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Post by beatle on Oct 19, 2016 12:11:58 GMT
I don't really see the Remote Control as a broken system concerning crew requirements.
In my view the main focus is maintenance not control. The basic difference is that the manned ship can be assumed to continuously operate most of its systems for a long time, making long interplanetary voyages, paroling, performing show of force and presence missions, training etc. That all takes its toil on various modules that need to have regular maintenance and be fixed occasionally.
In contrast, missiles and drones can be seen more as stowed rounds - spending their time dormant in storage - so requiring practically no constant maintenance.
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Post by redparadize on Oct 19, 2016 13:18:38 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 (Snip) By no means invincible however : (Snip) You can see the soft layers being peeled away easily. The other thing however is certainly a bug : (Snip) 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. Are these shots from your big gun? If it is, I am interested to see the armor layout. Does the thickness of aerogel affect overall performance allot ? |
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Post by captinjoehenry on Oct 19, 2016 14:09:03 GMT
I don't really see the Remote Control as a broken system concerning crew requirements. In my view the main focus is maintenance not control. The basic difference is that the manned ship can be assumed to continuously operate most of its systems for a long time, making long interplanetary voyages, paroling, performing show of force and presence missions, training etc. That all takes its toil on various modules that need to have regular maintenance and be fixed occasionally. In contrast, missiles and drones can be seen more as stowed rounds - spending their time dormant in storage - so requiring practically no constant maintenance. While I agree that maintenance is the main crew requirement for manned ships for complex full sized cap ship drones you will need just as many people remotely manning stations that need to be manned in a real spaceship for combat. Such as weapons officers, damage control and probably a fair bit more damage control people to do remote diagnosis. Technicians to manage the nuclear power plant and a whole butt load of people to do cyber warfare and countermeasures and I mean a lot as you would need to deal with the hostiles cyber warfare a whole hell of a lot more when you are remote controlling a cap ship compared to a drone. |
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Post by dragonkid11 on Oct 19, 2016 14:11:06 GMT
Okay...I tried out on trying to make sub-capital drone stuff and... Here's the thing, while the drone would be highly maneuverable with all the armor, weapons and engine while being practically 50% cheaper than the original ship design. The carrier itself needs to be REALLY large just to fit the drone. And the price barely tipped over the scale even after reducing some stuff like armor.  Yeah, it's big and very vulnerable. VERY vulnerable. But the sub-capital drone though.  They look so adorable! And that ridiculous thrust that can be used because the drone is unmanned makes it so damn maneuverable. And yes, the drone is carrying smaller drones. DRONE-CEPTION!!!  Not an exact size comparison but you do wonder how the hell do they fit in the launcher pod...  I love this game for so much shit I could do with it. But anyway, yeah. The control pod weight needs to be increased. Does the number of crew needs to be increased too? I think possibly...yes. The carrier total has 71 crews. Compared to my original ship design with the sub-capital drone is based on, each need like 41 people or so, so that 246 crew member job being handled by only 71 crews. Though this wasn't really related to armor thread anyway but I would like to do something about the current discussion. |
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Post by jakjakman on Oct 19, 2016 15:09:14 GMT
I don't really see the Remote Control as a broken system concerning crew requirements. In my view the main focus is maintenance not control. The basic difference is that the manned ship can be assumed to continuously operate most of its systems for a long time, making long interplanetary voyages, paroling, performing show of force and presence missions, training etc. That all takes its toil on various modules that need to have regular maintenance and be fixed occasionally. In contrast, missiles and drones can be seen more as stowed rounds - spending their time dormant in storage - so requiring practically no constant maintenance. While I agree that maintenance is the main crew requirement for manned ships for complex full sized cap ship drones you will need just as many people remotely manning stations that need to be manned in a real spaceship for combat. Such as weapons officers, damage control and probably a fair bit more damage control people to do remote diagnosis. Technicians to manage the nuclear power plant and a whole butt load of people to do cyber warfare and countermeasures and I mean a lot as you would need to deal with the hostiles cyber warfare a whole hell of a lot more when you are remote controlling a cap ship compared to a drone.
