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Post by samchiu2000 on Apr 15, 2018 1:33:27 GMT
Nice design! But the battery ship as you posted in the screenshot suffer from issues like intersections of module and crew radiation overdose, which is a flaw in such a decent piece of design. Your stock modules might've been overwritten by modded ones of the same name. I believe all my stock modules are still stock; I tend to remember the stats and check them to make sure I've got the right module selected. Can be a bit hard to pick them out though; if anyone else can confirm any errors I'll try to rectify them. It's work for me now even with community materials pack. Thanks
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Apr 15, 2018 12:01:36 GMT
I wonder if there is any point posting stock only missiles and drones here (I have superior, if a bit heavier and bigger Devastator, counterpart and managed to stockify my Hellfire counterpart*) given that they won't work without custom launchers. *) Not as impressive as the original (though it stays true to it in terms of painfully inflated volume - ammo cans will make you cry), won't solo a Gunship by just shooting it up all over the hull (unlikely to solo it at all and pretty much guaranteed to not survive if it does) but two of them aiming at the engines *can* reliably kill a Gunship and both are likely to survive, also of note - has pointy nose despite spinal guns
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Post by gfarrell80 on Apr 15, 2018 14:34:39 GMT
I've updated my stock collection with pictures and descriptions: steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1356489930They're all meant to be piloted, AI won't cut it. Working my way up to the heavier ship classes, going to do some frigates, destroyers, and cruisers. My faves to pilot 1 versus overwhelming odds in the sandbox: PKK Gunskiff PTG Missile Patrol Ship CRG Corvette CA Heavy Cruiser
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Apr 15, 2018 19:31:09 GMT
Ok, some of my own stuff (there will be more): steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197972745427/myworkshopfiles/?appid=476530"Dragon" class is direct descendant of my first ship ever (back when everything was cylindrical), which in turn started out as modified Laser Frigate. It's meant to be a Gunship counterpart and fits into Main Belt Extraction's budgets. It has relatively thin, and probably vastly suboptimal armor, but with nose-forward orientation and good subtargetting (or broadsiding targets) it should be able to tackle about 5 gunships simultaneously, even without excessive micro (at least in its 300MW variant). If you do want excessive micro, it has: - Auxiliary MethLOx RCS and boosters for occasional rapid manoeuvres (say, you really don't want to see how this massive cloud of drone 33mms tastes like, or want to keep your relative orientation during tight, high velocity swing-by) - you probably want to keep them deactivated most of the time.
- Auxiliary power capable of supporting CMs and at least some of its 60mm turrets even without main reactors - this gives it ability to shut down main reactors, fold the radiators and BRRAPP stuff with 60mm CIWS or distract incoming missiles with its undersized decoys
- Large selection of weaponry to switch between depending on circumstances (can't fire them all at once due to power constraints) - or switch to once you lose your previously firing set of guns.
- Roll thrusters.
- Laser-bait flak coilguns.
- Really good agility with RCS
"Gryphon" class is basically a cut-down "Dragon", sharing its design philosophy and all the fun bits.
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Post by gfarrell80 on Apr 16, 2018 3:52:28 GMT
Your vessel is a worthy adversary. imgur.com/a/N1N3TPiloting is everything, it is an easy enough kill for my [Core] CA Heavy Cruiser when the AI is running the dragon, but it also kills my heavy cruiser no problem when I'm piloting your Dragon.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Apr 16, 2018 4:44:49 GMT
Your vessel is a worthy adversary. imgur.com/a/N1N3TPiloting is everything, it is an easy enough kill for my [Core] CA Heavy Cruiser when the AI is running the dragon, but it also kills my heavy cruiser no problem when I'm piloting your Dragon. Yeah, neither ship works very well in broadside mode. Mine should only ever broadside when able to dodge enemy fire completely, otherwise the armour simply won't hold. It's a bit of a glass cannon, its main defensive strategy is to make the enemy stop shooting as soon as possible and deflect incoming rounds in the mean time. I have also definitely intended to make it a pilot's ship, with a lot of features benefiting from manual control. When I put your ship under the AI from the RCC fleet by Fgdfgfthgr (which nose forwards, but doesn't reorient at your preferred angle), I *can* kill it even without targetting the radiators which would be hidden under manual control, but it's definitely not an easy task - it has plenty of firepower and the armour is hard to scratch. With both vessels under skilled pilots' control it could be an interesting fight. Have you tried manually putting radially offset engines on your ship in an asymmetrical fashion, so that the thrust vector is off-axis when the engines gimbal to get it through the centre of mass? I think the AI should cope (because it can handle ship with unplanned asymmetrical engine layout due to enemy fire), but don't know whether it will put it at angle or nose-forward straight, but with angled thrust resulting in net sideways acceleration during manoeuvring. Either way could be interesting and potentially useful. I am thinking of childrenofadeadearth.boards.net/post/33735/thread and designing a dedicated nose-forward, sideways dodger with single preferred orientation relative to perpendicular component of relative velocity. The RCS setup is going to be a nightmare, though, and I don't think a corified version will be possible.
