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Post by gfarrell80 on Apr 29, 2018 19:11:08 GMT
Good comments AtomHeartDragon.
Can you explain "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" with a screenshot? I'm still not getting very good roll performance.
(side note - it would be nice to be able to control which direction you were commanding your ship to roll in!)
I tried ditching the ventral armor as well to optimize mass; however I was surprised that going to a light armor layer underneath didn't really save very much in terms of cost or mass. Also during crazy maneuvering despite best efforts the ventral areas do get exposed breifly; it is better not to have it tin-can thickness. Although for specialized glass cannon designs I might go with the paper thin ventral armor.
The blast launcher sympathetic detonation problem is avoidable if you (annoyingly) fire just one missile at a time to allow decent clearance between the missiles, or launch shortly before engagement. But yeah, it is a significant problem. I had 20 nuclear strikers warm up my belly once with a blast, and have seen a stack of flak missiles similarly evaporate. So, careful staggered launches or pre-launches before contact are necessary. I do prefer the blast launchers over the powered launchers to avoid having to put another radiator on the ship, and the blast launchers are relatively compact.
And yes, combustion guns on one side for the close final phase of the intercept is an excellent idea. I already started getting into that idea slightly with the side/cheek mounted guns, but I have been toying with the idea of ventral guns as well.
Side note: I've been challenging myself with these stock designs that my design should be able to come out on top in a 1 versus 5 match up versus a standard ship of similar weight class. Gunship, Corvette, Cutter, Gunskiff, no problem. However I've gotten to the Frigate class and the stock Laser Frigate is pretty tough to take on with a similar weight all stock ship 1 v 5. So take it as a challenge: see if you can build an all stock ship that can take out 5 laser frigates.
Parameters:
Stock laser frigate: 7.02 kt 5.88 deltaV
Improved Stock laser frigate: Maximum 8 kt (give you a bit of extra weight to play with) Minimum 5.0 dV At least 1x 100MW Violet laser and 4 mounts Other weapons and equipment at your discretion (stock parts only). Must be able to defeat 5 stock laser frigates.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on May 1, 2018 17:12:15 GMT
Good comments AtomHeartDragon. Can you explain "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" with a screenshot? I'm still not getting very good roll performance. I can do better than screenshot: Attached are two modifications of your cruiser. Core CAK Heavy Cruiser III.txt (7.21 KB) Core CAK Heavy Cruiser V.txt (7.21 KB) The first one has ring of three engines on the nose rather than two pairs of two. They can be used to provide roll torque or for reorientation, but they will generally produce net downward force causing wobble. On the upside the ship will preferentially reorient by pitching down so it might be a good starting point if you want to make something AI can handle without dropping your special features. The other one has boring, symmetrical ring of five engines - no wobble or hidden catches, but the added engines don't really help (or hinder) rolling, nor do they determine preferred manoeuvres. Both have all RCS grouped in rings rather than positioned individually - it's much less pain to do and avoids subtle placement errors. In general, if your thruster ring has symmetry that isn't a multiple of a factor of your armour symmetry, it will produce net thrust even if all engines are firing and thus will produce force that most of the time is misaligned with the direction of your manoeuvre. It's not automatically bad and you can find some uses for that (in the first modification I tried to demonstrate possible use of it), but most of the time it's not what you want, especially with the AI joining in and trying to make sense of the resulting fun. All available odd symmetries are also primes so the only way to avoid that is using them or their multiple when laying out thruster rings - 5, 10, 15 or 20 if you're going pentagonal, 3, 6, 9, 12, 15 or 18 if trigonal. With even symmetry you have more freedom - you can use any even number for them and also multiples of three for hexagonal and still get balanced thrust. Both the UI and AI are rather rudimentary, TBH. Yeah, but one of main advantages of blast launchers is that they allow sudden Macross Missile Massacres at close range - you don't get that if you just pop one or two missiles at the time and the extra velocity imparted by blast launchers can be troublesome when simply deploying missile fleets to perform their own intercepts. Recently I've been mixing both kinds of launchers, effectively treating blast launchers as extra ammo cans with different launch method. The idea is to mount a small number of high-velocity weapons on the armoured side (whatever has the longest range to help determine optimal orientation), then leaving the armoured side mostly untouched by anything compromising the continuity of the armour. The remaining long range weapons and fast-tracking CIWS go on the sides, so they can shoot forward and also destroy any missiles approaching from any direction - including the armoured one. The low velocity weapons, launchers, and possibly dedicated dodge engines, and radiators go on the soft side, possibly behind the bulge. The ship intercepts with some lateral velocity, orients armoured side forward in regards to the lateral velocity components and (pointy) nose forward in regards to the enemy. Thanks to lateral velocity the enemy has to lead the ship and any undodged projectiles impact the armoured side. The soft side remains relatively safe, which allows it to launch munitions with little risk and lead the target with slow guns without actually exposing them to direct fire.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on May 1, 2018 19:54:49 GMT