Well, on the other hand my one little PC is simulating the entire space battle including calculating the firing solutions and maneuvers for every drone, ship, and missile on both sides. The power plants can be managed with algorithms. The offensive/defensive electronic warfare systems can also be managed by algorithms. Any kind of damage control that is relevant during the 30 second battle will be switching to a redundant backup system, which again can be done by automated sensors and algorithms. The only thing for actual humans to do is exactly what we do when we play the game: tell the drones to go here and shoot this.
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Post by jakjakman on Oct 19, 2016 15:16:58 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.
Hmmm after some testing last night you're right. I have a 320MW laser on one side of a ship with all the radiators on the other side. The ship has plenty of dV and about 1.5g acceleration. Seen broadside by approaching missiles, the radiators are completely invisible, hidden by the hull. This has been more than enough to defeat the stock flak or nuclear missiles, but didn't work on missiles like yours with 75km + powered envelopes. Even with full lateral acceleration by my ship and 300MW flares streaming out the missiles seemed to "see" right through my hull and hit directly broadside.
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Post by captinjoehenry on Oct 19, 2016 16:01:40 GMT
While I agree that maintenance is the main crew requirement for manned ships for complex full sized cap ship drones you will need just as many people remotely manning stations that need to be manned in a real spaceship for combat. Such as weapons officers, damage control and probably a fair bit more damage control people to do remote diagnosis. Technicians to manage the nuclear power plant and a whole butt load of people to do cyber warfare and countermeasures and I mean a lot as you would need to deal with the hostiles cyber warfare a whole hell of a lot more when you are remote controlling a cap ship compared to a drone.
Well, on the other hand my one little PC is simulating the entire space battle including calculating the firing solutions and maneuvers for every drone, ship, and missile on both sides. The power plants can be managed with algorithms. The offensive/defensive electronic warfare systems can also be managed by algorithms. Any kind of damage control that is relevant during the 30 second battle will be switching to a redundant backup system, which again can be done by automated sensors and algorithms. The only thing for actual humans to do is exactly what we do when we play the game: tell the drones to go here and shoot this.
Ah yes but you see our PC are running black boxes. This game is a simulation and therefore simplified to allow our computers to run it. For example modern naval warships have supercomputers on board just to run everything. Take the Zumwalt class destroyer for example. It contains a massive server system in order to operate all of the fairly simple modern technology. In comparison most of the capital ships we have are going to have to do a whole hell of a lot more processing to function and take in all of the sensor data. Aim the guns. Manage the power system the cooling system the life support the guidance system the engine controls the ammo transportation and all of the million other things that all need a computer to run and then you need to operate all of this remotely from the mother ship. Honestly thinking about it there should be a separate computer module for all ships in game simply due to how vital the computers are to making everything work and the non insubstantial amount of cooling and power they will need to run and if they go then the whole ship is doomed. |
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Post by beatle on Oct 19, 2016 16:29:39 GMT
Ah yes but you see our PC are running black boxes. This game is a simulation and therefore simplified to allow our computers to run it. For example modern naval warships have supercomputers on board just to run everything. Take the Zumwalt class destroyer for example. It contains a massive server system in order to operate all of the fairly simple modern technology. In comparison most of the capital ships we have are going to have to do a whole hell of a lot more processing to function and take in all of the sensor data. Aim the guns. Manage the power system the cooling system the life support the guidance system the engine controls the ammo transportation and all of the million other things that all need a computer to run and then you need to operate all of this remotely from the mother ship. Honestly thinking about it there should be a separate computer module for all ships in game simply due to how vital the computers are to making everything work and the non insubstantial amount of cooling and power they will need to run and if they go then the whole ship is doomed. I think you underestimate the required amount of computational power to run a modern warship. It really is not that hard to do all the calculations for gun laying - people had automatic target tracking guns in WW2, you could do it on an Arduino. I am sure that the gaming consoles in the ships recreational facilities are easily comparable to the vital systems of the ship