The Capital Ship Armor Thread
Oct 3, 2016 22:14:15 GMT
leerooooooy, newageofpower, and 2 more like this
Post by millesmissiles on Oct 3, 2016 22:14:15 GMT
...there I was, sitting snug and secure behind 5 cm of aluminum space armor and, a meter and a half further in, 5 cm more of reinforced carbon-carbon ceramic. "Nobody can strike me down! My many tons of armor render me NIGH IMPENETRABLE!" I cried in hubris. But penetrable was I indeed, as those nasty 11mm railgun slugs chewed right through me. For that matter, I was getting sick and tired of lugging around so much massive, expensive armor if it'd only buy me a few seconds of sustained barraging before my death. As if that weren't enough, nuclear missiles melted my aluminum whipple shield like butter, and flak missiles went through my Spaceboat (tm) like green corn through a new maid, to borrow a Maine-ism.
It's safe to say that the stock armor designs aren't the best. Aluminum, even 5 cm of it, is fairly flimsy stuff. And reinforced carbon-carbon, while cheap and light, won't do much in stopping more than a few railgun slugs before being penetrated. That said, they perform a whole lot better than that one time I tried spider silk armor... Still, though, I wanted to reach out to the COADE community with my own thoughts and hopefully get some good advice in turn. This community has a penchant for finding imaginative solutions to difficult engineering problems, and I'm excited to see what people will come up with.
The Problem: Crew Sniping
The number-one issue I've had with all stock armor designs has consistently been crew-sniping. Ships can function without fuel tanks, engines, and weapons. I've had ships with schoolbus-sized holes punched in them like swiss cheese still gun down enemies. The crew module, however, seems to be the biggest weak point of capital ships: ships cannot function without their crew. To me, this means that the crew modules, above all else, are the most important part of a ship.
I've always designed my ships with multiple smaller radiators, and crew modules in my ships often have up to 4 times the required radiator capacity. Still: flak missiles and railgun fire have a nasty habit of stripping these off my ships faster than the bride's dress comes off after the newlyweds get home. For that matter, crew modules are pretty squishy: they're basically "little bubbles of air that we try to poke holes in", to quote a favorite "hard" sci-fi series of mine.
Even ships with multiple redundant or armored crew modules are subject to this. A flak barrage can core a ship with stock-like armor from the bow, and has a good chance of taking out multiple crew modules if taken beam-on (sidenote: is it still called the "beam" when talking about space ships?). This in mind, then, I've taken a page from US Naval History and have begun employing all-or-nothing armoring schema on my ships.
All-or-Nothing Armor
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_or_nothing_(armor)
If you're too lazy to browse some Wikipedia, then read this. Basically, in the early 20th century of Naval History, US navy analysts were fed up with the traditional armoring schema of battleships. Guns were getting so powerful, and ships were getting so large, that it was quickly becoming impossible to armor a ship against the guns it would face without it sinking like a lead duck. They then employed this new concept called the "all-or-nothing" principle, where what was essentially a thickly armored "box" was built around the central area of the ship: bridge, machinery, turrets, and magazines. The rest of the ship had what engineers refer to as "piss-all" for armor. Ideally, no gun would be able to penetrate this "citadel", though it might wreak havoc with the superstructure and outer compartments. That's why ships like the Yamato had such massive guns: naval engineers were forced to try and build ships to carry weapons large enough to penetrate these citadels.
How would one use a citadel in COADE? Well, I've taken to putting anywhere from 3-5 cm of Maraging Steel up at the top 15-25% of my ships, depending on length. This covers the crew modules from everything but lucky shots up the rear, and- like a high-class lady- I try to avoid showing my rear to just anyone. Spalling seems to be the biggest issue for metal armor against hypervelocity slugs and shots, and so directly behind and supporting this I will put 5-10cm of reinforced carbon-carbon on that same 15-25% zone (sidenote: Vanadium Chromium Steel, while seemingly stronger than Maraging steel, seems to have a much greater spalling issue for me- and I would wonder if anyone can reproduce this). This makes the bow of my ships almost wholly impenetrable: I've taken 30 missiles sporting custom 100 kg tungsten flak bombs directly on the nose without a scratch. The whipple shield isn't happy with this tactic, though...
Armor Angling
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sloped_armour
Another thing which greatly improved ship survivability is angling. I play World of Warships where this mechanic is key, and have applied it with great success in COADE. While tanks can be built with sloped armor easily enough, the same is not necessarily true for ships where shells can come in at a wide variety of angles and velocities (note: ships like the Tirpitz had this nasty thing called turtleback or turtle-deck armor which basically made their armor OP as hell against everything but dinky torpedo planes, apparently). And instead of building something complex like sloped internal armor, naval engineers had a far simpler solution: angle your ship to angle your armor.
