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Post by Enderminion on Sept 13, 2017 3:02:08 GMT
try silk
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Sept 13, 2017 9:05:54 GMT
Like I said nothing is going to be very good. UWFPVCE fiber is the lightest you can get and it's still 60% blast wall by mass. Everything else is going to be even worse.
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Post by bigbombr on Sept 13, 2017 10:12:23 GMT
Like I said nothing is going to be very good. UWFPVCE fiber is the lightest you can get and it's still 60% blast wall by mass. Everything else is going to be even worse. Graphene works, but conventional launchers are usually still lighter. |
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Sept 13, 2017 18:53:38 GMT
I changed both the braking and acceleration systems for the laser buses to conventional rockets, which reduced costs considerably. Now I can get 320 lasers for 30 Mc, and I was also able to increase cruise speed from 2 km/s to 5 km/s. This means that I can get around 300 lasers to sit next to a gunship in around 40 seconds from 150 km away. In my test I only used one salvo of laser accelerators since the deceleration has to be precisely controlled by hand. Otherwise you'll either get lasers that move too fast or the braking rocket runs out of fuel and gets disabled before it has time to pop out its cargo. Design of the ship below. Other parts are largely unchanged, except I switched blast launchers to a combination of NTRs and EM launchers. Combat test: Accelerators start their accelerating. The carrier ship is buried somewhere inside the thick cloud.  Braking rockets deployed at around 30 km range.  Lasers deployed around a kilometer away from the target. Velocity is not quite zero, but it's hard to time manually and this is close enough.  99 lasers out of 128 made it to their destination, now they can start their work.  Gunship returning fire, but it only has time to take down a few satellite before the guns are melted off.  At this range, the lasers melt through armor and guns almost instantly, so a few seconds later the gunship is disarmed  A few more seconds and it's dead meat  94 lasers are still in working order after the gunship is dead. Only lost 5 lasers even though they were less than 5 kilometers from the gunship.  |
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Post by tortugagreen on Sept 15, 2017 2:25:48 GMT
Remarkable, that laser satellite spam system, there, though it seems like it'll be expensive to operate. Also, how did you get the braking rockets to do that? I don't think there's any AI setup that can give you that.
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Post by Enderminion on Sept 15, 2017 3:28:38 GMT
unguided rockets
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Post by tukuro on Sept 15, 2017 5:32:57 GMT
I changed both the braking and acceleration systems for the laser buses to conventional rockets, which reduced costs considerably. Now I can get 320 lasers for 30 Mc, and I was also able to increase cruise speed from 2 km/s to 5 km/s. This means that I can get around 300 lasers to sit next to a gunship in around 40 seconds from 150 km away. In my test I only used one salvo of laser accelerators since the deceleration has to be precisely controlled by hand. Otherwise you'll either get lasers that move too fast or the braking rocket runs out of fuel and gets disabled before it has time to pop out its cargo. Design of the ship below. Other parts are largely unchanged, except I switched blast launchers to a combination of NTRs and EM launchers. Now this is a novel concept I hadn't seen executed before. This is actually a great interceptor weapon too: Position the laser drone in front of a missile swarm. Then in case they try to intercept use a screen of conventional interceptors to counter. This has me wishing we had much more advanced AI behavior. |
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Sept 15, 2017 8:10:16 GMT
Remarkable, that laser satellite spam system, there, though it seems like it'll be expensive to operate. Also, how did you get the braking rockets to do that? I don't think there's any AI setup that can give you that. They're unguided rockets with a precisely set DV budget so that they run out of fuel just as they're stationary. Sadly it's not usable by AI since even on unguided behaviour it doesn't always turn on the engines. Also, since they're drones, you have to manually change the order to homing to get them to go undguided, and drones that run out of dv get disabled even if they still have ammo left. So instead I just give them a move order, which guarantees the engines will run, and manually time the launch order on the satellite launchers. It should work with the current AI models we have but these limitations force it to manual use only. |
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Post by apophys on Sept 15, 2017 22:45:37 GMT
drones that run out of dv get disabled even if they still have ammo left. Drones controlled by AI that win an engagement will get destroyed even if they have dV left, for allegedly running out of dV. I've had many fleets of laser drones with over 40 km/s dV destroyed by the game this way. |
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Post by RiftandRend on Sept 15, 2017 23:11:09 GMT
I've had missile fleets spontaneously die on approach as well, leaving the "ran out of delta v" death message.
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seeingstripes
New Member
Starwolf Industries: Designer of the cheapest microdrone ever put on the CDE Steam Workshop.
