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Post by gfarrell80 on Apr 5, 2018 2:38:58 GMT
I dig this thread. Here are the basic stats on some of the fun 'heavy' guns I've been playing with. They're supposed to be fun marginal improvements over stock:
Conventional Cannon: 60mm, 30 gram, 2.88 km/s velocity, .003 spread, 66.7/s turning, 200ms reload, 1.37 tons, 34.4 kc, 50 kw power. 80mm, 100 gram, 2.83 km/s velocity, .006 spread, 47/s turning, 222ms reload, 5.67 tons, 96.1 kc, 6.74 MW power.
Railgun: 12mm, 50 gram, 8.30 km/s velocity, .002 spread, 30.3/s turning, 360ms reload, 29.5 tons, 1.42 Mc, 22 MW power. 13mm, 100 gram, 8.08 km/s velocity, .002 spread, 20.1/s turning, 555ms reload, 41.5 tons, 2.32 Mc, 40 MW power.
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Post by randomknight on Jan 6, 2019 14:02:45 GMT
Here's my entry for the light conventional cannon category: The 40cm cannon with a 10.5 calibre long barrel 10mm diameter 100 gram osmium slug [you can easily swap this out for a plain 100g disc and it'll give the same performance] 4.01km accuracy vs 1m 2 targets with 716kJ kinetic energy 267kc turret cost [not including ammunition costs] 12 tonnes in weight and a measly 280kW in power usage.
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Post by airc777 on Jan 8, 2019 5:12:17 GMT
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Jan 8, 2019 7:08:07 GMT
I have some stuff that definitely qualifies as heavy, but practical railguns: - slinging slugs (monolithic, not payload + armature) in 0.5-4.4kg range, at velocities in 10-20km/s range
- manageable rates of fire in 150-1004ms range (charging the gun for a minute only to miss or at best blow out a redundant propellant tank and skiff-sized chunk of armour on the opposite side kind of misses the point, even if the latter looks impressive)
- good turning rates
- a bit on the heavy-ish side but in-line with some of the stock stuff you could still consider practical
- spread lower than most stock EM guns
- thick-ish turret armour
But guess what? - The most interesting ones don't fit the mass bracket
- Graphogel bracing seems to be the only way to make such a weapon workable because our barrel armour needs to be monolithic and required mass of anything else would be prohibitive
- Because of how momentum wheel thickness (and thus mass) is determined you need a workaround in the form of thick layers of extremely lightweight materials for making practical heavy turrets
- And most importantly, because otherwise excellent diamond or amorphous carbon (or even aramid) barrel armour simply breaks those weapons with heat expansion stresses - again, barrel fins, truss, or even splitting barrel shroud into different layers performing different functions (passive/active cooling mantle, bracing, armour, cooling radiators) would help a lot. Moderate velocity sandblasters don't really care, trying to not stress the rails into pieces when firing kg range shells at 10-20km/s is actually somewhat demanding and doesn't like compromises.
- While they have lower spreads than all but few practical stock EM guns, they have lousy ranges against small targets, because it's simply hard to keep barrel from whipping about with forces involved.
I also have an actually lightweight, but long spinal coilgun firing 30 1kg slugs per second at around 7.5km/s mark and around 90% efficiency, accurately, but there is no spinal weapon category at all.
Bummer.
(I also experimented* with a non-gun unguided, unpowered** kinetic payload system mountable that can shred a gunship from about 70km mark, but it's rather contrived and has NO accuracy whatsoever against small targets.)
*) Actually I was mostly tuning my guided and powered high-velocity torpedo- and MLRS suitable for tiny ships. Working with dumb launch means minimizing the effort needed on part of a torpedo or missile salvo.
**) It does include rocket engines but they only work for about 1-1.3s before actual shot, helping the launcher clear manoeuvring launching ship, they don't even aim the thing - this is done with nose-mounted guns on ship itself.
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Post by airc777 on May 13, 2019 23:17:52 GMT
Got thematically bored of > 1 gram projectiles. Decided to toy around with 10 kilo projectiles. Effect on target of sandbox mode instant action Vesta Overkill fleet seemed promising. Currently attempting to downscale to 1 kilo projectiles and 8 kilotons to complete Vesta Overkill properly.
steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1740736196
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on May 14, 2019 6:18:45 GMT
Got thematically bored of > 1 gram projectiles. Decided to toy around with 10 kilo projectiles. Effect on target of sandbox mode instant action Vesta Overkill fleet seemed promising. Currently attempting to downscale to 1 kilo projectiles and 8 kilotons to complete Vesta Overkill properly. steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1740736196 Try doing it without needles. Also, I thought VO was 13kt?
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Post by airc777 on May 14, 2019 16:46:24 GMT
It is, I just loaded Vesta Overkills fleet into sandbox. This was a test to see if I could make something that had the desired effect on target at all, now I need to recreate my results on a smaller scale. Also probably using non limits edited radiators and reactors at some point wouldn't hurt. No Idea what I'm going to do for armor profile. With it's 50km range armoring against smaller faster projectiles or lasers seems completely pointless, but considering the effect on target it has it also seems a waste of mass to try and armor it against itself. The volume the ammo takes up is also a big concern, having secondary point defense lasers or faster railguns for drone and missile swatting would also defeat the point. Could make a 10 kilo flak module for drone swatting but then I'd have to use two sets of turrets and double the mass if I wanted to use both ammo types. Building a missile carrier and using the needle as a blast launched KKV payload on the missiles would achieve largely the same effect and solve some of my problems, but I really just wanted to play with bigger guns.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on May 14, 2019 19:53:59 GMT
It is, I just loaded Vesta Overkills fleet into sandbox. This was a test to see if I could make something that had the desired effect on target at all, now I need to recreate my results on a smaller scale. Also probably using non limits edited radiators and reactors at some point wouldn't hurt. No Idea what I'm going to do for armor profile. With it's 50km range armoring against smaller faster projectiles or lasers seems completely pointless, but considering the effect on target it has it also seems a waste of mass to try and armor it against itself. The volume the ammo takes up is also a big concern, having secondary point defense lasers or faster railguns for drone and missile swatting would also defeat the point. Could make a 10 kilo flak module for drone swatting but then I'd have to use two sets of turrets and double the mass if I wanted to use both ammo types. Building a missile carrier and using the needle as a blast launched KKV payload on the missiles would achieve largely the same effect and solve some of my problems, but I really just wanted to play with bigger guns. You can reasonably get up to around 4kg armature while still surpassing all stock EM guns in terms of velocity, staying within unedited limits and still achieving workable rates of fire and borderline practical turret sizes and masses* without low RPM warning. Even accounting for reasonable turret armour. *) As in "no worse than stock 13MW 1mm capacitor coilgun or nuke cannon". You can also make a payload version and 4kg is just enough to fit a micromissile (even with micronuke warhead), generously sized flak/mininuke or some interesting cluster kinetics.
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Post by airc777 on May 15, 2019 0:47:41 GMT
Attempt 2. This time I used a single gunship as the target, and I used the very long non capacitor coilgun method. I did not best the gunships mass, but I did come in under the gunships budget, and I had the desired effect on target with a 10 kilo projectile. steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1741534102
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