acatalepsy
Junior Member
Not Currently In Space
Posts: 97 
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Post by acatalepsy on Oct 4, 2016 2:34:26 GMT
Not necessarily- and that's not just because I haven't played with crew modules in particular  . I would say that for the same reasons as not relying on internal "radshields" to serve as armor: having a layer of external armor is great because it protects the bow of the ship from penetration in the first place, which also stops rounds from penetrating elsewhere. I can use the bow of my ship to bounce rounds from hitting the rest of my ship because of its tough armor. I'd also wonder whether you could make a radiation shield wide enough to protect the entire core of your ship without ballooning its cross-section and mass, as armor conforms to the shape of the hull. Both of these things are valuable, of course. But if you're looking to save on mass, and the only thing in that section of the ship is the crew section, I'd think you'd want your heaviest armor layer to be the one that most directly defends the thing that most directly needs defending. One thing that might be worth doing for the nose of the ship is to place a spacer in the front, to create a cone-shaped nose. This would increase armor costs, to be sure, but it might be worth it to be able to bounce incoming fire at an angle. |
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Post by Dhan on Oct 4, 2016 2:49:20 GMT
Wouldn't one just....directly armor the crew module, in the module editor? Not necessarily- and that's not just because I haven't played with crew modules in particular . I would say that for the same reasons as not relying on internal "radshields" to serve as armor: having a layer of external armor is great because it protects the bow of the ship from penetration in the first place, which also stops rounds from penetrating elsewhere. I can use the bow of my ship to bounce rounds from hitting the rest of my ship because of its tough armor. I'd also wonder whether you could make a radiation shield wide enough to protect the entire core of your ship without ballooning its cross-section and mass, as armor conforms to the shape of the hull. Note that in many circumstances, heavy Whipple shields actually make things *worse*, because more mass gets thrown at the belt armor. I suspect this was the problem with your 5cm aluminum/5cm RCC setup. The optimal Whipple shield is, I understand, proportional to projectile mass and inversely proportional to shell velocity (as higher velocity shells take less motivation to disintegrate). This also drives the usefulness of aerogel in a capship: the thin Whipple shields that are optimal against projectiles are susceptible to lasers, and a layer of aerogel can dramatically improve survivability while only minimally increasing shield mass. I built a lot of short, tubby ships for better volumetric efficiency, but am coming over strongly to the side of long, skinny ships. Not only do thinner ships make a smaller target (even if total area is greater, area within the circle of fire of an enemy gun is smaller), but they are less susceptible to radiator loss (since radiators will be, on average, further from the aim point). I also second observations that RCC is weak against optimized laser designs. I recently killed a laser frigate by cutting through its 5cm RCC armor to kill the reactors with a score of 2.5MW laser drones. If you want to leverage high conductivity and re-radiation, use diamond; if you want high heat capacity, use amorphous carbon; if you want low thermal conductivity, use aerogel (or basalt). That said, a smart opponent will be using lasers to snipe modules, not etch the Whipple shield. Care to share UserDesigns so that we can test against this cruiser? I hadn't known that about whipple shielding. I wonder if multiple 0.75 cm layers of RCC would serve better than a single 2.5 cm block, especially for my railguns. As for the aerogel, I'd be concerned about it being utterly destroyed by the kinetic pounding that the citadels of my ships routinely take before laser fire could even be an issue. How does it stand up to kinetic barrage? I'm including my Designs as .txt download. The craft referenced here in particular is the "TF Laser Cruiser I". Please note that the railguns and radiators could DEFINITELY use some armoring, and I haven't yet mustered the courage to design a better laser in the module designer. I used an earlier version of this ship in conjunction with the "TF Missile Cruiser II" to beat Vesta Overkill, which was a time and a half. At first I was reinforcing the armor around important modules like crew compartments and ammo stores with an extra 1 or 2 cm of heavy armor for just the small segment containing the modules. But I then realized that I was wasting a lot of the armor on just empty space around the module, specially with smaller ammo containers. So I decided to drop that extra 1 or 2 cm of armor and instead increase the armor of the modules themselves to 5 or more cm while still reducing a considerable amount of weight on my ship. As for the aerogel, you can basically consider it a paintjob for your ship. It isn't going to do anything for kinetics, but since it weighs so little, it's still worth it. I wonder how useful it is as a whipple shield. I doubt it even does anything but I still place it a small amount away from my main armor. |
