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Post by jakjakman on Oct 20, 2016 16:11:10 GMT
How are you guys drunk-walking your ships when in engagement range? Just randomly switching the move command to different vectors?
On most of my ships I have a couple broadside railguns with 5-6 kps muzzle velocity and at least 1.5g of acceleration from the main engines. As the ships come into range and they start firing at the enemy in broadside mode, the engines will fire to counteract the railgun kick to keep it in broadside (or maybe that's the automated dodging, but even so the ships seem to just burn in one direction). The end result of this is my ships burn a powered curve around the enemy with both sides firing long curving loops of projectiles at each other until my ships pass by out of range at 2Kps+ of differential velocity.
Most of the time my ships will get better hits because they're firing at stock designs that only have ~150mg of acceleration, and the return fire passes behind my ships missing by about a quarter of a ship length. Sometimes though if the acceleration vector is too shallow in relation to the enemy and the lateral projection of the acceleration vector is small enough my ships will burn like moths in a blowtorch of enemy railgun fire.
I'm trying to find a good balance between maneuver commands (homing, broadside, manual move commands) and ship design (broadside weapons, high acceleration, large delta-v) to consistently evade enemy fire while delivering a ship-killing amount of return fire.
I think in real life ships would be able to model the stream of incoming fire and solve for the correct acceleration vectors which would avoid the large portion of fire until the range closed enough that the acceleration of the ship could no longer move it out of the path of a fire before the projectiles hit. In one sense the game already does this by ignoring the target's acceleration entirely and calculating firing solutions based solely on the enemy ship's instantaneous velocity vector. As long as the enemy ship has sufficient acceleration to displace the ship from the space the projectile will pass through, it's reasonable to believe the enemy's ship will do just that so trying to factor acceleration into the firing solution is pointless.
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Post by ross128 on Oct 20, 2016 16:23:44 GMT
My general impression is that needleships generally have better survivability (tiny cross-section, thick, highly-sloped nose armor, ability to hide radiators behind the cone), though these advantages aren't fully realized due to the current limits on ship construction.
Broadside ships have more firepower, simply because they have more room to place guns. Full-armor broadside ships are also (mostly) facing-agnostic, because correctly spaced rings of guns can bring a full broadside (usually about half the ship's guns, unless we got elevated turrets to expand their firing arcs beyond 90 degrees) against a 360 degree cylinder around the ship. Half-armor broadside ships sacrifice that in order to gain radiator protection similar to a needleship.
A needleship would get a boost from being able to mount elevated turrets too though, because by gradually increasing the elevation you could bring rows of turrets to bear on the front arc all along the cone. Needleships are probably also a good configuration for missile boats, because launchers can simply be placed behind the cone as long as their launch velocity is high enough to clear it before the missiles' engines ignite.
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Post by Durandal on Oct 20, 2016 19:23:11 GMT
My general impression is that needleships generally have better survivability (tiny cross-section, thick, highly-sloped nose armor, ability to hide radiators behind the cone), though these advantages aren't fully realized due to the current limits on ship construction. Broadside ships have more firepower, simply because they have more room to place guns. Full-armor broadside ships are also (mostly) facing-agnostic, because correctly spaced rings of guns can bring a full broadside (usually about half the ship's guns, unless we got elevated turrets to expand their firing arcs beyond 90 degrees) against a 360 degree cylinder around the ship. Half-armor broadside ships sacrifice that in order to gain radiator protection similar to a needleship. A needleship would get a boost from being able to mount elevated turrets too though, because by gradually increasing the elevation you could bring rows of turrets to bear on the front arc all along the cone. Needleships are probably also a good configuration for missile boats, because launchers can simply be placed behind the cone as long as their launch velocity is high enough to clear it before the missiles' engines ignite. I'd agree up to a point. My main needleship design (a hulking 45kt 567Mc monster) can tank fire all day on its frontal cone. But not long after the enemy has LOS on the rear-cone and/or missile ports ai can expect a catastrophic armor failure/internal explosion. Now that might be a problem in my launcher design(despite having separate internal missile magazines with non-explosive methane fuel), but the armor scheme on this rear cone uses 1m of graphite aerogel over 3cm of boron over 2cm of reinforced carbon-carbon. A properly manuverable full-armor broadside ship, under the right conditions, can destroy a well equipped needleship and vice-versa.