Side note: I've been challenging myself with these stock designs that my design should be able to come out on top in a 1 versus 5 match up versus a standard ship of similar weight class. Gunship, Corvette, Cutter, Gunskiff, no problem. However I've gotten to the Frigate class and the stock Laser Frigate is pretty tough to take on with a similar weight all stock ship 1 v 5. So take it as a challenge: see if you can build an all stock ship that can take out 5 laser frigates. Parameters: Stock laser frigate: 7.02 kt 5.88 deltaV Improved Stock laser frigate: Maximum 8 kt (give you a bit of extra weight to play with) Minimum 5.0 dV At least 1x 100MW Violet laser and 4 mounts Other weapons and equipment at your discretion (stock parts only). Must be able to defeat 5 stock laser frigates. I am planning to make a destroyer (mostly anti-drone, anti missile and anti-module) matching LF's mass, cost, delta-v and armed with 1-2 100MW lasers, but it's still TBD. My Gryphon class is relatively close to what you described, although not en exact match, since it hasn't been intended to take Laser Frigate's niche - more like "half a Gunship". Base variant is 6kt with somewhere around 4.8km/s dv, long range variant is 7kt with slightly different armament and just 30m/s less delta-v than las frig. Both sport a whole bunch of 13MW green lasers in place of single 100MW violet one (in addition to whole bunch of other weapons) and both can take out 5 laser frigs in aggressive, by orienting nose forward, ignoring range on everything, disabling distributed targetting on lasers and simply targetting every module on enemy ships. Gryphon clas frigate:steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1362436412Medium size warship, agile and with a lot of firepower. Can kill 5 laser frigates at once. A bit more delta-v than gunship, and half its mass. Gryphon class, long range:steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1374794326Gryphon modified to more closely match Laser Frigate's role (but still not quite there). More mass (tankage mostly), slightly different armament, better delta-v. Similar performance to basic Gryphon. Dragon class gunship (300MW version):steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1362435835My Original Ship(TM). Started as laser frigate with basically all the components rearranged and replaced multiple times. Ended as gunship-size monstrosity (but somewhat cheaper - fits into Main Belt Extraction), with 2.5x the power, superior manoeuvrability, hideous amounts of various armaments and better delta-v. Eats gunships for breakfast (doesn't need substantial micro to beat 5 simultaneously), soloes Vesta. Looks cool. Dragon class gunship (240MW version):steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1362436073Dragon with slightly less reactors and radiators, removed excess armaments and additional methane tanks installed in their place. Still 2x more power than gunship and a lot of firepower. Leviathan class (fleet) carrier:steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1371086181Slightly let down by awfulness of stock missiles and drones, it still takes 1.5x more stingers than fleet carrier, a single additional wing of beam drones, a large bunch of various missiles including 10 devastators and 9 13MW lasers to improve point defence. Basically a fleet carrier, missile schooner, almost whole support carrier, three whole cutters and a bit of a siloship all rolled into one. For slightly less than fleet carrier's cost and mass fitting into FC's mass rounded up to nearest kiloton. Better delta-v too. 10kt methane tanker:steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1369738017For when you need to support things like smallish (1kt) deployment into Neptune's low polar orbit and want to use methane for that.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on May 3, 2018 20:52:37 GMT
So take it as a challenge: see if you can build an all stock ship that can take out 5 laser frigates. Parameters: Stock laser frigate: 7.02 kt 5.88 deltaV Improved Stock laser frigate: Maximum 8 kt (give you a bit of extra weight to play with) Minimum 5.0 dV At least 1x 100MW Violet laser and 4 mounts Other weapons and equipment at your discretion (stock parts only). Must be able to defeat 5 stock laser frigates. All according to the specs: Basilisk Wyvern class destroyer:steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1376944772Beats 5 Laser Frigates (can rapidly melt all their crew radiators and then just shoot them up at its leisure), 100MW laser plus general laser-heavy armament, same deltaV as LF, 8kt mass, stock components only.
