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Post by captinjoehenry on Oct 19, 2016 1:59:03 GMT
Honestly I think there has been some sort of oversight where cap drones are concerned. QSwitched made a lot of really good points about using unmanned capital ships which definitely need thinking upon. Because as it stands the remote control is really silly. Just 1kg of processors and single receivers are capable of controlling an entire capital ship. It really doesn't make any sense at all. At minimum there should be a limit to the complexity of a ship that a remote can control. So for example if you make a huge tanker you would only need a tiny remote control but if you build a fancy drone with multiple turrets on multiple sides you'll need something more advance. So a basic remote control could handle any of the current stock drones but as you get bigger and bigger you are going to need a lot more control systems to run it all and at the end of the day if you build a giant cap ship that is unmanned you should definitely need the same number of crew to run it as if it were manned. In all honesty you would need more people in order to trouble shoot communications and man all of the remote systems a manned ship wouldn't need.
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Post by dragonkid11 on Oct 19, 2016 2:09:00 GMT
Honestly I think there has been some sort of oversight where cap drones are concerned. QSwitched made a lot of really good points about using unmanned capital ships which definitely need thinking upon. Because as it stands the remote control is really silly. Just 1kg of processors and single receivers are capable of controlling an entire capital ship. It really doesn't make any sense at all. At minimum there should be a limit to the complexity of a ship that a remote can control. So for example if you make a huge tanker you would only need a tiny remote control but if you build a fancy drone with multiple turrets on multiple sides you'll need something more advance. So a basic remote control could handle any of the current stock drones but as you get bigger and bigger you are going to need a lot more control systems to run it all and at the end of the day if you build a giant cap ship that is unmanned you should definitely need the same number of crew to run it as if it were manned. In all honesty you would need more people in order to trouble shoot communications and man all of the remote systems a manned ship wouldn't need. Maybe have a weight ratio like 1 ton of mass need 1kg of processors? And the processor also get bigger and more vulnerable? |
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Post by captinjoehenry on Oct 19, 2016 2:14:53 GMT
Honestly I think there has been some sort of oversight where cap drones are concerned. QSwitched made a lot of really good points about using unmanned capital ships which definitely need thinking upon. Because as it stands the remote control is really silly. Just 1kg of processors and single receivers are capable of controlling an entire capital ship. It really doesn't make any sense at all. At minimum there should be a limit to the complexity of a ship that a remote can control. So for example if you make a huge tanker you would only need a tiny remote control but if you build a fancy drone with multiple turrets on multiple sides you'll need something more advance. So a basic remote control could handle any of the current stock drones but as you get bigger and bigger you are going to need a lot more control systems to run it all and at the end of the day if you build a giant cap ship that is unmanned you should definitely need the same number of crew to run it as if it were manned. In all honesty you would need more people in order to trouble shoot communications and man all of the remote systems a manned ship wouldn't need. Maybe have a weight ratio like 1 ton of mass need 1kg of processors? And the processor also get bigger and more vulnerable? Well that is a bit to simple. Because as I said if you make a tanker unmanned it would not really need anything at all to make it run. So an idea would be to make it based off of the number of weapons or something? Because missiles even if they are huge don't need much control and drone tankers don't need much control at all and both of those are massive. Maybe make it based off of power production? I'm really not sure as simple mass to control complexity doesn't work for quite a few situations like the ones I have pointed out. |
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Post by elouda on Oct 19, 2016 2:23:54 GMT
You could just use dry mass without including tank dry mass or cargo pod mass.