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Post by gfarrell80 on Apr 16, 2018 21:39:09 GMT
Have you tried manually putting radially offset engines on your ship in an asymmetrical fashion, so that the thrust vector is off-axis when the engines gimbal to get it through the centre of mass? I think the AI should cope (because it can handle ship with unplanned asymmetrical engine layout due to enemy fire), but don't know whether it will put it at angle or nose-forward straight, but with angled thrust resulting in net sideways acceleration during manoeuvring. Either way could be interesting and potentially useful. I am thinking of childrenofadeadearth.boards.net/post/33735/thread and designing a dedicated nose-forward, sideways dodger with single preferred orientation relative to perpendicular component of relative velocity. The RCS setup is going to be a nightmare, though, and I don't think a corified version will be possible. I am definitely going to mess a little more with my CA design, I like a few features of your Dragon, very cool ship. And yeah, I've also tried setting up something with both rear thrust engines and powerful sidethrust engines, but it is a tricky challenge in the ship editor. Edit- these LOX Methane combustion rockets... what is the proper ratio of Oxygen and Methane propellant tonnage to provide? First time I've messed with them.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Apr 17, 2018 0:06:18 GMT
Have you tried manually putting radially offset engines on your ship in an asymmetrical fashion, so that the thrust vector is off-axis when the engines gimbal to get it through the centre of mass? I think the AI should cope (because it can handle ship with unplanned asymmetrical engine layout due to enemy fire), but don't know whether it will put it at angle or nose-forward straight, but with angled thrust resulting in net sideways acceleration during manoeuvring. Either way could be interesting and potentially useful. I am thinking of childrenofadeadearth.boards.net/post/33735/thread and designing a dedicated nose-forward, sideways dodger with single preferred orientation relative to perpendicular component of relative velocity. The RCS setup is going to be a nightmare, though, and I don't think a corified version will be possible. I am definitely going to mess a little more with my CA design, I like a few features of your Dragon, very cool ship. And yeah, I've also tried setting up something with both rear thrust engines and powerful sidethrust engines, but it is a tricky challenge in the ship editor. Edit- these LOX Methane combustion rockets... what is the proper ratio of Oxygen and Methane propellant tonnage to provide? First time I've messed with them. Thanks! Not sure if I can even answer that. You don't want to run them as your main propulsion, so you're basically going to be carrying *some* oxygen in addition to all the methane that doubles as your main reaction mass. Consider the oxygen dead weight as far as your delta-v budget goes, and try to find amount that allows some manoeuvring without biting you too hard in the delta-v reserves. In non-core variants I'm simply using compact NTRs for that - not sure how realistic would that be given that NTRs might not really be able to ignite and shut down rapidly.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Apr 18, 2018 19:50:05 GMT
AtomHeartDragon I made some improvements. Hope you like it. - More engines. I don't think I can do things like combustion rocket RCS without destroying the shape and/or putting an inconvenient hole in the armour profile, but feel free to prove me wrong. - 3x6 radiator array instead of 2x8; supports an extra reactor with about the same number of radiators, which are covered a bit more with the lower symmetry. Reactors rearranged per your suggestion. - Scatter railguns, can get fire downrange a bit quicker. I want to avoid 60mm for performance reasons and because my Carronade Frigate does that already. I did want to use the 13MW coilgun with the 400 ton turret but it's just too big and heavy. - Better armour slope after I found two 1kt tanks stacked didn't cause the slope to snap inward prematurely if each set had the same amount of tanks... or tank, in this case, since I set each to 1 to keep the ship's mass from increasing much beyond the original 18kt, after having changed the bottom set of tanks to 1kts too. - Whipple shield made into a substantial layer of titanium diboride, having high hardness and the highest shear modulus of a realistic material (read: not 1cm thick plates of CVD diamond that would take years to build). One could fill the whole 2m space with aerogel to make it invincible but I like to keep stockalike armour schemes too. - Used the 10m horizontal spacers you pointed out. Gave something like 50m/s of delta-v, enough to take off from Minmus in KSP... I think? I forgot already. Would you consider this an improvement: Core Battery Ship RCS.txt (3.18 KB) ? TBH I'm not a fan of stock scatter railguns (because of the scatter part), but I have left the armaments be, only adding more power, Meth-LOx RCS and changing rear armour to something lighter. If adding nose RCS as well, a small cone/pyramid could be formed using tankage or spacers hiding the bottleneck with front RCS and CM radiators. I can take a quick stab at that as well. 13MW 1mm coilgun is, sadly, utterly hopeless - the gun isn't bad (if horribly inefficient) but the turret is hideously huge, heavy, expensive and fragile. Maybe sniper coilguns (13MW, accurate, good penetration and effective range), 60MW coilguns (power-hungry, but tiny and with obscene rate of fire) or 39MW 6mm railguns (kind of big and fragile, but good rate of fire, range and decent accuracy) could work?
