Post your designs here!

I just threw up a laser drill challenge that has a standardized target consisting of of both high and low intensity materials and one standard-ish metal.

childrenofadeadearth.boards.net/thread/663/challenge-000km-laser-drill-mass

I set the limit off cost and mass (as those are the usual fitting requirements for missions). There are pros and cons for both mind set. Individual powerful lasers save mass but get slowed down significantly by low critical intensity materials (aramid fiber and silica aerogel). Large laser arrays of low intensity are heavy but preform extremely well against aramid fiber and silica aerogel but suffer greatly against high heat resistant materials with high critical intensities. I think you have to find a good balance between intensity, spot size, and amount of lasers all constrained within the cost and mass limits.

If you had the choice between 2 different laser systems that burn through material at the same rate you will tend to always pick the cheaper, or lighter one (depending on what you need). So setting those as the constraining factor made the most sense to me. There are other factors to take into account for practical applications (amount of armor mass, target size, etc.) but all of those argument would be made as a counter point to lower performance. So it is still useful to know the base line for fastest time to burn through material, most efficient glass cannon if you will, so you can explain the advantages to dropping dps for the added defense etc. of your solution.

I like the target in particular because it is difficult to optimize for all 5 layers at the same time. The challenge is all about compromise in design as it is particularly hard to get good burn through time on AC and aramid fiber at the same time.

I don't think it really matters that much how much total power is used so much of how fast you can burn through material within the mass and cost limits. It is all a trade off if you want to spend 900t and 9Mc of your total 1,000t and 10Mc budget on reactors more power to you. If you want to do the opposite more power to your design as well. The thing is as much time as I have spent building lasers, I still have no idea what the absolute optimal approach is, which is why the challenge is interesting to me. I was pretty close in 1.0.7, but with the now ~2.5m @ 1,000km inaccuracy cone radius on lasers in 1.0.8 spot size is more of a thing to be built around. I have been trying to put together probability equations for the laser's position to create a dps multiplier for lower than 2.5m radius spot sizes (but I am still quite a ways off and not very motivated atm). I can say fairly certain that the edges of the 2.5m range are not as likely to be hit as the center 1m, as to total time spent in each region I don't have any solid numbers yet.

I am pretty sure you can throw out designs of greater than 2.5m spot size (could be wrong again). I built some 600m, 400m, 200m, and 100m radius spot size "flashlight" lasers in an attempt to shoot down multiple missiles at the same time but it didn't work default formation spacing has too much space between them and the amount of power required to make a beam that could destroy missiles in that size was just a bunch of wasted power (individual smaller lasers were much much more effective).

I've also been observing some other weirdness from wavelength burn through times but nothing consistent enough to really report on though just something to think about.

It might be possible to do some math to get more expensive solutions involved, or to increase the cost of the challenge. We could also increase it to 10kt and 100Mc (trying to keep the mass and cost requirements semi-consistent with mission loadout requirements) and then possibly divide the time to kill by 10 to measure against the 1kt / 10Mc options (or just make a second bracket for the huge laser arrays).

Decided to check out Carbon Dioxide as it's twiceish as dense as decane and is expulsed at halfish the spead.

Also decided to try to replicate the needle from above with CO2.

Close enough I say, but Cubane has an edge over CO2. I may try with Decane and Pentane tomorrow and see how much of a difference there is.

How do cubane NTRs compare to Methane NTRs?

You still managed to drop the price by almost half. I guess it might be in the powerplant you used? Can we get a detail on that?