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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Aug 9, 2017 20:36:14 GMT
could we see the warhead design for the nuke? Here you go: link
Edit: the missile uses the thruster I posted previously, so this one: linkI made a pentane version of my previous engine to get a little better acceleration for my drones. I ended up with 700kn thrust and a 2550 g thrust ratio on a ~80 cm diameter design. Link to engine design below. design linkUsing those engines I made a cannon drone that can quickly accelerate to 13 km/s and uses a lighter version of the vanilla 60mm cannon as its weapon. They're not spectacularly efficient but it's a fairly cheap design that can take down most targets with ease, and the huge volumes of bullets they fire look very nice. Again design below. design linkHere's a youtube video showing them off. You can also see some nukes go full retard and chasing debris in there. |
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Post by Enderminion on Aug 9, 2017 21:04:18 GMT
... never go full retard
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Post by someusername6 on Aug 12, 2017 19:35:08 GMT
I edited a few limits to fire even smaller explosives, copying Apophys' design (divide explosive mass by ~100, fire about 100 times more often, at a higher speed). It gets more lethal, as expected.  |
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Post by RiftandRend on Aug 13, 2017 3:56:09 GMT
I edited a few limits to fire even smaller explosives, copying Apophys' design (divide explosive mass by ~100, fire about 100 times more often, at a higher speed). It gets more lethal, as expected. Unless the bug has been fixed or I was incorrectly reporting it, that rate of fire is not providing much benefit. Listed reloads shorter than about 30ms do not actually increase the rate of fire or the rate of ammunition consumed. |
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Post by samchiu2000 on Aug 13, 2017 4:43:46 GMT
2000th post.
Yo~(duck)
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Aug 13, 2017 12:14:08 GMT
I made an improved version of the drones I posted previously. They have 15.8 km/s dv, and they reach it in a bit over 8 seconds. Each drone is armed with three miniatyrized versions of the vanilla 60mm cannon, with 15-gram rounds and 30 rounds per second fire rate. The muzzle velocity is fairly low at ~1.1 km/s but that's not very relevant when the drones are doing 15 km/s. The drones also double up as kinetic penetrators, since they have a tendendy of colliding their target. They make a very cheap and efficient weapon that can quickly take down targets from around 200 km range. Design link: linkNothing can really survive a salvo of the drones, since they chew through even 20 cm of VCS plate in seconds. They're also pretty much impossible to avoid due to their ridiculously high acceleration. Maybe some equally fast point defense nuke missile would be a viable counter against them, but even that is questionable since the drones would have time to fire a good amount of rounds before the nukes would hit. Here's a video of them making short work of my VCS plated station: And here's another one just for fun, this time starting at 20km range. The drones look far more impressive in this one, although they aren't nearly as effective at penetrating the armor since they don't have time to accelerate before they've already passed the target. |
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Post by cyborgleopard on Aug 13, 2017 15:08:46 GMT
I made an improved version of the drones I posted previously. They have 15.8 km/s dv, and they reach it in a bit over 8 seconds. Each drone is armed with three miniatyrized versions of the vanilla 60mm cannon, with 15-gram rounds and 30 rounds per second fire rate. The muzzle velocity is fairly low at ~1.1 km/s but that's not very relevant when the drones are doing 15 km/s. The drones also double up as kinetic penetrators, since they have a tendendy of colliding their target. They make a very cheap and efficient weapon that can quickly take down targets from around 200 km range. Design link: linkNothing can really survive a salvo of the drones, since they chew through even 20 cm of VCS plate in seconds. They're also pretty much impossible to avoid due to their ridiculously high acceleration. Maybe some equally fast point defense nuke missile would be a viable counter against them, but even that is questionable since the drones would have time to fire a good amount of rounds before the nukes would hit. [Snip] That Framerate Tho... I'm curious about how these drones do against some of the armor schemes I've been researching. If willing and interested, change the armor on the target to 5cm spider silk followed by (1M graphgel and 1.0cm platinum Whipple sheild)x3. |
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Post by treptoplax on Aug 13, 2017 16:25:50 GMT
That Framerate Tho... I'm curious about how these drones do against some of the armor schemes I've been researching. If willing and interested, change the armor on the target to 5cm spider silk followed by (1M graphgel and 1.0cm platinum Whipple sheild)x3. 15 grams is a pretty massive slug; I suspect conventional Whipple shield isn't going to work that well, but it would certainly be interesting to see. |
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Aug 13, 2017 16:37:45 GMT
I'm curious about how these drones do against some of the armor schemes I've been researching. If willing and interested, change the armor on the target to 5cm spider silk followed by (1M graphgel and 1.0cm platinum Whipple sheild)x3. It did fare a little bit better, but it still died within the first few seconds of the first bullets landing. At least the back armor isn't totally see-through now, although it does have a good few holes in it as well. Target dead about 5 seconds in to the salvo:  Front armor after the full salvo:  Internal view, with shots coming in from the right hand side. Only parts of the radiation shields survived, everything else is gone.  Rear armor. It looks a bit better than with the VCS plate.  |
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Post by cyborgleopard on Aug 13, 2017 18:05:06 GMT
Well its good to know the armor I've developed holds up at least slightly better, and was probably a lot cheaper and lighter than 20cm of VCS. That's one heck of a barrage though. Thanks for testing for me.