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Post by Rocket Witch on Apr 19, 2018 22:42:19 GMT
Would you consider this an improvement: ? TBH I'm not a fan of stock scatter railguns (because of the scatter part), but I have left the armaments be, only adding more power, Meth-LOx RCS and changing rear armour to something lighter. If adding nose RCS as well, a small cone/pyramid could be formed using tankage or spacers hiding the bottleneck with front RCS and CM radiators. I can take a quick stab at that as well. 13MW 1mm coilgun is, sadly, utterly hopeless - the gun isn't bad (if horribly inefficient) but the turret is hideously huge, heavy, expensive and fragile. Maybe sniper coilguns (13MW, accurate, good penetration and effective range), 60MW coilguns (power-hungry, but tiny and with obscene rate of fire) or 39MW 6mm railguns (kind of big and fragile, but good rate of fire, range and decent accuracy) could work? That's a lot of rockets. Having rear-facing RCS makes me think a high thrust 'speed boost' rocket would be good gunship feature, probably fed by oxidiser drop tanks. I made some changes in line with yours. I totally forgot the 6mm railgun is a thing. The turrets get taken out relatively quickly as they're a bit on the big side, but they get a lot of shots off. I'll probably put more of these on future ships in place of the 'default' autofire. I didn't want to use the sniper gun since putting a load of those on a high-power ship feels like a gimme for a stock-killing stock design. I've done the nose cone thing before with guns on other designs; it's attractive on this ship since it adds a bulge to half-cover the crew radiators, although those titanium carbide ones very rarely get destroyed anyway in my experience. Trying it with the engines, they get damaged quickly (maybe due to having gimbals) making them unavailable at the point when they'd be most useful (terminal stage). Also just lost all my designs after the game stopped responding and I closed it, but it's quite nice to subscribe to my own core designs and have them appear under the core designs list.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Apr 20, 2018 19:28:19 GMT
You should see my own designs sometime. Plus, I'm trying to make 19kt of mostly methane, amorphous carbon and titanium diboride spin on a dime - 2.67MN at a time. I can't see how it wouldn't take an awful lot of engines. Already included by default in my heavier stock module ships (non-stock use shortened NTRs, and large cans full of reactor people). Lateral ones can be on either end (or both) - the further from centre of mass, the better. The main issue I can see here is that you need the manoeuvring assist the most around the moment of closest approach - you won't have much left at that point if it's outside the hull and being shot at. Yeah, the turrets are big and thinly armoured, but the weapon itself is really nice. Personally I use them as a sort of "hello gu yns" to hose enemies with a lot of small kinetics right at the beginning of battle. For some reason they also seem to work as a bit of sacrificial turrets, extending vessels' survivability compared to what I can get by replacing them with autofires (which are actually fully entitled to being considered main workhorse weapons). As long as they are still there they also make for nice support kinetic PD against any missile or drone swarm that wanders too close. Could you explain? It's a good weapon if a bit bulky and expensive. You can cover a large bunch of stock 2.46km/s Meth-LOx fully on a design like yours, and if they do get popped, you'll have a lot of them left because of how many of them are actually needed to make a difference on a large ship. I did experience a meta-effect of giving the enemy AI reason to hit and eventually erode previously untargeted part of the ship, but they are not going to necessarily be less durable than the outer ring of guns, and on your design both the crew and one of the reactors are hidden in armoured nose cone well in front of any vulnerabilities. The worst thing is if you manage to deflect kinetics off the flared nosecone and into the main guns, which is surprisingly easy to accomplish with what would seem like a good shape. Mental note: back the design file somewhere safe. I have a lot of designs I wouldn't want to have to recreate.
