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Post by jeffrey on Oct 22, 2016 16:16:52 GMT
jonen, can you post the userdesign file for your 9 laser ship? I'm really bad at making the modules and ships in the editor. I just want to smoke some space cigars.
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Post by jonen on Oct 22, 2016 16:40:14 GMT
jonen, can you post the userdesign file for your 9 laser ship? I'm really bad at making the modules and ships in the editor. I just want to smoke some space cigars. Okay, first time doing this (didn't even know where my userdesign file was before now). Ship:
CraftBlueprint Attack Laser
Modules
30 Crew Module 2 0.75 null 0
10.1 GW Thermoelectric Fission Reactor 1 -0.875 null 0
1.000 GW Nd:YAG Green Laser 2 9 141.82 null 1.57
6.25 km/s Methane Gimballed Nuclear Thermal Rocket 7 0 null 0
500x30 Amorphous Carbon Radiator 2 20.983 10.1 GW Thermoelectric Fission Reactor 2.44
600 t Methane Tank 2 7 0.25 null 0
500x30 Amorphous Carbon Radiator 2 99.922 1.000 GW Nd:YAG Green Laser 2 0
50x10 Amorphous Carbon Radiator 2 118.53 30 Crew Module 0
600 t Methane Tank 2 7 1.25 null 0
500x30 Amorphous Carbon Radiator 2 47.897 1.000 GW Nd:YAG Green Laser 2 1.57
500x30 Amorphous Carbon Radiator 2 74.456 10.1 GW Thermoelectric Fission Reactor 0.78
Armor
ArmorLayers
Silica Aerogel 0.014 1 0 1 1
Powerplant:
ThermoelectricFissionReactorModule 10.1 GW Thermoelectric Fission Reactor
ReactorCoreDimensions_m 0.25 0.1
NuclearReactor
Coolant Sodium
Moderator Diamond
ModeratorMass_kg 1
Fuel U-235 Dioxide
FuelMass_kg 110
FuelEnrichment_Percent 0.97
ControlRodComposition U-233 Dioxide
ControlRodMass_kg 99
NeutronReflector Diamond
ReflectorThickness_m 0.6
AverageNeutronFlux__m2_s 2e+020
InnerTurbopump
Composition Amorphous Carbon
PumpRadius_m 2.3
RotationalSpeed_RPM 480
ThermocoupleInnerDimensions_m 13 30
Thermocouple
PTypeComposition Tungsten
NTypeComposition Tantalum
Length_m 0.001
ThermocoupleExitTemperature_K 2500
OuterCoolant Sodium
OuterTurbopump
Composition Boron
PumpRadius_m 0.75
RotationalSpeed_RPM 800
Laser (maybe mind the name?)
LaserModule 1.000 GW Nd:YAG Green Laser 2
ArcLamp
GasComposition Krypton
EnvelopeComposition Fused Quartz
PowerSupplied_W 1e+009
Radius_m 0.01
CavityWallComposition Silver
CavityCoolantComposition Hydrogen
CavitySemimajorAxis_m 1
CavitySemiminorAxis_m 0.99
GainMedium Nd:YAG
OpticalNodes 7000000
LasingRodRadius_m 0.014
Mirror
Composition Silver
OutputCoupler
Composition Fused Quartz
CoolantTurbopump
Composition Boron
PumpRadius_m 0.9
RotationalSpeed_RPM 460
CoolantInletTemperature_K 1200
FrequencyDoubler
NonlinearOptic
Composition Silver Gallium Selenide
OpticLength_m 0.026
OpticRadius_m 0.025
ApertureRadius_m 2.4
FocusingMirror
Composition Silver
Turret
InnerRadius_m 5.1
ArmorComposition Boron
ArmorThickness_m 0.03
ReactionWheels
Composition Lead
RotationalSpeed_RPM 72
EngagementRange_km 250
TargetsShips true
TargetsShots true
Thrusters:
NuclearThermalRocketModule 6.25 km/s Methane Gimballed Nuclear Thermal Rocket
ReactorCoreHeight_m 0.16
NuclearReactor
Coolant Methane
Moderator Graphite
ModeratorMass_kg 0
Fuel U-235 Dioxide
FuelMass_kg 73
FuelEnrichment_Percent 0.97
ControlRodComposition Boron Nitride
ControlRodMass_kg 56
NeutronReflector Graphite
ReflectorThickness_m 0.837
AverageNeutronFlux__m2_s 2.1e+020
ThermalRocket
ChamberComposition Vanadium Chromium Steel
ThroatRadius_m 0.16
ChamberWallThickness_m 0.011
ChamberContractionRatio 2.7
NozzleExpansionRatio 31
NozzleExpansionAngle_degrees 6.7
RegenerativeCooling_Percent 0.332
Injector
Composition UHMWPE
PumpRadius_m 0.62
RotationalSpeed_RPM 980
Gimbal
