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Post by captinjoehenry on Oct 14, 2016 1:26:33 GMT
Ok so I made a nano drone! It is pretty good but the gun is far too accurate to be really useful. Against a fleet of gunships I would target their lasers at 35 km and all of the shots go in one laser through the power plants killing the gunship and out the other side through the other laser and do nothing to anything else! Mind you by switching targets I was able to snipe all of their power plants but it is a bit silly. The drone:  The engine:  The power plant:  The gun:  The tiny tiny radiators:  |
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Post by RA2lover on Oct 14, 2016 2:40:38 GMT
You don't need that high of an exhaust temperature when emitting this little heat. You can dissipate 11.8kW with 0.02m² of radiator area(the smallest radiator possible) at 1800K, 9.4kW at 1700 K, 7.25kW at 1600K, 5.7kW at 1500K, 4.3kW at 1400 K, 3.2kW at 1300 K, 2.3kW at 1200 K, 1.6kW at 1100 K and 1.1kW at 1000 K.
Your 2400 K output temperature allows you to dissipate a whooping 37.5kW with a single one of those radiator panels. I'd suggest reducing it to improve efficiency.
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Post by Dhan on Oct 14, 2016 3:07:54 GMT
I dub this one "the traffic cone"  |
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Post by nerd1000 on Oct 14, 2016 3:42:26 GMT
I dub this one "the traffic cone" Looks rather heavy. Did you consider making the barrel longer/thinner and reducing propellant burn rate? Might save some mass. |
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Post by captinjoehenry on Oct 14, 2016 3:43:43 GMT
You don't need that high of an exhaust temperature when emitting this little heat. You can dissipate 11.8kW with 0.02m² of radiator area(the smallest radiator possible) at 1800K, 9.4kW at 1700 K, 7.25kW at 1600K, 5.7kW at 1500K, 4.3kW at 1400 K, 3.2kW at 1300 K, 2.3kW at 1200 K, 1.6kW at 1100 K and 1.1kW at 1000 K. Your 2400 K output temperature allows you to dissipate a whooping 37.5kW with a single one of those radiator panels. I'd suggest reducing it to improve efficiency. Thanks! I got a fair bit more power from it now! |
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Post by Dhan on Oct 14, 2016 3:49:11 GMT
I dub this one "the traffic cone" Looks rather heavy. Did you consider making the barrel longer/thinner and reducing propellant burn rate? Might save some mass. That weird bug requires specific dimensions. It will only assume traffic come dimensions with specific values, hence the impractical performance. It wasn't a serious attempt at making a module  |
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Post by dragonkid11 on Oct 14, 2016 16:16:12 GMT
Okay, after a week of tweaking, I think I finally made the smallest drone currently possible by me.   Not only is it really light, but it's also dirt-cheap at the price of only 4660 credit. That's...honestly ridiculously cheap. Here's the ship that carry it.  As the name implied, it used broken coilgun that I never really can figure out whether they are too broken or not. And as with my design philosophy, it's light as hell and cheap as hell. Of course, it will be escorted by...  Broken Sabre and Broken Sword. Honestly, I think I might phase out Broken Sword or try to lighten it further. They are also cheap as hell and can take out stock warship with ease to a certain degree. Anyway, that's all for now. |
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Post by morrigi on Oct 14, 2016 17:22:39 GMT
Wow, that drone is impressive. Might be worth it to use multiple, more compact radiators for the sake of redundancy, though.
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Post by someusername6 on Oct 14, 2016 19:16:30 GMT
Ok so I made a nano drone! I was inspired by your design (and literally copied the engines) to try to make a laser version of it. In the process, I might have created the lightest laser I've seen so far (including mass for radiators, reactor, and reactor radiators). I also used the minifridge nuclear radiator that was present in the forum. Here is a small, hot green laser, under 50kg and 3kc. Engagement range is set to 4.3 km -- the cutoff for 5 MW / m^2 intensity.  Here's how it is built. Diamond and molybdenum are chosen to allow it to run as hot as possible, hydrogen coolant is chosen to make it as light as possible, and the radius + aperture are chosen to make it have roughly the same size as the stock laser with the largest aperture possible.  Putting this together on a mini drone with 3 of your methane engines, a custom 100 kg methane tank, the nuclear minifridge, and very small amorphous carbon radiators, we get:   (edit: fixed tank mass) |
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Post by captinjoehenry on Oct 14, 2016 19:32:58 GMT
Glad to know my tiny engine is in use! I've also made a 90 degree gimballed methan engine that weighs only a few 100 kg for some of the sillier drones I have made. As for the nuke mini fridge I basically copied it from the UNlIMITED POWER reactor thread. They have some really nice micro power plants. And yeah turns out the way to go for the tiniest drones you want the nuclear thermal engines! They are a bit expensive but they can be so tiny efficient and have a decent amount of thrust! Also how does such a low power laser fare in combat? I'm wondering as with a range of 4.3km it is going to have a very short amount of time to engage any target so I'm curious how it performs.
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Post by someusername6 on Oct 14, 2016 19:56:28 GMT
It doesn't do too well in combat, sadly -- maybe improving armor can help that, but I don't know how to do armor well.
A wave of 400 of those was sufficient to kill a stock cutter, but a wave of 300 wasn't (targeting weapons first, but not enabling fire outside of minimum engagement range). I haven't tested it as point defense, and sending similar amounts of mass / credits as other drones tends to be framerate-prohibitive for me.
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Post by redparadize on Oct 14, 2016 20:24:42 GMT
Laser are ineffective against anything but drone and missile. As for armor, armoring drone is conterproductive. Your best bet is silicon aerogel because its good agaist laser, because the main counter to drone is Laser! |
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Post by dragonkid11 on Oct 15, 2016 2:09:55 GMT
After seeing nerd1000's saucer warship design, I tried to make Broken Quiver into that form. Hint, tried.  Introducing the Alien Quiver Mark 1 In which it is heavier, more expensive than the original Broken Quiver and it looks like a giant potato. Also the acceleration calculation is screwed up for some reasons despite having same number of thrusters. The only advantage it has? It can shoot EVERY single gun it currently has in one facing. This thing is rather difficult to build and honestly, I really want it to be as flat as possible but that's not possible with the construction style in CoDE. Edit: I took the thing to a ride on a gun duel. AND THE IT SOMEHOW MANAGED TO DEFEAT MY CYLINDER SHIP WHILE TANKING HITS LIKE IT'S NOTHING WHAT THE HELL!? Edit 2: Okay, tested out a bit. Turn out it can take hit well because it has two crew compartments and the SAME crew compartment will always be destroyed in a gun fight. I guess redundancy wins the day. But it's weird flight pattern thanks to its shape has also lengthened its life expectancy for quite a bit. |
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Post by redparadize on Oct 15, 2016 5:07:11 GMT
Protip: If you place weapon(s) on the front, it will look like the image on the right. Here its not that bad because I don't have much spaced armor. (I don't need it because the stacked stuff in the nose are blocks of graphite aerogel and tin layer of armor. From the front it can sustain quite allot of punishment while remaining realy light.) Now, if you move down your weapon(s) just a little bit down, they will still point foward as you see on the second image. Giving it a much nicer pointy nose, and it is also more light that way.  It works with engine too, but only if you have gimbals of more than 45 degree. It is usefull to add additional control to gimballess/small angle engines. Its the best way to control roll too:  |
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Post by dragonkid11 on Oct 15, 2016 5:13:59 GMT
 This was supposed to be an impractical, expensive silly design. WHY DOES IT WORKS SO WELL!? |
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