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Post by cuddlefish on Oct 10, 2016 12:51:11 GMT
Or, if using the Steam overlay, hit F12.
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Post by redparadize on Oct 10, 2016 13:41:37 GMT
Edited to to stay on topic, I will poast the full thing on the post your ship tread. Basicly, my main armor is DV... It still can sustain quite allot of damage from the front. For sure I will not add more weight to this, but I curious to see if I can get a better armor layout from your test. Does your armor layout scale down well ?  |
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Post by dwwolf on Oct 12, 2016 11:38:31 GMT
The armor I use for my 4 to 5 kt missile schooners is as follows :
Inner to outer.
2.5cm RCC
2 cm VC steel
2 cm Boron Carbide
1m empty space
5mm Aluminium
2cm Si-areogel.
I may switch the Al to Boron and increase the gel to 3 or 4 cm.
It gets a fair amount of bounces vs the AI drones.
Nukes tend to heat the outerlayer.
I'd pay to be able to get another layer or 2 in the armor matrix......
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Post by captinjoehenry on Oct 12, 2016 18:23:06 GMT
One type of armor that works really well if a bit costly is to fill the space between your wiffle shield and hull with silica aerogel. It really helps to soak up all forms of damage and the mass penalty is not that much for even silly thicknesses of aerogel. So my armor always has about a 1 meter thick layer of aerogel topped with a wiffle shield. It is a bit costly but if offers a huge increase in armor protection.
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Post by redparadize on Oct 13, 2016 19:37:05 GMT
For cheaper and lighter filler, try graphite aerogel instand. Its not as good as silica, but again it does the job when you want to cover allot of surface.
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Post by mrwizard on Oct 14, 2016 4:54:44 GMT
Hello ladies and gentlemen. I have been messing about with armor values, and I think I hit upon an excellent if expensive whipple shield. I draped 5mm of PBO fiber over 1cm of amorphous carbon, and set that 1m over the next surface. I found that this set up produces very tiny holes when struck. As the damage from repeated strikes does not spread, it increases the lifespan of the whipple shield.
The combination of the thermal properties of the PBO fiber (It shrinks when heated) and the amorphous carbon (it does not conduct heat well and ablates), combined to create something that does not deform much under very high temperatures. The whipple shield survives the strongest stock lasers pretty well, and easily survives the heat from stock nukes. Nuclear strikes do not vaporize it, as they do to an aluminum whipple shield.
I tested this shield over 4cm of Boron and find that it is much more effective than stock armor.
tl;dr:
5mm of PBO Fiber (Outermost)
1cm of Amorphous Carbon
1m of Empty Space
4cm of Boron (Innermost)
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Post by nerd1000 on Oct 14, 2016 13:15:18 GMT
Another thing that seems to be very helpful is a whipple shield with more than one layer. I was messing around with the armour on the stock gunship, and I've found that thinning out the main armour layer and adding a second whipple shield layer between the original one and the main armour greatly reduces the damage caused by pretty much any kinetic gun (even the slower bullets fired by stinger drones). A gunship with armour changed to 5mm Amorphous carbon -> 1000mm gap -> 5mm boron carbide -> 500mm gap -> 570mm boron -> 100mm spider silk easily outlasted the stock one- in fact it only seemed to start taking internal damage when the second whipple layer was essentially destroyed. The second layer degraded much faster than the first layer- the first layer only gets small holes in it from incoming projectiles, while the second whipple layer gets enormous chunks blasted out of it.
Interestingly the improved protection seems to be reduced if you use regular boron instead of boron carbide.
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Post by captinjoehenry on Oct 14, 2016 18:34:41 GMT
Hmm so I seem to have found an attack I have yet to figure out an effective armor against. A massed shot gun of nukes. The issue comes from the fact that when nukes are blowing up all around any ship the armor is only rarely penetrated and the turrets are easy to protect but even a single nuke behind a ship will almost always knock out the ships engines. In addition to this I cannot for the life of me figure out any way to protect my ships radiators against nuclear blasts or at least a shot gun blast. If all of the nukes hit one side of my ship it's fine as the radiators on the other side are still intact and the engines are fine as well. But as soon as nukes start going off on all sides of your ship I just can't find anything that'll protect engines or radiators and I just lose all of them. So has anyone had any luck to protect against this type of attack?