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Post by nivik on Oct 4, 2016 3:08:43 GMT
This thing was still fighting right up until the radiators got too shot up to work:   Those crew modules haven't been armored yet, so the fact that one survived is pretty impressive. Citadel armor is 2.5cm vanadium-chrome steel. The main hull armor is 1.5 cm of titanium diboride, with a 60cm gap before a composite whipple shield of 0.5mm copper with 1.0mm silicon carbide backing. (The idea there is that the silicon carbide has a high specific heat capacity, so would cool the copper plasma down before it hits the hull armor. I'm not impressed with titanium diboride as armor, honestly. I'm going to switch to an equivalent mass of silicon nitride: it has twice the yield strength, is less dense, and is cheaper. Primary weapon used in these trials is a 2 MW railgun with 3mm, 9km/s, 1.0 g rounds. Rails are only powered at 1 MW for the sake of accuracy at range -- engagement range on these is over 50km against capital ships. Not really a massive shipkiller, but seemed like a good starting point. |
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Post by millesmissiles on Oct 4, 2016 3:23:10 GMT
At first I was reinforcing the armor around important modules like crew compartments and ammo stores with an extra 1 or 2 cm of heavy armor for just the small segment containing the modules. But I then realized that I was wasting a lot of the armor on just empty space around the module, specially with smaller ammo containers. So I decided to drop that extra 1 or 2 cm of armor and instead increase the armor of the modules themselves to 5 or more cm while still reducing a considerable amount of weight on my ship. As for the aerogel, you can basically consider it a paintjob for your ship. It isn't going to do anything for kinetics, but since it weighs so little, it's still worth it. I wonder how useful it is as a whipple shield. I doubt it even does anything but I still place it a small amount away from my main armor. I could see module armoring being a solid tactic. It'd be interesting to use your hull armor as a lightweight whipple shield alone and rely on module armoring to withstand constant penetrations of the hull. Part of the big appeal of hull armor is its ability to bounce projectiles entirely even when they might have penetrated instead thanks to angling, but the internal structure of most of my ships would mean that any shot that bounces off a module would ricochet into a wider module behind it. Spall shielding also becomes tough for modules because you can't use complex multiple layer arrangements like for hull armor. I think I'll play with building a module-armored version of my laser cruiser and just use the hull for whipple shielding. I'll report back when I figure that one out. Have been playing with that 1 GW laser station and definitely see a need for some aerogel bukkake all over my ship. This thing was still fighting right up until the radiators got too shot up to work: [snipe] Those crew modules haven't been armored yet, so the fact that one survived is pretty impressive. Citadel armor is 2.5cm vanadium-chrome steel. The main hull armor is 1.5 cm of titanium diboride, with a 60cm gap before a composite whipple shield of 0.5mm copper with 1.0mm silicon carbide backing. (The idea there is that the silicon carbide has a high specific heat capacity, so would cool the copper plasma down before it hits the hull armor. I'm not impressed with titanium diboride as armor, honestly. I'm going to switch to an equivalent mass of silicon nitride: it has twice the yield strength, is less dense, and is cheaper. Primary weapon used in these trials is a 2 MW railgun with 3mm, 9km/s, 1.0 g rounds. Rails are only powered at 1 MW for the sake of accuracy at range -- engagement range on these is over 50km against capital ships. Not really a massive shipkiller, but seemed like a good starting point. I would test that ship against a railgun firing a much heavier slug at those same velocities. Spalling is the biggest downfall of metal armor: you really need some kind of backing, in my case a cm or two of RCC, to prevent deadly spalling when dealing with heavy rounds. Let me know how the whipple shields work out, I'm interested to know. |
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Post by nivik on Oct 4, 2016 6:44:18 GMT
