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Post by Amistad on May 7, 2018 2:02:45 GMT
Hey all,
I've had CDE for a while now and have roughly 80 hours on the game itself. I'm pretty terrible at the game, but one thing I noticed is that actual chemical guns are pretty killer if you can get in range - insane RoF, larger shell sizes, and way less required energy input. I'm interested in using some sort of chemical gun as an anti-missile CIWS system, but I'm not sure how to get better. What's the best CIWS-type cannon you can make in CDE (IE, firing at least twice a second, mountable on a turret, low energy requirement)?
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Post by The Astronomer on May 7, 2018 2:45:33 GMT
Don't use guns. Not chemical, not railgun nor coilgun. They don't work.
Use 100 MW lasers. They work.
Join the laser faction today.
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Post by treptoplax on May 7, 2018 3:46:33 GMT
Hey all, I've had CDE for a while now and have roughly 80 hours on the game itself. I'm pretty terrible at the game, but one thing I noticed is that actual chemical guns are pretty killer if you can get in range - insane RoF, larger shell sizes, and way less required energy input. I'm interested in using some sort of chemical gun as an anti-missile CIWS system, but I'm not sure how to get better. What's the best CIWS-type cannon you can make in CDE (IE, firing at least twice a second, mountable on a turret, low energy requirement)? You can probably find a ton lying about here someplace or in the Steam workshop, but building your own isn't hard. IIRC they can be optimized up to a certain point pretty easily but not much further because the speed of the explosives is a fundamental limit. Assuming you're just concerned about the game (there might be some realism issues here), go for projectiles that are as thin as possible and as wide as they need to be; my most-used gun designs are 14mm and 50mm diameter with 4g and 35g projectiles, respectively, if I recall correctly. You should be able to get a muzzle velocity of around 2Km/s; VC steel and diamond or amorphous carbon are popular barrel materials. For increased accuracy make the barrel stiffer with barrel armor (graphite aerogels work well). You might want to purposely limit accuracy for a CIWS, though, YMMV. Flak is also a good option for this sort of gun but the designs for that take a good bit of tuning and produce a lot of lag in my experience. As you say, rate of fire is high - for drones you may want to keep it purposely low so they can fire for longer, and for large ships the cost of the explosives in very large ammo magazines can be nontrivial. Also, FWIW, ships with mostly conventional guns and launchers can have *very* low heat signatures. Flares, or drones/missile decoys with a higher heat signature than the mothership (with it's engine off!) may be a viable option. YMMV, void where prohibited.
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on May 7, 2018 16:01:55 GMT
Stock-style dinnerplate launchers are not terribly effective against armor. Sure you can get a bit more energy into the projectile but that hardly helps when even the smallest amount of armor can easily stop it. I've taken to using subcaliber cannons firing either small flak warheads or plain tungsten penetrators, usually a mix of both on a single ship. The fairly unimpressive muzzle velocity can easily be compensated for by mounting the gun on a drone that goes really fast. This way you can get 10 km/s launch velocity out of a gun that's capable of firing projectiles weighing several kg, without going bankrupt. Here's an example gun used by my latest interceptor drone: 400 gram projectile mass on a thin rod that can actually get through a stock ship's armor, a decent rate of fire that won't melt your PC and enough muzzle velocity to land hits even on a poor intercept. All for under half the mass of a stock 60mm gun and for less than quarter of the price. Put that on one of these drones and you can melt through a gunship in seconds with just a couple of drones: Some combat screenies and a more detailed shot of the cannon design in spoilers below: Gun: Drone firing on a gunship. Note the 8 km/s velocity of the round. That's a ~14 MJ projectile 5 times per second out of a 350 kg gun. Dead gunship a second or two later.
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Post by treptoplax on May 7, 2018 17:54:08 GMT
Stock-style dinnerplate launchers are not terribly effective against armor. Sure you can get a bit more energy into the projectile but that hardly helps when even the smallest amount of armor can easily stop it. I've taken to using subcaliber cannons firing either small flak warheads or plain tungsten penetrators, usually a mix of both on a single ship. The fairly unimpressive muzzle velocity can easily be compensated for by mounting the gun on a drone that goes really fast. This way you can get 10 km/s launch velocity out of a gun that's capable of firing projectiles weighing several kg, without going bankrupt. Here's an example gun used by my latest interceptor drone: [snip] 400 gram projectile mass on a thin rod that can actually get through a stock ship's armor, a decent rate of fire that won't melt your PC and enough muzzle velocity to land hits even on a poor intercept. All for under half the mass of a stock 60mm gun and for less than quarter of the price. Put that on one of these drones and you can melt through a gunship in seconds with just a couple of drones: [snip] Some combat screenies and a more detailed shot of the cannon design in spoilers below: [snip] Gun:
[snip]
Drone firing on a gunship. Note the 8 km/s velocity of the round. That's a ~14 MJ projectile 5 times per second out of a 350 kg gun.