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Post by Durandal on Oct 14, 2016 20:35:51 GMT
Hmm so I seem to have found an attack I have yet to figure out an effective armor against. A massed shot gun of nukes. The issue comes from the fact that when nukes are blowing up all around any ship the armor is only rarely penetrated and the turrets are easy to protect but even a single nuke behind a ship will almost always knock out the ships engines. In addition to this I cannot for the life of me figure out any way to protect my ships radiators against nuclear blasts or at least a shot gun blast. If all of the nukes hit one side of my ship it's fine as the radiators on the other side are still intact and the engines are fine as well. But as soon as nukes start going off on all sides of your ship I just can't find anything that'll protect engines or radiators and I just lose all of them. So has anyone had any luck to protect against this type of attack? One effective defense that I've found is to launch a counter-wave of nukes. ;p Beyond that, try to retract your radiators just before engagment and hope they don't get behind you? |
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Post by captinjoehenry on Oct 14, 2016 20:40:52 GMT
Well yeah avoiding getting hit is a great idea. But I mean it is not always possible. Which is why I am looking into some sort of armor that is at least a bit resistant to nuke shotgun attack.
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Post by nivik on Oct 14, 2016 21:37:45 GMT
Well yeah avoiding getting hit is a great idea. But I mean it is not always possible. Which is why I am looking into some sort of armor that is at least a bit resistant to nuke shotgun attack. I've been working on nuke-resistant engines. Right now I think one of the best materials is going to be amorphous carbon. I just need to figure out if more regenerative cooling is better, or if a thicker chamber/nozzle wall is better. |
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Post by captinjoehenry on Oct 14, 2016 21:43:19 GMT
Well yeah avoiding getting hit is a great idea. But I mean it is not always possible. Which is why I am looking into some sort of armor that is at least a bit resistant to nuke shotgun attack. I've been working on nuke-resistant engines. Right now I think one of the best materials is going to be amorphous carbon. I just need to figure out if more regenerative cooling is better, or if a thicker chamber/nozzle wall is better. Great! I want to stay up to date on this as it is a major issue! Edit: Gosh darn it! My engines are already at the limit of performance! Dang. My super dreadnaughts main engines are made of 10cm thick Vanadium Chromium Steel and I can't switch to amorphous carbon without all sorts of performance lose. Ugh... Edit 2: Ok I have found a truly superb armor. It is made of pure credits and not really that good for anything where cost is a concern but here it is: basalt fiber, nickel phosphorous microlattice, basalt fiber, nickel phosphorous microlattice, basalt fiber. Now nickel phosphorous microlattice is the best filler you can get for a wiffle shield. It has a density less than half that of silica aerogel. BUT it cost over 5,000 credits per kilogram  . So if you want to use it at a worthwhile thickness for a packed wiffle shield it will cost a huge amount but it really excels at it. In addition with the basalt fiber you end up with a truly superb armor that isn't terribly heavy but is more or less made of pure credits. |
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Post by concretedonkey on Oct 17, 2016 19:24:17 GMT
I'd like to share with you my best armor test so far. This armor setup survived far longer than anything else I tried, cheerfully dodging drones, micro missile barrages , nukes and guns even if it lost almost all of its radiators on the first micro missile salvo and not being able to return fire most of the time. I guess it was luck that the nukes didn't fry its engines and the drones didn't hit the last radiator for so long , but still at the end the armor was mostly intact. All of this without hitting your wallet quite as much as basalt and microlattice. Ship setup :  I usually use this ship as a drone target , lacking offensive weapons but still dangerous for drones - a large array of 20MW 80cm apperature lasers. Don't look at the guns , they are completely ineffective. Look instead at the armor... This setup was born out of my static tests - a single conventional cannon pounding a flat dumb target. After a long series of tests revolving around the idea that it really sounds good to fill something between the armor layers - captainjoehenry's comments about the microlattice. It did indeed prove better than my current setup of UHMWPE - boron - Silica aerogel combo. But quite a bit more expensive and just not better enough to really consider it. I starged testing with graphite aerogel instead. On the static tests the results with aerogel filling between the boron layers did 4! times better than anything I tested before. With slooped armor it almost made me stop the test out of pure boredom. Now a few shots from the slug fest :    You can see the relatively clean impacts. On the other end of the breakthrough were relatively small patches of 3x3 and 4x4 , which were the result of hundreds of flak detonations , combined with 100 gram slugs fired from both the carrier and the attack drones. I'm a bit perplexed really the whole thing started as a joke - hey what will happen if I stick the soft armor before the hard one? |