I've updated my railgun to 2.9 MW, 4 gram slugs at 9.1 km/s. I'm out of time for the night, but from what I can tell, the biggest limiting factor for withstanding railgun fire seems to be heat fatigue. The plasma blow-through from repeated impacts to the same area leads to extreme heating, which undermines the toughness of the armor material and makes it easier to penetrate. It became really obvious when I put a layer of titanium at the innermost layer: after a couple penetrations, the entire inside of the ship is glowing orange hot. This makes me think that specific heat capacity is crucial for the layer under the Whipple shield, though I don't have any incredible evidence to back that up. I'm leaning towards layer 3 being heat tolerant, layer 4 being an insulator, and layer 5 being the main anti-ballistic layer (cannons and flak). I've had decent luck with RCC on fuel tanks and using clusters of tanks instead of large monolithic ones, and for my crew modules I'm using Alpha-2 Titanium Aluminide, which is a good compromise between strength, cost, melting point, and specific heat capacity. The weight isn't great, but 5cm of A2TA gives me 25-man crew modules that can be glowing orange from a plasma penetration and still be habitable, for only 20 tons more than the stock modules, so I'll take that and be happy. Tomorrow I'd like to do some more testing with railguns, then see how armor I've optimized for rails works against cannons, flak, and nukes. This is what I've got so far. I don't think it's optimal by any means, but I'm fairly content with it so far. Keep in mind that the reactors are amidships and are designed to produce very little radiation: the vanadium-chromium layer only extends back to just past the reactors:  More testing tomorrow, hopefully. |
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Post by blothorn on Oct 4, 2016 8:57:57 GMT
Note that there are a bunch of conditions that need to be tested fairly independently. 1g hypervelocity slugs are an extreme challenge for belt armor, but are fairly effectively broken up by Whipple shields. Expect your primary concerns for the main armor vs. them to be handling plasma heating and avoiding spalling vs high but distributed loads. Medium-mass, medium-speed projectiles are likely to come through the Whipple shield more intact, and so test armor performance against penetrators, while still being hypervelocity against many armors. Low-velocity projectiles are likely to actually ignore the Whipple shield and thus have the best concentration of force against the main armor, but will usually hit below the speed of sound in the armor (meaning that a very different set of characteristics are in play against them.
I am surprised I have not seen much mention of UHMWPE; it has the best tensile strength/mass ratio in the game, with decent shear modulus, relatively low Young's modulus, and excellent speed of sound. The relatively low shear modulus probably means that there are better options for resisting hypervelocity projectiles, and the low melting point means you want to keep it out of the way of plasma. However, its relative flexibility and high tensile strength:weight ratio should make it very resistant to spalling itself while being the best armor in the game against low-velocity impacts.
Applying a combination of some informal testing and my knowledge of the real-world physics:
* Be careful with heterogenous layers in a single armor block: a stiff layer over a flexible layer will shatter before the flexible layer contributes much strength, and a flexible layer over a stiff layer will transmit more force than you expect to a backing. I suspect the first is why basalt over UHMWPE does not work as well as I hoped, and 50/50 combinations (hard outer surface over thick spall liner) did very poorly. On the other hand, against hypervelocity projectiles contribution from backing armor should be minimal anyway.
* I have replicated the concerns about low-heat-capacity armor struggling with plasma heating.
* I had noticeably better results from aluminum zinc magnesium than the comparable mass of aramid fiber (which is a relief, given their relative costs).
* Maraging steel performed terribly relative to the more exotic materials (thickness adjusted for weight). On the other hand, it is likely to suffer less extensive cracking/spalling when close to its limit.
* For its weight, 5cm of silica aerogel over an immense layer of UHMWPE took an amazing amount of abuse. The UHMWPE also cost 10x more than everything else on the ship.
I would encourage testing against the Gunship--the 286mm coilgun (10kg@5.14m/s) provides a very different sort of challenge that is not exercised by the railguns I am hearing about. (In particular, I doubt that 2mm of Whipple shield is optimized against something that heavy and that slow.
