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Post by ross128 on Oct 20, 2016 0:54:06 GMT
That is definitely a bit of an oversight, and is especially annoying on Vesta Overkill. I swear the AI de-targets and orbits some of its ordinance just to spite me when it realizes it's going to lose. It only takes me two hours to kill their main fleet, but several days to hunt down their parked ordinance. >_> This does sound like something Overkill would do, though. Sub-capital drones would warrant its own thread, as there are many thing to discuss there beyond what is required for tactical combat. Why are nuclear engines and powerplants require 6 months of fuel if those drones will run for at most a few days? Why is the natural fission powering a RTG magically stopped when the drone/missile is stowed in ammo boxes? (I suspect it is the same Weak Force Nullifier that is used on radon tanks) If drones and missile use something as complex as a nuclear reactor or as atrociously corrosive as some of the available fuels, why are they magically maintenance-free once stored? Why do drones need a launcher? Why can't they be docked, or even simply having a lamprey-style command ship detach and let the main body of the ship go fight on remote control? Also, the reports of NEFP piercing metres of osmium do feel a bit strange. Wouldn't there be some calculations failing, like with the superguns? The NEFP one actually has a rather simple explanation. You're using a nuclear explosion to propel several kilograms of molten (or possibly solid, only the game knows for sure) Osmium to a little over 3% of the speed of light (though of course I have no idea how efficient our particular designs are or what their actual velocity is, that's the ballpark estimate for this kind of device). At that point you no longer have a kinetic kill vehicle, you have a (very primitive) relativistic kill vehicle. The design essentially uses the nuke as a single-shot Orion drive, with only the pusher plate as the payload. Of course, considering this engine wasn't coded to accommodate RKVs it is entirely possible that the sheer speed of the projectile does break the code, however said breaking may also be irrelevant because the RKV has more than enough energy to punch through anything you could reasonably put in front of it, bugged or not. Any bug that may be present would only be noticeable if you tried to hit a small moon or something like that.  Though I suppose the pusher plate surviving the blast in the first place may itself be a bug, but that would just mean we'd have to use thicker plates (and expect a chunk of it to get vaporized). Worst case, we'd only be looking at them getting more expensive and difficult to build. The only way to kill off NEFPs would be if the game stopped processing the plate's trajectory after the nuke went off, (which would actually be less realistic, the fact that the game bothers to check if the plate survived *and* follow its trajectory is quite impressive! Basically, punching through several meters of Osmium isn't unrealistic at all once you consider what you're hitting it with. |
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Post by Dhan on Oct 20, 2016 1:49:17 GMT
Can't the effect also be replicated by conventional explosives?
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Post by redparadize on Oct 20, 2016 2:18:02 GMT
Edit: I forgot to had the quote, this message is in responce to captinjoehenry message.
Thats not a problem, just need to drop the pocket BB drone and do a burn of 11km/s DV in the oposite direction of the enemy fleet, escape velocity if need be. Anything sent just won't reach the mothership.
For sure, the Pocket BB are more or less a proof of concept. I could very well have any another playload of equal mass.
No armor needed.
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Post by captinjoehenry on Oct 20, 2016 2:36:24 GMT
hmm well if you are going straight to an escape trajectory that would work. But then you are running into progressively worse communication issues with the drones. Admittedly you would get away from a missile attack and then those same missiles can just go after the drones and kill them just as dead . It wouldn't be as effective as killing the command ship but in most situations its going to come down to who runs out of missiles first and cheap expendable drone. So considering the cost of a mother ship along with the drones will probably put you at a disadvantage in terms of the amount of expandable munitions such as cheap drones and all types of missiles that you can bring to the fight. Mind you I just thought of the missile issue because while drones are great on their own they also need a launcher and a huge ammo box. Any ship that mounts that isn't going to be able to go into a fight just because it wouldn't be able to resist weapons fire at all and as such a drone fleet has a whole mountain of non combat mass that a manned fleet can use to carry far more missiles than the drones and given the sheer effectiveness of missiles and the expendable drones I'm not sure if a drone cap ships advantages out weigh the cost of so much non combat mass and cost which could be used for more missiles and cheap drones. |
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Post by redparadize on Oct 20, 2016 2:45:55 GMT
I agree about over-engineered drone being not cost effective. Unless if I would drop the guns and most of the armor for large number of small missile.
