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Post by airc777 on Oct 8, 2018 19:18:26 GMT
This is my first post here and I'm not entirely sure where specifically to post this question. I'm 115 hours in this game and I'm not sure if the mission 'The Jovian Lunar Tour' is possible in the current patch.
The current stock Gunship weighs 11.7 Kt and has 4.24 Km/s of Delta V. I found a guide for the mission via google on forums.mudspike.com dated October of 2016 and it suggests the Gunship is 9.8 Kt and has 5.48 Km/s of Delta V.
The mission does not let you customize the gunship, or I would have already made a clone with far thinner armor, far lighter radiators, and far more efficient engines.
I don't believe I'm being particularly inefficient with my burns and gravity assists, but I'm having a hell of a time just getting the gunship where it needs to go. I've tried firing the flak missiles immediately at the start of the mission to give me extra Delta V to work with, but it doesn't give me much.
I can kill the marauders in orbit of Europa via a flyby without circularizing around Europa. I can get the gunship and the tanker to the Lagrange point, but I can't quite seem to get the gunship to intercept the fuel depot, even without fighting the marauders first. I can get the tanker to the fuel depot easily, but I can't seem to set the gunship as the frame of reference and I haven't been able to re-intercept it.
I have no idea how I'm going to get to the fleet in orbit of Io, let alone how I'm going to chase them down when they evade after I get there.
Is there something I'm just fundamentally miss understanding? Because this just doesn't look doable.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Oct 8, 2018 21:33:30 GMT
This is my first post here and I'm not entirely sure where specifically to post this question. I'm 115 hours in this game and I'm not sure if the mission 'The Jovian Lunar Tour' is possible in the current patch. The current stock Gunship weighs 11.7 Kt and has 4.24 Km/s of Delta V. I found a guide for the mission via google on forums.mudspike.com dated October of 2016 and it suggests the Gunship is 9.8 Kt and has 5.48 Km/s of Delta V. The mission does not let you customize the gunship, or I would have already made a clone with far thinner armor, far lighter radiators, and far more efficient engines. I don't believe I'm being particularly inefficient with my burns and gravity assists, but I'm having a hell of a time just getting the gunship where it needs to go. I've tried firing the flak missiles immediately at the start of the mission to give me extra Delta V to work with, but it doesn't give me much. I can kill the marauders in orbit of Europa via a flyby without circularizing around Europa. I can get the gunship and the tanker to the Lagrange point, but I can't quite seem to get the gunship to intercept the fuel depot, even without fighting the marauders first. I can get the tanker to the fuel depot easily, but I can't seem to set the gunship as the frame of reference and I haven't been able to re-intercept it. I have no idea how I'm going to get to the fleet in orbit of Io, let alone how I'm going to chase them down when they evade after I get there. Is there something I'm just fundamentally miss understanding? Because this just doesn't look doable.
If it's any help - that's how I have done it:
My strategy involved pummeling marauders with flaks from higher, retrograde orbit (because they are downright nasty against something like Gunship), and only going in to finish the job, revisiting the depot (this is crucial, you really want to refill before trying to get to Io), then trying to inject around Io (which I botched leaving me with insufficient delta-v so I went for fine tuned fly-by, while dropping missiles and decelerating a bit to let them fall ahead - final intercept was at around 6km/s while passing metres from enemy ships and firing everything, it also involved pre-launched missile screen).
Making your trip as follows: L4 -> Europa -> L4 -> Io
should work. With depot intercept you just need to tweak your trajectory and then find the right point on it to start the join manoeuvre.
Currently it's the last mission I haven't golded, partially due to trajectory calculation getting really computation heavy and due to floating point math getting wonky.
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Post by airc777 on Oct 8, 2018 23:29:08 GMT
Thanks for the input.
Do you mean a Europa gravity assist to the L4?
I'm not entirely sure what the most efficient way to approach the L4 is, but I don't think I could get a direct burn there unless I left one of the ships on 0 delta V.
Is it necessary to keep the tanker after the first time you make it to the depot?
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Post by airc777 on Oct 9, 2018 1:09:22 GMT
Ok, I'm doing some part of the burn just fundamentally wrong and I bet it has to do with the L4.
I know this because I finally manage to get to l4, Europa, the l4 again, and fly by Io. It took me 16.8 Km/s to do it, to gold this mission you need to do this in 9.26, how the hell do you do this in 9.26?
I did a direct burn to the l4. Then I did a very low periapsis flyby at Europa and barely captured into a highly elliptical orbit. I did about 3/4ths of an orbit and put myself on flyby of the Europa fleet, which took all remaining DV on the tanker so I left it floating. I destroyed the Europa fleet on the flyby. Chasing their evasion accidentally put me on a nearly free return to the l4, but I had barely any DV left, so I fired all the missiles and that made the difference of me intercepting the depot. I had damaged fuel tanks when I arrived at the depot, so I fast forwarded a few orbits until Io was in the correct spot to do the most efficient burn, and then I put myself on a direct flyby to the Io fleet. Once I arrived I managed to destroy one ship before the gunship was destroyed.
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Post by The Astronomer on Oct 9, 2018 3:29:18 GMT
Did you wait for the transfer window? Because if my memories are correct, to beat it in the delta-v limit, you probably have to wait for it and transfer during the window.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Oct 9, 2018 6:45:15 GMT
Transfer windows and orbit phasing are crucial in this mission (I still haven't achieved gold in it, only silver). One strategy I haven't tried is splitting off the tanker and have it fly loops between L4 and the gunship as it travels between battles.
Also, it's really important to keep both the tanker and the gunship in good shape (keep the tankage and those flimsy aluminium radiators intact!). Marauders' 60MW coilguns are nasty (and you don't want to be hit by cannons either), so it's a good idea to pummel them with flaks first. Missiles can also be helpful around Io, although the cutter may pose a problem there.