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Post by pokington on Oct 4, 2016 11:32:32 GMT
I'm out of time for the night, but from what I can tell, the biggest limiting factor for withstanding railgun fire seems to be heat fatigue. The plasma blow-through from repeated impacts to the same area leads to extreme heating, which undermines the toughness of the armor material and makes it easier to penetrate. It became really obvious when I put a layer of titanium at the innermost layer: after a couple penetrations, the entire inside of the ship is glowing orange hot. This makes me think that specific heat capacity is crucial for the layer under the Whipple shield, though I don't have any incredible evidence to back that up. I'm leaning towards layer 3 being heat tolerant, layer 4 being an insulator, and layer 5 being the main anti-ballistic layer (cannons and flak). Probably more important than specific heat under sustained fire is thermal diffusivity (the ability to spread around that heat). Below are materials with yield strength over 1GPa (probably important for armor), sorted by thermal diffusivity. Diamond Spider Silk Zirconium Copper Beryllium Copper Osmium Boron UHMWPE Ferritic Stainless Steel Martensitic Stainless Steel Vanadium Chromium Steel Nickel Chromium Iron Maraging Steel Magnetic Metal Glass Para-Aramid Fiber Liquid Crystal Polymer Fiber S-Glass Composite Ceramic Oxide Fiber Aramid Fiber Basalt Fiber Composite The other things to consider are the speed of sound through the material -- the higher it is, the less heating you get from a hypervelocity impact -- and shear modulus -- super hard/stiff materials tend to shatter (I suspect diamond won't make very good armor). As an aside, high thermal diffusivity combined with excellent yield strength is what makes boron such an effective barrel material for conventional guns -- the diffusivity enables it to conduct away that heat so it has a very low cooldown period. Vanadium Chromium Steel has a pretty low diffusivity. |
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Post by nivik on Oct 4, 2016 13:22:19 GMT
I'm out of time for the night, but from what I can tell, the biggest limiting factor for withstanding railgun fire seems to be heat fatigue. The plasma blow-through from repeated impacts to the same area leads to extreme heating, which undermines the toughness of the armor material and makes it easier to penetrate. It became really obvious when I put a layer of titanium at the innermost layer: after a couple penetrations, the entire inside of the ship is glowing orange hot. This makes me think that specific heat capacity is crucial for the layer under the Whipple shield, though I don't have any incredible evidence to back that up. I'm leaning towards layer 3 being heat tolerant, layer 4 being an insulator, and layer 5 being the main anti-ballistic layer (cannons and flak). Probably more important than specific heat under sustained fire is thermal diffusivity (the ability to spread around that heat). Below are materials with yield strength over 1GPa (probably important for armor), sorted by thermal diffusivity. *snip* The other things to consider are the speed of sound through the material -- the higher it is, the less heating you get from a hypervelocity impact -- and shear modulus -- super hard/stiff materials tend to shatter (I suspect diamond won't make very good armor). As an aside, high thermal diffusivity combined with excellent yield strength is what makes boron such an effective barrel material for conventional guns -- the diffusivity enables it to conduct away that heat so it has a very low cooldown period. Vanadium Chromium Steel has a pretty low diffusivity. Innnteresting. I'll admit that I don't have any real background in materials science, so this is a bit of a learning experience for me. Do you think a backing layer of carbon aerogel would work to enhance an otherwise low thermal diffusivity? Or are there downsides which make that an unattractive option? Edit: I did consider shear modulus for my radiators and settled on boron carbide. I believe they're around 10cm thick in total, though; that's where I found a balance between mass and ability to take fire. Well...honestly, I haven't considered it because it's expensive. I'm trying to balance effectiveness, mass, and cost. |
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Post by millesmissiles on Oct 4, 2016 20:05:12 GMT
