The Capital Ship Armor Thread

Hmm so what type of radiators are you using? Also are your radiators proof against massed megaton range nuke attack?

Well we can't optimise for all characteristics at once. I think nuke resistant thrusters are possible, but only at the cost of thrust:weight ratio and isp.

I can't test it at the moment, but I'd try making a NTR from hafnium carbide. That stuff melts at over 4000K, so damaging it with heat should be difficult. Downside is that it is brittle and not especially strong, so you'll need to compromise on thrust.

Edit: Okay, Hafnium Carbide is a rubbish engine material (too low specific heat, and thermal expansion of 600 MK^-1. Yes, that is almost certainly a bug). In testing, I found out a few things:
1. Any damage (no matter how slight, the ablation of tiny bit of material from the surface is sufficient) to the engine bell on a gimballed thruster will result in that thruster becoming unusable.
2. Non-gimballed thrusters are extremely resistant to nuke damage, even when you open up the back of the ship so they get full exposure.
3. If your main fuel tank is damaged by a nuclear explosion but you still have a different RCS propellant in another tank, the game can bug out and give your ship negative delta-V

Well....I made a 600kg missile variant that used 8x 40gram 400N fluorine/methane thrusters as RCS (4 above/under CoG) and they always seemed to be taken out by laser NPCs. The missiles themselves never exploded because the main body used Si-gel as armor.
Gimballing the RCS seemed to increase vulnerability and made things less stable though it did seem to increase turning time.

Overall the static RCS seemed more stable ( way less pronounced wobble) than gimballed main thruster though this might have been a side effect of a lower overall turning time ( 3.45s instead of 1.3s).

Overall I didnt like it. I may have undersized the RCS fuel tanks relative to overall dV.

I've done 7-engine clustered missiles and they maneuver quite nicely (not to mention looking pretty) - the one major caveat is that you tend to need high thrust to get decent turn rates, which means the collective mass flow has to be massive - which in turns means rapid burnout times.

Try changing your armor package around to: 1 - 1.5cm Boron (outermost), 50cm graphite aerogel, and 2-3mm para-aramid fibers (innermost). I've tanked a few hits from flak (and more than a few disabled flak missiles striking the ship) with no-to-minimal damage.



What I suspect is happening is #1) the round strikes the boron, causing it to shatter, #2) these fragments pass through the aerogel layer and diffuse into a wide cone, and #3) are then caught by the kevlar layer preventing / minimizing intrusion inside the armor envelope.

The issue is your whipple shield is far far too thick.   Try it again but with 5mm of boron on the outside.  Even a thick whipple shield of basalt fiber is worse than a thinner one.  All it is there to do is break up the projectile and as it is fully supported by the aerogel underneath it can be really thin and still do a superb job and making it thicker only makes the aerogel worse.

I never really bothered armoring my ships beyond ~1cm of boron and maybe some silica aerogel because throughout the campaign I noticed delta V and acceleration were often decisive in battles. Setting up custom battles quickly revealed one of the weakest aspects of my ships was the radiators. They would be easily be melted off by nearby nuclear detonations. Disturbingly the most weight efficient material I could find for protecting them against nuclear blasts without compromising the heat that they radiate was Osmium. I'm guessing that this is due to its high specific heat and conductivity. It still seems odd that something that dense would be weight efficient for anything at all. 1cm of Osmium proved sufficient to protect my radiators from even single point blank 1Mt detonations while remaining almost one order of magnitude lighter than the default radiators. Has anyone else found better materials for protecting radiators against nuclear blasts and/or lasers?

I'm also having trouble protecting my ships from kinetic energy attacks in a weight and cost effective manner. It became obvious in testing that it was cheap to field cost effective kinetic kill missiles capable of piercing any reasonable and even completely unreasonable armor, but this doesn't mean armoring against kinetic energy attacks is completely futile as weaker attacks might still be possible to defend against.