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Post by redparadize on Oct 19, 2016 17:21:47 GMT
No matter what I do, can`t get the same effect. Probably, that is related to the turret angle somehow. Or to kinetic turrets. Lasers with limited turn angle, just won`t fit that way. If I try to mount the thrusters same way, they tend to stay unconnected to the main hull, just floating nearby. Maybe you can share the txt version of a sample ship of yours? Yeah, I could not do the same thing with my coilgun yesterday. On engines, it will be placed on the outer rim of it, gimbal range included. So, if you don't want your radial engine to be far, have a center engine with low or no gimbal. |
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Post by Dhan on Oct 19, 2016 17:49:57 GMT
Oh boy, Mario is in for a world of hurt with all of those bullet bills coming his way  |
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Post by dragonkid11 on Oct 22, 2016 0:10:37 GMT
Ladies and gentlemen, when I design my ship sometimes, I wonder... 'Why not?' more instead of 'Why?' This is apparently the result after I see some major advantages in sub-capital drone carrier.  That's right, it's a freaking alien mothership. It's capable of launching six of these. That also contains some 120 Shuriken I drones which is basically attack space roomba fighter. The sub-capital drone launching out of the carrier.  Also kinda a size comparison I guess. Look at the mothership, it's really big.  Shuriken I drones launching out of their drone carrier after it was launched out of the mothership.  The mothership launching the drones to unleash some serious non-nuclear fire power. So yeah, it's really ridiculous. |
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Post by captinjoehenry on Oct 22, 2016 0:21:37 GMT
Um all I can see is the glow of some radiators. I only haave an idea of what the first two look like and the rest of them being black against the blackness of space means I can't see them at all
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Post by dragonkid11 on Oct 22, 2016 0:40:56 GMT
It looks bright enough to me?
I just wish the sunlight can be brighter sometimes too...
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Post by cuddlefish on Oct 22, 2016 3:27:58 GMT
It looks bright enough to me? I just wish the sunlight can be brighter sometimes too... I'd imagine that scales with your location? Try setting the sandbox locale to Mercury, see if it's any better. |
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Post by dragonkid11 on Oct 22, 2016 7:45:16 GMT
I think I just found a new strategy. Here's another saucer shaped craft.  Notice anything? Like where the other half of the gun is?  They are behind it. And this new strategy I found when testing this flying saucer? FIRE AT ENEMY WHILE RUNNING AWAY. Surprisingly effective. Now, you might think that having your back to the enemy means your thrusters and radiators are exposed. But by running outside of their range, this ship can shoot them back without impunity! Also UFO armor for some reasons just cover thrusters up, effectively protecting it. Glitch? Bug? Alien technology? I DON'T CARE!!! It's a feature to me! This ship is the ship that embodied WW2 French in Children of Dead Earth! |
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Post by jonen on Oct 22, 2016 14:35:46 GMT
I love lasers. I am particularly fond of the idea of the Composite Beam Superlaser (that is to say: Many individually weak, smaller lasers focus fire to OP effect). That said, the forum inspires me to use larger lasers according to the same schema. So I did a thing.Thus. ... I find myself in need of tips for good anti-laser designs that'd survive closing into gun range or delivering a missile warhead even if the ships focus fire, because a pair of these things will annihilate stock fleets in seconds of coming into 250 km range - like if you flicked a lightswitch. Hell, you don't even need to focus fire to melt stock fleets, smart use of focus just makes them go away faster. The biggest weakness in the design so far is that they run themselves out of deltaV right quick if they need to fire thrusters in combat (and all those radiators mean if they need to start turning, they need to burn more or less continuously just to cancel out angular momentum - I could probably do with some more thrusters to help with that, but meh). (Oh, and note the price - these are being worked on for the 100mc fleet challenge. Cheezy Laser Module Sniping.) |
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Post by bigbombr on Oct 22, 2016 14:58:32 GMT
I love lasers. I am particularly fond of the idea of the Composite Beam Superlaser (that is to say: Many individually weak, smaller lasers focus fire to OP effect). That said, the forum inspires me to use larger lasers according to the same schema. So I did a thing.Thus. ... I find myself in need of tips for good anti-laser designs that'd survive closing into gun range or delivering a missile warhead even if the ships focus fire, because a pair of these things will annihilate stock fleets in seconds of coming into 250 km range - like if you flicked a lightswitch. Hell, you don't even need to focus fire to melt stock fleets, smart use of focus just makes them go away faster. The biggest weakness in the design so far is that they run themselves out of deltaV right quick if they need to fire thrusters in combat (and all those radiators mean if they need to start turning, they need to burn more or less continuously just to cancel out angular momentum - I could probably do with some more thrusters to help with that, but meh). (Oh, and note the price - these are being worked on for the 100mc fleet challenge. Cheezy Laser Module Sniping.) Silica airogel has magical anti-laser properties. 100 missiles with each 5 mm of silica airogel will break through any laser defense. |
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Post by ross128 on Oct 22, 2016 15:02:59 GMT
Probably the most impressive thing is the price. Arrays of gigawatt lasers can be hilarious, sure, but usually a single gigawatt laser, its radiators, and its power supply will break the bank. How the hell did you squeeze five of them, a 10GW reactor, and enough radiators to cool ALL of that into 50Mc? XD
I can see at least part of the answer is "by armoring it with Silica Aerogel and wishful thinking", still, in general squeezing that much laser into such a small price tag is very impressive.