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Post by gfarrell80 on May 4, 2018 1:38:56 GMT
Cool stuff man! I hope to mess around with your designs a little bit this weekend.
Stupid question: how does one take the text file and put it the proper folder so it shows up as one of your ship designs? I'm new at this.
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Post by Fgdfgfthgr on May 4, 2018 6:14:08 GMT
Cool stuff man! I hope to mess around with your designs a little bit this weekend. Stupid question: how does one take the text file and put it the proper folder so it shows up as one of your ship designs? I'm new at this. Put the txt file you downloaded into "C:\Users\[Your User Name]\AppData\Roaming\CDE\Mods\Data\Imports".
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on May 7, 2018 23:28:13 GMT
I cheated a bit by using custom guns with stock-like stats. The stock conventional guns don't exactly have too much variety so I added some myself. Using them, I made my favourite ship class, the dakkaboat: Decent armor, some acceleration and dv and a stupid amount of high-firerate guns. Gun stats in spoilers below: Point-defence and long-range drilling gun: 60mm gun but better penetration: An intermediate gun between 60mm and 120mm guns: Point-defence guns doing their work: And drilling through a gunship: Some nice-looking battle damage resulting from a duel between gunboats:
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on May 8, 2018 18:21:33 GMT
I like the line of reasoning - Can we allow different size radiators, but same stock materials as the stock radiators? That is the only change to the 'all stock' rule I would seek And I cheated a bit by using custom guns with stock-like stats. The stock conventional guns don't exactly have too much variety so I added some myself. Using them, I made my favourite ship class, the dakkaboat: *snip* Here you go.jtyotjotjipaefvj also, any reason for going polygonal? You could use it for roll thrusters and the ship would probably benefit from some RCS anyway. And do post blueprints.
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on May 8, 2018 21:46:25 GMT
any reason for going polygonal? You could use it for roll thrusters and the ship would probably benefit from some RCS anyway. Hexagon armor looks cool, that's pretty much it. I don't usually use RCS on ships since it makes holes in armor and it's not usually necessary to use them with customized NTRs. I guess I should try them out too.