InnerRadius_m 0.9
ArmorComposition Reinforced Carbon-Carbon
ArmorThickness_m 0.01
ReactionWheels
Composition UHMWPE
RotationalSpeed_RPM 33000
GimbalAngle_degrees 15
Proptanks
PropellantTankModule 600 t Methane Tank 2
Propellant Methane
StructureComposition UHMWPE
ReactionMass_kg 6e+005
HeightToRadiusRatio 9.2
AdditionalArmorThickness_m 0
Large radiators
RadiatorModule 500x30 Amorphous Carbon Radiator
Composition Amorphous Carbon
PanelWidth_m 50
Height_m 25
Thickness_m 0.001
ArmorThickness_m 0.001
Panels 10
SurfaceFinish Diamond Small radiators
RadiatorModule 50x10 Amorphous Carbon Radiator
Composition Amorphous Carbon
PanelWidth_m 10
Height_m 10
Thickness_m 0.015
ArmorThickness_m 0.025
Panels 5
SurfaceFinish Graphite
Crew module should be stock.
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Post by jeffrey on Oct 22, 2016 16:58:54 GMT
Thanks!
For the other readers, its in C:\Users\your username\AppData\Roaming\CDE
It's glorious! Everything dies super fast!
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Post by redmars on Oct 22, 2016 17:40:09 GMT
I've been having a lot of luck with 'medium' drones in the range of 40-50 tonnes. A few of these, each with a pair of stock 3mm railguns, a few light point-defence cannons, and 10-20 3kt nuclear SRMs, are able to do terrible damage to capital fleets. Will post in more detail when I settle on a final design.
Also, I have accepted LOX/LH2 as my personal lord and saviour, at least for drones and RCS/combat thrust. Larger ships also get a hydrogen nuke or resistojet for a primary cruising engine.
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Post by thorneel on Oct 22, 2016 17:53:29 GMT
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. This is pretty much how I do it as well (though I haven't needed a radiation shield yet), the pain is more about placing each element by hand by fiddling with the rotation slide until it more or less looks correct, and radiators that are oriented vertically instead of horizontally. My initial design used a flat crew module as the central disc, but this revealed to be way too fragile, ending up with two halves flying in each direction more often than not. Here is what I got so far: The 25 lasers are hidden under the armour, which is an exploit I feel slightly less bad about than the hidden thruster one. From initial tests it works fairly well apart from two things: Broadside doesn't work properly and is always wrong by about five or ten degrees, meaning four lasers can't properly fire, and the flight computer is lost and flails the resistojets around in the hope of pointing the thing in vaguely the right direction - which means I can't compensate by giving it an orientation order. Apart from that, it works fairly decently, though it is not optimised yet, and armour is probably far from optimal. Attachments:
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Post by beta on Oct 22, 2016 21:18:12 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. Those 1GW deathrays were the main inspiration for designing my capital ships with anti-laser defenses in mind. Mount all your weaponry on one side of your ship (nadir/zenith), begin the combat with a high intercept speed to close distance as fast as possible, rotate ship such that the gun side is facing away from the deathray. When you get to effective weapons range, rotate back to gun side. You generally lose weapons on the roll over due to time of flight of the projectiles, but the death ray is typically doomed. That being said, the testing I did was with 1 of those 1GW green lasers, not freaking 9 of them heh.
