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Post by millesmissiles on Oct 18, 2016 21:23:51 GMT
Ironically enough for the guy who started this crazy thread, I've been turned off from the idea of armor recently. This is based on experimentation over the past few weeks, and I've come to a few conclusions:
1. The Missile Will Always Get Through: if you take a look at the micro missiles thread, you'll be amazed by how small and cheap missiles are getting. It's trivial to build a missile weighing a few hundred kilograms for less than 500c with a dV approaching 5-10 kps. At this point, you don't even need warheads: sheer velocity means these missiles punch through ships like they're butter. Armoring against a 10 kps missile impact is impossible with anything like a reasonable budget- and budgeting is a whole other issue unto itself.  2. Missiles Spam Rules: the best (and arguably only) defense against missiles is more missiles. Interceptor missiles are a fascinating thing unto themselves, and I suspect there's a great deal of development to be had of the missile meta in general. Flares are limited (and surprisingly expensive), and an enemy throwing small salvos at you will deplete your flare supply quickly. Gun interception of missiles is mediocre at best (especially because we can't do independent targeting) and seems flawed in principle, considering the cost in crew, credits, and kilograms of a ship sporting enough guns to shoot down upwards of 100 incoming missiles. "Using dV for armor" is also a flawed concept: a ship firing missiles in salvos possesses, in practice, the dV of its missiles times however many salvos it can fire plus the ship's own dV. There is no means of defeating missile swarms as cost-, mass-, and crew- effective as another missile swarm. 3. Missiles Are the Most Lethal Weapon Systems: I guarantee you that even those fancy new stuffed whipple shield designs won't stop a 10 kps missile, especially considering how cheap and easy it is to throw 50-100 missiles per salvo at your enemy. For that matter, designing a 1-ton KKV missile is trivial- and I haven't met a block of armor yet that doesn't get holes punched in it by one of these things. Missiles also possess the most tactical diversity: I have ships with batteries of flak, nuke, and kinetic impactor missiles to use at will. It'd be pretty ludicrous to make a railgun which could throw a 1-ton projectile at 10 kps with any decent rate of fire, but it's cheap as dirt to shoot 100 missiles which do the same thing.  4. Guns Are Obsolete: gun systems built to physics-respecting, economical, and mass-saving standards will not approach the lethality of a missile system which does the same. Consider: my Fleet Standard Missile I masses 75 kg with a dV of 7.8 kps for only 171 credits. It carries a 2kg octogen flak bomb, which I like to think creates shrapnel that bounces around the inside of a ship even after the missile overpenetrates. A launcher system which carries 50 of these costs 12 Kc, masses 4 tons, and uses only 200 Kw to fire them at a rate of 180 rpm.  A 2 MW railgun firing 1g rounds at 9.6 kps does so at a rate of (physics-breakingly) 16,500 rpm. It masses 3 tons and costs 64 Kc. Even using my (now apparently obsolete) Boron-Boron-Boron armor setup, ships of mine can take a solid 1-3 minutes of fire from these 'lil guys if I angle. Meanwhile, I can carry 250 missiles for the same cost as that one railgun (they're heavier but fuel is cheap). With each launcher pumping out 3 missiles a second, these missiles accelerate to 7.8 kps in 45 seconds for a fully powered (non-ballistic) engagement range of 60km. I think there's a clear winner here. 
I've still been armoring my ships with my usual Boron-Boron-Boron hull/ Steel-Boron citadel setup, but much less thick. My main worry is drones that might slip past my interceptor missiles and laser escorts, but for this rare case angling and relatively thin armor works just fine. One of my missile cruisers sports 120 FSM II's (60 with nukes, 60 with flak) and 300 FSM I's (150 with nukes, 150 with flak) with a total mass of 3 kt for little more than 30 Mc. I've talked about comparing ships in terms of Mc per kt, and for this ship the ratio is 11.8 Mc per kt. For comparison, the ship with the stuffed whipple shield stuffed earlier is 15.8 Mc per kt.  I'm often struck by how this game accurately parallels the development of tactics in human history. In the modern age, we've learned a key lesson: missiles are king, and active defense trumps passive defense every time. Then again, they don't call me "Millesmissiles" for nothing. Missiles have their flaws, and it takes patience to painstakingly manually arrange 5 different salvos (especially when the enemy DODGES SLIGHTLY EVERY FREAKING MINUTE of a two-hour flight). Guns and drones are certainly more convenient weapons systems, and perhaps I'm overconfident in my long-range sword-arm. What do you think? Do you believe in the Missile Meta, or are you a gun nut through and through? |
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Post by beta on Oct 18, 2016 22:10:16 GMT
Missiles used to be about equivalent until armouring with silica aerogel (or basalt fibre). With those armours, the missiles cannot be stopped by a laser and have to be intercepted by another missile. As you said, guns are ineffective at stopping even small missile constellations, even if they had independent targeting.
