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Post by newageofpower on Dec 22, 2017 23:25:34 GMT
Okay, I'm perhaps being too hard on the newbie >jtyotjotjipaefvj >newbie Lurk moar. What happeneth to the Charlotte Avatar? Turn in your best girl badge. |
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Post by dragonkid11 on Dec 23, 2017 0:28:50 GMT
Wait, you can make fuel tank weighs less than 100 G now or it's just modifying the limit?
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Post by Rocket Witch on Dec 23, 2017 0:30:51 GMT
What happeneth to the Charlotte Avatar? Turn in your best girl badge. Never! /changes back |
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Post by Rocket Witch on Dec 23, 2017 0:36:35 GMT
Wait, you can make fuel tank weighs less than 100 G now or it's just modifying the limit? Stock limit is still 100g. |
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Post by samchiu2000 on Dec 23, 2017 3:43:19 GMT
A small RTG is in fact more than enough Rocket Witch (Although it's far from a few grams  ) Huh? What did I say about RTGs before? Rather than a sodium-cooled gigawatt reactor. |
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Post by blackstar on Dec 28, 2017 1:15:26 GMT
Have you guys tried using Caesium in the internal reactor cooling loop? it seems to result in a weight savings of ~5 percent when I swapped to it from sodium.
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Post by samchiu2000 on Dec 28, 2017 1:48:51 GMT
Have you guys tried using Caesium in the internal reactor cooling loop? it seems to result in a weight savings of ~5 percent when I swapped to it from sodium. Well it become heavier and more costly for me. Maybe we got a distinct reactor design. Maybe you can check out this and get some nice reactor designs from apophys . |
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Post by blackstar on Dec 28, 2017 2:25:53 GMT
Have you guys tried using Caesium in the internal reactor cooling loop? it seems to result in a weight savings of ~5 percent when I swapped to it from sodium. Well it become heavier and more costly for me. Maybe we got a distinct reactor design. Maybe you can check out this and get some nice reactor designs from apophys . My current best design gets a mass efficiency of 127MW/Ton running at 2500K outlet temp whereas apophys's only get 116MW/ton at best. Attachments:
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Post by samchiu2000 on Dec 28, 2017 2:28:38 GMT
Well it become heavier and more costly for me. Maybe we got a distinct reactor design. Maybe you can check out this and get some nice reactor designs from apophys . My current best design gets a mass efficiency of 127MW/Ton running at 2500K outlet temp whereas apophys's only get 116MW/ton at best. Oh. That's quite light for a 2 GW reactor. May look into it later.  EDIT: I guess that it's the density that make thing lighter as the reactor need a smaller volume for the denser coolant, hence reducing the weight albeit higher cost. |
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Post by blackstar on Dec 28, 2017 7:20:38 GMT
My current best design gets a mass efficiency of 127MW/Ton running at 2500K outlet temp whereas apophys's only get 116MW/ton at best. Oh. That's quite light for a 2 GW reactor. May look into it later. EDIT: I guess that it's the density that make thing lighter as the reactor need a smaller volume for the denser coolant, hence reducing the weight albeit higher cost. The denser coolant also enables smaller turbopumps as there is less volume to pump around, this is further improved on by the massive specific heat of Caesium(24kj/kgK). Also by messing around with the pump/thermocouple ratios, I managed to get a 2.06GW/15.8t reactor giving a 130.5MW/Ton ratio. Edit: I just realized that the specific heat of Caesium is a bug... back to sodium I go. |
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Post by zappy99 on Dec 29, 2017 2:56:00 GMT
Long time lurker here. After seeing jtyotjotjipaefvi's submission, I decided to try my hand at making a cheaper version of the missile that can still ventilate a gunship with one hit. I cut down the mass ratio and the size of the payload massively, replaced the NTR's with gimballed flourine hydrogen rockets, and replaced the armour with PTFE and nitrile rubber. I'm pretty happy with the result. Introducing the F-36 "Bucko" Cluster Missile: The missile weighs 188 kg and costs 567 credits. It has a lower Delta-v, but it's small enough to be packed in a carrier drone and a salvo of these can kill an entire fleet. It also kills gunships quite nicely. A single missile can usually survive long enough for it to deploy its submunitions and wreak bloody havoc on the ship's internals. Here's the result from a test I made with a single missile: Entry wound: Internal damage: Exit wound:  The munitions aren't as evenly spread as in jtyotjotjipaefvi's missile, so instead of concentric circles you get these hexagonal gashes. Not as aesthetically pleasing, but still pretty deadly. The design uses 10*50g and 10*100g submunitions which are fired 1 km from the target for a relatively tight and even spread, though the 10*100g submunitions have a tendency to over-penetrate. The missile is generally pretty overpowered against smaller ships, often cutting them into pieces. One thing to note is that the missile often manages to hit even after being disabled before it can deploy its munitions, sometimes killing the ship (though in one test with my custom 500 ton gunboat, the ship managed to survive getting hit by three disabled missiles with barely any damage. I then sent a 20-missile salvo that vaporized it. In another test, the gunboat managed to dodge the entire salvo by whipping its tail around). So overall, these things are way better than regular flak missiles. So overall, fuses are a pretty great addition Also, concave armour makes for some pretty cute nosecones: ]  |
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Post by newageofpower on Jan 4, 2018 0:03:53 GMT
