|
|
Post by newageofpower on Jan 8, 2017 2:05:02 GMT
Now that is a extremely cuuute missile.
I'm really not sold on the effectiveness of subkiloton warheads (outside of a NEFP role); you'd have to get contact detonations to do serious damage.
The low dV on the missile requires you to spend large amounts of dV on the launch platform to give your missiles sufficient velocity to penetrate defenses with a reasonable number of attacking missiles. This can be a significant problem if the missile carrier is a capital ship.
The large missile capacity is probably fine; your design launches about 50 missiles per second and can empty the magazine in under two minutes, even assuming you don't prelaunch a bunch or split off waves of missiles for harassment.
I do worry about lag, though.
|
|
|
|
Post by Rocket Witch on Jan 8, 2017 2:13:56 GMT
Well, it has already been established by the developer that a 10x10cm sensor is sufficient to detect ships at interplanetary ranges and conduct the required (Mm level) firing solutions. Problem is, 10x10cm is larger than the front of that drone. Which is taken up by all gun. Really looking forward to sensors being modeled as discrete entities you need to place on craft and payloads, will make things a lot more interesting and a whole lot less gamey. You could just have a radial sensor though, maybe even form it into a ring around the hull. Interplanetary distances aren't something most drones are concerned with either, could well be that a 1x1cm sensor is all that's needed. Oh Rocket Witch I find Water works better on launchers and not sodium. Not in my case at least; switching to water makes this launcher's reload jump up to 1.88s. On the other hand, I've found that the liquid lithium I defined for use as a propellant is almost as good as sodium at cooling, and its lower density can give it an edge in lightweight modules. Now that is a extremely cuuute missile. I'm really not sold on the effectiveness of subkiloton warheads (outside of a NEFP role); you'd have to get contact detonations to do serious damage. The low dV on the missile requires you to spend large amounts of dV on the launch platform to give your missiles sufficient velocity to penetrate defenses. This can be a significant problem if the missile carrier is a capital ship. The large missile capacity is probably fine; your design launches about 50 missiles per second and can empty the magazine in under two minutes, even assuming you don't prelaunch a bunch or split off waves of missiles for harassment. I do worry about lag, though. Oh the lag is disgusting. The game practically froze at that point where I had launched 324 (even the pause menu ran at 3fps). For my system I should optimise missiles for wave sizes of 100, which my standard 5kt missile is. I do have drones that can launch 50 Callistos each and they are supposed to be the primary user of the weapon. I added them to the escort since it was reasonably lightweight to do so and gave the ship something to use outside of direct combat. |
|
|
|
Post by David367th on Jan 8, 2017 2:19:21 GMT
Oh Rocket Witch I find Water works better on launchers and not sodium. Not in my case at least; switching to water makes this launcher's reload jump up to 1.88s. On the other hand, I've found that the liquid lithium I defined for use as a propellant is almost as good as sodium at cooling, and its lower density can give it an edge in lightweight modules. Yeah you're right, this whole time using simple water... |
|
|
|
Post by someusername6 on Jan 8, 2017 2:31:02 GMT
I have had to switch cooling away from Sodium in launchers when they were launching too fast, causing collisions on whatever it was I was launching at the time.
I would like to be able to instead limit the launching rate as a setting -- just because it *can* launch that fast it doesn't mean it should.
