The Capital Ship Armor Thread

There aren't a lot of liquid metals out there though, the only two I can think of off the top of my head are Mercury and Sodium-Potassium alloy. I don't think anyone would want to live completely submerged in either (and where are you going to get a small moon's worth of Mercury?). Google indicates that Caesium, Rubidium, Francium, and Gallium could work if you keep them a bit above room temperature, but I don't think anyone would want to be submerged in any of those either (especially not Francium!). I suppose you'd have more options if you keep the station's armor really hot, but that has its own downsides.

Also, anything on that list other than Mercury and Gallium could be defeated by a sufficient quantity of water. Gallium would present problems with any metallic object you want to pass through the armor, since Gallium corrodes most metals (usually forming a soft/brittle alloy with them). I'm not sure if Gallium-tin alloy would behave itself any better.

What would you call a strong anti-drone defense? My own super dreadnought which I'll post tonight has 300+ 50MW YAG greens, typically able to bring 120-140 to bear in a broadside. As far as I can tell from sheer lag, they melt drones like butter but that's obviously waaaay off the deep end of practicality.

I've tried to develop a suitable non DEW based PD weapon against drones but had no such luck. My 46kc Tactical Drones are able to overwhelm most of my capital designs in sheer numbers and volume of fire (lag and a new green star not withstanding). On that same token, keeping a group of drones in formation with my capships as a close air patrol until is somewhat effective.

I've attempted rapidfire subKt nuclear coilguns as well but I wasn't happy with the results. Right now I'm leaning towards Mt level kamakazi drone/missiles.

You're welcome! 
I had a lot of fun working on these, even if it did take up a large portion of my afternoon.
I think that if you switched to more lower requirement guns, you'd have much more effective designs in general; your energy should be spent shooting at the enemy, not pointing the gun in the right direction 
My point on the viability of battleships was in response to all the people who have been saying that big ships aren't viable, with most of them claiming that missiles are unconditionally better than any guns, reasoning that it takes too much armor to stop certain missile designs, that the range of missiles means guns are useless, and that the damage they do compared to their cost is too much greater for missiles than guns. I did however neglect drones, and I think you're right there too. But given that most builders here are apparently leaning towards missiles, I find that many designs are ill-equipped to deal with any contact with enemy capital ships, and I think there's some counterplay that could be developed. And as they say; 'the more everyone does one thing, the more valuable it becomes to do anything else'

Yeah, I actually haven't spent much time testing it, but I know from some other tests and the metrics given that increasing the mass of the projectile can give some pretty big improvements to muzzle energy at a relatively low cost in speed, but I just wanted to point out just how high the speed can go, and what sort of ranges are theoretically possible if we push the envelope. Also, I doubt the game takes into account relativistic effects; why bother? even at 125 km/s we're still talking about less than .042% C. It's just too much of a drain on processing power to be worth it if I had to guess. Also yes, it is pretty darn expensive, but I think it might be able to be fudged down some. In any case, it may be the best chance guns have against missiles. Also this isn't my design originally, so I'm not the one who submitted it  

You beat me to the post about this idea, I was thinking the same thing about using drones equipped with flare launchers. What you are showing here is a tactical deployment of decoys to improve the soft-kill defense capability of your ships by increasing the depth of the ECM defense zone around your ships. In fact your use of the drones to screen your ships reminded me of these two videos.



Now have you considered using the flare drones at longer range in a missile engagement?

For example, an enemy fleet has launched a salvo of missiles from long range with a flight time of a few hours. While the missiles are still a long distance off sent out the flare decoy drones to a location where they would still be in the missiles' seekers field of view but to get to that position the missiles would have to burn a lot of DeltaV. Then wait until the missiles are close enough that they would have maneuver hard to reorient, then shut down power and retract radiators on the missiles primary target and fire of the flares on the drones. They might try and engage the new target and in doing ruin the intercept geometry with your ships.

This above is simplified as you could split a flare drone fleet of twenty into groups of five and send them to four different decoy locations and further confound the missiles targeting systems.

So, this has been a fun thread to read, although I did skip parts of it. On the topic of armor, would materials with a decently high tensile strength, and a high speed of sound (i.e Zirconium copper) be good materials to prevent spalling, say as a final layer in a ships armor? Rather than using some sort of spall liner, such as Aramid fiber. I'd presume aramid fibers are worse at absorbing projectiles. 

I don't understand a lot of the different interactions related to material stats, yet.

Well, if anything, do people know what spalling looks like, along with other sorts of damage? I have no idea what this is.


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