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Post by captinjoehenry on Oct 17, 2016 19:35:58 GMT
I'd like to share with you my best armor test so far. This armor setup survived far longer than anything else I tried, cheerfully dodging drones, micro missile barrages , nukes and guns even if it lost almost all of its radiators on the first micro missile salvo and not being able to return fire most of the time. I guess it was luck that the nukes didn't fry its engines and the drones didn't hit the last radiator for so long , but still at the end the armor was mostly intact. All of this without hitting your wallet quite as much as basalt and microlattice. Ship setup : I usually use this ship as a drone target , lacking offensive weapons but still dangerous for drones - a large array of 20MW 80cm apperature lasers. Don't look at the guns , they are completely ineffective. Look instead at the armor... This setup was born out of my static tests - a single conventional cannon pounding a flat dumb target. After a long series of tests revolving around the idea that it really sounds good to fill something between the armor layers - captainjoehenry's comments about the microlattice. It did indeed prove better than my current setup of UHMWPE - boron - Silica aerogel combo. But quite a bit more expensive and just not better enough to really consider it. I starged testing with graphite aerogel instead. On the static tests the results with aerogel filling between the boron layers did 4! times better than anything I tested before. With slooped armor it almost made me stop the test out of pure boredom. Now a few shots from the slug fest : You can see the relatively clean impacts. On the other end of the breakthrough were relatively small patches of 3x3 and 4x4 , which were the result of hundreds of flak detonations , combined with 100 gram slugs fired from both the carrier and the attack drones. I'm a bit perplexed really the whole thing started as a joke - hey what will happen if I stick the soft armor before the hard one? Cool! I'm really happy to see someone else using packed wiffle shields! They are really really good as the aerogel or lattice between the wiffle shield and the main armor soaks up more or less all of the plasma and really degrades the shrapnel from the exterior armor. Now one thing to keep in mind with a packed wiffle shield is that it allows you to use multiple main belts. So instead of just a paper thin wiffle shield you can have a fairly thick exterior armor envelope and the extra plasma that comes from a breakthrough of the armor will just soak up all the extra plasma. In addition this heavy exterior armor will significantly prolong the life of the packing beneath it which is very very beneficial for protection. And yeah graphite aerogel is much cheaper and less dense than any of the other packing material and only a bit worse than silica aerogel. Now the microlattice definitely gives a big boost to protection but dam is it expensive as hell! Also definitely keep the soft armor inside. All of the aerogels and microlattices just don't work as armor for anything other than lasers. Microlattice might work on its own but I haven't tested it. Basicly the primary point of the aerogel is to totally absorb all of the plasma from the impacts and the heat. Shrapnel will only be slowed down slightly by them and the aerogels are all brittle. So if they are on the outside they will get destroyed in very short order. |
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Post by concretedonkey on Oct 17, 2016 19:40:53 GMT
This is the most surprising thing , I have way way WAY better results when the soft aerogel is on the outside not the inside. Might be an error , might be a bug , might be something else. The results with filling behind the armor were decent but the results with soft armor on the outisde were... flabbergasting? Astounding ? Sorry I'm not a native speeker  . |
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. So if you want to use it at a worthwhile thickness for a packed wiffle shield it will cost a huge amount but it really excels at it. In addition with the basalt fiber you end up with a truly superb armor that isn't terribly heavy but is more or less made of pure credits.
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