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Post by eaterofsuns on Oct 13, 2018 16:17:47 GMT
  So I made slightly ridiculous laser with future and community materials... I'll just leave this here |
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Post by eaterofsuns on Oct 14, 2018 16:03:54 GMT
Terribly sorry chaps. That last laser was just preposterous. Here we have a much more sensible option, thanks to the awesome powers of that wonder metal, Aluminium. 40.1% efficiency, even lighter and cheaper. Just don't ask how much radiator area ~6GW@887K takes to dissipate.  |
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Post by airc777 on Oct 19, 2018 9:45:23 GMT
Blows up Vesta fleet pretty good. |
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Post by dragonkid11 on Oct 21, 2018 15:23:03 GMT
Got bored, made some of my first crewed vessel since a very long time due to my affinity with drones.    Unopmitized? Yes? Also looking absolutely fabulous? Yes. All these vessels are based on designs by Atomheartdragon, Rocket Witch and many others, so credit to them for my ships. |
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Post by airc777 on Oct 26, 2018 17:46:31 GMT
This is my first sort of 'combined arms' ship that makes reasonably effective use of a verity of weapon systems, instead of just being a uni-tasker. It features anti drone / missile lasers, anti capital railguns, conventional ciws cannons, and a total of 144 missiles in 4 blast launchers with 42 kt warheads and 6 km/s of delta v. It also weighs exactly the same as a stock Gunship. It's not very pretty though, and it causes a fair bit of lag if you try to fight against it and it decides to ignore maximum range with its conventional cannon.
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Post by treptoplax on Oct 27, 2018 20:50:22 GMT
Here's something... a little different. The Loris drone was a design exercise that turned out to be effective:  Originally intended to test anti-laserstar weapons, the test platform itself turned out to be surprisingly effective. Its behavior is a bit... peculiar. It closes to within 10,000 Km of opposing ships, then stops. It then proceeds to hold that position while firing a 3.5 Km/s railgun every 7.5 seconds for approximately 14 hours. Due to its small size it's almost immune to kinetics. Similarly, even most large laser arrays are ineffective at distance much past 500Km; even the largest I've tested against (the JT spider with 15 Gigawatts of near-UV laser) are harmless against such a small frontal section out past 4.5 Mm. Such arrays are eventually destroyed by the cloud of incoming railgun fire, though, if not dodging, and of course most ships are incapable of dodging for such an extended period. Ten of these will easily dispose of any pure laserstars I've seen, and if they don't have railguns your computer might not even melt first. For a possibly more practical drone, we suggest replacing the current 10Kw reactor with 60Kw or so and increasing the power input of the railgun accordingly; consider deleting the 'rangefinder' launchers and perhaps replacing the resistojets with a suitable NTR. |
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Post by gedzilla on Oct 28, 2018 11:37:40 GMT
That would break prob most computers
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Oct 28, 2018 14:43:30 GMT
10,000 Km (...) 3.5 Km/s (...) every 7.5 seconds (...) 14 hours. Computer says no. My computer, to be exact.
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Post by airc777 on Oct 28, 2018 17:12:19 GMT
10,000 Km (...) 3.5 Km/s (...) every 7.5 seconds (...) 14 hours. Computer says no. My computer, to be exact.
I suppose if it was to much lag you could hypothetically fire one round, then turn off ignore maximum range and wait the 47.619 minutes for the shot to arrive, then repeat until it's had the desired effect on target. Is there an equation for calculating the average amount of time to have better then 50% odds of the laser wobbling in the correct direction and incinerating the drone? You could have calculate the average number of shots to have better then 50% odds of successfully hitting and destroying the laser, and from that you could calculate the optimal number of shots in a volley to fire without causing to much lag. Just fire a volley and wait 47 minutes, and if you don't hit then fire another volley and repeat until either you hit or the laser hits. |
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Oct 28, 2018 20:01:04 GMT
Computer says no. My computer, to be exact.