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Post by airc777 on Oct 9, 2018 15:16:34 GMT
Found my problem.
I was exiting the L4 to transfer to Europa in a very inefficient manner. Still haven't beat it, but now Delta V is a complete non issue.
Current problem is forcing the marauders to intercept.
I just spent more then an hour plotting 0.5 m/s correction burns to try and get either the missiles or the gunship to intercept, and they just kept evading. I had to walk away from the computer because I was just unreasonably mad at the end of that. I think part of the problem was they decided to evade by going into progressively lower orbits until they were just skimming the surface, which made for high relative velocity's between our two orbits and narrow viable approach angles between our orbits and Europa.
I really wish they would just react to your actual trajectory instead of your planed maneuvers, I'm tired of fighting mind readers. There is a damn good spy in my ranks and he needs to be thrown out the air lock.
Thanks for the support guys. I'm going to try again later, maybe.
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Post by The Astronomer on Oct 9, 2018 15:23:36 GMT
I really wish they would just react to your actual trajectory instead of your planed maneuvers, I'm tired of fighting mind readers. There is a damn good spy in my ranks and he needs to be thrown out the air lock. Go to Suggestions or report it as a bug Technical Support, maybe? |
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Oct 9, 2018 16:28:22 GMT
Found my problem. I was exiting the L4 to transfer to Europa in a very inefficient manner. Still haven't beat it, but now Delta V is a complete non issue. Current problem is forcing the marauders to intercept. I just spent more then an hour plotting 0.5 m/s correction burns to try and get either the missiles or the gunship to intercept, and they just kept evading. I had to walk away from the computer because I was just unreasonably mad at the end of that. I think part of the problem was they decided to evade by going into progressively lower orbits until they were just skimming the surface, which made for high relative velocity's between our two orbits and narrow viable approach angles between our orbits and Europa. I really wish they would just react to your actual trajectory instead of your planed maneuvers, I'm tired of fighting mind readers. There is a damn good spy in my ranks and he needs to be thrown out the air lock. Thanks for the support guys. I'm going to try again later, maybe. Marauders have very low thrust. If you inject into orbit some way above and launch flaks only making hard burns right before the intercept, they won't be able to evade (you might try going retrograde for that to exploit sluggishness of Marauders and to give their CIWS as little time as possible, but you might be worse off against their weapons should you need to intercept with your gunship).
Depending on all sorts of random factors you might be able to destroy the reactor on one or both ships or burst the tanks or take out the engine, separating ships and possibly causing one or both to perform lithobraking.
You might also accomplish little of note (hopefully after killing the engines) even with repeated flak salvoes, forcing you to enter gun range.
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Post by vegemeister on Oct 9, 2018 17:31:23 GMT
Do stock flak missiles even work with the current standoff warhead bug?
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Post by airc777 on Oct 9, 2018 19:14:49 GMT
I did it! The marauders seem less prone to evading the gunship if you don't also have the tanker in the gunships fleet. No idea why they are so scared of the tanker.
Edit: I think the AI's evasion decision making process is at least in part based on either total mass or total cost of the intercepting fleet, and not how actually dangerous it is. Previously when playing in sandbox with the Vesta Overkill scenario with a ship that cost more then a billion credits the attacking fleet would charge at it and then 180 before intercepting.
I ended up using the tanker during the Io fight, primarily just to give the opponent something else to shoot at other then the gunship. Worked great! Plus I had already done all the maneuvering, so the tankers survival didn't seem mission critical. Full mission profile ended up being: Direct burn to L4, intercept and refuel. Burn to retrograde Europa, captured to elliptical orbit, refueled and split fleet. Tanker immediate burn to L4 and intercept. Gunship maneuver at apoapsis for flyby, target made no attempt to evade. launched half of missile reserves without splitting fleet to screen the gunship from enemy fire, appeared to have negligible effectiveness but the gunship only lost one fuel tank and one radiator. Gunship burn to L4 and intercept, refuel. Fleet to retrograde Io, captured to strange 'zentangles' looking orbit. Maneuver at apoapsis for flyby. |
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Oct 9, 2018 20:20:58 GMT
Do stock flak missiles even work with the current standoff warhead bug? They do, interestingly enough.
I have around 650t stock ship that can kill a Gunship at gun range if it starts firing flaks right from the start of the intercept.
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Post by The Astronomer on Oct 10, 2018 2:43:41 GMT
Wait, you guys really brought the tanker into the battle? I always left it at the L4 station or something.
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Post by gedzilla on Oct 10, 2018 5:18:28 GMT
Found my problem. I was exiting the L4 to transfer to Europa in a very inefficient manner. Still haven't beat it, but now Delta V is a complete non issue. Current problem is forcing the marauders to intercept. I just spent more then an hour plotting 0.5 m/s correction burns to try and get either the missiles or the gunship to intercept, and they just kept evading. I had to walk away from the computer because I was just unreasonably mad at the end of that. I think part of the problem was they decided to evade by going into progressively lower orbits until they were just skimming the surface, which made for high relative velocity's between our two orbits and narrow viable approach angles between our orbits and Europa. I really wish they would just react to your actual trajectory instead of your planed maneuvers, I'm tired of fighting mind readers. There is a damn good spy in my ranks and he needs to be thrown out the air lock. Thanks for the support guys. I'm going to try again later, maybe. Increased intelligence realism is bothering you ? Think how the syrians must have felt |
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Oct 10, 2018 9:31:44 GMT
Wait, you guys really brought the tanker into the battle? I always left it at the L4 station or something. I mostly split and rejoin if I have nothing to do with it. |
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