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Post by captinjoehenry on Oct 19, 2016 2:45:29 GMT
You could just use dry mass without including tank dry mass or cargo pod mass. That actually seems like a pretty good idea! Now it still is probably a bit too simple when you start getting into a full blown drone cap ship as the same dry mass cap ships can vary quite a lot in complexity from a missile boat to a single super laser to a gun boat and they could all have the wet and dry mass but the weapon system and power plants not to mention radiators will vary a heck of a lot from ship to ship which should require proportionally more crew and a bigger control unit. But as a rough figure that sounds good. But again for the big ships you'll need a crew on the launch vessel to man each of them separately as managing a full blown remote control cap ship isn't something you can do multiple of at a time. |
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Post by beta on Oct 19, 2016 3:12:51 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. Hah, yeah, no. Not hiding 1 GWt. Hiding 1 MWt (at most). Your missile launching ship doesn't need a laser to defend itself, it uses missiles for that. Nukes are a bit more of an issue for flares, so you would likely intercept those with missiles, prioritized over flak missiles. |
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Post by redparadize on Oct 19, 2016 3:23:07 GMT
Honestly I think there has been some sort of oversight where cap drones are concerned. QSwitched made a lot of really good points about using unmanned capital ships which definitely need thinking upon. Because as it stands the remote control is really silly. Just 1kg of processors and single receivers are capable of controlling an entire capital ship. It really doesn't make any sense at all. At minimum there should be a limit to the complexity of a ship that a remote can control. So for example if you make a huge tanker you would only need a tiny remote control but if you build a fancy drone with multiple turrets on multiple sides you'll need something more advance. So a basic remote control could handle any of the current stock drones but as you get bigger and bigger you are going to need a lot more control systems to run it all and at the end of the day if you build a giant cap ship that is unmanned you should definitely need the same number of crew to run it as if it were manned. In all honesty you would need more people in order to trouble shoot communications and man all of the remote systems a manned ship wouldn't need. Excuse my ignorance, but is QSwitched the game creator? His tag say admin. Anyways, I can't find where he mentioned what you said. I am glad he came to that conclusion too. I wish the creator could find a solution to the missile/drone spamming as well. The Donnager concept I posted would be even more effective if I mounted small drones that carry very small missile. Its not that I would like to completely dismiss missile/drone spamming, its just that missile can be made so light and cheap that it is just too good, to the point where its the only viable strategy. It cannot be countered because any counter can be defeated with even more missile. Not only it is game breaking, ultimately its CPU killing. I am doubtful that rocket engine could be made that small without losing its effectiveness or cost effectiveness. If you look at modern day rocket, the trend is toward bigger rocket, even for small satellite, the just pack more on a single rocket. Same is true for the new generation of small guided bomb, their price tag/delivered boom is much higher. Guidance unit are expensive. It is not unreasonable to think the same would apply to space weapon. Edit: Oh, i forgot to mention. Its on the same topic as the unmanned capital ship dilemma. It would be nice if the minimum crew would be lowered. If the gap could be bridged between the unmanned/crewed downward as well. If a modern day boat can operated by a single person for several month, I believe spaceship could be operated by a skeleton crew lower than 16 in the future. |
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Post by captinjoehenry on Oct 19, 2016 3:44:01 GMT
Honestly I think there has been some sort of oversight where cap drones are concerned. QSwitched made a lot of really good points about using unmanned capital ships which definitely need thinking upon. Because as it stands the remote control is really silly. Just 1kg of processors and single receivers are capable of controlling an entire capital ship. It really doesn't make any sense at all. At minimum there should be a limit to the complexity of a ship that a remote can control. So for example if you make a huge tanker you would only need a tiny remote control but if you build a fancy drone with multiple turrets on multiple sides you'll need something more advance. So a basic remote control could handle any of the current stock drones but as you get bigger and bigger you are going to need a lot more control systems to run it all and at the end of the day if you build a giant cap ship that is unmanned you should definitely need the same number of crew to run it as if it were manned. In all honesty you would need more people in order to trouble shoot communications and man all of the remote systems a manned ship wouldn't need. Excuse my ignorance, but is QSwitched the game creator? His tag say admin. Anyways, I can't find where he mentioned what you said. I am glad he came to that conclusion too. I wish the creator could find a solution to the missile/drone spamming as well. The Donnager concept I posted would be even more effective if I mounted small drones that carry very small missile. Its not that I would like to completely dismiss missile/drone spamming, its just that missile can be made so light and cheap that it is just too good, to the point where its the only viable strategy. It cannot be countered because any counter can be defeated with even more missile. Not only it is game breaking, ultimately its CPU killing. I am doubtful that rocket engine could be made that small without losing its effectiveness or cost effectiveness. If you look at modern day rocket, the trend is toward bigger rocket, even for small satellite, the just pack more on a single rocket. Same is true for the new generation of small guided bomb, their price tag/delivered boom is much higher. Guidance unit are expensive. It is not unreasonable to think the same would apply to space weapon. Edit: Oh, i forgot to mention. Its on the same topic as the unmanned capital ship dilemma. It would be nice if the minimum crew would be lowered. If the gap could be bridged between the unmanned/crewed downward as well. If a modern day boat can operated by a single person for several month, I believe spaceship could be operated by a skeleton crew lower than 16 in the future. QSwitched is the forum account of the game maker. Here is his article about crew and unmanned ships: childrenofadeadearth.wordpress.com/2016/09/21/life-in-the-lonely-void/As for cheap missile spam being too good. Well first thing first. This is a simulator designed to figure out what space combat will end up like. So as long a strategy follows the laws of physics it is perfect! In fact if you have a design better in all ways and is unstoppable and follows the laws of reality then by all means use it! There is no balance in this game. It is not a feature and everything cost included is derived from equations. Now that thats out of the way. Micro missiles are more or less worthless against packed whipple shields. They just don't have enough mass or a big enough warhead to get through packed whipple shields. They are simply too small. Against other armor types it works quite well! But again if you consider spamming cheap missiles to be op then we are all probably on to something! I personally do not think so but as this is a simulator before all else if you have something OP and follows the laws of physics then by all means use it to hell! |
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Post by ross128 on Oct 19, 2016 3:54:44 GMT
One possible solution to drone capships would be to give the controller a performance metric, such as MFLOPs, that is roughly analogous to a certain amount of crew capacity.