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Post by jonen on Oct 22, 2016 21:31:37 GMT
My experience is that if you're not maneuvering enough to keep the focus from wandering, the GW laser array will burn through anything less than at least decimeters of anti-laser coating, through your ship, to hit subsystems on the other side.
Also, the best way to disable radiators is to not focus on them, as the lasers just walking randomly over the hull has a bigger chance of hitting the radiators and doing damage than focusing fire on the base of them to burn them off.
And if all else fails, target engine nozzles. (The non-gimballed thrusters on the Cutter, Corsair and Hiveship seem weirdly resistant to laser - I'm fairly sure most of my kills targeting those are from collateral due to killing propellant tanks behind them.)
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Post by dragonkid11 on Oct 23, 2016 9:11:57 GMT
Sometimes, you just want to make something silly. Yes, both of these drones have 20 guns. Yes, the game lags like hell if there's more than two of them firing simultaneously.
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Post by zuthal on Oct 24, 2016 6:00:30 GMT
Tasil Aerospace Incorporated presents: The "Storm" line of micromissiles. Want to obliterate your enemies from a safe distance, but all other missile designs are too large or too expensive? Worry not, we at Tasil Aerospace have got you covered! All missiles of the "Storm" line use non-explosive fluorine-hydrogen fuel and the same highly efficient 5 km/s exhaust velocity engine, for a delta-V of 2.8 km/s and a burnout range of 13.7 km. They are also armoured with 3.8 mm of silica aerogel, giving lightweight, moderate protection against lasers. (Disclaimer: No guarantee of protection is given against unreasonable laser designs. The definition of unreasonable laser designs is left to Tasil Aerospace Incorporated's legal department) The SSM-1 Hurricane is a novel Armour-Piercing Non-Discarding Sabot (APNDS) EFP design, with an osmium long-rod penetrator propelled by a 400 g octogen charge via a UHMWPE sabot. The SSM-2 Buran is a simple long-rod penetrator KKV. Thus, it is completely inert. It is also the cheapest option out of our suite of missiles, at only 48.8 credits a piece! The SSM-3 Wirbelwind is a convential octogen-osmium flak bomb design, throwing a shower of high-velocity shrapnel at the enemy. The SSM-4 Typhoon is our conventional EFP option, with a 600 g copper penetrator propelled by the same 400 g octogen charge as in the SSM-1 Hurricane. The SSM-5 Orkan, with a 114 t pure fission nuclear detonator as the payload, is our most potent option by far, but also the most expensive, costing almost twice as much as the next most expensive model. Each missile also comes with a pre-made launcher. Each launcher carries 100 rounds, fires one missile every second at between 1.5 and 1.6 m/s, and releases less than 130 W of waste heat. Required Modules:
CombustionRocketModule 5.00 km/s Fluorine Hydrogen Gimballed Combustion Rocket Reaction Fluorine Hydrogen StoichiometricMixtureRatio 1 ThermalRocket ChamberComposition Boron ThroatRadius_m 0.003 ChamberWallThickness_m 0.0001 ChamberContractionRatio 38 NozzleExpansionRatio 100 NozzleExpansionAngle_degrees 7.6 RegenerativeCooling_Percent 1 Injector Composition Lithium PumpRadius_m 0.01 RotationalSpeed_RPM 1500 Gimbal InnerRadius_m 0.016 ArmorComposition Aluminum ArmorThickness_m 0.0001 ReactionWheels Composition Osmium RotationalSpeed_RPM 1e+05 GimbalAngle_degrees 5.5