|
|
|
|
Post by midnightdreary on Jan 8, 2017 2:42:26 GMT
Big issue I have with all these tiny drones ... Where exactly does it have the sensors to locate and engage ships to it's front? Unless it plans on flipping to it's every time it wants to see again, it is literally all gun barrel forward facing ... Why does it even need it's own sensor? The capital ship can just send the updated data remotely to the missiles / drones? (unless there's a planet in the way or something). Although it would be very cool to have our own optic, radar, laser etc sensor modules to design. edit: bleh, several others beat me to these. lol. I need to read the rest of the responses before posting from now on. |
|
|
|
Post by dragonkid11 on Jan 8, 2017 4:34:50 GMT
You know, I really should have done this when droptank was released. So my first thought about this is, 'Hey, micromissiles are really hard to hit. And gigawatt laser has laser wobble now.' 'So what if I make them even faster?" The result is this.  In which a 167 c micromissile swamp can absolutely demolish a gigawatt laser ship. The strategy is very simple, accelerate a fleet of micro missile until the droptanks drop off, and aim at enemy ship. So far, it's pretty damn effective against my gigawatt laser ship, but things might be different if the laser ship has more than a G of acceleration. I think I will start experiment with drop tank equipped missiles now. |
|
|
|
Post by someusername6 on Jan 8, 2017 5:13:45 GMT
That's pretty smart. I didn't think of doing it because I thought that droptanks would be begging to be popped by lasers, sitting outside of armor, but it is fine if you drop them before you enter the engagement range.
|
|
|
|
Post by dragonkid11 on Jan 8, 2017 5:19:41 GMT
That's pretty smart. I didn't think of doing it because I thought that droptanks would be begging to be popped by lasers, sitting outside of armor, but it is fine if you drop them before you enter the engagement range. I actually made a mistake in the first test run with droptanks still attached to the missile. But the laser wobbles so much that they barely hit the missiles at all when they accelerates in the terminal stage of acceleration. |
|
|
|
Post by jasonvance on Jan 8, 2017 5:49:53 GMT
Individual lasers are pretty bad against missiles, large laser arrays of less powerful lasers are much better (can still be over saturated with enough missiles ofc. but will kill a lot more on the way in). The only real way to counter attacker missile swarms is with an equal-ish sized interceptor missile swarm, of cheaper missiles. It is possible to 1:1 any attacker missile designed for taking down laser boats though by just using essentially the same missile minus the armor (and the drop tanks in this case). I've been working on a defender missile system that basically just launches a bunch of ~20c missiles to intercept incoming missiles. Lag is the real enemy in-game though as any missile saturation attack great enough to overrun 1,000x 1Mm lasers will likely crash the game.
|
|
|
|
Post by newageofpower on Jan 8, 2017 7:08:43 GMT
Individual lasers are pretty bad against missiles, large laser arrays of less powerful lasers are much better (can still be over saturated with enough missiles ofc. but will kill a lot more on the way in). The only real way to counter attacker missile swarms is with an equal-ish sized interceptor missile swarm, of cheaper missiles. It is possible to 1:1 any attacker missile designed for taking down laser boats though by just using essentially the same missile minus the armor (and the drop tanks in this case). I've been working on a defender missile system that basically just launches a bunch of ~20c missiles to intercept incoming missiles. Lag is the real enemy in-game though as any missile saturation attack great enough to overrun 1,000x 1Mm lasers will likely crash the game. See this excellent post from Apophys against the tactical viability of pure missile swarms. In fact, my own post on this topic is fairly comprehensive as well. |
|
|
|
Post by jasonvance on Jan 8, 2017 7:54:53 GMT
Individual lasers are pretty bad against missiles, large laser arrays of less powerful lasers are much better (can still be over saturated with enough missiles ofc. but will kill a lot more on the way in). The only real way to counter attacker missile swarms is with an equal-ish sized interceptor missile swarm, of cheaper missiles. It is possible to 1:1 any attacker missile designed for taking down laser boats though by just using essentially the same missile minus the armor (and the drop tanks in this case). I've been working on a defender missile system that basically just launches a bunch of ~20c missiles to intercept incoming missiles. Lag is the real enemy in-game though as any missile saturation attack great enough to overrun 1,000x 1Mm lasers will likely crash the game. See this excellent post from Apophys against the tactical viability of pure missile swarms. In fact, my own post on this topic is fairly comprehensive as well. I am thinking you didn't read my post as I am supporting laser arrays in conjuncture with