itself, computing power vise. Wiki states that Zumwalt uses PPC7A and PPC7D computers for it's control needs and the manufactures website states that they are 512MB RAM, 1.4GHz CPU computers that are even obsolete and discontinued. My guess is that by far the largest reasons for big computers on ships are requirements for massive redundancy, robustness, ease of expansion and use of old technology (dictated by conservative designs, as in all safety critical applications, small production runs and huge amount of paperwork). Of course, 1kg computer controlling 1k t warship is still silly, tho. But still I would think that well less than 1% of that 1k t ship would be needed for this purpose, so it can be safely ignored. Definitely as long as sensors are abstracted away too - as these things would be something that I would like to see explicitly handled a bit more. |
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Post by captinjoehenry on Oct 19, 2016 16:44:24 GMT
Ah yes but you see our PC are running black boxes. This game is a simulation and therefore simplified to allow our computers to run it. For example modern naval warships have supercomputers on board just to run everything. Take the Zumwalt class destroyer for example. It contains a massive server system in order to operate all of the fairly simple modern technology. In comparison most of the capital ships we have are going to have to do a whole hell of a lot more processing to function and take in all of the sensor data. Aim the guns. Manage the power system the cooling system the life support the guidance system the engine controls the ammo transportation and all of the million other things that all need a computer to run and then you need to operate all of this remotely from the mother ship. Honestly thinking about it there should be a separate computer module for all ships in game simply due to how vital the computers are to making everything work and the non insubstantial amount of cooling and power they will need to run and if they go then the whole ship is doomed. I think you underestimate the required amount of computational power to run a modern warship. It really is not that hard to do all the calculations for gun laying - people had automatic target tracking guns in WW2, you could do it on an Arduino. I am sure that the gaming consoles in the ships recreational facilities are easily comparable to the vital systems of the ship itself, computing power vise. Wiki states that Zumwalt uses PPC7A and PPC7D computers for it's control needs and the manufactures website states that they are 512MB RAM, 1.4GHz CPU computers that are even obsolete and discontinued. My guess is that by far the largest reasons for big computers on ships are requirements for massive redundancy, robustness, ease of expansion and use of old technology (dictated by conservative designs, as in all safety critical applications, small production runs and huge amount of paperwork). Of course, 1kg computer controlling 1k t warship is still silly, tho. But still I would think that well less than 1% of that 1k t ship would be needed for this purpose, so it can be safely ignored. Definitely as long as sensors are abstracted away too - as these things would be something that I would like to see explicitly handled a bit more. Fair enough. But still remote controlling a cap ship is a different kettle of fish than a drone. How different I am not sure but I would definitely imagine that you would need a fair bit of people to run a full cap ship remotely. Not to mention the fact that a remote cap ship I would think would be a bit more vulnerable as a hit that knocks out a computer or resets it is a much bigger issue if you don't have people on hand. Mind you I would think that that could be countered but it is still something to bear in mind. |
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Post by concretedonkey on Oct 19, 2016 16:46:31 GMT
Are these shots from your big gun? If it is, I am interested to see the armor layout. Does the thickness of aerogel affect overall performance allot ? On the shots the armor composition varies. The heavily sloped one is 3cm boron , 1.7m Graphite aerogel, 5mm boron, again 1.7m Graphite aerogel then 1.7 meters empty and 3cm Silica. The flat and dumb target was the same , just with 3mm boron instead of 5. Tested both with and without the interval between the silica and the graphite... nothing conclusive for the moment. I was in a hurry. Trying to find out what was wrong and why neither could reach more than 30-50 seconds survivability when the day before they were measured in minutes. Sadly I will probably not be able to do a proper testing before the weekend. Btw the gun is not really that dangerous, at that point I was fixated on high speed. Newer designs are better, but I started testing with this one and switching it will invalidate the old results. |
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Post by ross128 on Oct 19, 2016 16:55:30 GMT
Hmm, building fully capital-ship sized drones does seem to introduce some inefficiencies with the launcher (probably getting hit by the square-cube law somewhere, at that scale you probably have to resort to launching them out of a minimally viable station). However, I think stand-off drones configured to behave like tiny, drone-sized capital ships may have some potential.
