Post your designs here!

Yup, hands down the best looking ship to date.

A labor of love for sure. 

I remember someone mentioned in the forums (I forget who, sorry) that you can add more layers of armor by editing the user design file. I haven't tested it though.

So I was testing something yet again.

We all know that making drone as small as possible make them super deadly to big ship due to big cross-section.

But I recently decided to look into a fun option back again.

The fun option of using big ass gun and strap them to big drone.

I quit doing this before because I was going in from the wrong perspective.

Instead of just making a big gun that shoot big projectile, I should have made a gun that shoot big payload.

Which I first tried to experiment with a 50g flak conventional cannon, but unfortunately the projectile was too light to be effective.

So I make another version that is much bigger, one that fire 300g flak payload.

Which result in this.



In less than ten confirmed hits, the ship went from pristine to glowing swiss cheese, ripping everything within and it's all thanks to this custom payload. 



One thing I discovered about flak is that if you keep fragment weight more than 1 gram, they tends to rip things apart way more effective.

That and using multiple of them together always seem to render more fragments at the same time.




The drone has nothing special about it. It weighs almost a ton, with decent delta-v and anti-laser armor.

But it was the perfect platform to launch flak rounds at the target.

I'm going to experiment with slightly smaller version like for example, 100g conventional cannon round or 200g.

Aramid Fiber (for low ablation rate, costs about 300c/kg)
Nitrile Rubber (for cost effectiveness, ablates twice as fast as Aramid)

Thats for single layers, I'm fairly confident there's a carbon heatsink you can use if you connect it to the rubber layer.

I use silica gel, you can never go wrong with more silica gel because I'm too lazy to use other stuff.

No, silica gel still has great anti-laser resistance.

Just that it's not as good as before, so you need to use centimeters of it for decent protection instead of 500 micrometers of it.

Compared to aramid fiber composite armor, it's better and way less complicated.

And thanks to its slow ablativeness, it's the best thing against gigawatt laser since everything else will get cut down in seconds while it will lasts more than that.

EDIT:

Also great, I just found out that flak can explode without a remote control, but a nuclear bomb can't.

There goes the mini nuke cannon.

Short answer: no

If you ignore the density on it, yeah SA gets eaten through at a fairly high amount of cm/s. But if you take into account the low density it is still an okay anti-laser material, and has some uses for super light weight somewhat laser resistant armor. It does not share the same burn through rate as say graphite aerogel (the other low density contender). It gets heavily beat by aramid fiber in laser defense and beat by rubber in cost effectiveness, but if you need something light weight that will survive a scratch its still worth while.

100cm Silica aerogel will hold off a single high intensity laser for ~50 seconds
100cm Graphite aerogel will hold off a single high intensity laser for ~3 seconds
10 meters of graphite aerogel will hold off a single high intensity laser for ~20 seconds (this is the mass equivalent of 100cm silica aerogel)