|
|
Post by lieste on Jan 9, 2017 18:27:27 GMT
I use Cadmium for the limited requirements of nose mounted guns - inexpensive but reasonably dense. Broadside guns have higher traverse requirements.
|
|
|
|
Post by midnightdreary on Jan 9, 2017 18:59:27 GMT
Does anyone have any tips on reaction wheels for light railguns? I'm trying to get my total power requirements, mass, and cost below 10MW, 10t, and 100kc (for a 3-meter railgun that's 3.85t and 69.4kc without the turret) for a light PD drone, but I'm not having any luck with osmium, vanadium chromium steel, or any of the other heavy metals; either my mass balloons into the 30t range or the required RPM breaks the material. I believe Lithium takes the cake in the ultra-light / cheap category. Next comes Magnesium for light, but good performance. Then Boron? If you're breaking the wheels with VanCrome Steel you might have the radius to small. Post a pic? |
|
|
|
Post by caiaphas on Jan 9, 2017 19:26:00 GMT
Does anyone have any tips on reaction wheels for light railguns? I'm trying to get my total power requirements, mass, and cost below 10MW, 10t, and 100kc (for a 3-meter railgun that's 3.85t and 69.4kc without the turret) for a light PD drone, but I'm not having any luck with osmium, vanadium chromium steel, or any of the other heavy metals; either my mass balloons into the 30t range or the required RPM breaks the material. I believe Lithium takes the cake in the ultra-light / cheap category. Next comes Magnesium for light, but good performance. Then Boron? If you're breaking the wheels with VanCrome Steel you might have the radius to small. Post a pic? Sorry, should've clarified, I wasn't breaking the VC Steel, I was toying with some other materials and they tended to shatter. At this point I'm getting the best performance out of Magnesium with a turning speed of 44.3 o/s and a turn angle of 78 o, but seeing as this is meant to be a PD weapon that still feels way too low for me. I'm starting to think that it's largely a consequence of my self-imposed limit of 10 MW, to be honest; I'm going to try shrinking the turret and shaving some mass off of the railgun itself and see if I can squeeze some more performance out that way. EDIT: sidenote, what's a good mass/cost ceiling for a drone if you're planning on fielding up to 40 at a time to serve as a PD screen? Most of my designs up until now haven't really been designed to work as part of a fleet in terms of tonnage or cost, they've gone more for the WTF factor.  |
|
|
|
Post by lieste on Jan 9, 2017 22:27:39 GMT
I'd drop the turret size to ~1.0m and switch to Cadmium/520rpm momentum wheels. Goes to 55.9 dps and 72 deg off centre which should be enough for most purposes, but is only 12.1t and 92.3kc - I'd also note that anything above 23kW for the loader is going to break physics - which those values are based off. Magnesium/AmC gives similar performance in a slightly bigger but much cheaper package (45.2kc/12.8t at 37cm/3.2m rails and a 2.6mm bore 37kW loader).
In some use cases I go for much lower angles of fire and traverse rates on PD weapons - especially for longer ranged types with higher velocity, the engagement range significantly reduces the azimuthal coverage of the enemy approaches - as the range is set lower, the requirement for large jumps between targets increases.
|
|
|
|
Post by The Astronomer on Jan 10, 2017 0:21:36 GMT
25 MW 14.1 km/s 18.0 km for 1m^2 32.0 km for 10m^2 101 km for 1,000m^2 9.64 t The new generation of OP guns ...wait a tick, is this a railgun or a coilgun? Railguns. They said coilguns work well with heavy projectiles. Will post the pic later because I got lazy. |
|
|
|
Post by The Astronomer on Jan 10, 2017 0:23:27 GMT
I have this for 25MW. Though it's approaching 50t I doubt Astro's gun fires NOOKZ.   Can use U-233 bombs too but I wanted something a bit classier for the capitals. Effectiveness added by the pellets is indeterminate.  Mainstay of the fleet. Massing 5.14kt without the external tanks, carries 1000 rounds for the main gun as well as 2500 5kt missiles and 5000 defensive drones. Steel armour is only in the nose. One important note: with terrible realistic fire rate, coilguns are pretty much out of my favor. |
|
|
|
Post by caiaphas on Jan 10, 2017 0:28:13 GMT
I'd drop the turret size to ~1.0m and switch to Cadmium/520rpm momentum wheels. Goes to 55.9 dps and 72 deg off centre which should be enough for most purposes, but is only 12.1t and 92.3kc - I'd also note that anything above 23kW for the loader is going to break physics - which those values are based off. Magnesium/AmC gives similar performance in a slightly bigger but much cheaper package (45.2kc/12.8t at 37cm/3.2m rails and a 2.6mm bore 37kW loader). In some use cases I go for much lower angles of fire and traverse rates on PD weapons - especially for longer ranged types with higher velocity, the engagement range significantly reduces the azimuthal coverage of the enemy approaches - as the range is set lower, the requirement for large jumps between targets increases. Thanks, I'll give it a shot. Right now I've tweaked the loader to give me about 40 shots per second, and I'm planning to drop it to 10 rounds per if I continue to get similar kill rates for purposes of ammo conservation. As a sidenote, a 30-drone swarm is absolute gangbusters at taking out enemy missile swarms, since apparently the game does the "shoot the nearest enemy target" calc for each drone independently, so four or five missiles get taken out every second. |
|
|
|
Post by newageofpower on Jan 10, 2017 0:43:11 GMT
Interesting. So instead of a single drone with 20x 1GW lasers, I should use 20x 1GW drones, each with their own laser..