My Trident D16 would be a better choice. I posted it on the other tread. Its a 1.66t drone with 8.27km/s Dv carrying 16 3kt nuclear missiles that have 5km/s themself. So a leg of about 13km/s total. If I would scale them up, and maybe do another layer of sub-munition, I could probably get the 28km/s needed to catch my own mothership.
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Post by captinjoehenry on Oct 20, 2016 2:51:10 GMT
Honestly if an enemy ship is going to be running away at 10s of km/s of delta v you can ignore them. They are no threat and they can do nearly nothing to you as any missile or drone is going to have more or less no delta v left after just negating the launch ship velocity. So just wait for the ship to come back or be content with your unchallenged control of what ever you were fighting over after you mop up the left overs.
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Post by redparadize on Oct 20, 2016 3:14:52 GMT
You lunch your playload before doing the burn. Note that full a mothership that does not have armor can easily have +14km/s with playload. So by drooping just a portion of the playload at start would allow multiple strike while still be out of range of armored enemy.
My point remain the same: Armor, as it is, is a mostly a liability.
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Post by captinjoehenry on Oct 20, 2016 3:24:42 GMT
You lunch your playload before doing the burn. Note that full a mothership that does not have armor can easily have +14km/s with playload. So by drooping just a portion of the playload at start would allow multiple strike while still be out of range of armored enemy. My point remain the same: Armor, as it is, is a mostly a liability. Umm all that delta v means you have a lot of mass tied down in fuel and if the mothership is mostly carrying cap drones the mother ship is non combat mass and expense. In addition with only 14km/s of delta v before munitions drop you need to get all your munitions dropped immediately or else you are doomed to death by preemptive missile strike. If missiles start coming in for your mothership right from the start you need to get your munitions away and get the hell out before the missiles arrive or else you are dead. And again any ship that's main defense is achiving escape velocity is well not going to be doing any fighting at all once it is going that fast. It just wont have any weapons that can get back to hit the hostiles. So if you use your delta v to get the hell outa dodge that is removing a whole crap load of mass and money from your combat strength and the amount of fuel that ship is going to carry is going to put you at a huge weapon mass penalty no matter what as your ship would be mostly fuel. And a hostile fleet of the same mass and less delta v is almost always going to have more munitions and fire power than your fleet simply because of all the mass you are putting into fuel instead of more missiles or drones. So it really isn't worth it at all if you are engaging an equal force. Let alone if you are at a mass disadvantage. |
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Post by redparadize on Oct 20, 2016 3:48:12 GMT
First, I need to insist that the cap drone concept was created only to prove that a mothership plus cap drone was superior to equal capital ship. Both in term of cost and mass. I am not defending cap drone. I believe they are sub optimal.
Massive wave of small drones that carry a even more massive wave of missiles is the way. That setup can provide a unparalelled combined Dv. That mean both massive escape and intercept speed. No armor or weapon can stop even a modest wave of projectile going that fast. So no armor but tin silica aerogel.
Thats optimal.
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Post by ross128 on Oct 20, 2016 3:49:28 GMT
Somewhat back on the subject of armor, I've determined that if a NEFP is only driven by a 94t warhead it is no longer capable of coring 5m of Osmium in a single shot (though it still does a decent number on more typical space-ship armor). Much like a flak missile though, if you fire enough of them they'll get through eventually.
They cost about twice as much as a flak missile of roughly the same size/weight, but tend to secure kills with about half as many missiles so it just about breaks even (and is more weight-efficient). I would consider that kind of micro-NEFP to be a flashy alternative to flak (at that scale the effects of the detonation itself are negligible, it's effectively a kinetic missile).
One issue they have is for some reason, small nuclear warheads don't like to detonate. The vast majority of the missile wave will just impact the hull as duds, with maybe 10% actually detonating. I don't think it's simply failing to reach critical mass, because near-misses will detonate 100% of the time, but direct-hits impact the hull more often than not. For some reason, small nuclear warheads just seem to have a tendency to wait too long before detonating, even when approaching at a fairly low velocity. They'd probably be more impressive if their detonators worked better.
Also, I don't recommend them to anybody prone to migraines or seizures.