Edit: And I can say from my own experiments with laser arrays, that thing definitely can burn through Silica Aerogel. Maybe not at 250km, but it'll start popping missiles at some point and it will pop a lot of them. Like I said I'm sure it'd be theoretically possible to saturate (quite economically too, missiles are cheap), but launching enough missiles to do it would probably crash the game.
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Post by jonen on Oct 22, 2016 15:27:52 GMT
Hm. The AI doesn't launch missiles in those kinds of numbers, though, and besides, the thrust on the thing means that (for as long as you have enough deltaV - see my prime weakness) you can ensure missiles will never hit by just waiting until the AI missiles have expended most (if not all) of their deltaV and then burning for a upwards to a couple of seconds (or as long as required to ensure the enemy can't set off a nuke in range to take out the thrusters). Player controlled missiles have a tendency to get through any defense scheme that they are physically able to survive, though (particularly since the AI is bad at achieving maneuver kills), and even so, if the AI starts thrusting for any reason, there's a better than even chance you won't have the deltaV to hit (well, I suppose a missile design with more thrust and deltaV could, but that's something more like an interplanetary ballistic missile than something I'd use for anti-shipping duties), though using nukes I was able able to get close enough that a manual detonation killed the thrusters (and thus allowed me to finish it off with guns). EDIT: Yeah, in testing it killed 20 to 30 missiles as they closed, would've killed more faster by burning, since a lot of the time it was wasting lasing time on missiles that'd expended their deltav. Modules are actually lifted more or less out of the Unlimited Power and Laser threads on this forum, so I won't take credit for anything but pairing them up. (And even that, I'm fairly sure I'm not the first to do.) Powerplant.Laser 1 Laser 2. Yes, that's a .5 Mc 1GW laser. EDIT 2: How the hell did you squeeze five of them, a 10GW reactor, and enough radiators to cool ALL of that into 50Mc? XD Not five. ⑨. |
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Post by thorneel on Oct 22, 2016 15:49:53 GMT
This ship is the ship that embodied WW2 French Italian in Children of Dead Earth!
More seriously, I find Saucers superior to Needleships and Broadsiders, but they are such a pain to design. I don't like taking advantage of the Armoured Engines bug, so I am more going for partial armour, but on the other hand, Full Saucers are so hilarious... I am experimenting with covering the aft with giant non-gimballed MPD thrusters for cruise thrust. They can be up to 10m wide and still be almost as efficient as smaller ones, with relatively equivalent thrust per surface, and less and wider MPDs require less crew. They are a power hog, so the ship requires big powerplants, but they are of no use in tactical combat: as such I switch them off, leaving power available for armament like coilguns and laser banks. For tactical manoeuvring, I use resistojets that are switched off outside of combat: as power is available anyway, no need for nuclear rockets. (My designs are still WIP, so no image yet) |
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Post by ross128 on Oct 22, 2016 15:54:24 GMT
Getting missiles across even an undefended 250km engagement envelope is definitely tricky. You've basically got to do a short burn to get your approach vector in vaguely the right direction, coast until you're inside your missile's engagement envelope (usually ~40-90km depending on dV and burn time) then switch homing back on.
The need for a long coast will work in the laser's favor, because it means basically the first half of the approach will be very slow. The missile user will definitely want to take up a retrograde orbit and launch from there, so that the missiles can get cheap retrograde intercepts (basically spend the fuel once at the ship, instead of having the missiles spend it every time they launch). That'll allow the missiles to arrive with a high closing speed and relatively full fuel tanks, meaning they can spend less time coasting and extend their effective engagement envelope (because your initial closing velocity times your burn time gets added to your engagement range).
Of course, between the high closing speed and lag, the player might have a hard time actually executing the burn-coast-burn pattern. They'll also definitely want to match orbits before intercepting so that the initial intercept can be as close to head-on as possible, if the initial intercept is off-target they're likely to overshoot and miss entirely.