However, I do not agree that flares are not useful. Minimize your heat output on your launching ships (extremely easy, launcher require tiny amounts of power and heat rejection) and maximize the burn time on flares. You can get flares that burn for 10 minutes at heat levels that are sufficient to conceal your ships. A single flare per missile volley is fairly cheap (cost and mass). Sending small constellations of missiles can more easily be intercepted by defensive missiles (they tend to target the same missiles, so a wave of 20 will only have 8-10 knocked out with equivalent missiles).
If flares ever become less effective, something better be done about the various missile armours or weapon variety will die and missiles will reign supreme.
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Post by millesmissiles on Oct 18, 2016 22:43:14 GMT
Missiles used to be about equivalent until armouring with silica aerogel (or basalt fibre). With those armours, the missiles cannot be stopped by a laser and have to be intercepted by another missile. As you said, guns are ineffective at stopping even small missile constellations, even if they had independent targeting. However, I do not agree that flares are not useful. Minimize your heat output on your launching ships (extremely easy, launcher require tiny amounts of power and heat rejection) and maximize the burn time on flares. You can get flares that burn for 10 minutes at heat levels that are sufficient to conceal your ships. A single flare per missile volley is fairly cheap (cost and mass). Sending small constellations of missiles can more easily be intercepted by defensive missiles (they tend to target the same missiles, so a wave of 20 will only have 8-10 knocked out with equivalent missiles). If flares ever become less effective, something better be done about the various missile armours or weapon variety will die and missiles will reign supreme. As to this, I might mention drones as another cheap remote weapon system which negate the idea of passive defense for capital ships. Drones aren't distracted by flares, and a laser-toting drone-killer will necessarily have a high heat output which means that its flares must be hotter and correspondingly shorter-burning or hideously expensive. At this point you might use laser drones to kill incoming drones, but those can be targeted by missiles- not to mention confirming my original point that remote weapon systems and active defense dominates. |
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Post by jakjakman on Oct 18, 2016 22:44:47 GMT
Ironically enough for the guy who started this crazy thread, I've been turned off from the idea of armor recently. This is based on experimentation over the past few weeks, and I've come to a few conclusions:
1. The Missile Will Always Get Through2. Missiles Spam Rules3. Missiles Are the Most Lethal Weapon Systems: 4. Guns Are Obsolete
What do you think? Do you believe in the Missile Meta, or are you a gun nut through and through?
There are serious flaws in relying on a heavy missile doctrine. It can easily be countered with a non-symmetric capital ship mounting a powerful laser on one side and hiding the radiators behind its mass on the other side. Add in a decoy launcher and the missiles will never touch the ship. 350MW to 1GW lasers can engage at 150 Km+ and will start sniping your missile launchers and radiators well outside your missiles' full-powered envelope.
Regardless, the missile homing algorithms in the game right now are pretty bad. Counter missiles don't really work unless you're trying to blast swarms with multi-megaton nukes. Swarms of more than 40 missiles slow the game to a crawl even with a good processor. So it's hard to say what missile heavy space warfare would really be like.
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Post by Dhan on Oct 18, 2016 22:56:39 GMT
Ironically enough for the guy who started this crazy thread, I've been turned off from the idea of armor recently. This is based on experimentation over the past few weeks, and I've come to a few conclusions:
1. The Missile Will Always Get Through2. Missiles Spam Rules3. Missiles Are the Most Lethal Weapon Systems: 4. Guns Are Obsolete
What do you think? Do you believe in the Missile Meta, or are you a gun nut through and through?
There are serious flaws in relying on a heavy missile doctrine. It can easily be countered with a non-symmetric capital ship mounting a powerful laser on one side and hiding the radiators behind its mass on the other side. Add in a decoy launcher and the missiles will never touch the ship. 350MW to 1GW lasers can engage at 150 Km+ and will start sniping your missile launchers and radiators well outside your missiles' full-powered envelope.
Regardless, the missile homing algorithms in the game right now are pretty bad. Counter missiles don't really work unless you're trying to blast swarms with multi-megaton nukes. Swarms of more than 40 missiles slow the game to a crawl even with a good processor. So it's hard to say what missile heavy space warfare would really be like.