ExplosiveModule 400 g Octogen Explosive Length_m 0.027 ExplosiveMass_kg 0.4 ExplosiveComposition Octogen ShrapnelMass_kg 0 ShrapnelComposition Aluminum Detonator Range_km 0.001 MinimumRange_km 0 TargetsShips true TargetsShots false
ExplosiveModule 1.000 kg Octogen Flak Bomb Length_m 0.05 ExplosiveMass_kg 0.1 ExplosiveComposition Octogen ShrapnelMass_kg 0.9 ShrapnelComposition Osmium Detonator Range_km 0.002 MinimumRange_km 0 TargetsShips true TargetsShots false
NuclearPayloadModule 114 t Pure Fission Nuke CoreComposition Pu-239 ReflectorComposition Boron SlowExplosive CombustionReaction Octogen DelayComposition Boron DelayCompositionMassFraction 0.873 FastExplosive Octogen CoreMass_kg 0.012 Enrichment_Percent 0.97 HollowCoreRadius_m 0.04 InnerExplosiveWidth_m 0.003 FusionBoost null FusionFuelDensity_kg__m3 0 Detonator Range_km 0.0057 MinimumRange_km 1 TargetsShips true TargetsShots false
PropellantTankModule 1.90 kg Fluorine Tank Propellant Fluorine StructureComposition UHMWPE ReactionMass_kg 1.9 HeightToRadiusRatio 2.9 AdditionalArmorThickness_m 0
PropellantTankModule 100 g Hydrogen Tank Propellant Hydrogen StructureComposition UHMWPE ReactionMass_kg 0.1 HeightToRadiusRatio 3.7 AdditionalArmorThickness_m 0
RadiationShieldModule 2.40 cm Diameter 9.80 cm Radiation Shield Composition Osmium Dimensions_m 0.012 0.098
RadiationShieldModule 2.00 cm Diameter 14.0 cm Radiation Shield Composition Osmium Dimensions_m 0.01 0.14
RadiationShieldModule 10.0 cm Diameter 1.00 cm Radiation Shield Composition UHMWPE Dimensions_m 0.05 0.01
RadiationShieldModule 10.0 cm Diameter 8.60 mm Radiation Shield Composition Copper Dimensions_m 0.05 0.0086
SSM-1 Hurricane:
CraftBlueprint SSM-1 Hurricane Modules 5.00 km/s Fluorine Hydrogen Gimballed Combustion Rocket 1 0 null 0 1.90 kg Fluorine Tank 1 0.22577 null 0 100 g Hydrogen Tank 1 0.43633 null 0 Remote Control 1 0.68564 null 0 2.00 cm Diameter 7.40 cm Radiation Shield 1 0.73944 null 0 10.0 cm Diameter 1.00 cm Radiation Shield 1 0.71254 null 0 400 g Octogen Explosive 1 0.69909 null 0 Armor ArmorLayers Silica Aerogel 0.0038 0 0 1 1
CarrierModule 1.000 kW SSM-1 Hurricane Launcher Payload SSM-1 Hurricane Launcher Stator Cobalt TrackLength_m 0.1 StatorDepth_m 0.025 Forcer Zirconium Copper ForcerRadius_m 0.0021 Coolant Water PowerConsumption_W 1000 CoolantTurbopump Composition Boron PumpRadius_m 0.01 RotationalSpeed_RPM 35 CoolantInletTemperature_K 1300 ArmorMaterial Boron ArmorThickness_m 0.041 AttachedAmmoBay Capacity 100 Stacks 4 EngagementRange_km 13.7 TargetsShips true TargetsShots false
SSM-2 Buran:
CraftBlueprint SSM-2 Buran Modules 5.00 km/s Fluorine Hydrogen Gimballed Combustion Rocket 1 0 null 0 1.90 kg Fluorine Tank 1 0.22577 null 0 100 g Hydrogen Tank 1 0.43633 null 0 Remote Control 1 0.68564 null 0 2.00 cm Diameter 14.0 cm Radiation Shield 1 0.73944 null 0 Armor ArmorLayers Silica Aerogel 0.0038 0 0 1 1
CarrierModule 1.000 kW SSM-2 Buran Launcher Payload SSM-2 Buran Launcher Stator Cobalt TrackLength_m 0.1 StatorDepth_m 0.025 Forcer Zirconium Copper ForcerRadius_m 0.0021 Coolant Water PowerConsumption_W 1000 CoolantTurbopump Composition Boron PumpRadius_m 0.01 RotationalSpeed_RPM 36 CoolantInletTemperature_K 1300 ArmorMaterial Boron ArmorThickness_m 0.04 AttachedAmmoBay Capacity 100 Stacks 4 EngagementRange_km 13.7 TargetsShips true TargetsShots false