Ironically a gunship would have a harder time, because you can't cover the gun barrels in aerogel. So as long as it can melt the gun barrels at 250km, they're kind of boned. They might be able to get revenge if they switch "ignore range" on and saturate the area. Usually gunships are a strong counter to laser arrays, because they quickly pop enough array elements that the laser stops doing damage (a gunship with one gun left can still kill you, a laser array with one element left is a laser pointer). However, in this situation the relationship is reversed because the gunship is likely to be completely disarmed and stripped of radiators before its rounds finish traveling all the way to the target. Though when the rounds do arrive they'll probably get the kill, so maybe they can call it a draw.
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Post by jonen on Oct 22, 2016 16:02:17 GMT
Getting missiles across even an undefended 250km engagement envelope is definitely tricky. You've basically got to do a short burn to get your approach vector in vaguely the right direction, coast until you're inside your missile's engagement envelope (usually ~40-90km depending on dV and burn time) then switch homing back on. The need for a long coast will work in the laser's favor, because it means basically the first half of the approach will be very slow. The missile user will definitely want to take up a retrograde orbit and launch from there, so that the missiles can get cheap retrograde intercepts (basically spend the fuel once at the ship, instead of having the missiles spend it every time they launch). That'll allow the missiles to arrive with a high closing speed and relatively full fuel tanks, meaning they can spend less time coasting and extend their effective engagement envelope (because your initial closing velocity times your burn time gets added to your engagement range). Of course, between the high closing speed and lag, the player might have a hard time actually executing the burn-coast-burn pattern. They'll also definitely want to match orbits before intercepting so that the initial intercept can be as close to head-on as possible, if the initial intercept is off-target they're likely to overshoot and miss entirely. Ironically a gunship would have a harder time, because you can't cover the gun barrels in aerogel. So as long as it can melt the gun barrels at 250km, they're kind of boned. They might be able to get revenge if they switch "ignore range" on and saturate the area. Usually gunships are a strong counter to laser arrays, because they quickly pop enough array elements that the laser stops doing damage (a gunship with one gun left can still kill you, a laser array with one element left is a laser pointer). However, in this situation the relationship is reversed because the gunship is likely to be completely disarmed and stripped of radiators before its rounds finish traveling all the way to the target. Though when the rounds do arrive they'll probably get the kill, so maybe they can call it a draw. With 3 G's of acceleration at full thrust, "spray and pray" is not a viable tactic - the thing can kill any gunship trying it before the rounds get downrange, then thrust all of once to be well clear of incoming fire. That said - anything that forces it to expend deltaV? (And that includes turning to get lasers on target.) A step on the way to victory. Angular momentum is hell. |
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Post by dragonkid11 on Oct 22, 2016 16:08:20 GMT
This ship is the ship that embodied WW2 French Italian in Children of Dead Earth!
More seriously, I find Saucers superior to Needleships and Broadsiders, but they are such a pain to design. I don't like taking advantage of the Armoured Engines bug, so I am more going for partial armour, but on the other hand, Full Saucers are so hilarious... I am experimenting with covering the aft with giant non-gimballed MPD thrusters for cruise thrust. They can be up to 10m wide and still be almost as efficient as smaller ones, with relatively equivalent thrust per surface, and less and wider MPDs require less crew. They are a power hog, so the ship requires big powerplants, but they are of no use in tactical combat: as such I switch them off, leaving power available for armament like coilguns and laser banks. For tactical manoeuvring, I use resistojets that are switched off outside of combat: as power is available anyway, no need for nuclear rockets. (My designs are still WIP, so no image yet) I pretty much mastered the art of designing saucer already. Here's the how to basic. Stack the following things in order. Nuclear reactor, short, bulky fuel tanks, crew compartment and then maybe ammo or drone container or something. The idea is to make both top and bottom of your saucer as pointy and flat as possible. To place engine, click center of mass and just line the engine up with the line on its back. To not have the insignia on the back of your saucer, put engine on 90 or 180 or 270 degree. To add more engine, duplicate and then line it up to the main engine and move it to the side, remember to balance them. To prevent radiation leakage, place radiation shield right below the compartment. Now for the true saucer part, add spacer. Add as much as you want of it, but the bigger the spacer, the costlier your armor will get. But your armor would have more slope and thus easier to bounce rounds from enemy fire. And now you just add whatever the hell you want on your saucer! Though my saucer is only possible because I have optimized and miniaturized anything that is possible to be made smaller by myself or by copying other people's design. So yeah, remember that. And now you can long live and prosper. |
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