[snip]
Dead gunship a second or two later.
[snip]
In my experience, small guns are fine if you have a high enough rate of fire; that 14mm:4g:2Km/s gun is installed on a 2Kc drone and can empty its magazine in a hurry. Targets that cross that stream of slugs will get sliced up in a hurry, even with heavy armor. YMMV, and I think we've actually had this discussion before. I'm a big fan of the smallest possible drones so they have enough time to close. That said, I do agree that heavy, low velocity slugs are an under-appreciated option. I have a drone intended for heavily armored targets with a 10G NTR, 10 Km/s dV and a 60g : 700 m/s gun (!) - the gun isn't so much a weapon itself as terminal guidance for the kinetic warhead...
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Post by Rocket Witch on May 7, 2018 21:23:27 GMT
Best chemgun for CIWS is probably a cluster nuke design using the kind of blast launcher canister shot people have been making pretty patterns with. I don't have one to show off though. Also, FWIW, ships with mostly conventional guns and launchers can have *very* low heat signatures. Flares, or drones/missile decoys with a higher heat signature than the mothership (with it's engine off!) may be a viable option. YMMV, void where prohibited. :) Yes indeed, a low heat ship (<10MW) can carry tens of thousands of flares to match micromissile swarms, especially since depending on how the missiles are set up you may only need 1 flare per 100+ missile attack. Rather absurd how it works seamelssly against missiles but as soon as a drone gets involved the flares do nothing.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on May 7, 2018 23:18:45 GMT
Chemical guns have two things going for them - ability to fire lots of rounds without using much power and lack of objections towards firing heavy, large diameter payloads (also with modest power requirements). The former can be exploited by making rapidly firing guns, possibly very small, possibly numerous, and either putting them en-masse on a ship or drone (turreted or spinal - for "shotgun" effect) or making very small drones. The latter allows for all kinds of interesting payloads - both anti-ship and anti-wave ones (nukes for example are neat for frying thrusters and melting radiators). When in doubt, you can always do crazy stuff like putting microturrets on nuke shells. Due to their low velocity chemical guns are not affected as much by whipple shielding and in high-velocity intercepts gun itself becomes more of a tool for putting slugs where you want them, than for giving them kinetic energy to deal damage. When you're going for head-on, low orbit intercept around Neptune (about 30km/s), 1g railgun pellets with added 10km/s suddenly pale compared to multi-kilogram slugs that only add 1.5km/s to intercept velocity, but you can fire much more of them rapidly, for much less power. Stock-style dinnerplate launchers are not terribly effective against armor. True, with one exception: if they are rapid firing and accurate enough, they can keep hitting the same spot, which tends to cut through the armour. Of course maximizing velocity with combustion gun is a losing game, because it goes against the main strength of those weapons, quickly hits diminishing returns and is not going to yield anything particularly impressive compared to rail- or coilguns (and coilguns can fire pretty heavy, rod-shaped slugs). I have never got the hang of gun-fired mini-flaks. As for subcalliber munitions, I hope we get the non-payload option at some point - emulating them with payloads is not very good for your framerate. It's not like melting through a gunship is particularly hard - I can make a bit bigger, Hellfire style drone even out of stock components, that should be able to make a mess out of gunship with a in a flight of two (with high velocity manual intercept, AI sucks with drones). Also, there is one thing your gun lacks compared to stock 60mm - tracking speed. It's good to be able to aim quickly, especially with something that may only have seconds in range.
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on May 7, 2018 23:48:57 GMT
True, with one exception: if they are rapid firing and accurate enough, they can keep hitting the same spot, which tends to cut through the armour. You can make the rod cannon accurate too, although that will make it a fair bit heavier than a comparable dinner plate gun. Faster drilling speed is good when your target is not stationary, a ship that's spinning due to lost fuel tanks can be hard to penetrate using a dinner plate gun, since no spot is going to stay still long enough for the guns to get through. I'm not really sure if a rod cannon is worth the extra cost though. That would be very nice, yeah. You also lose tracers when using a payload, which is a big drawback when using subcaliber rounds. I haven't really found fast tracking to be useful unless your ship goes into a spin, and at that point you're usually dead anyway so it doesn't matter too much. Usually your ship will just keep its nose pointed at the enemy until it collides or passes the ship, which doesn't really need too much tracking.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on May 8, 2018 0:01:37 GMT
Faster drilling speed is good when your target is not stationary, a ship that's spinning due to lost fuel tanks can be hard to penetrate using a dinner plate gun, since no spot is going to stay still long enough for the guns to get through. For sufficiently high rates of fire every target is stationary. Actually, I think that the best solution here would be an ability to put tracers on anything classed as payload. High velocity passes, last-ditch CIWS, etc.