A drone built like a tiny capital ship may be able to combine many of the advantages of missiles (expendability, high acceleration, a second delta-V pool from the launching ship, small crew requirements) with the advantages of gun-based capital ships (near-immunity to decoys and point defense, ability to sequentially engage multiple targets).
They will likely still need support from expendable missiles to screen them against interception, though a missile support drone as part of the fleet composition could probably fill that role. And since these mid-size drones would likely be large enough to mount point defense, or be escorted by dedicated point defense drones, intercepting them would be about as difficult as intercepting a capital fleet.
There's probably a sweet spot somewhere in the 100t-600t range that provides a nice balance of endurance, firepower, and portability. A carrier for these types of drones would probably not carry more than 10, since they're intended to behave more like ships than typical expendable drones, though if mass and credit budgets allow for it carrying more may certainly be on the table.
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Post by redparadize on Oct 19, 2016 17:24:03 GMT
ross128
About the luncher mass. It can be hit hard its true, but you don't need these launcher to be armored, same for the carrier. If you do its kinda defeating the purpose I believe. For my 60t pocket battleship, it was only 1.5 tons, its not too bad.
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Post by captinjoehenry on Oct 19, 2016 17:26:33 GMT
True, but you don't need these launcher to be armored, same for the carrier. If you do its kinda defeating the purpose I believe. That's true but another thing is that drones and missiles are fully functional even if there is no one alive to control them. Which is an issue as normally you would just spam and take out the command ship but currently that would do nothing for you. |
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Post by jakjakman on Oct 19, 2016 17:34:21 GMT
Well, on the other hand my one little PC is simulating the entire space battle including calculating the firing solutions and maneuvers for every drone, ship, and missile on both sides. The power plants can be managed with algorithms. The offensive/defensive electronic warfare systems can also be managed by algorithms. Any kind of damage control that is relevant during the 30 second battle will be switching to a redundant backup system, which again can be done by automated sensors and algorithms. The only thing for actual humans to do is exactly what we do when we play the game: tell the drones to go here and shoot this.
Ah yes but you see our PC are running black boxes. This game is a simulation and therefore simplified to allow our computers to run it. For example modern naval warships have supercomputers on board just to run everything. Take the Zumwalt class destroyer for example. It contains a massive server system in order to operate all of the fairly simple modern technology. In comparison most of the capital ships we have are going to have to do a whole hell of a lot more processing to function and take in all of the sensor data. Aim the guns. Manage the power system the cooling system the life support the guidance system the engine controls the ammo transportation and all of the million other things that all need a computer to run and then you need to operate all of this remotely from the mother ship. Honestly thinking about it there should be a separate computer module for all ships in game simply due to how vital the computers are to making everything work and the non insubstantial amount of cooling and power they will need to run and if they go then the whole ship is doomed.
A large portion of a manned capital ship's computing power will be to facilitate strategic operations, which is why we see a server room for something like the Zumwalt you mentioned. For tactical roles like our drone ships it will be much more like the avionics package of a modern fighter, like the F-22. The onboard computers for that fighter do the actual flying by computing and manipulating the control surfaces, managing the engines, managing the coms, EW, radar, firing solutions, etc. Any of the onboard black box systems (such as the engines, datalinks, or radar) will have their own embedded processors to handle their own inner workings. I don't think it's correct to assume any of that needs to be operated remotely from the mothership during the 30 second space battle. Some coms for coordination and telemetry would be there, but there doesn't need to be a tech back at the mothership constantly fiddling with the reactor or radar (again, think F-22).
All of the actual drone avionics would add up to more than a 1kg remote control package surely. But I don't see it being a server farm either.
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Post by ross128 on Oct 19, 2016 17:58:52 GMT
All-or-nothing armor with a slim profile would likely help, smaller cross-section means a smaller, lighter launcher, and reduces the enemy's effective range.
I know bulky stuffed whipple shields are popular right now, but a drone doesn't really need that much protection, they can stuff their ammo, controller, reactor, and a tiny bit of spare fuel into a single small citadel to make them sufficiently difficult to mission-kill (just make sure to cut engines if it loses the main tanks, so it doesn't burn the last of its fuel and self-destruct).
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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.