I picked up CoaDE after a few months' hiatus (I never could get the campaign/sandbox to work) and decided to mess around with the component editor. Yesterday was spent almost entirely making a whole variety of missiles and generally improving a lot of old components:
-Placed extruded turrets where possible. Thank you
qswitched!
-Shaved components masses by more than half with various optimizations, but a large part of that was that I seemed to have stubbornly insisted on using 15 cm thick armor on turrets where available (what was I thinking?)
-Built a new far-firing railgun using the 200 kW 4 mm capacitor stock railgun as a basis, upping it to 15 MW. That thing seriously overperforms compared to all the other stock models.
-Increased rate of fire of the old 15 MW railgun to 500 rounds per second, then upped it to a 100 MW variant for the same mass with double the speed and range.
-All of the two coilguns I'd made were messed up by the patches (which is odd, since I never got a supergun working - 3 km/s muzzle velocity was the best I could manage). Messing around revealed I still don't have a hand on coilguns, but at least I was able to salvage one of them (the other I consigned to the waste bin).
-Changed all my lasers to use 1200 K coolant, added a second frequency doubler, reduced the number of optical nodes needed and messed around with the cavity sizes to make them smaller (I used to be completely obsessed with every miniscule point of efficiency I could ring out, but in retrospect a lot can be done with only minor losses). These much smaller, lighter lasers let me change the turret materials and swap out the heavy tungsten reaction wheels which had only exacerbated the mass problem (my old parts were so heavy that super-heavy wheels were the only way to get stuff moving without abhorrent power). The 1 GW laser has gone from 74.7 kt to 11.4 kt and is less than half its former length. It might actually get similar intensities per mass to
apophys' lasers at the time, but I'm sure he's made way better since we last talked.
-Now that the sliders go much higher, I was able to more than triple the thrust of my formerly largest hydrogen NTR, getting up to 180 MN of thrust. I can go way higher with far less uranium for just about any other propellant (I've joined the decane is awesome club), but I'm still running into the issue of the uranium not lasting long enough.
-Used the solar system standards document to make a much lighter 1 GW reactor with 2500 K as the cold temperature.
A look back at my old ships showed that improving these component changes dramatically improved all their performance, and I went in and decided to tweak them further. As for why I bring that up, it's because if you look back far enough, these are the original CoaDE over-large supercarriers. Remember these guys?
I was able to shave the turnabout speed down to 40 seconds and 2 minutes respectively by gimballing the thrusters shortly after taking that pic, but that's not the real difference. Here's what all the rounds of improvement have done to them:
This is a result of five things:
-The improved 1 GW laser took up a lot less space, giving the Virgil II a much narrower profile, and leaving room to stuff a whole lot more of these ultra-lasers onto the Virgil III. Those 8 together still mass only half what the original 2 did!
-With the radiator temperatures turned up, I suddenly had LOTS of area to spare. I swapped them out for body-hugging panels, ensured that all were doubly redundant, and distributed them about the ship body. With how incredibly many there are, I'm sure quite a few will get shot off (though they are armored), but between all this the ship should still have ample capacity to use all its equipment for quite a while.
-I increased armor thickness and swapped out the absurdly expensive basalt fiber for much more practical silica aerogel.
-I increased the number of guns (since they were lighter)
-I doubled the number of all components that did not initially have redundancies, including crew. Doing this with reactors means that both Virgil variants have enough power to run all their weapons simultaneously (yes, even all 8 of the death lasers). Not that I can test it, but with any luck, both Virgils will be extremely hard to kill.
And even after all that, the mass budget had still gone down enough to vastly improve mobility. Before the five tweaks, the new Virgil II had 10.8 km/s of delta-v - even after all that, it's still got 8.30 km/s, thrust of 1.14 g, and turnabout time of 20 seconds (that's at least comparable to the stock ships). I could probably get this even farther if I were willing to sit down and build my own drones or use my own missiles instead (might post those in here later). Provided it doesn't melt your CPU from the number of components, rounds and drones launched, Virgil II might actually be practical to play now. Even the Virgil III can keep up with most stock ships now. Sure, it takes forever to turn, but it has all around guns and extruded turrets for a reason.
As for a more close up view of the Virgil II:
Having heard how easily laser optics can be damaged now, I figured it would pay to use a lot of small lasers rather than just big ones, seeing as they can hit things from much further than the railguns. Lots of point defense is also probably a necessity when you're dealing with a ship this big.
That's 36x 4 mm railguns firing at 100 rps and 6x 2 mm railguns firing at 500 rps, making for a total of 6600 rounds per second if all are firing, all moving at a good 9-11 km/s and capable of striking a capital ship from 60+ kilometers.
And to top it all off, it costs a fifth what the original did (7.87 Gc compared to 42.7 Gc)! That's almost all between the much smaller laser rods and switching out the basalt fiber. Judging from that graph, it's probably close to practical considering all its components - I don't see how you could take much more than another half off.
Oh, and it has a cargo bay in case you want to make deliveries. It's a carrier, of course it's going to have payloads.
And for the Virgil III:
Those lasers will lay into you. The 60 MW lasers aren't actually any different pound for pound than the 13 MW (pretty much everything scaled up as you'd expect), and I could probably have gotten better performance if I used titanium sapphire instead of NAD:YAG, but this was just improving upon an older model, and with a mass budget like this, mass of these puppies is not an issue.
That's so many guns they won't even fit in the menu all at once! Chewing through armor (and your CPU) in half the time as the Virgil II. I really wish I could see this thing fire because I'm sure the visuals would be breathtaking.
Pound for pound, the Virgil III is slightly more expensive than the Virgil II, but it's a bargain compared to the original, at nearly an eighth the price (34.4 Gc compared to 263 Gc).
Awesome! It's in the attached file.
it only costs the low and affordable price of one hundred thrity four gigacredits. your firstborn child, your immortal soul, and both arms and legs