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Apr 21, 2018 16:10:00 GMT
Also just lost all my designs after the game stopped responding and I closed it, but it's quite nice to subscribe to my own core designs and have them appear under the core designs list. Shouldn't they still be in the backups folder? The game makes a backup of userdesigns.txt every time you start the game AFAIK. It's in AppData/Roaming/CDE/Backups/
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Post by Rocket Witch on Apr 21, 2018 18:14:39 GMT
Could you explain? It's a good weapon if a bit bulky and expensive. A good weapon, indeed. You can target weapons and declaw the enemy before they fire back much, and with 6+ sniper guns firing that's a highly probable turret knockout every time they fire, taking out 20 weapons in 10 seconds. I haven't actually tried this though, just extrapolating from what the snipers do in lower numbers. The worst thing is if you manage to deflect kinetics off the flared nosecone and into the main guns, which is surprisingly easy to accomplish with what would seem like a good shape. I'm not sure about that. I've observed that the impact point visually appears somewhere in front of the turret, as though the armour slope's hitbox is ahead of where it should be, and this seems to cause weapons to last longer than they might otherwise. Fgdfgfthgr's RCC Fleet has some laser drones with pointed noses that I first noticed this apparent effect on when I thought their mirrors should be getting burnt out much quicker. Shouldn't they still be in the backups folder? The game makes a backup of userdesigns.txt every time you start the game AFAIK. It's in AppData/Roaming/CDE/Backups/ Thank you!
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Post by gfarrell80 on Apr 23, 2018 23:33:09 GMT
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Apr 28, 2018 23:26:45 GMT
I've been slowly improving my ships (armour, RCS layouts, etc.) and adding things like descriptions and screenshots. I have added a carrier - more or less Fleet Carrier's counterpart, so also capable of direct combat, but stock drones and missiles are all sorts of bad. Could you explain? It's a good weapon if a bit bulky and expensive. A good weapon, indeed. You can target weapons and declaw the enemy before they fire back much, and with 6+ sniper guns firing that's a highly probable turret knockout every time they fire, taking out 20 weapons in 10 seconds. I haven't actually tried this though, just extrapolating from what the snipers do in lower numbers. One way to counter that is not holding still when the enemy is firing their sniper coilguns. They are insanely precise, but they are unguided, if you move in any unexpected manner between firing and projectile arrival, they will miss your turrets with the same godly precision. I mean during my own attempt at adding forward RCS to your design. It looked very sound in terms of shape and the armour fully shielded forward RCS ring as well as CM modules, but in practice round fired at forward RCS tended to skip right into the main turrets. I have them downloaded along with the rest of Fgdfgfthgr's stuff. I appreciate the diversity of explored concepts and cool, different looks resulting from them, although RCC fleet is very vulnerable to anything that gets past armoured nosecone - including kinetics fired with large lateral velocity and nukes. Regarding your point, it seems that you can visualize discrepancies between visible armour and physical model with armour visualizer. I would really love some sort of more WYSIWYG solution in COADE. I like those. Some observations: I tried similar layout before (Dragon became pentagonal back when I first modified it for the latest patch) and hit similar snags with rolling. It seems that the AI can't really handle different thruster symmetry on odd symmetrical ships. Scratch that. The AI may have trouble handling RCS setups that produce significant net thrust in another direction than desired, though - this will cause drift or wobble, and in some circumstances compensating for that may cause it to burn engines continuously without performing the actual manoeuvre. On even symmetrical ships you can generally use any lower symmetry that also applies to armour layout (for example 2x or 3x on hexagonal, whether you actually use a ring with multiple of that number, or for example use 4x thruster ring at 45 degrees and let it degrade to 2x symmetry after armour affects it - I've been experimenting 2x at 0 + 4x at 45 lately to encourage manoeuvring without exposing flats). With pentagonal you pretty much need to stick with rotationally symmetrical rings of multiples of 5 thrusters - preferably in pairs for CW and CCW rolling - you can get good roll performance with that and pentagonal ships look way cool without being too mass and cross-section inefficient. OTOH breaking symmetry with turrets tends to work out great. Your cruisers definitely look business in addition to working nicely. Neat rows of turrets are a gift to the enemy - there is a good chance that a burst intending to hit one turret will also take out one behind it and another behind that. When barbecue-rolling, so are neat rings of turrets sharing the symmetry with armour layout - for the same reason. Ditching ventral armour had the unfortunate side effect of making it pretty much impossible to get any semblance of working AI with your designs - I know that they are meant to be piloted, but without multiplayer even half-working AI is nice. Blast Launchers have one drawback - missiles are launched perpendicularly, exposed to enemy fire and one disabled missile can trigger fuses of the remaining bunch - ouch. Lastly, this might of interest to you: childrenofadeadearth.boards.net/thread/1618/benefits-asymmetry?page=3What would you think about putting slow weapons (like combustion guns) on the "soft" side of your vessel and then, with any perpendicular velocity vector, orienting "hard" side towards incoming projectiles (in more or less nose forward orientation) and firing outgoing ones from the "soft" one?
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