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on May 16, 2018 21:43:13 GMT
I improved on my gunship concept and I think I've achieved peak performance for a purely stock ship using conventional cannons. Since the 60mm cannons have almost no power draw, it's very cheap to add hundreds of them. I settled on 200 guns as a nice balance between firepower and lag. 6000 rounds per second ensure that no target will survive very long. It also has a low profile which reduces enemy weapons range and enough dv to do a fast intercept so that you don't need to waste your life waiting for it to get into effective firing range. The armor is fairly light but the gun layout ensures that enemy fire will focus only on the outer edges, and wont hit anything vital. An additional safety feature is the spacing under the osmium nose cone. This ensures that ammo explosions won't damage the main armor of the ship, since the ammo bins are far enough outside of the ship to vent to space harmlessly. It also lifts the guns themselves further out from the hull, which means any shots aimed at the guns will just pass through the gun into space, instead of hitting the hull. Ship design: Internal view: Blueprint and combat test spoilered below: dl.dropbox.com/s/54lmcwgmzoh4g58/Fish%20in%20Dry%20Water.txt?dl=0opening fire gunship about to have a bad day gunship in the process of having a bad day interlude: 60mm cannons pretending to be particle beams interlude over, bad day for gunship continues Damage dealt to gunboat. It sustained around 30 seconds of continuous fire from all the gunship's guns. Same with armor view on. No serious damage to the hull armor. By comparison, here's roughly the same design with front-mounted guns and slightly lighter armor. There's a 5x5 meter hole in the front armor and around a hundred crewmembers got fried but the ship's still operational. The armored tanks seemed to absorb a bunch of shots, and the crew modules themselves have a decent amount of armor as well. See-through nose armor: One or two internal components are missing but nothing too important:
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on May 17, 2018 17:08:35 GMT
I settled on 200 guns as a nice balance between firepower and lag. You either have very fast rig, very modest framerate requirements, or are using a definition of "balance" I am sadly not familiar with. Kickass opening fire shot, delta-v is a bit crap, though. The technical term is WIMPs - weakly interacting massive particles. 10g is quite massive by particle physics standards, and they are weakly interacting 'cause they are passing through already made holes - everything fits. BTW: Could you drop your previous hex-ship blueprints into semi-CORE thread?
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Jul 3, 2018 15:36:10 GMT
Currently all my ships have been hidden until further notice: Since all my designs relied on fine tuned component placement, the last update has broken vast majority of them quite horribly, including everything I pushed to Workshop. They will return once they are repaired, updated and retested.
On the bright side, some fairly beefy multi-NTR have been added which may reduce my reliance on meth-LOx boosters (but not on meth-LOx RCS).
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Jul 7, 2018 4:52:18 GMT
Ok, I am abandoning my RCS scheme - the new engine bundles make it not worth it to burden ships with oxidizer. If we ever get compact NTRs, compact and performant RJ, or if I ever get to upload custom module designs, my RCS scheme will make comeback, although not in chemical version.
Currently fixed Leviathan and both versions of Gryphon (actually, just fixed the standard one and used it as basis for rebuilding extended range version) - both are available for download again.
With Gryphon frigate (either) I can actually beat 10 stock laser frigates set to aggressive while only suffering minimal damage, if I play my cards right (aluminum radiators really need to disappear from stock designs that aren't cheap, disposable drones) and two Gryphons still easily beat Vesta (haven't tried it with a single one).
Screenshots not updated.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Jul 14, 2018 11:50:34 GMT
Fixed and improved my collection of stock components ships (no dependency issues and a showcase what you can still do without simply outteching and outranging the enemy) - now with pics: All the ships listed (except tanker) have power generation split between forward and rear reactors, backup RTG (in case of full reactor loss and to enable signature reduction - scram, fold, launch decoys), crew around centre of gravity to better handle spins, all refractory radiators (even for the crew), diversified weapon battery and externally hardened (CVD diamond, titanium nitride, boron carbide) MgAlZn alloy whipple shields stuffed with thick layer of graphogel, with boron filament/amorphous carbon/PBO fiber sandwich as spall-lined bulk armour. I have so far abandoned the RCS schemes, but retained the angular hulls.
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Jul 14, 2018 17:48:19 GMT
I made a better beam drone for point defence purposes. It has one 13 MW laser, a bit of armor and enough dv to stick around its fleet for a maneuver or two before it needs to be abandoned. When you stick them into a blast launcher, you get a nice reusable point defence net that deploys quickly in combat and doesn't cost much. If you add a refueler, you could keep them around for longer trips, although refueling them all the time would get annoying so I didn't put one on the carrier. They're cheap and so you can just chuck the empty drones and pop out new ones when needed. Design screenies for drone and carrier: Design export: PD Bote.txt (1.94 KB) Video showing how it works against a fleet carrier: This seems to be an easy to use and convenient solution to killing enemy drones and missiles. No need to plot intercepts against missiles trying to avoid the drones, and doesn't need to be deployed beforehand so they don't limit fleet maneuverability either.
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