This has the same effect as using sloped armor and is far simpler, as well as being easily doable in COADE. I build my ships long and slim, with a 200 meter ship often being little more than 30 meters wide at the stern and 5 or so at the bow. Coupled with angling the ship against incoming fire, I bounce railgun shells like no tomorrow- even the 50 gram slug, 11 kps, 600 rpm railguns my ships all sport.
Materials
I want to like aluminum. I really do. It's cheap as dirt and nice and light. The only issue: it's about as strong as dirt and lets railgun slugs through like glass. Actually, scratch that: glass does a far better job of stopping bird impacts than aluminum does railgun slugs. Couple that with how quickly it melts under nukes and aluminum's main merit quickly becomes its cheapness. Boron is a little heavier but much stronger and still very cheap.
Reinforced carbon-carbon is neat but as a primary armor layer I'm not such a fan. Fast and heavy slugs tend to weaken it severely with sustained fire, and flak missiles punch right through (esp. my tungsten 100 kg flak bombs). Still, it's cheap and light and decently strong, especially against nukes and lasers.
I've taken for a Boron/ Reinforced Carbon-Carbon setup on my ships as hull armor, with that Maraging Steel/ Reinforced Carbon-Carbon arrangement as citadel armor. On my 5 kt laser cruiser, the armor looks like this:
10 cm Reinforced Carbon-Carbon (topmost 20% of hull)
3.5 cm Maraging Steel (topmost 20% of hull)
35 cm empty space
2.5 cm Boron
135 cm empty space
2.5 cm Reinforced Carbon-Carbon
I can take thousands of slugs bow-on and with radiators retracted. What usually gets me in the end is my radiators getting sniped by lucky shots- need to build some with more armor, I guess. If I'm fighting another capital ship, they can fire all day and will never ever get through my citadel. At a 15-30 degree angle I can bring my guns to bear (4 per side plus a laser on the nose) and shred most ships while bouncing their shots. Drone fire, even Hellfire drones, just bounces off if they get past my lasers. Sometimes I'll let whole salvos of flak missiles hit my bow just for the cool noise they make when they ricochet. A single 5 kt Laser Cruiser can obliterate two 14 kt Fleet Carriers on a good day, thanks to this armor.
If I'm caught flat-footed the RCC whipple shield can take a solid barrage before it and the boron underneath starts to suffer. That said, multi-megaton contact nukes are this thing's weakness- they usually blow it into bits- but 9 times out of 10, that citadel just breaks off and the crew is kept alive.
I recommend my armoring schema as a lightweight, low-cost, super-strong arrangement.
Now what does your armor look like?
It's safe to say that the stock armor designs aren't the best. Aluminum, even 5 cm of it, is fairly flimsy stuff. And reinforced carbon-carbon, while cheap and light, won't do much in stopping more than a few railgun slugs before being penetrated. That said, they perform a whole lot better than that one time I tried spider silk armor... Still, though, I wanted to reach out to the COADE community with my own thoughts and hopefully get some good advice in turn. This community has a penchant for finding imaginative solutions to difficult engineering problems, and I'm excited to see what people will come up with.
The Problem: Crew Sniping
The number-one issue I've had with all stock armor designs has consistently been crew-sniping. Ships can function without fuel tanks, engines, and weapons. I've had ships with schoolbus-sized holes punched in them like swiss cheese still gun down enemies. The crew module, however, seems to be the biggest weak point of capital ships: ships cannot function without their crew. To me, this means that the crew modules, above all else, are the most important part of a ship.
I've always designed my ships with multiple smaller radiators, and crew modules in my ships often have up to 4 times the required radiator capacity. Still: flak missiles and railgun fire have a nasty habit of stripping these off my ships faster than the bride's dress comes off after the newlyweds get home. For that matter, crew modules are pretty squishy: they're basically "little bubbles of air that we try to poke holes in", to quote a favorite "hard" sci-fi series of mine.
Even ships with multiple redundant or armored crew modules are subject to this. A flak barrage can core a ship with stock-like armor from the bow, and has a good chance of taking out multiple crew modules if taken beam-on (sidenote: is it still called the "beam" when talking about space ships?). This in mind, then, I've taken a page from US Naval History and have begun employing all-or-nothing armoring schema on my ships.
All-or-Nothing Armor
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_or_nothing_(armor)
If you're too lazy to browse some Wikipedia, then read this. Basically, in the early 20th century of Naval History, US navy analysts were fed up with the traditional armoring schema of battleships. Guns were getting so powerful, and ships were getting so large, that it was quickly becoming impossible to armor a ship against the guns it would face without it sinking like a lead duck. They then employed this new concept called the "all-or-nothing" principle, where what was essentially a thickly armored "box" was built around the central area of the ship: bridge, machinery, turrets, and magazines. The rest of the ship had what engineers refer to as "piss-all" for armor. Ideally, no gun would be able to penetrate this "citadel", though it might wreak havoc with the superstructure and outer compartments. That's why ships like the Yamato had such massive guns: naval engineers were forced to try and build ships to carry weapons large enough to penetrate these citadels.
