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Post by anonymous on Oct 12, 2018 2:32:42 GMT
It is mentioned on the "Armor" blog entry that sharp-nosed missiles are much more likely to survive than flat-nosed missiles (I'm assuming from the consequent effect of the nose essentially becoming sloped armor). Why does this not apply to ships and drones? Virtually all of the stock ships have a flat nose.
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Post by anotherfirefox on Oct 12, 2018 4:20:35 GMT
Because stock ships suck and poorly optimized. You can see that Corvette and Gunship have pointy nose and surprisingly sturdy.
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Post by AdmiralObvious on Oct 12, 2018 4:47:18 GMT
It's also marginally cheaper to not have a pointed nose. But that's probably not why it's the case in game for most of the stock ships.
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Post by treptoplax on Oct 12, 2018 16:31:08 GMT
Depends on your expected combat alignment, too. If you're mostly expecting to be flying broadside using main engines to dodge, the nose won't be facing the enemy and it may as well be blunt.
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Post by newageofpower on Oct 12, 2018 19:37:40 GMT
Depends on your expected combat alignment, too. If you're mostly expecting to be flying broadside using main engines to dodge, the nose won't be facing the enemy and it may as well be blunt. Broadside armor is massively, massively inferior to pointy needles, though.
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Post by anonymous on Oct 12, 2018 19:44:51 GMT
It's also marginally cheaper to not have a pointed nose. But that's probably not why it's the case in game for most of the stock ships. I considered this, but the same can be said for missiles. In fact proportionally it is less expensive to add a pointed nose to capital ships with typical armor because of the square-cube law. Depends on your expected combat alignment, too. If you're mostly expecting to be flying broadside using main engines to dodge, the nose won't be facing the enemy and it may as well be blunt. This is very true, but if this were the reason then most stock capital ships wouldn't be tapered at all.
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Post by anotherfirefox on Oct 12, 2018 23:48:15 GMT
Depends on your expected combat alignment, too. If you're mostly expecting to be flying broadside using main engines to dodge, the nose won't be facing the enemy and it may as well be blunt. Broadside armor is massively, massively inferior to pointy needles, though. Only if you don't have enough acceleration. The point of going broadside is dodging, so your armour don't need to stand harsh salvo but a few bullets.
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Post by anonymous on Oct 13, 2018 1:12:07 GMT
The point of going broadside is dodging, so your armour don't need to stand harsh salvo but a few bullets. I believe you're mistaken; broadside gives you a much greater cross-sectional area and so is extremely counter-productive for avoiding projectiles. Broadside is good for when you want to point a lot of guns at the enemy.
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Post by anotherfirefox on Oct 13, 2018 2:03:55 GMT
I believe you're mistaken; broadside gives you a much greater cross-sectional area and so is extremely counter-productive for avoiding projectiles. Broadside is good for when you want to point a lot of guns at the enemy. You can't concentrate fire with nose pointing ship when dodging, when broadside can fire it's 100% weaponry while dodging perpendicular. With 0.5~1G acceleration you can be invulnerable against kinetic guns while beating your enemy hard as you can.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Oct 13, 2018 13:02:19 GMT
- For the most part stock ships aren't very well designed, even accounting for their unoptimized (and often borderline suicidally designed - devastators, nuke cannons) components.
- A lot of stock ships do have pointed noses, especially those that are designed for direct combat - Corvette, Laser Frigate, Gunship, Marauder. The remaining ones are mostly either carriers or missile ships (so not really meant to go into direct combat and if they do mostly meant to try to get away safely, not fly at the enemy guns blazing), mount decoy launcher on the nose (which had its merits prior to the last patch when gimballed motors were easily destroyed by nukes) or use nose mounted armaments (with which you currently can't really have pointed nose save for some special cases and obsessive tweaking - see my "Garuda" class Dreadnought). Some stock ships, even those with spinal armaments, do have rounded noses which is still better than flat ones in terms of withstanding enemy fire.
- All stock drones are relatively simple devices with spinal armaments and no concessions to survivability (a mistake IMNSHO as having only a tiny and possibly redundant remote control to worry about makes it easy to build something that will keep working even after it gets Swiss cheesed).