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Post by beta on Oct 20, 2016 21:23:11 GMT
How are you guys drunk-walking your ships when in engagement range? Just randomly switching the move command to different vectors? On most of my ships I have a couple broadside railguns with 5-6 kps muzzle velocity and at least 1.5g of acceleration from the main engines. As the ships come into range and they start firing at the enemy in broadside mode, the engines will fire to counteract the railgun kick to keep it in broadside (or maybe that's the automated dodging, but even so the ships seem to just burn in one direction). The end result of this is my ships burn a powered curve around the enemy with both sides firing long curving loops of projectiles at each other until my ships pass by out of range at 2Kps+ of differential velocity. Most of the time my ships will get better hits because they're firing at stock designs that only have ~150mg of acceleration, and the return fire passes behind my ships missing by about a quarter of a ship length. Sometimes though if the acceleration vector is too shallow in relation to the enemy and the lateral projection of the acceleration vector is small enough my ships will burn like moths in a blowtorch of enemy railgun fire. I'm trying to find a good balance between maneuver commands (homing, broadside, manual move commands) and ship design (broadside weapons, high acceleration, large delta-v) to consistently evade enemy fire while delivering a ship-killing amount of return fire. I think in real life ships would be able to model the stream of incoming fire and solve for the correct acceleration vectors which would avoid the large portion of fire until the range closed enough that the acceleration of the ship could no longer move it out of the path of a fire before the projectiles hit. In one sense the game already does this by ignoring the target's acceleration entirely and calculating firing solutions based solely on the enemy ship's instantaneous velocity vector. As long as the enemy ship has sufficient acceleration to displace the ship from the space the projectile will pass through, it's reasonable to believe the enemy's ship will do just that so trying to factor acceleration into the firing solution is pointless. To hit a maneuvering ship, you simply need to shoot where it could be. Since we have intimate knowledge of enemy and friendly designs, this is much, much easier as you know the exact gimbal range, thrust, and dV of any given ship design. Essentially, the goal would be to fill the potential volume of the maneuvering ship's movement arc with a certain density of projectiles. This is where extreme rate of fire weapons with very quick rotations are key. The higher the enemy craft's acceleration and/or the further the enemy is, the lower this shot density will become, down to a point where fire can be considered ineffective or wasteful. This may not extend projectile weapon range very far at all, but it will likely guarantee some hits rather than 25 very angry streams of tracers that are pin-point accurate ... 50m behind the enemy spacecraft, until you close the distance such that enemy acceleration can no longer overcome the distance between your gun's aimpoint and how far they can move their ship in the time provided. Here's a crappy picture to explain:
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Post by cuddlefish on Oct 20, 2016 21:37:54 GMT
There are few problems that can't be made more soluble by increasing volume of fire. Well, save for collateral damage and CPU load, anyway.
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Post by beta on Oct 20, 2016 21:56:55 GMT
Heh. You are literally increasing the volume of your fire ... aim less, hit more?!
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Post by cuddlefish on Oct 20, 2016 21:58:00 GMT
Heh. You are literally increasing the volume of your fire ... aim less, hit more?! Auuuuuugh! That was wonderful, I salute you.
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Post by trevlite on Oct 20, 2016 22:22:33 GMT
I still hope that they add internal spinal mounted weapons and horizontal turrets to complement the current vertical turrets. Would make needle ships more powerful. The ability to armor the leading edge of radiators would also make needle ships more powerful too. Just armor the noise cone and the edge of the radiators and you are a heavily armored small crossection.
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acatalepsy
Junior Member
Not Currently In Space
Posts: 97
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Post by acatalepsy on Oct 24, 2016 21:27:57 GMT
One thing that's worth pointing out on needleship survivability - its predicated on an ability to point it's armored front unerringly at the source of incoming fire. That's all well and good, but what happens if the enemy has more than one source of incoming fire? One broadside versus one needle might be in favor of the needle...but fleets usually have more than one combat spacecraft. Not to mention missiles and drones deployed on off-axis attack vectors. Broadside designs have a lot more freedom to maneuver at and near the point of engagement, and even a few kilometers separation in the opposing fleet could make things very bad for a group of needleships.