missile saturation attacks... However I read yours and Apophys posts anyways and the part that I disagree with is you always assume perfect tactical interceptions for the missiles / drones you command (your scenario is always played out how you want it to be played out with no devils advocate or thought to how counter play would occur). I agree A large yield nuke would do amazing if it ended up in a fight against a large cheap missile swarm... However no one would do that. They would send a single cheap missile ahead to intercept a single powerful nuke. Missiles cannot choose their encounters favorably unless they are the cheapest solution on the battlefield, as they are required to trade with whatever they run into. In the situation of 1,000 100c mini missiles and 100 1,000c nukes the mini-missiles will come out 900 missiles up with proper micromanagement of intercepts (800 up at a 50% kill rate, 700 up at a 33% kill rate, 600 up at a 25% kill rate, 500 up at a sub current air-to-air missile interception kill rate). You can't split 10% of a missile off to deal with a single incoming missile threat if your missile is more expensive. Even if it takes 2-4 attacker missiles to deal with a single missile (which is unlikely with how deadly things we build are) the trade is still favorable. You cannot have a favorable trade with less total missile forces unless the enemy horribly blunders and feeds you a good AoE. I make the argument against large scale expensive nukes that your enemy has to play horribly to fall into the AoE trap. |
|
|
|
Post by jasonvance on Jan 8, 2017 8:37:32 GMT
I also want to note how grossly underestimated my cost on nukes were as an AoE quality nuke starts around the 1Mt range (which costs roughly 100,000c) which means your nuke would be required to intercept 100 or more missiles simultaneously to be able to trade cost effectively (assuming 100% perfect kill rate which would require a perfectly clumped missile swarm with no cascading approach, which is actually questionable on missiles designed to tank large amounts of EM and heat damage from the front (aka laser armor)). Considering that the nuke would be forced into making that intercept to protect the drone fleet (as 100 mini-missiles threatens them) all tempo is in the hands of the attacker in this case. The nuke would also be forced into an early detonation, before the first wave of attackers hit in a cascade as if the attackers land a disabling blow the payload could be lost (and would likely be lost within the first 5 missiles). This would not insure 100% kill rate on the missile swarm as many could hang back. You have no situational control or tempo when you are in control of the more expensive missile. So even in the best case scenario for this engagement the trade is even 1:1 cost ratio. When your best possible outcome from a tactical blunder is 1:1 it is a very unfavorable exchange.
|
|
|
|
Post by bigbombr on Jan 8, 2017 9:04:34 GMT
Well, it has already been established by the developer that a 10x10cm sensor is sufficient to detect ships at interplanetary ranges and conduct the required (Mm level) firing solutions. Problem is, 10x10cm is larger than the front of that drone. Which is taken up by all gun. Really looking forward to sensors being modeled as discrete entities you need to place on craft and payloads, will make things a lot more interesting and a whole lot less gamey. If it were a problem for the drone, maybe it's the mothership doing calculations and targeting for the drones. Get the target position, drone position, and calculate firing direction. Send it to drone. Probably wouldn't be able to target modules but you could put accurate shots into the ship's cross section. Oh Rocket Witch I find Water works better on launchers and not sodium. By my experience, ethane beats both in launchers. |
|
|
|
Post by The Astronomer on Jan 8, 2017 9:47:03 GMT
If it were a problem for the drone, maybe it's the mothership doing calculations and targeting for the drones. Get the target position, drone position, and calculate firing direction. Send it to drone. Probably wouldn't be able to target modules but you could put accurate shots into the ship's cross section. Oh Rocket Witch I find Water works better on launchers and not sodium. By my experience, ethane beats both in launchers. Sodium already has my drones launching too fast and eventually colliding with each other. Why need better coolants? EDIT: Oh, yes! Low mass, that's a very nice thing. |
|
|
|
Post by jasonvance on Jan 8, 2017 10:02:45 GMT
By my experience, ethane beats both in launchers. Sodium already has my drones launching too fast and eventually colliding with each other. Why need better coolants? Less mass and cost is the advantage of ethane in launchers (or small nuclear reactors for that matter). Sodium is the undisputed king of heat transfer performance, but as you said in the case that your launchers are already firing too fast using a lighter cheaper coolant could save mass and cost and resolve the too fast problem all at the same time. (I personally use sodium in most things though)  |
|
