Post your designs here!

I have used a fleet centered around hydrogen deuteride, and while they were fine, I found them too light, too fragile and too costly. Then, as I began to experiment with RCS thrusters and engines resilience against nuclear blasts, I switched to methane. While RCS and nuke-surviving thrusters didn't really pan out, I wanted to share one design.

It's not as much a finished ship as it is a test bed for various weapons I'm experimenting with, yet in my tests I grew to like it a lot. It's not innovative or powerful as some other designs posted here, but it is quite fun. It's also a nuke-less design, i.e. I tried to make it as good as I can without using nuclear weapons. It still has reactors and NTRs of course, but no nuclear warheads on-board.


I will talk about the armaments later, but they are not the point. I was surprised how sturdy (compared to my previous designs) this ship turned out to be given its light armor. Pounded by a salvo of thirty 1.5 MT nuclear missiles, and still in business:

The flares weren't launched on purpose.

The nose is cut off by enemy fire, but it keeps fighting.

The crew survives the ordeal, and it even has delta-V left.

The two types of railguns are nothing exceptional, and both are well within physics limits. In fact, I could greatly increase their rate of fire before they start breaking physics, but I'm mostly preoccupied with missiles for now.

The front cannon is a broken coilgun I need to replace. It fires guided fragmentation rounds that shred gunships like no tomorrow.


If I'm able to make the payload two times lighter and decrease rate of fire to 60 RPM, it won't break the laws of physics.

The missiles were designed as counter missiles, and originally used fragmentation warhead. I was not satisfied with the results and for now I'm experimenting with pure KKV designs. So far, they seem to work surprisingly well against small targets and in addition are devastating against capital ships. They can be further optimized as well, but I won't probably miniaturize them to much.

The flares are stock. For them to work, you need to shutdown two of the main radiators (this is a bug) as well as engines.

Nicely done (yup, my railgun is as I suspected, about 650% efficient).  You might add a bbl length and do a check on muzzle energy as well.  If my understanding is correct you shouldn't be able to generate more than [2*Power*(rail length (m)) / (muzzle velocity (m))] and even that would require your rails and armature to be 100% efficient.

This formula assumes that the projectile is of negligeable length compared to the barrel, right? Also, is it valid for coil guns too?

Yeah, my main Dreadnaught cannon is 243% more efficient than it should be. Thankfully, I can buff the power input with a few of my GW reactor designs.

BTW: what's a good countermeasure against laser (if any, since that seems to be the current meta atm)...

That's because stock railguns ARE broken

I think the 39Mw gun is the only gauss weapon in the game that doesn't violate basic thermodynamics. That's a big part of why I stopped worrying about it so much.

I can't get my head around it.  I read through a few articles on the railgun the USN is testing and it isn't adding up.  They're quoting a power-input of 25 MW, muzzle energy of 20-32 MJ, and a muzzle velocity of 2 km/s.  Looking at pictures of it I'm estimating the barrel length to be about 6m.

Low-balling the energy output at 20 MJ,  With an average velocity of 1000 m/s, the projectile spends about 6ms in the barrel.  Power = Energy / time so 20,000,000 J / 0.006 s gives us ~3.33 GW of power... NOT 25 MW.

The only thing I can think of is either they are using capacitors to deliver the three DeLoreans worth of power each shot takes and 25 MW is the steady power draw to recover the capacitors between shots (putting its sustained rate-of-fire at one round every two+ minutes) or I am flat wrong about how I am going about things.


HELP! 

I made a tread just for that! The way to defeat laser, or anything else really, remain the same.