- Pointed noses do carry a mass and cost penalty (although considering that you can skimp on overall armour thickness they are likely to more than pay for themselves - as long as you can ensure nose-forward orientation, which is a limitation in itself).
I believe you're mistaken; broadside gives you a much greater cross-sectional area and so is extremely counter-productive for avoiding projectiles. Broadside is good for when you want to point a lot of guns at the enemy. It is trivial to build a ship that can point all or most of its guns at the enemy in nose forward configuration - certainly easier than doing it for broadside, especially accounting for AI limitations.
OTOH dodging sideways doesn't really work too well in game (although mainly due to AI limitations - see here for my further musings on the subject). Broadside configuration also has the advantage of making it easier to completely hide the radiators and of not stacking all the critical components one in front of another inside of small cross-section in which the enemy will concentrate all their fire - broadside craft will be much easier to damage, but harder to destroy entirely once the armour is breached. OTOH needleship armour advantage is really hard to ignore.
Personally, I don't commit to either philosophy instead opting for hybrids that can quickly reorient from dodging enemy fire completely in broadside configuration to tanking it nose forward. Of course AI is kinda lousy at that.
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Post by anotherfirefox on Oct 13, 2018 13:15:46 GMT
OTOH needleship armour advantage is really hard to ignore.
I found out that with decent acceleration(1G) and outranging weaponry you can keep your enemy away from approaching you enough to beat you up. If you start battle at 150km, even with more than 1G acceleration their closest approach is no more than 50km.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Oct 13, 2018 13:40:53 GMT
OTOH needleship armour advantage is really hard to ignore.
I found out that with decent acceleration(1G) and outranging weaponry you can keep your enemy away from approaching you enough to beat you up. If you start battle at 150km, even with more than 1G acceleration their closest approach is no more than 50km. The thing is here you assume both superior weaponry and acceleration to your enemy. That doesn't seem like good assumptions to make and the enemy can always hit you with lasers anyway - slope DOES help against lasers too.
Also there is a direct tradeoff between acceleration and combat endurance, although of course you should be able to throttle your propulsion IRL.
The AI doesn't seem that great at aiming either.
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Post by anotherfirefox on Oct 13, 2018 13:56:18 GMT
I found out that with decent acceleration(1G) and outranging weaponry you can keep your enemy away from approaching you enough to beat you up. If you start battle at 150km, even with more than 1G acceleration their closest approach is no more than 50km. The thing is here you assume both superior weaponry and acceleration to your enemy. That doesn't seem like good assumptions to make and the enemy can always hit you with lasers anyway - slope DOES help against lasers too.
Also there is a direct tradeoff between acceleration and combat endurance, although of course you should be able to throttle your propulsion IRL.
The AI doesn't seem that great at aiming either.
I guess I was unclear. My ship has superior weapon range but acceleration was inferior. Even without range superiority, you can outmaneuver your enemy so can dictate where and when will the battle happen. About lasers, unless you make some deep fryer style huge mirrors (which would be vulnerable to some solid KKV) keeping outrange helps. The AI is especially shitty at aiming indeed, but it's physics that you can lower your chance to get hit by orders of magnitudes with some superior acceleration.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Oct 13, 2018 14:20:53 GMT
The thing is here you assume both superior weaponry and acceleration to your enemy. That doesn't seem like good assumptions to make and the enemy can always hit you with lasers anyway - slope DOES help against lasers too.
Also there is a direct tradeoff between acceleration and combat endurance, although of course you should be able to throttle your propulsion IRL.
The AI doesn't seem that great at aiming either.
I guess I was unclear. My ship has superior weapon range but acceleration was inferior. Even without range superiority, you can outmaneuver your enemy so can dictate where and when will the battle happen. About lasers, unless you make some deep fryer style huge mirrors (which would be vulnerable to some solid KKV) keeping outrange helps. The AI is especially shitty at aiming indeed, but it's physics that you can lower your chance to get hit by orders of magnitudes with some superior acceleration. But not keep dodging absolutely everything like you can currently.
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Post by anotherfirefox on Oct 13, 2018 14:31:46 GMT
But not keep dodging absolutely everything like you can currently. I didn't get it, can you paraphrase your words?
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