|
|
Post by captinjoehenry on Oct 20, 2016 14:24:39 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. That sounds quite interesting. I look forward to seeing your design and figuring out how to counter it! |
|
|
|
Post by nivik on Oct 20, 2016 14:38:14 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. Yeah, I've been playing around with 95 ton warheads as NEFPs. I probably need to change my penetrator -- right now I'm experimenting with different materials, and I'm trying graphite -- but I score occasional single-shot penetrations of 0.5 meter thick RCC. The next patch is supposed to help with the proximity fusing issues: I think they'll be more useful then. |
|
|
|
Post by ross128 on Oct 20, 2016 14:55:12 GMT
I've had a lot of success with tungsten. It's a bit lighter and cheaper than osmium, with very similar performance characteristics. Though really anything with a melting point in the 3000k range and enough density to put a decent amount of mass behind it would probably work.
A rather interesting question though, is whether a layer of silica aerogel would allow experimenting with low melting point materials. Of course, I don't know if there would be any particular merit to those materials (other than, perhaps, aluminum and copper being cheap) even if we could get them to form a projectile. Well, if chemical reactivity was modeled there would be *some* interesting options specifically for targeting ships that use water or fluorine for remass... though those aren't particularly common. I can't think of any metals off the top of my head that would have amusing reactions with common cap-ship propellants like hydrogen, methane, and decane.
|
|
|
|
Post by redparadize on Oct 20, 2016 15:06:10 GMT
Where these user design are written?
|
|
|
|
Post by ross128 on Oct 20, 2016 15:16:47 GMT
By default it's C:\Users\[Username]\AppData\Roaming\CDE (where [Username] is whatever you use on that computer, of course). AppData is hidden by default, so you might have to enable "show hidden files and folders".
|
|
|
|
Post by dragonkid11 on Oct 20, 2016 15:50:25 GMT
So, onto the subject of armor...without talking about the armor.
How often do you guys armored the internal?
I more often than not just armored the crew compartment with 3 to 4cm of boron because it's the most important part in the ship.
I'm not sure on whether to armor the fuel tank, or just have a crapton of smaller fuel tank, but for now I settle on the later instead.
|
|
|
|
Post by ross128 on Oct 20, 2016 16:09:07 GMT
Honestly, I don't bother armoring internals at all. But that's partially because none of my ships are designed to get into extended gunfights. Any internal component I'd actually care about losing has a ring of vanadium-chromium steel wrapped around it in the main armor, usually one for crew somewhere near the middle of the ship, and a nosecap for the power plant and anything explosive (mainly because putting the crew in the nose can be a problem when turning).
The rest of the ship is only armored against lasers and accidents.
|
|
|
|
Post by nivik on Oct 20, 2016 20:42:07 GMT
So, onto the subject of armor...without talking about the armor. How often do you guys armored the internal? I more often than not just armored the crew compartment with 3 to 4cm of boron because it's the most important part in the ship. I'm not sure on whether to armor the fuel tank, or just have a crapton of smaller fuel tank, but for now I settle on the later instead. I'm using boron on my propellant tanks. For my crew compartments, I've had decent success with either boron or...I think it's Gamma Something Aluminide, but it might be the other one. I've also used amorphous carbon, since it has good attributes at a decent price. I need to revisit this, though, and do some testing. I'm not sure if my crew depressurizations are typically because of a penetration event, or a thermal melt-through due to secondary plasma spall, so I need to compare physical vs thermal armor materials. |
|
|
|
Post by captinjoehenry on Oct 20, 2016 20:59:17 GMT
So, onto the subject of armor...without talking about the armor. How often do you guys armored the internal? I more often than not just armored the crew compartment with 3 to 4cm of boron because it's the most important part in the ship. I'm not sure on whether to armor the fuel tank, or just have a crapton of smaller fuel tank, but for now I settle on the later instead. Personally I have found that when I use a huge number of low capacity tanks and I give each of them at least a bit of boron armor they can soak up a lot of punishment. Mind you they get destroyed but they will shield whats behind them from a good portion of the attack allowing tanks deeper in the ship to survive. |
|
|
|
Post by ross128 on Oct 20, 2016 21:03:14 GMT
Tank clusters can definitely turn out surprisingly resilient even with the most minimal armor. Though it can take a bit of experiment to find a cluster size that won't crash the game. |
|
|
|
Post by redparadize on Oct 20, 2016 21:14:48 GMT
It is effective. And it follow the current day trend toward damage control over armor. The only issue is that they take more space.
|
|
|
|
Post by cuddlefish on Oct 20, 2016 21:28:50 GMT
I make a policy of 3cm V.C. Steel on all my crew modules, along with keeping them distant from ammunition and radiators. Granted, most of my losses are mission or power kills rather than direct crew casualties, but I like to think my brave space men and women appreciate the sentiment. It... does make up a good half the cost of my standard flak-wagon, though. But at least for nuke carriers it's not that bad.
|
|
|
|
Post by beta on Oct 20, 2016 21:39:09 GMT
Most of my crew depressurization is due to whipple shield failure and a round getting through and poking a big hole in it. Would be fantastic if you could make module with complex armour layers (same with turrets ...). Currently, can't even use ballistic fibres for armouring crew modules, so I've been using Amorphous Carbon. Doesn't seem to spall as badly as Boron, but still has very high thermal resistance and moderate ballistic resistance.
|
|
|
|
Post by wafflestoo on Oct 21, 2016 15:39:46 GMT
I'm working on surviving nuclear strikes; I've got decent near-miss survivability with a 4mm RCC cover and some redundancy for the crew compartment radiators, but the engines remain a really soft-spot in the design. Anyone figure anything out on how to harden these against nuclear hell-fire?
|
|
|
|
Post by captinjoehenry on Oct 21, 2016 15:46:26 GMT
I'm working on surviving nuclear strikes; I've got decent near-miss survivability with a 4mm RCC cover and some redundancy for the crew compartment radiators, but the engines remain a really soft-spot in the design. Anyone figure anything out on how to harden these against nuclear hell-fire? Have you had any luck hardening the powerplant radiators against nuke strikes? That seems to be the primary cause of death when you are being nuked. As for engines I have had no luck what so ever. So far what I've done is just slap on some shity resistorjets so that way at least some of those will still be alive allowing my ship to be facing the right way next time its attacked. Mind you it isn't going to have any notable acceleration left but at least it can still maneuver in a very much crippled state. |
|
. 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. 