Boron really is some amazing stuff, though I can't wonder if it's not perhaps a *bit* too cheap in-game. The speed of sound through boron is something like 16 kps, and coupled with the thermal diffusivity means it doesn't fracture under hypervelocity impact, doesn't take much heat from slugs hitting it, spreads that heat out well, and absorbs laser fire like a champ. I've developed a new Boron-Boron-Boron-Maraging Steel-RCC armor schema that I've been calling the "boron moron." I wanted to use aluminum for a whipple shield but boron is stronger by mass and withstands nukes much better than aluminum. Also: reading around, I've found nothing about elemental boron being used as armor. The closest thing to it is usage as Boron Fiber, which is fine tungsten mesh coated with boron fibers. Other uses are as reinforcement for fiberglass composite structures and as Boron Carbide, a well-known tank armor. I wonder if the values for Boron and Boron Carbide aren't mixed up in-game, or if the values for Boron reflect its use as Boron Fiber? Paging qswitched  The outermost layer of my whipple shield is 1 cm of boron, spaced about 1.5 m from the inside of the hull. Spacing doesn't seem to change much so long as its more than a few cm, but I've been liberal with it just in case. Also: dat mass fraction.  The next stage in my whipple shield is 1.5 cm of boron. The two-stage makeup works well against high-velocity/ low mass and low-velocity/ high mass slugs. At least, that's what I tell myself at night.  My actual armor layer is 2.5 cm of boron. At this point, slugs that have gone through the two-stage whipple shield are usually messed-up enough to just impact against this.  That's it for the hull armor. At this point it's citadel shielding and a place to mount those railguns, which must have some INSANE recoil on them. 3.5 cm of Maraging Steel doesn't appreciate your bullets, and frowns on any attempt to be penetrated. The speed of sound in the steel armor is lower than the velocities of my slugs but the steel seems to cope just fine with that. The biggest threat to my ships has consistently been spalling from citadel strikes- I'd consider using something other than steel if it weren't so cheap and strong. I'm debating whether to call this armor "Soviet steel stronk like Stalin" or "Glorious Nippon steel folded ten thousand times."  With that, we come to the fifth and final layer: the spall shield! 10 cm of RCC does a good job of supporting the steel citadel outer armor, as well as catches any spalling (the first and biggest issue with steel citadels) and insulates the crew module against heat transmitted through the steel (the second issue with my steel citadels). If anything were to penetrate the steel, it'd have a fun time contending with 10 cm of RCC  . Switching to a triple Boron-Boron-Boron setup for the hull armor shaved off nearly 40 Mc from my ship. I still can't tell if I want to replace the RCC spall liner with something else... maybe boron  ? I would use a radshield for the purpose but spalling happens all over the metal citadel, not just the bow. Ah well. I'm thinking I'll switch this thing over to methane perhaps, as its pretty expensive (20 Mc per kt of wet mass) to operate because of its size. I'd love to know your cost metrics, in terms of Mc per kt of wet mass. I think that'd be a neat way of standardizing ship costs for the sake of comparison. In the meantime, though, enjoy these pictures of my Laser Frigate with the Boron Moron schema taking fire from two laser frigates at once:  Starting to take fire. That whipple shield is holding well, and the inner boron armor is untroubled.  Getting closer. I lost my guns fairly quick (definitely should armor them more... or at all...) but the real kicker is the radiators. Anyone got good radiator armoring designs?  Bearing down. Look at all those bounces! The inner Boron hull armor bounces shots at decent angles, and the citadel is impenetrable from the stock 11mm guns.  Point-blank and broadside-on. I think the inner Boron armor would be penetrated if I sat here long enough, especially if the whipple shield was depleted. They killed my radiators, though, and I didn't get a chance to test this.  Bonus image: the citadel armor glowing after the Boron-Boron-Boron hull at the bow was stripped off. Even taken on the flat nose nothing penetrates the citadel. Thanks for reading! Attachments:UserDesigns.txt (17.34 KB)
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Post by beta on Oct 4, 2016 20:24:13 GMT
I find for radiators, having lots of small radiators is far superior to a few big ones. I have 20-25 6x2 silicon carbide radiators (for 50MW of nuclear reactor) and you will essentially never lose radiator capacity before losing all weapons, dV, and usually crew compartments.
The downside is it incurs a higher crew penalty - more radiators means more engineers, but the trade-off of not having ships go down to loss of radiator capacity is worth it in my opinion.
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Post by qswitched on Oct 4, 2016 20:25:23 GMT
Boron in game is Amorphous Boron (akin to Amorphous Carbon). I wasn't aware of Boron Fibers, those are actually even stronger. Boron sees much more use in space because solar abundance of Boron is much higher than earth crust abundance of it, so it is far less expensive.
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Post by Dhan on Oct 4, 2016 20:47:57 GMT
For radiators I usually prefer placing several lightweight small height, long radiators asymmetrically around my ship as opposed to a big armored stack that sticks out very far at the rear. I feel like the smaller height of my radiators allows for greater coverage from my hull when at an angle and the asymmetrical placement means that the opposing ship has to shift it's aim several times as opposed to just concentrating fire on a single location. I also tend to place my hot radiators away from important modules.