I suppose if it was to much lag you could hypothetically fire one round, then turn off ignore maximum range and wait the 47.619 minutes for the shot to arrive, then repeat until it's had the desired effect on target. Is there an equation for calculating the average amount of time to have better then 50% odds of the laser wobbling in the correct direction and incinerating the drone? You could have calculate the average number of shots to have better then 50% odds of successfully hitting and destroying the laser, and from that you could calculate the optimal number of shots in a volley to fire without causing to much lag. Just fire a volley and wait 47 minutes, and if you don't hit then fire another volley and repeat until either you hit or the laser hits. As much as I love hard-SF space combat I could really think of some better ways to spend my time. |
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Post by bigbombr on Oct 28, 2018 21:02:58 GMT
... Such arrays are eventually destroyed by the cloud of incoming railgun fire, though, if not dodging, and of course most ships are incapable of dodging for such an extended period. Ten of these will easily dispose of any pure laserstars I've seen, and if they don't have railguns your computer might not even melt first. ... My laserstars can in fact dodge longer than a measly 14 hours. And Anything within 10 Mm dies to lasers, eventually. 47 minutes is more than enough time for evasive maneuvers, and most of my laserstars can dodge for at least an entire day, so these drones would run out of ammunition before my laserstars run out of propellant, even if my laserstars wouldn't return fire for some reason. I've found that at long range, beam wobble is more limiting than intensity, so the obvious answer is more laser. Small laserdrones would be highly effective. It's still an interesting concept, and these things make me wish we could alter the game speed to test these tactics without having to wait too long. And 6000-7000 rounds barrel life, while still beyond what's possible with existing IRL railguns isn't to outrageous either. |
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Post by airc777 on Oct 28, 2018 22:42:12 GMT
Ten giganewton rocket, twenty degrees gimbal.
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Post by treptoplax on Oct 29, 2018 13:44:42 GMT
Computer says no. My computer, to be exact.
I suppose if it was to much lag you could hypothetically fire one round, then turn off ignore maximum range and wait the 47.619 minutes for the shot to arrive, then repeat until it's had the desired effect on target. Is there an equation for calculating the average amount of time to have better then 50% odds of the laser wobbling in the correct direction and incinerating the drone? You could have calculate the average number of shots to have better then 50% odds of successfully hitting and destroying the laser, and from that you could calculate the optimal number of shots in a volley to fire without causing to much lag. Just fire a volley and wait 47 minutes, and if you don't hit then fire another volley and repeat until either you hit or the laser hits. I tried that at one point (while watching a baseball game - I'd wander over to the PC every few minutes and flick ignore range on and off), and yeah, it's a tedious as it sounds. The whole point of this design was to do that testing by just turning the input power of the railgun down to the point where even at these range/velocities it doesn't have enough railgun slugs in flight to produce high lag. |
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Post by treptoplax on Oct 29, 2018 13:53:49 GMT
... Such arrays are eventually destroyed by the cloud of incoming railgun fire, though, if not dodging, and of course most ships are incapable of dodging for such an extended period. Ten of these will easily dispose of any pure laserstars I've seen, and if they don't have railguns your computer might not even melt first. ... My laserstars can in fact dodge longer than a measly 14 hours. And Anything within 10 Mm dies to lasers, eventually. 47 minutes is more than enough time for evasive maneuvers, and most of my laserstars can dodge for at least an entire day, so these drones would run out of ammunition before my laserstars run out of propellant, even if my laserstars wouldn't return fire for some reason. I've found that at long range, beam wobble is more limiting than intensity, so the obvious answer is more laser. Small laserdrones would be highly effective. It's still an interesting concept, and these things make me wish we could alter the game speed to test these tactics without having to wait too long. And 6000-7000 rounds barrel life, while still beyond what's possible with existing IRL railguns isn't to outrageous either. Yeah, I do think drones are the meta-efficient thing now, almost regardless of weapon details. (I do want to try building a broadside laserstar with heavily redundant turrets using flattened armor to spread the mirrors away from each other and the main ship body...). I haven't really been happy with any of the laser drones I've put together myself. The laser damage modeling is really starting to break down at this size/power/distance combo, I think. The one nice thing railguns have over laserstars at extreme range is that the damage they do doesn't really decrease at distance, just the chance of hitting (assuming non-dodging targets). |
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Post by airc777 on Oct 30, 2018 20:27:02 GMT
I made a dumb thing. I wanted to see what was the upper limit of tonnage my largest engine could effectively move. I should have named it 'Lag Generator'.
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