Missiles being so strong isn't really surprising though, rockets are just a great way to accelerate things, especially when you can stretch that acceleration out across hundreds of kilometers of vacuum (long burn time means low acceleration, which means low component stress, which means light, cheap materials). Being guided is also really great at those kinds of ranges.
More/better options for lasers might help mitigate them a little bit, especially since I've noticed that aerogel only seems to defeat lasers up to a point, then fails catastrophically when you pass a critical intensity threshold (I don't know exactly what that threshold is, it's just that I've seen aerogel suffer sudden catastrophic failure when getting too close to laser arrays I was testing).
A CWIS mode for railguns might help too, right now the only thing that really holds railguns back as PD is that their targeting algorithm viciously overkills a single missile at a time (wasting precious seconds that allow the rest of the swarm to close). With a smart algorithm that proactively spreads its fire across the incoming swarm, a sandblaster style railgun may form an effective missile defense. Obviously you'd want to toggle CWIS mode off when fighting ships.
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Post by redparadize on Oct 19, 2016 4:08:57 GMT
I do not disagree about physics being the natural balance. But there is still cost to consider. Guidance unit are complex and expensive. Even in the emptiness of space detecting/identifying/tracking/homing remain complex. Small guidance typically rely on external tracking device. Like GPS or plane mounted radar/sensor. Sensor accurate at 1 500 000 km are not cheap or small. Detection does not translate into identification, usable tracking data, and fire solution. If all these thing need to be done independently, it will expensive and big. Anyways, I should probably bring that subject to its own page.
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Post by concretedonkey on Oct 19, 2016 4:25:29 GMT
Sorry, yesterday I had no time to do proper testing but I think we see two things here : One is a slightliy weird armor scheme that benefits disproportionally from sloping  By no means invincible however :  You can see the soft layers being peeled away easily. The other thing however is certainly a bug :  This shot is taken after more than a minute continuous firing, much longer than the other two shots. I triggered it after pushing up and down armor layers and switching the places of the two graphite aerogel layers - pushing the upper layer down and the lower layer up. That being said , I still like the armor scheme but mostly because its cheap and light. It deserves a bit more testing , but for the moment I have no time for it. Sorry to dissapoint you all. |
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Post by dragonkid11 on Oct 19, 2016 4:31:34 GMT
Anyone actually built drone sub-capital ship before though?
I didn't see any example in the Post Your Designs Thread.
And yeah, calling them sub-capital seems more appropriate because they are not...real capital ship.
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Post by elouda on Oct 19, 2016 5:34:36 GMT
I used a missile/nosegun 371 ton 'drone' as part of my third generation designs. It actually originated as an attempt at a 'light' capital ship / fast attack craft in the 500-600 ton range, but the crew requirements killed it, as they were like 75% of those of my regular capital ships. Instead I removed the crew quarters and ended up with that.
childrenofadeadearth.boards.net/post/1166/threadI haven't revisited the concept of drones that big in either my fourth or fifth generation designs, though it might be time to do so. Given that the carrier was only carrying 7-8kt of drones, I figure something half the size could have done the same if one was willing to be a lot more frugal in other respects. Also, on the general topic of flares and missile avoidance - a 'decoy drone' deliberately engineered for massive energy output is often the better solution. It can be deployed before the battle (or several can) and then told to scatter. If any survive, refuelling them would allow 'reusability' to a degree. As for general 'missiles rule concept' - yes, but I think its hard to determine how effective anti-missiles really could be given the limits of the AI and the proxy fuzes still being a little lacking at the moment. I forsee that the current 'paradigm' if you will of missile dominance might certainly be true against non-antimissile armed opponents, but two equivalently armed forces would probably exhaust their magazines without much result (somewhat akin to what I expect a lot of larger surface vessels would do today) and then either call it a day, or decide to get into closer combat. There are a couple of other factors were missing too that would favour 'gun/lasership' designs; 1) No logistics and hence no ammo to worry about (long term) - this is particularly a concern if my statement above turns out to be true 2) Costs only account for raw materials, not construction/manufacturing work |
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Post by dragonkid11 on Oct 19, 2016 7:29:52 GMT
Okay, I'm going to test out sub-capital drone ship when I get back home afterward.
Then maybe I can see someway of fixing this.
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Post by blothorn on Oct 19, 2016 11:49:38 GMT
Of curiosity, what are people seeing for packed armor versus the stock gunship? It seems that something (probably the 286mm coilgun) is still making it through my attempts rather quickly--I wonder if this is another case where high-velocity projectiles are much easier to stop because they take less to convince to turn into plasma.
That said, forcing your opponent to use low-velocity projectiles is a fairly substantial victory in itself, since it forces him to fight at closer ranges.
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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.