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Post by captinjoehenry on Oct 20, 2016 3:56:58 GMT
First, I need to insist that the cap drone concept was created only to prove that a mothership plus cap drone was superior to equal capital ship. Both in term of cost and mass. I am not defending cap drone. I believe they are sub optimal. Massive wave of small drones that carry a even more massive wave of missiles is the way. That setup can provide a unparalelled combined Dv. That mean both massive escape and intercept speed. No armor or weapon can stop even a modest wave of projectile going that fast. So no armor but tin silica aerogel. Thats optimal. Hmm I mean yeah if you can survive to intercept that is very true for sure. It's just the mass of such high performance system is going to limit the number that you can deploy on a mass budget and they can still be taken out or run out of delta v with waves of lower performance missiles. If you have a missile with close to 10km/s of delta v or even just 5km/s of delta v you can carry a lot of them and if the enemy is throwing waves of 15km/s+ Dv missiles or drones at you you can still take them out with 5 km/s missiles which are a lot smaller. So you will always be able to carry more defense missiles than an enemy can launch high Dv missiles at you. As such you will still have missiles left over when the enemy has run out of missiles. So yeah if your massive velocity missiles can survive all of the smaller lower performance missiles coming at them they'll do a load of damage but with even a few near misses with nukes you'll take out all of the enemies much bigger missiles or drones. And for drones massive closing velocities are counter productive giving minuscule time on target. If I am missing something please let me know. I could definitely be wrong but I'm just not seeing super high Dv missiles or ships really being worthwhile due to the sheer amount of mass tied up in their fuel which a fleet with less Dv could have in missiles that even with far lower performance would still be fully able to defend them against these high Dv missiles and drones. |
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Post by dragonkid11 on Oct 20, 2016 4:02:40 GMT
Well, to me, unless I'm doing something wrong, that sub-capital drones with their carrier tends to be... REALLY costly.
Both in term of cost and mass.
I will try to reduce it even further, but it seems that relegating the carrier to defense of the system seems to be a better way due to how costly it was.
I might redesign the carrier to be a station and see what will happen.
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Post by ross128 on Oct 20, 2016 4:13:00 GMT
I did some experimenting with some ~100 ton railgun drones, and they worked pretty well in groups of 5-10 while being a bit more cost-effective than a capital ship fielding a similar number of railguns.
So the concept seems to work okay up to a point, you just have to avoid going *too* big due to how the launcher scales.
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Post by dragonkid11 on Oct 20, 2016 4:21:36 GMT
I was trying to make a bunch of sub-capital drone designs that is nearly as tough and armed as the capital ship the drone is based on so they can be reused via the carrier which can also refuel them for repeated sortie.
The more I think about it, the most this design seems to be limited for planetary defense only due to how expensive the carrier is and a couple lucky shots can take it out instantly.
Maybe I can make some designs of drone with lightened armor and such for planetary assault, allow them to be more expendable.
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Post by redparadize on Oct 20, 2016 4:40:34 GMT
hmm well if you are going straight to an escape trajectory that would work. But then you are running into progressively worse communication issues with the drones. Admittedly you would get away from a missile attack and then those same missiles can just go after the drones and kill them just as dead . It wouldn't be as effective as killing the command ship but in most situations its going to come down to who runs out of missiles first and cheap expendable drone. So considering the cost of a mother ship along with the drones will probably put you at a disadvantage in terms of the amount of expandable munitions such as cheap drones and all types of missiles that you can bring to the fight. Mind you I just thought of the missile issue because while drones are great on their own they also need a launcher and a huge ammo box. Any ship that mounts that isn't going to be able to go into a fight just because it wouldn't be able to resist weapons fire at all and as such a drone fleet has a whole mountain of non combat mass that a manned fleet can use to carry far more missiles than the drones and given the sheer effectiveness of missiles and the expendable drones I'm not sure if a drone cap ships advantages out weigh the cost of so much non combat mass and cost which could be used for more missiles and cheap drones. The part you are missing is that the setup i am talking about does not suffer cost or mass penality. If you remove the armor you lower your dry mass, and when you do that the dv raise expodentialy, well almost. I am on my phone right now so i can't bring the exact math. i will post a demo of what i am talking about tomorrow. If you are intrested we could do a little contest. Like doing the best with a within a budget and explain how we would play it after that. I am curious to see how my stategy could be countered. See you tomorrow. |
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