Posts: 15 
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Post by seeingstripes on Sept 23, 2017 19:11:15 GMT
So, I've recently been experimenting with dual-warhead missile designs. Flak-nuke combo, with the same hard range for simultaneous detonation. Nuke to flash off Whipple shields, flak to arrive a few microseconds later and punch through the newly weakened armor. As it turns out, using about 24kt of nuclear payload and 40 kg of flak bombs, set to deliver their payload as decently serious 20 gram chunks, I can consistently core out any stock target. The nuke-flash weakens the impact point enough that the flak punches through every time, but loses *just* enough energy that it ricochets off the armor on the other side, rather than punching all the way through. The flak burst fans out as it bounces off the inside of the armor, scattering across the interior and shredding 95% of the target's systems. I think I've hit a sweet spot, too, because scaling up or down diminishes performance. A variant with a 14 Mt nuke with 400kg flak has repeatability and consistency issues. My best guess as to why is it weakens the armor too much, and the flak just goes out the far side without ricocheting. I'll post design pics below. Also, anyone with tips on further decreasing mass and cost of these, or improving their fraction-to-target ratio, I welcome your advice.  The effective one, A+ rating; Effective, cheap, lightweight.  The strangely unreliable one, C- rating; Big, expensive, and questionably effective. Design notes: Decane fuel because it's cheap, dense, and the standard for my fleet. VCS tanks for best possible mass ratio. Titanium Dioxide armor layer for best laser defense I've yet discovered. |
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Sept 23, 2017 20:00:08 GMT
Hydrogen Deuteride is also a good propellant for heavy payloads. I was able to double your dv while adding only 10kg of mass and not quite doubling the price per missile, so I'd consider that an overall improvement. The only downside is the increased size but if you're going twice as fast it might not be an issue.  |
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seeingstripes
New Member
Starwolf Industries: Designer of the cheapest microdrone ever put on the CDE Steam Workshop.
Posts: 15
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Post by seeingstripes on Sept 23, 2017 20:39:44 GMT
jtyotjotjipaefvj : As it turns out, size is a fairly important consideration for me. The missile cross section is one thing, but I'm more concerned with keeping launcher mass and ammo container sizes reasonable too. I'm more than willing to go for less dV if it means a significantly cheaper and more compact arsenal. 5 km/s or so is my fleet standard, and anything around there will satisfy. That said, size isn't my biggest concern; That would be price and mass. The lighter and cheaper my missiles, the more I can throw around. If I can fire 80 of mine for the price of 40 of yours, and they're comparable in survivability and payload, then more of mine will get through the countermeasures and do more damage. Thanks for the advice though! Any idea why the bigger one is acting funny? tl;dr: Cheap, light, and lethal is my preferred design philosophy, as my drone work will attest. Small is also good, but negotiable. Will sacrifice some dV for better mass and price, but will never sacrifice lethality if I can avoid it.
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Sept 23, 2017 21:04:55 GMT
Fair point with the size there. Here's a different version with 3 fixed-mount methane NTRs and 5.4 km/s.  It's a bit bigger than yours but slightly cheaper and lighter. You can't really go cheaper than this, the propulsion parts only cost 500c, with most of the cost coming from the nukes. You could shave off around 70 kg by switching to a hydrogen deuteride fuel but then you end up with doubled fuel volume. So really it depends on what kind of tradeoff you want between dv, cost and fuel volume. Also, remember that shrapnel energy increases with the square of missile velocity, so this one would have around tripled fragment energy compared to yours. The added speed also decreases the time enemy PD has to kill missiles before they hit, which means more missiles make it to the target. At 20 km/s, missiles are pretty much impossible to stop completely, since even if you take out the controller or warhead, the missile has enough dry mass to punch straight through pretty much any armor you can have. They also arrive quickly from hundreds of kilometers away so you can launch them from a lot further away in combat. I rarely use missiles that go under 10 km/s, but that's mostly just personal preference, I don't know if it's actually optimal. |
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Sept 23, 2017 22:05:41 GMT
So your comment about quantity over quality got me thinking, resulting in this design: It's a dirt-cheap KKV with 10 km/s dv, 340c per missile and 13.5 kg dry mass. It's enough to punch through the armor of a gunship in one hit, and you can fire as many of them as you like without running out of money. Which is what the above ship does. It has 24 launchers each firing 6 missiles per second, resulting in a good rate of 144 missiles launched per second. It carries 3000 missiles but still costs a bit under 9 Mc. Below is a video showing how it works against a gunship. Even though 90% of the missiles launched missed completely, there's still enough hits to take out the gunship in one 2-second salvo. Plus the cloud of missiles coming out of the launchers looks pretty great. |
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