How would one use a citadel in COADE? Well, I've taken to putting anywhere from 3-5 cm of Maraging Steel up at the top 15-25% of my ships, depending on length. This covers the crew modules from everything but lucky shots up the rear, and- like a high-class lady- I try to avoid showing my rear to just anyone. Spalling seems to be the biggest issue for metal armor against hypervelocity slugs and shots, and so directly behind and supporting this I will put 5-10cm of reinforced carbon-carbon on that same 15-25% zone (sidenote: Vanadium Chromium Steel, while seemingly stronger than Maraging steel, seems to have a much greater spalling issue for me- and I would wonder if anyone can reproduce this). This makes the bow of my ships almost wholly impenetrable: I've taken 30 missiles sporting custom 100 kg tungsten flak bombs directly on the nose without a scratch. The whipple shield isn't happy with this tactic, though...
Armor Angling
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sloped_armour
Another thing which greatly improved ship survivability is angling. I play World of Warships where this mechanic is key, and have applied it with great success in COADE. While tanks can be built with sloped armor easily enough, the same is not necessarily true for ships where shells can come in at a wide variety of angles and velocities (note: ships like the Tirpitz had this nasty thing called turtleback or turtle-deck armor which basically made their armor OP as hell against everything but dinky torpedo planes, apparently). And instead of building something complex like sloped internal armor, naval engineers had a far simpler solution: angle your ship to angle your armor.
This has the same effect as using sloped armor and is far simpler, as well as being easily doable in COADE. I build my ships long and slim, with a 200 meter ship often being little more than 30 meters wide at the stern and 5 or so at the bow. Coupled with angling the ship against incoming fire, I bounce railgun shells like no tomorrow- even the 50 gram slug, 11 kps, 600 rpm railguns my ships all sport.
Materials
I want to like aluminum. I really do. It's cheap as dirt and nice and light. The only issue: it's about as strong as dirt and lets railgun slugs through like glass. Actually, scratch that: glass does a far better job of stopping bird impacts than aluminum does railgun slugs. Couple that with how quickly it melts under nukes and aluminum's main merit quickly becomes its cheapness. Boron is a little heavier but much stronger and still very cheap.
Reinforced carbon-carbon is neat but as a primary armor layer I'm not such a fan. Fast and heavy slugs tend to weaken it severely with sustained fire, and flak missiles punch right through (esp. my tungsten 100 kg flak bombs). Still, it's cheap and light and decently strong, especially against nukes and lasers.
I've taken for a Boron/ Reinforced Carbon-Carbon setup on my ships as hull armor, with that Maraging Steel/ Reinforced Carbon-Carbon arrangement as citadel armor. On my 5 kt laser cruiser, the armor looks like this:
10 cm Reinforced Carbon-Carbon (topmost 20% of hull)
3.5 cm Maraging Steel (topmost 20% of hull)
35 cm empty space
2.5 cm Boron
135 cm empty space
2.5 cm Reinforced Carbon-Carbon
I can take thousands of slugs bow-on and with radiators retracted. What usually gets me in the end is my radiators getting sniped by lucky shots- need to build some with more armor, I guess. If I'm fighting another capital ship, they can fire all day and will never ever get through my citadel. At a 15-30 degree angle I can bring my guns to bear (4 per side plus a laser on the nose) and shred most ships while bouncing their shots. Drone fire, even Hellfire drones, just bounces off if they get past my lasers. Sometimes I'll let whole salvos of flak missiles hit my bow just for the cool noise they make when they ricochet. A single 5 kt Laser Cruiser can obliterate two 14 kt Fleet Carriers on a good day, thanks to this armor.
If I'm caught flat-footed the RCC whipple shield can take a solid barrage before it and the boron underneath starts to suffer. That said, multi-megaton contact nukes are this thing's weakness- they usually blow it into bits- but 9 times out of 10, that citadel just breaks off and the crew is kept alive.
I recommend my armoring schema as a lightweight, low-cost, super-strong arrangement.
Now what does your armor look like?
. I would say that for the same reasons as not relying on internal "radshields" to serve as armor: having a layer of external armor is great because it protects the bow of the ship from penetration in the first place, which also stops rounds from penetrating elsewhere. I can use the bow of my ship to bounce rounds from hitting the rest of my ship because of its tough armor. I'd also wonder whether you could make a radiation shield wide enough to protect the entire core of your ship without ballooning its cross-section and mass, as armor conforms to the shape of the hull.