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Post by redparadize on Oct 24, 2016 21:40:16 GMT
Most of my design do not require to be exactly frontal. I armor my sides enough to withstand medium fire at 45degrees.
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Post by jonen on Oct 24, 2016 22:04:43 GMT
Would be nice if something like the layout of a Murderer class ROU was possible (3 forward facing blisters that can also target just about anything in the forward hemisphere with at least one of them, then a belt of five about midships, can target anything not in the aft deadzone with at least three of them - end results, eight weapons blisters, most firepower in the forward aspect, but there is no angle outside the aft deadzone that isn't covered by at least three). Of course, Culture is fairly soft, actually designing turrets with that kind of traverse would probably require putting them on extending masts...
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Post by wafflestoo on Oct 24, 2016 23:20:16 GMT
One thing that's worth pointing out on needleship survivability - its predicated on an ability to point it's armored front unerringly at the source of incoming fire. That's all well and good, but what happens if the enemy has more than one source of incoming fire? One broadside versus one needle might be in favor of the needle...but fleets usually have more than one combat spacecraft. Not to mention missiles and drones deployed on off-axis attack vectors. Broadside designs have a lot more freedom to maneuver at and near the point of engagement, and even a few kilometers separation in the opposing fleet could make things very bad for a group of needleships. All of my current designs are technically needleships (mostly dirt-cheap gun-carriers, each one is designed around a single nose-mounted weapon). I'm coming around to this style of thinking though. If the engagement would start a little more outside of weapon-range it would favor the broadside-ships by allowing for improved envelopment tactics.
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Post by Durandal on Oct 24, 2016 23:27:48 GMT
One thing that's worth pointing out on needleship survivability - its predicated on an ability to point it's armored front unerringly at the source of incoming fire. That's all well and good, but what happens if the enemy has more than one source of incoming fire? One broadside versus one needle might be in favor of the needle...but fleets usually have more than one combat spacecraft. Not to mention missiles and drones deployed on off-axis attack vectors. Broadside designs have a lot more freedom to maneuver at and near the point of engagement, and even a few kilometers separation in the opposing fleet could make things very bad for a group of needleships. True, but I've found the opposite to be just as true. A broadside ship, when faced with multiple hostiles, can become just as quickly envoloped even with superior manuverability at close range. And an unarmourned flank much more vulnerable than a needle's flank. I've been messing around more with "standard" conical ships lately. TheyRe more versitile than a pure broadside or a pure needle I'm finding.
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Post by ross128 on Oct 24, 2016 23:41:56 GMT
I consider the standard ships to effectively be broadside ships, though that's why I made the distinction between "full armor" and "half armor". Probably the most reliable way to pull off flanking in an orbital environment would be plotting simultaneous intercepts, though that's something this game can't handle right now (it'll just do one of the intercepts, the other will "miss"). A maneuver battle in gun range would require a situation where you can reasonably match velocities with the target, such as a small asteroid with a low orbital velocity. Battle in most reasonably strong gravity wells will consist mostly of jousting, which needleships are very good at. Of course, if you somehow survive the fly-by then you can open up on the needleship's unarmored and unarmed rear, and a full-armor broadside ship wouldn't even have to turn around to do so, it would just start firing its guns on the opposite side. 360 degree gun coverage certainly does have its advantages. Edit: Of course this assumes a gun battle takes place at all. My experience so far is that missiles hold an extremely dominant position, and armoring against them tends to prove futile. So ship armor and that armor's layout is rarely relevant at all.
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Post by Durandal on Oct 24, 2016 23:56:08 GMT
snip My experience so far is that missiles hold an extremely dominant position, and armoring against them tends to prove futile. So ship armor and that armor's layout is rarely relevant at all. I have some ideas about CWIS drones that I'm still waiting to try out. I do hope we get multilayer eventually.
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