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on May 8, 2018 0:19:15 GMT
Faster drilling speed is good when your target is not stationary, a ship that's spinning due to lost fuel tanks can be hard to penetrate using a dinner plate gun, since no spot is going to stay still long enough for the guns to get through. For sufficiently high rates of fire every target is stationary. maximum firerate says otherwise although you can circumvent it if you're a genius like me!
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Post by Kerr on May 8, 2018 17:26:16 GMT
Don't use guns. Not chemical, not railgun nor coilgun. They don't work.
Use 100 MW lasers. They work.
Join the laser faction today.Perfection. Thanks for spreading the truth.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on May 8, 2018 17:32:32 GMT
For sufficiently high rates of fire every target is stationary. maximum firerate says otherwise although you can circumvent it if you're a genius like me! Point taken, but even stock 60mm is great at sawing ships in half (and creating tons of lag in the process). If the target is spinning so fast that the stock 60mm can't keep up, it's probably not an immediate threat any more. Also, I give you this - getting downright silly with stock 33mm cannons: (I built it for a cannon only, stock only run of Solar Ties, as saturating the budgets with 1kt ships (each with 60mm cannons and 10x 33mm spinal battery) put them in way too tight formation.)
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Post by tangentialthreat on May 18, 2018 7:01:02 GMT
It's tiny! Check out that 10 cm barrel and middling muzzle velocity.
Adorable! No engines, whole thing only weighs 3.6 kg.
And a 116 gram nuclear reactor, of which 100 g is fuel!
It has a big brother though.
I miniaturized a gun enough to fire it out of another, larger gun.
Gunception works really well against stock missiles because it still has adequate small-target killing power and this system can effectively switch targets faster than any other pure chemgun ever. Moving your point defense guns closer to the enemy is a massive bonus and is the only valuable lesson learned from this project. The rate of fire and sheer amount of dakka just dissolves armor piece by piece, and the primary bullets are still 3.6 kilograms moving at a respectable 2.05 km/s. Catastrophically increase the loader wattage if you want even more GPU-melting dakka overdrive.
There is one massive weakness that may be a bug. If the gunception primary fires while the ship is accelerating then secondaries tumble on exit, and it can never stop tumbling it has no thrusters. This makes it very difficult for the turret on the secondary to hit anything. You have to turn the ship engines off to really get the full effect and ensure stable projectile flight. Gun drones with fluorine/hydrogen rockets don't have this problem - design those and put them in blast launchers if you want something practical.
But if you feel you need gunception in your life, here is the Steam link.
Oh, and the game reliably crashes if you load a payload into a chem gun without it having any armor layer. Don't worry I gave it half a millimeter of graphogel.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on May 20, 2018 15:45:48 GMT
You can alleviate tumbling by attaching more than one turret around central ammo bin and moving them behind the center mass. It will still tumble, but less and will be less affected by it. I have a PD nuke following this concept (with four tiny sub-kg microturrets I copied from somewhere and modified to suit my needs) and also working on building microturrets into my continuous rod munitions, since they already use radiators to cause damage. Your reactor seems unphysical, BTW, why not a sub-pocket sized RTG? You can make one massing 2g using curium if you don't mind having to downclock the autoloader a bit.
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siskinedge
New Member
Working on a All conventional guns single ship campaign run
Posts: 18
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Post by siskinedge on Jul 10, 2018 14:03:06 GMT
I've got a decent design here I posted for the heavy weapons challenge: steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1222578447It's got a 3.72km/s muzzle velocity and fires 25g rounds. you can use it on drones reasonably well if you lower the loader speed to reduce power and weight. I might be uploading soon some of my newer designs though. I got a (barely) functional point defence design working with chem cannons recently, needed a lot of tweaking though. the point defense side for chemical guns is difficult due to the lower comparative muzzle velocity though with the higher comparative projectile weight they can make up for that with flares.
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