SSM-3 Wirbelwind:
CraftBlueprint SSM-3 Wirbelwind Modules 5.00 km/s Fluorine Hydrogen Gimballed Combustion Rocket 1 0 null 0 1.90 kg Fluorine Tank 1 0.22577 null 0 100 g Hydrogen Tank 1 0.43633 null 0 Remote Control 1 0.68564 null 0 1.000 kg Octogen Flak Bomb 1 0.73944 null 0 Armor ArmorLayers Silica Aerogel 0.0038 0 0 1 1
CarrierModule 1.000 kW SSM-3 Wirbelwind Launcher Payload SSM-3 Wirbelwind Launcher Stator Cobalt TrackLength_m 0.1 StatorDepth_m 0.025 Forcer Zirconium Copper ForcerRadius_m 0.0021 Coolant Water PowerConsumption_W 1000 CoolantTurbopump Composition Boron PumpRadius_m 0.01 RotationalSpeed_RPM 32 CoolantInletTemperature_K 1300 ArmorMaterial Boron ArmorThickness_m 0.044 AttachedAmmoBay Capacity 100 Stacks 4 EngagementRange_km 13.7 TargetsShips true TargetsShots false
SSM-4 Typhoon:
CraftBlueprint SSM-4 Typhoon Modules 5.00 km/s Fluorine Hydrogen Gimballed Combustion Rocket 1 0 null 0 1.90 kg Fluorine Tank 1 0.22577 null 0 100 g Hydrogen Tank 1 0.43633 null 0 Remote Control 1 0.73599 null 0 400 g Octogen Explosive 1 0.73944 null 0 10.0 cm Diameter 8.60 mm Radiation Shield 1 0.76644 null 0 Armor ArmorLayers Silica Aerogel 0.0038 0 0 1 1
CarrierModule 1.000 kW SSM-4 Typhoon Launcher Payload SSM-4 Typhoon Launcher Stator Cobalt TrackLength_m 0.1 StatorDepth_m 0.025 Forcer Zirconium Copper ForcerRadius_m 0.0021 Coolant Water PowerConsumption_W 1000 CoolantTurbopump Composition Boron PumpRadius_m 0.01 RotationalSpeed_RPM 32 CoolantInletTemperature_K 1300 ArmorMaterial Boron ArmorThickness_m 0.045 AttachedAmmoBay Capacity 100 Stacks 4 EngagementRange_km 13.7 TargetsShips true TargetsShots false
SSM-5 Orkan:
CraftBlueprint SSM-5 Orkan Modules 5.00 km/s Fluorine Hydrogen Gimballed Combustion Rocket 1 0 null 0 1.90 kg Fluorine Tank 1 0.22577 null 0 100 g Hydrogen Tank 1 0.43633 null 0 Remote Control 1 0.73599 null 0 114 t Pure Fission Nuke 1 0.73944 null 0 Armor ArmorLayers Silica Aerogel 0.0038 0 0 1 1
CarrierModule 1.000 kW SSM-5 Orkan Launcher Payload SSM-5 Orkan Launcher Stator Cobalt TrackLength_m 0.1 StatorDepth_m 0.025 Forcer Zirconium Copper ForcerRadius_m 0.0021 Coolant Water PowerConsumption_W 1000 CoolantTurbopump Composition Boron PumpRadius_m 0.01 RotationalSpeed_RPM 38 CoolantInletTemperature_K 1300 ArmorMaterial Boron ArmorThickness_m 0.038 AttachedAmmoBay Capacity 100 Stacks 4 EngagementRange_km 13.7 TargetsShips true TargetsShots false
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Post by lawson on Oct 24, 2016 15:25:53 GMT
Been working on making a capital drone with a Mega-laser and some nuclear micro-missiles to "encourage" tough targets to die faster. (Just don't ever hit the missiles's "launch all" or even "launch 20" with a large fleet of 'em!) It's all custom parts, and the laser only puts out 40MW to save weight and operate at a 1355K outlet temperature. (copper mirrors sacrifice about 5% of output power and let the laser run at 1355K)
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Post by 123nick on Oct 24, 2016 16:30:50 GMT
