:   The first design that kind of worked was a ~10km/s dv ship with two 1-gram railguns shooting with a big spread pattern and 60k RPM, firing 17 km/s bullets. That did kind of work, but it didn't have enough firepower to destroy the radiators that were behind the target's hull. Besides, 1-gram railguns feel boring to me, so I went for a combination of high-dv missiles fired from a high-dv ship with a good amount of 60mm cannons for destroying the radiators if the ship manages to close the distance. Here's the design for the ship:  The missile is a 3-ton design with 13 km/s dv and a very high thrust, giving it a 20s burn time. It has cluster flak launchers to create a radiator-killing sand cloud, as well as a very powerful KE impactor, with 300kg dry mass moving at ~20km/s at impact when fired from a moving ship. I figured that the laser boat would be dead if even one of the missiles made it through, or if the ship got close enough to use its 60mm cannons effectively (and without crashing the game due to high projectile counts.) The missiles turned out to be too weak to survive more than a few seconds of laser fire each, but with 40 missiles, that was enough time the lasers weren't melting the cannon boat for it to close down to 300km, 30 seconds away from closest approach. At that point, I activated the cannons and watched the game slow down to around 10 seconds/frame, but the game never crashed. After the cannons had fired for 10 or so seconds, I had lost all cannons facing the laser boat and the cannons went silent. By that point they had fired around 18000 rounds that were now on their way to the laser boat though, so I was hoping they'd do their job. And that they did. The laser boat lost all radiators in the single frame (or rather, second) the first rounds hit, and it was quickly turned into swiss cheese by the sustained fire. My ship still had some crew modules and generators left, so it was still techically alive even though it had lost all fuel tanks and most of its guns. The cannonboat did live, and the laser boat died, proving that lasers aren't really the best thing you can get. Laser boat getting peppered by cannons. Disabled missiles flying past it in the background.  Laser boat armor post-combat. Riddled with bullet holes.  Cannonboat armor and status post-combat. Still a bit alive.  |
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Post by apophys on Jul 31, 2017 0:27:00 GMT
I've seen people mention lasers being totally overpowered a bunch of times on these forums, so I wanted to try my hand at taking down a ridiculously powerful laser boat. First I made a laser boat with 6 1GW lasers that I designed ages ago. I'm fairly sure they're not as good as they can be, as I didn't find laser design too interesting Well, there is an update of a tournament-winning laser-based ship design you could test with...  childrenofadeadearth.boards.net/post/26597/thread |
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Post by Enderminion on Jul 31, 2017 3:18:25 GMT
I've seen people mention lasers being totally overpowered a bunch of times on these forums, so I wanted to try my hand at taking down a ridiculously powerful laser boat. First I made a laser boat with 6 1GW lasers that I designed ages ago. I'm fairly sure they're not as good as they can be, as I didn't find laser design too interesting, so I gave the target a generous amount of extra credits to compensate for any inefficiencies. My first instinct was that a fast cannonboat should be good enough against the lasers, but I quickly discovered that the lasers were able to drill through them before they made it under the 500km mark, so I'd have to do something a little smarter. Here's the laser and target ship designs: The first design that kind of worked was a ~10km/s dv ship with two 1-gram railguns shooting with a big spread pattern and 60k RPM, firing 17 km/s bullets. That did kind of work, but it didn't have enough firepower to destroy the radiators that were behind the target's hull. Besides, 1-gram railguns feel boring to me, so I went for a combination of high-dv missiles fired from a high-dv ship with a good amount of 60mm cannons for destroying the radiators if the ship manages to close the distance. Here's the design for the ship: The missile is a 3-ton design with 13 km/s dv and a very high thrust, giving it a 20s burn time. It has cluster flak launchers to create a radiator-killing sand cloud, as well as a very powerful KE impactor, with 300kg dry mass moving at ~20km/s at impact when fired from a moving ship. I figured that the laser boat would be dead if even one of the missiles made it through, or if the ship got close enough to use its 60mm cannons effectively (and without crashing the game due to high projectile counts.) The missiles turned out to be too weak to survive more than a few seconds of laser fire each, but with 40 missiles, that was enough time the lasers weren't melting the cannon boat for it to close down to 300km, 30 seconds away from closest approach. At that point, I activated the cannons and watched the game slow down to around 10 seconds/frame, but the game never crashed. After the cannons had fired for 10 or so seconds, I had lost all cannons facing the laser boat and the cannons went silent. By that point