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Post by nivik on Oct 4, 2016 21:09:08 GMT
Boron really is some amazing stuff, though I can't wonder if it's not perhaps a *bit* too cheap in-game. The speed of sound through boron is something like 16 kps, and coupled with the thermal diffusivity means it doesn't fracture under hypervelocity impact, doesn't take much heat from slugs hitting it, spreads that heat out well, and absorbs laser fire like a champ. I've developed a new Boron-Boron-Boron-Maraging Steel-RCC armor schema that I've been calling the "boron moron." I wanted to use aluminum for a whipple shield but boron is stronger by mass and withstands nukes much better than aluminum. The outermost layer of my whipple shield is 1 cm of boron...<snip> The next stage in my whipple shield is 1.5 cm of boron... <snip> My actual armor layer is 2.5 cm of boron... <snip> That's it for the hull armor. At this point it's citadel shielding...3.5 cm of Maraging Steel doesn't appreciate your bullets, and frowns on any attempt to be penetrated. The speed of sound in the steel armor is lower than the velocities of my slugs but the steel seems to cope just fine with that. <snip> With that, we come to the fifth and final layer: the spall shield! 10 cm of RCC... <snip> I'd love to know your cost metrics, in terms of Mc per kt of wet mass. I think that'd be a neat way of standardizing ship costs for the sake of comparison. I'm definitely going to have to look at boron. As I said below, I'm using boron carbide for my radiators (3.5 cm thick with 7.4 cm armor). As for your armor...uh. We've been working on entirely different scales, I think. My whole ship is 2.2 kt and under 30 Mc. I run a small backwater navy with barely a dwarf planet to its name. I'm going to have to beef up my whipple shields, I think. I've been working with 1-2 millimeters instead of centimeters, and a 10 cm RCC spall liner is above and beyond anything I'd even considered. Then again, I'm running a ship on 3 MW of power, with the primary armament being railguns whose rounds are only delivering 108 kJ on-target. (2.5 MW, 4 grams, 9.5 km/s). Defensive armament is 2 400kW violet lasers. Slight difference in scale, there. I think I'm going to focus on minimizing cross-section by using denser fuels, because that has two advantages: it increases armor thickness per unit mass, and it decreases likelihood of being hit. I've also taken to only pairing my weapons, one on each side of the ship, in line with my radiators. When the ship rolls to present its weapons to the enemy, it also puts its radiators edge-on to the enemy. It does limit the ability of the ship to fight when it's been mobility killed. I'm totally on board with the idea of classifying ships by cost per ton. I like the idea of RPing a budget-focused admiral of a third-rate navy, so I'll probably continue to focus a lot on cost effectiveness! |
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Post by beta on Oct 4, 2016 21:14:30 GMT
For radiators I usually prefer placing several lightweight small height, long radiators asymmetrically around my ship as opposed to a big armored stack that sticks out very far at the rear. I feel like the smaller height of my radiators allows for greater coverage from my hull when at an angle and the asymmetrical placement means that the opposing ship has to shift it's aim several times as opposed to just concentrating fire on a single location. I also tend to place my hot radiators away from important modules. There should probably be some sort of penalty for having radiators at (relatively) long distances from the component they are cooling. Running dozens of meters of heat pipe is sure to have mass, cost, and efficiency penalties ... Either way, with the current uhm ... fantastic .. missile guidance, it is actually fairly beneficial to have the radiators as far to the rear of the craft as possible. They seem to target the centre of the hottest radiator grouping, so a few hot radiators near the tail of the ship will a lot of times end up with missiles missing behind the ship. Then again, this can be detrimental for nuclear payloads as they will typically cook your rocket nozzles. |
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Post by pokington on Oct 4, 2016 22:03:43 GMT
Boron in game is Amorphous Boron (akin to Amorphous Carbon). I wasn't aware of Boron Fibers, those are actually even stronger. Boron sees much more use in space because solar abundance of Boron is much higher than earth crust abundance of it, so it is far less expensive. My understanding is not that boron is hard to find, necessarily (we mine almost as much boron per year as we do nickel), it's that it's very hard to purify. Which I suppose doesn't apply for the cost system in game. That said, the Earth has three orders of magnitude more boron by mass than solar abundance, but I know, for example, that the Moon has much greater boron concentration than the Earth does... so I guess I'm not really sure how you're defining solar abundance. |
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. I would say that for the same reasons as not relying on internal "radshields" to serve as armor: having a layer of external armor is great because it protects the bow of the ship from penetration in the first place, which also stops rounds from penetrating elsewhere. I can use the bow of my ship to bounce rounds from hitting the rest of my ship because of its tough armor. I'd also wonder whether you could make a radiation shield wide enough to protect the entire core of your ship without ballooning its cross-section and mass, as armor conforms to the shape of the hull.
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? I would use a radshield for the purpose but spalling happens all over the metal citadel, not just the bow. Ah well. I'm thinking I'll switch this thing over to methane perhaps, as its pretty expensive (20 Mc per kt of wet mass) to operate because of its size.