Been working on making a capital drone with a Mega-laser and some nuclear micro-missiles to "encourage" tough targets to die faster. (Just don't ever hit the missiles's "launch all" or even "launch 20" with a large fleet of 'em!) View AttachmentIt's all custom parts, and the laser only puts out 40MW to save weight and operate at a 1355K outlet temperature. (copper mirrors sacrifice about 5% of output power and let the laser run at 1355K) View AttachmentWoah, 1 GW reactor! that is very good reactor, i assume it is from the reactor thread?
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Post by lawson on Oct 24, 2016 20:02:11 GMT
Been working on making a capital drone with a Mega-laser and some nuclear micro-missiles to "encourage" tough targets to die faster. (Just don't ever hit the missiles's "launch all" or even "launch 20" with a large fleet of 'em!) It's all custom parts, and the laser only puts out 40MW to save weight and operate at a 1355K outlet temperature. (copper mirrors sacrifice about 5% of output power and let the laser run at 1355K) Woah, 1 GW reactor! that is very good reactor, i assume it is from the reactor thread? Yes, though I did modify it to be longer and thinner for that drone.
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Post by cuisinart8 on Oct 25, 2016 20:37:22 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.) This thing is incredibly difficult to fight. It outranges pretty much any ship in the game, and the only way I've found to take it down is to completely overwhelm it. You can cheese it by waiting to launch missiles until combat starts, causing the AI to prioritize the missiles as targets. If you send enough missiles, it never even fires on you ships until they get in weapons range. (For reference, in tests with gunships, the lasers took out almost 500 flak missiles.) Another way I tried to take it out was to armor missiles more. Adding a few centimeters of silica aerogel to the Devastator design yields great results until close range, when the added armor doesn't really make a difference. I've also found a strange phenomenon- often, when sending large missile salvos, the ship will struggle to take all of the missiles down- until the last moment. The up-armored Devastators would have worked, with about 200 missiles out of 300 hitting, if the last 200 hadn't all been mysteriously disabled in the seconds before detonation. Most had no actual damage, and hadn't collided with each other either. I'm not sure what happened there...
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Post by magusunion on Oct 25, 2016 21:07:42 GMT
Been working on making a capital drone with a Mega-laser and some nuclear micro-missiles to "encourage" tough targets to die faster. (Just don't ever hit the missiles's "launch all" or even "launch 20" with a large fleet of 'em!) It's all custom parts, and the laser only puts out 40MW to save weight and operate at a 1355K outlet temperature. (copper mirrors sacrifice about 5% of output power and let the laser run at 1355K) It's not quite as bad as this expensive abomination, though. I really wish I could create a "big gun" with a faster rotation speed than what its got. Engagement range is usually between 150-270 kilometers
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Post by wafflestoo on Oct 25, 2016 23:38:22 GMT
Out of curiosity, has anyone ever built anything worthwhile out of the 1MW ruby lasers? Every test I've done with them has ended as an utter failure with either the 400kw IR laser or the 13GW YAG laser being superior options.
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