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Aug 13, 2017 18:43:54 GMT
I managed to improve the penetration quite a bit by changing to cluster frag dispensers instead of the conventional gun. Now instead of each drone shooting 600 15-gram rounds all over the target over a fairly long period of time, they deploy 600 51-gram fragments focused in a very narrow pattern surrounding the impact site of the missile itself, with the cluster warheads being deployed roughly 0.25 seconds before impact. This gives better reliability, as the drones won't need to spend a long time expending their ammo bins, and gives better penetration as well since there's more fragment mass as well as a tighter pattern of hits. It also lags the game far less. With the drones being deployed from a bus, they have practically a 100% hit rate, as they already start on a collision course with the target due to the bus using homing guidance as well. There's less damage to the full armor plate, but I did manage to cut the target ship in half due to the more focused penetration:  You can see the vertical cut patterns surrounding the bigger holes made by the drones impacting the ship at around 22 km/s. The shrapnel cuts go through all layers of the armor as well, so they'd do a good deal of damage to internals if some managed to survive the kinetic impact of the drone itself. This was with just 30 drones as well, worth about 150 kc in total, making these drones a very cheap counter to heavy armor. |
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Aug 13, 2017 22:27:48 GMT
The previous test gave me the idea of designing a ship that's very hard to kill, but rather due to extreme redundancy than heavy armor. As a result, I arrived at this broadside design:  It has three separate sections, each of which has some fuel, at least four gimballed thrusters, a generator, a crew module, some weapons and enough radiators to run everything in that section. This means that even if the ship would get cut into bits, the separate pieces should be operational if they're not too damaged. Thanks to the broadside profile, just penetrating a few shots through the nose won't kill the ship either. At worst, you're going to lose one of three crew compartments. This means that the ship can usually return fire even if most of its armor has been shot off and the hull is riddled with holes. I've found that the design is very hard to kill completely, although the heavy guns do come off rather quickly. I did a couple of tests against mixed ships, and found that after some intelligent gun placement that guides enemy fire away from the crew modules, it will take pretty much forever to die to conventional guns. Heavy nukes or flak missiles would probably fare better, though the armor is at least somewhat resistant against those. In a test against two gunboats, one gunskiff and a few ships of my own design, it managed to kill all but one gunship and one ship that has a 25-cm VCS plate protecting it from all sides. My ship lived through the combat and was able to float away after leaving enemy weapons range after a close approach. Below is a youtube video showing the full combat if you wish to see it. |
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Post by treptoplax on Aug 14, 2017 13:30:52 GMT
The previous test gave me the idea of designing a ship that's very hard to kill, but rather due to extreme redundancy than heavy armor. As a result, I arrived at this broadside design: [snip] It has three separate sections, each of which has some fuel, at least four gimballed thrusters, a generator, a crew module, some weapons and enough radiators to run everything in that section. This means that even if the ship would get cut into bits, the separate pieces should be operational if they're not too damaged. Thanks to the broadside profile, just penetrating a few shots through the nose won't kill the ship either. At worst, you're going to lose one of three crew compartments. This means that the ship can usually return fire even if most of its armor has been shot off and the hull is riddled with holes. I've found that the design is very hard to kill completely, although the heavy guns do come off rather quickly. I did a couple of tests against mixed ships, and found that after some intelligent gun placement that guides enemy fire away from the crew modules, it will take pretty much forever to die to conventional guns. Heavy nukes or flak missiles would probably fare better, though the armor is at least somewhat resistant against those. In a test against two gunboats, one gunskiff and a few ships of my own design, it managed to kill all but one gunship and one ship that has a 25-cm VCS plate protecting it from all sides. My ship lived through the combat and was able to float away after leaving enemy weapons range after a close approach. Below is a youtube video showing the full combat if you wish to see it. [snip] Hm. Is this actually cheaper/more effective that just