The asymmetrical ship won't counter nuke missiles and probably won't counter flak missiles passively either. Decoy launchers do counter missiles pretty hard but they are also countered by never ending micro missile spam since flares are heavier and more expensive than micro missiles. I've gotten hits with my 10k deltaV missiles at 300-400 km so it's unlikely that your laser will outrange some missiles. Also launchers can have silica aerogel armor and line of sight to radiators can be covered by orienting your hull in the way of the laser. |
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Post by millesmissiles on Oct 18, 2016 23:02:40 GMT
There are serious flaws in relying on a heavy missile doctrine. It can easily be countered with a non-symmetric capital ship mounting a powerful laser on one side and hiding the radiators behind its mass on the other side. Add in a decoy launcher and the missiles will never touch the ship. 350MW to 1GW lasers can engage at 150 Km+ and will start sniping your missile launchers and radiators well outside your missiles' full-powered envelope.
Regardless, the missile homing algorithms in the game right now are pretty bad. Counter missiles don't really work unless you're trying to blast swarms with multi-megaton nukes. Swarms of more than 40 missiles slow the game to a crawl even with a good processor. So it's hard to say what missile heavy space warfare would really be like.
What kind of flares do you have that are light and cheap enough to hide a gigawatt laserboat against 25 salvos of missiles  ? Like I said in my post above yours, I don't think it's actually possible to make flares which can hide a high-power laser ship from a large number of salvos. For that matter, nuclear warheads will fry you real nice after a few closely-missed salvos. But I agree: COADE is pretty limited in how it can handle missile combat. I suspect that the biggest barrier to the "Missile Meta" is the game's optimization and algorithms, rather than physics or game mechanics. |
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Post by redparadize on Oct 18, 2016 23:18:11 GMT
Flare need a serious buff. It is silly to believe a flare would only last 10sec in space. Take a steel tube, fill it with something that burn, just enough to make it melt without vaporizing it. Et voila, you have now a 2500k blob of steel flying around. Nuclear flare would do even better, Im not sure I would want to have one next to my ship trought.
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Post by ross128 on Oct 18, 2016 23:24:08 GMT
Yeah, the only two weaknesses of micromissiles seem to be your patience, and your CPU's performance. If those two things weren't factors, I'd even say that simple flak micromissiles are even superior to nuclear EFPs simply on the basis of cost efficiency, at 50c a pop you can potentially launch around 3,000 of them for the price of a single nuke. When you're throwing that much ordinance around, any armor can be ablative armor if you're persistent. With patience and CPU performance taken into account though, nuclear EFPs are a great way to speed things along without murdering your frame rates.  Of course, in terms of mass you're looking at closer to 200-300 per nuke, so nukes can potentially be a tiny bit more mass-efficient if you're going after a *really* hardened target that would require 400+ flak missiles to drill through, but could still be penned by a single nuclear EFP. At that point you're probably looking at a station though. |
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Post by redparadize on Oct 18, 2016 23:49:27 GMT
I am ok with missile spamming, but it need a limiting factor. Gameplay wise, there is a huge weakness that need to be addressed, it is simple, the amount of drone/missile flying should be limited by crew size. It make sense and it will also cover for a huge game exploit: Right now, you can have drones just as big and powerful as a capital ship, without requiring large crew to control them. In fact, I a have been working on a design just like that: The tashi is a drone, the Rosinante is a ship, the Tashi have about 1/2 of the fighting capacity of the Rosinante. Yet the Tashi require 5 crew per luncher. Keep in mind that I could have done a pure clone drone of the Rosinante. |
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Post by ross128 on Oct 18, 2016 23:55:11 GMT
Well, it does make sense that missiles are not very crew-intensive due to how they're controlled. The entire swarm is slaved together during orbital maneuvers, so an arbitrarily large missile swarm only requires a single pilot (or more accurately, navigator). During terminal approach they are set to heat-seeking mode, and require no pilots at all.
Presumably drones can achieve similar efficiency by putting the weapons under the control of a fire control computer, so the "drone pilot" only herds the swarm in broad strokes.
