Post your designs here!

1 cm of iron as the drone/missile body ?

Okay, I did it. I finally made a NTR micromissile.

When I used decane at first, it's just bad and costful without actually doing anything.

Now, I used hydrogen deuteride instead and it finally works out.

Except there's....multiple problem with this prototype.




As you can see, it's WAY BIGGER than normal combustion micromissile.

It's also three times as expensive, due to for some odd reasons that the NTR refused to have lower enrichment percentage and thus end up having such high price.



Here's the micro NTR. Anyone that can make it even smaller please show me some tips.

The micro decane NTR I made was nearly half the price of this rocket, so I'm extremely annoyed as to why the nuclear reactor won't last without higher enrichment percentage.

And of course, I made a ship just to launch it.




Yeah, it's expensive, but not THAT expensive.

By the way, the ship armed with the combustion rocket micromissile has 40000 of them, while the ship with NTR micromissile has only 30000 of them.

But with the extended range of the micromissile, they could be worth it.

Still a bit annoyed at how I can't figure out how to make the micro NTR cheaper though.

So, after fixing the price tag of that NTR micro missile by a bit less, I decided to see if some...odd strategy could work.

Like for example, does anyone remember Phalanx?

The ship that weighs less than a kiloton and was somehow being stupid expensive?

Well, it has the shooting star launcher, which actually shoot a area-denial gundrone that's so small and tiny, enemy craft can't attack it until it's too late or too close.

I tried using the stock ship in combat against a stock corvette once.

It won.

So I tried to see if I can replicate that by using ultra light conventional guns and mount them on micro missile platform, and then mount the launcher that launch them on a drone and put it to the test.

It works.



Here's the micro gun drone, I want to try and see if I can make it even smaller.

And it can make some rather spectacular result with one drone carrier packing 20 of them.




It's pretty insane and I fairly it's probably useless outside of unique circumstance or against stock ships.

But it's pretty cool too.

Tenorite, though I'm starting to think I don't like yellow and probably switch to green or something.

Also managed to lessen the weight of the drone so much that it actually weigh about the same as a machinegun.

Now my one ton drones can fit over 50 of them with a price tag of slightly over 10 Kc per drone.

EDIT:

So basically for the...hmmm.

The Area Denial Multi-Gun System or ADMGS, the thruster you placed for your gun pods are only for recoil and stabilisation.

So pick some that consume least amount of fuel and has long burn time.

The micro missile thruster I used for my 3.5 kg micro missile is in fact too much for the system, I has to decrease the thrust by four times so I have a lasting time of more than 1 minutes for the gun to fire and depleted their ammo.

Of course, the system are incredibly vulnerable to laser weapon, or you can just armor the turret up with tons of silica gel.

It will drive up the cost though that's for sure.

After a week of mostly work disrupted by by frantic attempts to find a suitable anti laser armor things finnaly stabilized yesterday with another "lesson from the stock" .

So my after patch experience was that silica no longer works and even 5 cm of it wasn't able to give me more than a few missiles survivability from a flock of a 100. I'm still not sure if I was testing in a harder situation than the others or there is something else. Anyway after a bit of juggling around with different multi layered armor configurations I came up with this :






A few obvious things , first - turns out graphite is a really really good anti laser armor. I should have tested it before , frankly I have no idea why I overlooked it for so long. In my tests it is better than boron nitride, diamond , aramid fiber , unreasonable amounts of silica aerogel and amorphous carbon. I noticed it when I was testing my capital drone against stock ships and noticed that the missiles aren't really doing that bad all things considering...

Second, pointy is good. Pointy and narrow is twice as good. Again a no shit Sherlock moment. I have the tendency to overlook this and think that the nosecone in the front will be enough... turns out its way better to design the missile itself slooped. You are loosing effectiveness - more armor - less volume, but the new laser heavy environment tends to be not very forgiving and its worth it.

Third the underlayer of boron is not there so much for armor, its to give the NEFP some mass to work with. Tested it without and the result was neat little holes in the enemy armor and nothing else. With it however... large scale destuction.

The drone itself :




So the first version of this drone was almost ready for posting just before the patch came up , oh boy , was I in for a surprise. Nothing was the same afterwards. My small drones were burning like flies in a forest fire and suddenly the capital drone became something more than a simple expensive distraction - it was the salvation.

First I got rid of the coil gun - it was fun while it lasted , but at 1000 km the chance to hit is... slim and its not worth it. And if you survive from 1000 to a few hundred km everything is decided one way or the other. Second I briefly played with an array of smaller lasers , then got rid of them as well, switched them for a 84cm 101MW big one. I would prefer an array of them but that will have to wait for the broadside version of the drone.

Second the new environment called for massed missile barrages. And the ammo grew up... 3 times. From 2x200 to 2x600. Sure its fun to fight in a tactical battle but if your enemy sports a mutiple GW lasers its probably safer to kill him from a distance with a sledgehammer blow of a hundred/two hundred missiles and may the FPS forgive you.
If you feel like you really want to enter tactical battle face to face with your enemy , the procedure is to start pumping out the MFM (multifunctional frag missile) to distract the enemy , intermixed with NEFPs... both are designed with the same delta V and acceleration and move in the same pack. Snipe the enemy's lasers at your lesure with your own lasers. From my experience even the staggered launch has a good chance to penatrate if facing around a GW of lasers. With more you may need to launch without orders and then hurl them in bigger packs. But in that case better hit from the strategic map.

Propulsion is dual - MPDs and NTRs the resistojets are there only to give it the ability to roll in tactical combat. Its a temporary solution untill I can do a proper compact NTR with more than 2MNs thrust and fit 2 of them in the back.



Drone itself grew "a bit" and got to 445 tons, but costs 1 million less. Getting rid of the coil gun was worth it.
Carrier itself is interesting but I don't consider it worthy yet, its around 400 meters , overengineered for a simple drone taxi and probably with too much emphasis on self reliance - 18x200MW lasers that should be probablly shifted to a proper escort vessel.

Not quite sure if I want 90° gimballed thrusters, I can turn well enough with my base thrusters already.

I already updated the ship quite a bit since that last screen shot and now it's longer but thin enough to rely on the frontal armor in better way.

And I'm thinking about taking the space at the ship front away for more weight budget to put more osmium shield instead for better protection.

The only thing I am annoyed about the ship is that it's so long, the insignia ended up only get painted halfway on the shit because the armor only reached so far.

Maybe I should 'armor' the rest of the ship in a thin layer of silica gel too, to give the ship some laser protection but it would ruin the aesthetic of the ship.

EDIT: Here's the image for the new ship.



Better Delta-V and slightly thinner hull.

Graphite aerogel filled whipple shield armor.

Or basically 2cm silica aerogel,1.40m graphite aerogel,5mm thin boron layer,1.40m graphite aerogel,3cm thick boron final layer.

Also on top of the crew module is several osmium radiation shield for extra protection.