they had fired around 18000 rounds that were now on their way to the laser boat though, so I was hoping they'd do their job. And that they did. The laser boat lost all radiators in the single frame (or rather, second) the first rounds hit, and it was quickly turned into swiss cheese by the sustained fire. My ship still had some crew modules and generators left, so it was still techically alive even though it had lost all fuel tanks and most of its guns. The cannonboat did live, and the laser boat died, proving that lasers aren't really the best thing you can get. Laser boat getting peppered by cannons. Disabled missiles flying past it in the background. Laser boat armor post-combat. Riddled with bullet holes. Cannonboat armor and status post-combat. Still a bit alive. the laser is far bigger then it needs to be, haveing the semi-major/minor axis be about a meter should be good, using Silver in the cavity wall will improve efficenticy, and for god's sake add another frequency doubler |
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Jul 31, 2017 8:28:50 GMT
I updated my laser design with your recommendations, and made it roughly 10 times lighter and cheaper, and 40 times more powerful. This in turn reduced the size of the laser boat quite a bit, down to 320m length down from 800 or so from the previous iteration. The cost also dropped to 480 Mc, down from 1.5 Gc or so. Designs below.   Since the missiles turned out to be not very effective against lasers, I switched to a quantity-based strategy. I designed a cheap and fast ship with a reasonable amount of armor and enough guns that even one ship can destroy the laser boat with some reliability. Design again below.  The ship is cheap enough that I can get 13 ships against one laser boat and still have a slightly cheaper fleet. This time around I also started from a stationary position to give the laser boat the maximum advantage, since I'd have to spend an extra minute or so accelerating to the top speed.  Accelerating towards the target. At ~700km, five ships are already down. They're picking up speed now though, so it won't be much longer until the remaining ships are at weapons range.  A minute or so later the ships have made it to ~200km, and I opened fire. Only 5 ships remaining now, but they still have more than 100 60mm cannons between them, so it shouldn't be an issue.   First hits land, destroying most turrets facing the attacking ships. This caused the laser boat to start rolling to bring more lasers to bear, causing much of the fired shots to miss. It does have over 2g acceleration after all.   It only works for a few seconds though. The fire is adjusted quickly and the shots start hitting home again, quickly destroying all reactors on the laser boat. I still have 5 ships remaining, and one of them even has some dv left to fly home with!  Here's what the surviving cannon boats' armor looked like. Pretty cannon bullet braid in the background is nice too. It does look like the vanilla 60mm cannon is more effective than at least my 1GW lasers, credit for credit. I'll try the design apophys posted later today once I get back from work. |
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Post by Enderminion on Jul 31, 2017 14:37:58 GMT
couple other things jtyotjotjipaefvj is that the Frequency doublers should be made of silver gallium selenide and the output coupler should be made of Fused Quartz, minor things though only useful if you want to extract every w/m^2 out of a laser, the turbopump could be looked at as well, I would minimize the turbopump for 1173k outlet temp, and use something like Amorphus Carbon |
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Post by samchiu2000 on Jul 31, 2017 15:08:43 GMT
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Jul 31, 2017 16:25:03 GMT
I had a go against the laser boat apophys linked and I sort of beat it. That is to say, both ships died but mine had less people and credits in it so it's way more efficient  The laser boat has practically no thrust, so I don't need to worry about dodging, which means that conventional guns can easily hit it even from 1000km away.  My design. It's ~400kc cheaper and has one less crew than the ship apophys used.  A few seconds into the combat. My ship died but it managed to squirt off a few hundred rounds before that. Now we wait.  About a minute later, the bullets are still on their way. Getting closer though.  And here we go. The laser boat died instantly since it has no armor. There's only a few broken pieces left of it. |
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Post by apophys on Jul 31, 2017 16:28:49 GMT
couple other things jtyotjotjipaefvj is that the Frequency doublers should be made of silver gallium selenide and the output coupler should be made of Fused Quartz, minor things though only useful if you want to extract every w/m^2 out of a laser, the turbopump could be looked at as well, I would minimize the turbopump for 1173k outlet temp, and use something like Amorphus Carbon Silicon is cheaper than amorphous carbon for the turbopump. But minor edits like this are moot when the cavity costs a whopping 7 Mc due to the lasing rod. About a thousand times what it should be costing. |
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