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Post by redparadize on Oct 19, 2016 0:16:25 GMT
Well, it does make sense that missiles are not very crew-intensive due to how they're controlled. The entire swarm is slaved together during orbital maneuvers, so an arbitrarily large missile swarm only requires a single pilot (or more accurately, navigator). During terminal approach they are set to heat-seeking mode, and require no pilots at all. Presumably drones can achieve similar efficiency by putting the weapons under the control of a fire control computer, so the "drone pilot" only herds the swarm in broad strokes. Possibly, but it still game breaking. Here is the DonnagerI, it carry 4 Tashi I. Basically its twice as powerful as the Rosi, and only have a crew of 37. Thats 10 less than the Rosi.  Here is the picture, with that much DV, the Donnager can't be catched by the design I have seen so far. It carry 4 pocket battleship, each of them can cut a ship in half before bing destroyed. I have seen its gun destroy 12 out of a 20 missile volley, and I didn't even use the 3kt dwarf missile to destroy them. Its so small that most KKV missile have a low chance of touching it. Its armor should be good enough to counter flak missile and nuke. This is just a prof of concept, there is room for allot of improvement here, the way Tashi is too powerful for what it does. I say its game breaking. |
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Post by captinjoehenry on Oct 19, 2016 0:49:08 GMT
Well as for dealing with massed missile spam. Honestly if your ship carries 100s of flares which isn't that hard at all if you do it right you can effortlessly defeat as many missile waves as you have flares. Not to mention if you are sending tiny waves the enemy can just trust in their CWIS to deal with them. Also the packed whipple shields while expensive are actually hugely resistant to even massive kinetic penetrators. So as it stands I am personally not hugely concerned by massed micro missile spam as they are fairly easy to deal with in almost all situations and with the effectiveness of flares I'm not really concerned about missiles. I mean if you have some low power power plants and much bigger power plants you can have the big plants only online to deal with drone spam and you can shut them down and launch flares to deal with missile spam. Not to mention the fact that there really is a lot of room for making flares far better and cheaper if we use some other sort of system than the current one as just launching a molten mass of metal would do a great job of being a huge heat source that can last for quite a long time. And with a packed whipple shield the lightweight micro flack just aren't ever going to get through. You can just shoot some of them down or just take the missile hit on the chin. The whipple shields can take 150kg coilgun rounds going at 19.2 km/s all day long and give not a single shit! And the amount of flack pieces just isn't going to be enough to ablate through a packed whipple shield unless you have an insane number of them all hit the same spot. I mean even if you use micro kinetic missiles they still do jack shit to a pack whipple shield they just are not big enough to effect it. Mind you this is just from my testing and I am happy to be proven wrong by others and their tests.
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Post by redparadize on Oct 19, 2016 0:52:22 GMT
150kg coilgun rounds going at 19.2 km all day long??? I want to see that!
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Post by captinjoehenry on Oct 19, 2016 0:58:46 GMT
150kg coilgun rounds going at 19.2 km all day long??? I want to see that! Yep! If I am recalling right my more affordable set up for packed armor isn't wholly immune to it but the penatrations were few and far between more or less at random.  Worth noting is the fact that the coils of the gun only use 140 kw. The loader takes 100 mw. It's just the reaction wheels that use 266mw. I cannot imagine a more physic breaking gun than this but man I think it makes one hell of a test by fire for any armor out there. |
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Post by Durandal on Oct 19, 2016 1:10:18 GMT
Well, it does make sense that missiles are not very crew-intensive due to how they're controlled. The entire swarm is slaved together during orbital maneuvers, so an arbitrarily large missile swarm only requires a single pilot (or more accurately, navigator). During terminal approach they are set to heat-seeking mode, and require no pilots at all. Presumably drones can achieve similar efficiency by putting the weapons under the control of a fire control computer, so the "drone pilot" only herds the swarm in broad strokes. Possibly, but it still game breaking. Here is the DonnagerI, it carry 4 Tashi I. Basically its twice as powerful as the Rosi, and only have a crew of 37. Thats 10 less than the Rosi. Here is the picture, with that much DV, the Donnager can't be catched by the design I have seen so far. It carry 4 pocket battleship, each of them can cut a ship in half before bing destroyed. I have seen its gun destroy 12 out of a 20 missile volley, and I didn't even use the 3kt dwarf missile to destroy them. Its so small that most KKV missile have a low chance of touching it. Its armor should be good enough to counter flak missile and nuke. This is just a prof of concept, there is room for allot of improvement here, the way Tashi is too powerful for what it does. I say its game breaking. Well, it isn't supposed to be a "balanced" strategy game. It's supposed to be a simulation. I'd like to add though that I haven't been able to develop a working micro missile yet. I mean yeah, I've built a few, but they don't seem that useful.I've troed up to 3cm of silica aerogel on them, and against a stock gunship they just get burnt up by lasers not long after launch. Only got a 20ish second burn time even with 8+kms dV. I much prefer 20g acceleration 5kt "standard" missiles that can cook a target from 60+ km away. |
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? Like I said in my post above yours, I don't think it's actually possible to make flares which can hide a high-power laser ship from a large number of salvos. For that matter, nuclear warheads will fry you real nice after a few closely-missed salvos.