I'm fairly familiar with homing AI, having written a few of them myself, so I have a fairly good grasp of how they should fly and what variables to use for that. Are you like, a missile designer? |
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Jan 4, 2018 0:23:39 GMT
I'm fairly familiar with homing AI, having written a few of them myself, so I have a fairly good grasp of how they should fly and what variables to use for that. Are you like, a missile designer? No, it was for a 2D space combat simulator I worked on my free time some years back. It had homing missiles that worked fairly similarly to those in CDE, with boost, coasting and terminal acceleration phases just like we have here. The actual homing math is probably identical to CDE, at least the missiles behaved just like they do here. Here's our tigsource thread from a long ago, it even seems to have a working link to the latest demo release from 2014: forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=38782.0Edit: here's a relevant webm demonstrating the latest missile behaviour: dl.dropbox.com/s/3tcfl1bo7tixcgg/missule.webm?dl=0 |
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Jan 12, 2018 1:37:29 GMT
I was never quite happy with how tedious anti-laserstar drones are to use, so I spent some time improving on my old ideas. I also made the discovery that high-speed intercept stability issues only happen around small bodies, when you play around Earth even 20 km/s burns are stable. As such, I made a staged design that has a high-dv bus stage that accelerates my drones out of combat, and a terminal stage with a small railgun and some dv so it can counter last-minute avoidance maneuvers by the target laserstar. Designs for both stages in spoilers below: Drone bus:  Drone:  The bus has zero armor, which means it can get the drones up to speed fairly cheaply. I could have saved around 600 kc by switching to Methane, but HD results in a 60% lighter package which might be more useful if you want to carry more than one bus on a capital ship for some reason. The drone has almost no dv, instead focusing on survivability. It has a single 30x60cm diamond block to protect it from even close-range lasing damage, as well as some tin foil wrapped around its body to allow it to survive glancing hits to its sides while maneuvering further away. The 276 m/s dv as well as its railgun's 5 km/s muzzle velocity ensure that the laserstar can't escape during the free-fall approach after the bus has spent all its dv and released the gun platforms. The thrusters could also be used to avoid point-defense railguns - 1 gee of acceleration should be more than enough even when forced to keep the nose pointing very close to the target to block the laser. Separating the drones to a high-dv unarmored boost stage and an armored final approach platform means that the final stage can be quite small, as it doesn't need to carry around large engines or empty external tanks (or worse yet, launch droptanks to drop your framerate while playing!) Small size again translates to lower armor mass and cost, so it's an all-around win-win situation. Combat test against one deep fryer in spoilers below. Start of scenario, my station has launched the anti-laser bus which then burns to intercept.  Start of combat, bus starts deploying drones at 2 Mm range. It's so far that it can survive for a good while even with zero armor.  At 250 km range, I manually told the guns to fire. I suppose I should increase their range to somewhere past 100 km so that you don't need to micromanage opening fire on time. No guns have been disabled so far, are drones are fully operational still. At around 140 km, everything is still fine. The armor is holding up nicely.  After this, the laser is close enough to start burning through the armor on the guns as well as the monolithic blocks. The last gun pops at around 60 km range. It's close enough that the laserstar wouldn't have time to avoid the shots, even with >1 g acceleration.  Finally, a second later the laserstar dies as the bullets arrive. Only 12 drones are left, all of them disarmed.  It's a pretty simple and easy-to-use design, though it could be improved a bit by increasing the amount of armor on the railguns, as well as increasing their range so that you don't need to manually fire them before they're all burned off. All in all a decent laser remover. |
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Post by dragonkid11 on Jan 13, 2018 12:59:30 GMT
The munitions aren't as evenly spread as in jtyotjotjipaefvi's missile, so instead of concentric circles you get these hexagonal gashes. Not as aesthetically pleasing, but still pretty deadly. The design uses 10*50g and 10*100g submunitions which are fired 1 km from the target for a relatively tight and even spread, though the 10*100g submunitions have a tendency to over-penetrate. The missile is generally pretty overpowered against smaller ships, often cutting them into pieces. One thing to note is that the missile often manages to hit even after being disabled before it can deploy its munitions, sometimes killing the ship (though in one test with my custom 500 ton gunboat, the ship managed to survive getting hit by three disabled missiles with barely any damage. I then sent a 20-missile salvo that vaporized it. In another test, the gunboat managed to dodge the entire salvo by whipping its tail around). So overall, these things are way better than regular flak missiles. So overall, fuses are a pretty great addition What are the sub-munitions like? Do they simply explode after a set time or do they go off based on proximity to the target? I ask this because I was similarly inspired by jtyo's design, but my sub-munitions don't seem to explode at all. After running test with my own cluster missile design, I would suggest putting fuse on those sub-minitions even if they explode after impact just so the leftover won't lag out your game and computer. Considering my missile will be at top velocity upon impact, I picked a release point from 1 kilometer to less with fuse time of 0.2 to 0.1 seconds just to test the water. The result is pretty and surprisingly effective for its size. |
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