Thanks!
|
|
|
|
Post by midnightdreary on Jan 10, 2017 0:59:35 GMT
I believe Lithium takes the cake in the ultra-light / cheap category. Next comes Magnesium for light, but good performance. Then Boron? If you're breaking the wheels with VanCrome Steel you might have the radius to small. Post a pic? Sorry, should've clarified, I wasn't breaking the VC Steel, I was toying with some other materials and they tended to shatter. At this point I'm getting the best performance out of Magnesium with a turning speed of 44.3 o/s and a turn angle of 78 o, but seeing as this is meant to be a PD weapon that still feels way too low for me. I'm starting to think that it's largely a consequence of my self-imposed limit of 10 MW, to be honest; I'm going to try shrinking the turret and shaving some mass off of the railgun itself and see if I can squeeze some more performance out that way. EDIT: sidenote, what's a good mass/cost ceiling for a drone if you're planning on fielding up to 40 at a time to serve as a PD screen? Most of my designs up until now haven't really been designed to work as part of a fleet in terms of tonnage or cost, they've gone more for the WTF factor. Here's one I whipped together that is similar to the overall dimensions you have, weighs a little less, but about 50 kc more for the big performance gain. (you could tune the wheels more, but this seems to be working fine)  Edit: Here are the general shenanigans for rails I like to slap on to micro drones for screening purposes. I tend to pre-deploy 100+ drones before intercept.  |
|
|
|
Post by apophys on Jan 10, 2017 2:56:46 GMT
Interesting. So instead of a single drone with 20x 1GW lasers, I should use 20x 1GW drones, each with their own laser.. Thanks! Actually, in that case I'd suggest 20x 1GW drones, each with 12x 75MW lasers and a 100 MW MPD thruster for turning. |
|
|
|
Post by David367th on Jan 10, 2017 4:16:55 GMT
Messed around a little bit with the previous ship I've shown off, The Nightstalker. Which is a design that exploits a bug with the color of Cadmium is made of VantaBlack, and projects no visible light. Beforehand the ship was unarmed, and could be thought of as a rather stylish shuttle. Unfortunately it was still operating under diamond high heat CH 4 NTRs, who project quite a lot of visible light. Yet worst of all, it had no weapons.
The fun wall of text can be read below, or you can view the pretty pictures can be viewed in an organized imgur album here. Or you can look at and read both, I can't stop you. Adding weapons was surprisingly easy, modifying a Tessfield 1 MW reactor to operate in 593K (you're going to see this number a lot), which made it quite a lot smaller and efficient if I'm not mistaken. Plus I could fit five of these with the radiators already installed, and two more with another group of 4 10x10 radiators. The lasers are hand built from a Xenon + Ti:Sa standard design, except with the exception running in 593K as with the reactors. Two lasers can operate at a time to any off the ship's four sides, each radiating to another set of four 10x10 radiators. The missile launchers are modified from a low power medium flak missile design of mine, again modified to run at 593K, and radiated to a set of four 3x5 rads. The fun part in all of this however was trying to get NTR's to run with cadmium. Nuclear Thermal Rockets practically rely on heat, as I'm sure most of you know, the hotter the better. So after a few minutes building a rocket, I cut the poor Nightstalker's Delta-V in half even with reductions to crew module and armor mass. Yet methane still leaves quite the vapor trail, and I tried messing with other fluids that don't have these trails but I couldn't find anything whose velocity was >1 Km/s. So to end this I thought it might be quite the challenge to make an NTR, or any resistojet or MPD that does not project light. Of course, for resistojets and MPD the light restriction goes to their powerplant radiators as well. And I guess Rocket Which can use her precious Cubane if she wants  |
|
|
|
Post by apophys on Jan 10, 2017 7:15:05 GMT
modifying an apophys 1 MW reactor to operate in 593K I haven't made a 1 MW reactor in a long while. And looking at the album, I do not recognize the internals of that reactor at all. |
|
|
|
Post by The Astronomer on Jan 10, 2017 9:44:14 GMT
 A Pluto-Charon Gravity Swinging Craft. |
|
|
|
Post by David367th on Jan 10, 2017 11:51:53 GMT
modifying an apophys 1 MW reactor to operate in 593K I haven't made a 1 MW reactor in a long while. And looking at the album, I do not recognize the internals of that reactor at all. I think I modified it quite a lot over the months. I know I didn't make it lol.I'm wrong it's actually one of Tessfields. |
|
|
|
Post by dragonkid11 on Jan 10, 2017 12:34:01 GMT
So, I read about the Orion and while I has absolutely no idea on where to start with making an Orion drive. I looked at another glitch and decided to make broken stuff with it. Introducing, Buckler drone.  It's a cheating crap that make use of the armor coverage math glitch that allow it to have super thick non-existent armor that only exist at the front. And with it, I tested its cheating 'usefulness against my gigawatt laser ship. I swear, that ship is like a punching bag right now. Anyway, as expected, it's so damn thick, the laser need dozens of precious second just to get through the armor.  And the osmium layer did absolutely nothing against the laser but that's kinda expected. With the gun at the side of course, it eventually need to be oriented to hit the laser ship.  I kinda like how these ships look like giant mushroom. Anyway, this drone will be completely useless after Qswitch fixed the bug, but it's something good to know, I guess. |
|