building multiple ships, though? (Maybe it's less crew?) One trick I have seen that I don't think you took full advantage of there is that missiles home in on heat (even against a single ship, they don't just target center-of-mass) - there have been similar designs that put their main radiators on the empty/connector/bait sections to let missiles just punch through there. Maybe combine that with your design and have high-power weapons and radiators on the connector sections, with lower-powered weapons (guns, launchers?) and smaller redundant generators in the machinery/crew sections? A similar but less extreme thing I am doing regularly now is to figure out what amount of crew is 'maintenance' (that is required just by virtue of size, mass, other crew - the cooks, life-support technicians, etc) and how many are actually required to operate all the weapons. In addition to the big paper-mache (Ok, not really, but I would if it was lighter) main crew cabin there are one or more small 'battle bridge' sections with light armor and just enough crew to man most or all of the weapons. |
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Post by Enderminion on Aug 14, 2017 16:12:54 GMT
The previous test gave me the idea of designing a ship that's very hard to kill, but rather due to extreme redundancy than heavy armor. As a result, I arrived at this broadside design: [snip] It has three separate sections, each of which has some fuel, at least four gimballed thrusters, a generator, a crew module, some weapons and enough radiators to run everything in that section. This means that even if the ship would get cut into bits, the separate pieces should be operational if they're not too damaged. Thanks to the broadside profile, just penetrating a few shots through the nose won't kill the ship either. At worst, you're going to lose one of three crew compartments. This means that the ship can usually return fire even if most of its armor has been shot off and the hull is riddled with holes. I've found that the design is very hard to kill completely, although the heavy guns do come off rather quickly. I did a couple of tests against mixed ships, and found that after some intelligent gun placement that guides enemy fire away from the crew modules, it will take pretty much forever to die to conventional guns. Heavy nukes or flak missiles would probably fare better, though the armor is at least somewhat resistant against those. In a test against two gunboats, one gunskiff and a few ships of my own design, it managed to kill all but one gunship and one ship that has a 25-cm VCS plate protecting it from all sides. My ship lived through the combat and was able to float away after leaving enemy weapons range after a close approach. Below is a youtube video showing the full combat if you wish to see it. [snip] Hm. Is this actually cheaper/more effective that just building multiple ships, though? (Maybe it's less crew?) One trick I have seen that I don't think you took full advantage of there is that missiles home in on heat (even against a single ship, they don't just target center-of-mass) - there have been similar designs that put their main radiators on the empty/connector/bait sections to let missiles just punch through there. Maybe combine that with your design and have high-power weapons and radiators on the connector sections, with lower-powered weapons (guns, launchers?) and smaller redundant generators in the machinery/crew sections? A similar but less extreme thing I am doing regularly now is to figure out what amount of crew is 'maintenance' (that is required just by virtue of size, mass, other crew - the cooks, life-support technicians, etc) and how many are actually required to operate all the weapons. In addition to the big paper-mache (Ok, not really, but I would if it was lighter) main crew cabin there are one or more small 'battle bridge' sections with light armor and just enough crew to man most or all of the weapons. fun fact: drone control units are smaller and lighter, and don't increase crew requirements |
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Post by treptoplax on Aug 14, 2017 17:15:12 GMT
fun fact: drone control units are smaller and lighter, and don't increase crew requirements !! So... you're telling me that if I have a 1Kg drone control stashed away somewhere on my capital ship, it'll continue fighting after all the crew are dead? Perhaps it's time to get rid of crew armor entirely and just sprinkle those all over the ship. Doubtful that'll be great for morale, but having redundant robotic systems take up the fight when all crew are disabled does make good sense. Sure, there are no internal bulkheads in the crew compartment, it's made of thin magnesium sheet, and it's right next to a magazine full of explosive-laden nuclear missiles that are mostly florine by mass. But not to worry, the AI systems will continue fighting after you're dead. |
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