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Post by Apotheon on Oct 28, 2018 20:55:19 GMT
Hey, for a few months on and off I've started to get into guns and armour. I've created a civilian spacecraft template (112 tons) and now I'm gonna start placing guns on it, then armour that can stop the guns and work my way up through the calibres. I’m starting with conventional guns and monolith armour. Also, max 1 MW (reasonable?) and for starters I’ve built a 1-ton gun, but I’m probably gonna move up to about 10-100 tons eventually. After cannons, I’m gonna move on to railguns and coilguns, but question is whether I should just move on directly to the lasers instead? I’ve heard lasers win against everything, but is that valid even in the 1 MW range? I’m also curious whether armour is worth having at all… I guess I may end up using only lasers and armouring only against lasers, because VCS is awful, but maybe a 7-layer composite can convince me armour is worth it?
Anyway, my current strategy is a VCS-osmium communion gun that shoots 1-gram coins and for the 1-ton gun (60% of mass is turret… I should probably go internal!) and my only attempt at armour is VCS. Muzzle velocity is my first priority to outrange the opponents and I’m guessing the optimal cannon is a gun that shoots small coins as fast as possible for a given mass of the entire weapon system. In other words, I choose a max mass and I get a muzzle velocity as input/output. My 1-ton gun gets to about 4 km/s.
Anyway, I’m probably going to continue working on this for the rest of the year and my next step is probably building a bigger internal gun in the 70-ton range, aiming for a total spacecraft mass of about 224 tons, then build an armour that can stop it and also switch to methane instead of dew if the armour makes it a worthwhile action.
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Post by bigbombr on Oct 28, 2018 21:25:01 GMT
Hey, for a few months on and off I've started to get into guns and armour. I've created a civilian spacecraft template (112 tons) and now I'm gonna start placing guns on it, then armour that can stop the guns and work my way up through the calibres. I’m starting with conventional guns and monolith armour. Also, max 1 MW (reasonable?) and for starters I’ve built a 1-ton gun, but I’m probably gonna move up to about 10-100 tons eventually. Conventional cannons are indeed a good weapon system to get started, as they're comparatively easy. I recommend you try railguns next, as coilguns are a little more fiddly (and multistage capacitor coilguns are currently crippled by a bug) and lasers are quite a bit of effort to get working (though once you have a working template scaling up and down is easy). 1 MW isn't a lot of juice, and at that power level lasers are of limited use and railguns probably suffer from low rates of fire. Railguns and especially lasers really start to shine when you feed them considerable amounts of energy (dozens or hundreds of MW). After cannons, I’m gonna move on to railguns and coilguns, but question is whether I should just move on directly to the lasers instead? I’ve heard lasers win against everything, but is that valid even in the 1 MW range? I’m also curious whether armour is worth having at all… I guess I may end up using only lasers and armouring only against lasers, because VCS is awful, but maybe a 7-layer composite can convince me armour is worth it? I personally almost exclusively use lasers, laserdrones and missiles, but each has their own preference. Lasers aren't unbeatable, but how much of their succes and limitations are realistic remains to be seen. Kinetics (conventional cannons, railguns and coilguns) tend to penetrate heavy armor better than lasers, but lasers are king of component sniping. They also make for very good point defense. Most of my craft are barely armored, mostly focusing on anti-laser armor and being dirt cheap. There are several threads on armor design on this forum you might be interested in. Diamond, polyethylene, VCS, aramid fibre, graphite aerogel, spider silk, amorpheus carbon, ... are often components of composite armor designs.
Anyway, my current strategy is a VCS-osmium communion gun that shoots 1-gram coins and for the 1-ton gun (60% of mass is turret… I should probably go internal!) and my only attempt at armour is VCS. Muzzle velocity is my first priority to outrange the opponents and I’m guessing the optimal cannon is a gun that shoots small coins as fast as possible for a given mass of the entire weapon system. In other words, I choose a max mass and I get a muzzle velocity as input/output. My 1-ton gun gets to about 4 km/s. Conventional cannons have a poor muzzle velocity and get increasingly inefficient the closer they get to their limits. For high velocity projectiles, railguns are better. For conventional cannons, you're often better off aiming for a muzzle velocity of ~2 km/s but projectiles of dozens or even hundreds of grams. Think of lasers and railguns as long range weapons that cripple your opponent by stripping of radiators and weapons, and conventional cannons as armor perforating close quarter weapons performing a coup de grâce.
Anyway, I’m probably going to continue working on this for the rest of the year and my next step is probably building a bigger internal gun in the 70-ton range, aiming for a total spacecraft mass of about 224 tons, then build an armour that can stop it and also switch to methane instead of dew if the armour makes it a worthwhile action. Internal weapons often have trouble hitting (maneuvering) targets. Do you use gimbals for steering, differential steering or RCS? And what do you mean by "dew"? Heavy armor tends to favor dense propellants (decane, RP-1) while high delta-v favors propellants that give high exhaust velocities (methane, hydrogen deuteride) with the hydrocarbons between methane and decane (light>ethane, propane, butane, pentane, hexane>dense) being a compromise of density and exhaust velocity. Assuming NTR's and resistojets, that is. Combustion rockets and magnetoplasmadynamic drives play by slightly different rules.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Oct 28, 2018 22:05:22 GMT
If you want range and muzzle velocity, chemguns are about the worst thing you can use short of throwing kitty litter out of airlock.
Cannons do pretty much three things well, neither of which is velocity: - Measly power requirements - you can fire a gun and fire it rapidly for funny amount of power. This means that guns make good armaments for low-powered drones, tiny subcap ships, and great secondary weapons and CIWS, as they avoid draining power from main weapons. Unless it's a disgustingly huge behemoth of a cannon, even 1MW is an awful lot of power for chemical gun.
- Speaking of disgustingly huge behemoths - the other thing cannons do well is scaling up in terms of projectile mass. Trying to make a heavy hitting railgun with reasonable power draw while retaining good exit velocity is an exercise in frustration. Coilguns fare a bit better but they still don't exactly excel at heavy shelling. Conventional gun? Even small ones can easily fire tens of g slugs without meaningful extra mass, power consumption or decrease in the rate of fire. Want more? Just increase the bore size and load more propellant - BLAM! It's easy to retain (admittedly still unimpressive) exit velocity even with tens of kg per shell. This means two things:
- Chemguns make excellent targetted payload launchers. Have small enough missile? Fire it out of gun. Have a nice, compact nuclear device? Fire it out of gun. have a fun arrangement of blast launchers that shreds ships when it is fired at them? Fire it out of a gun. Have a small enough gun with compact RTG? Fire your gun out of a gun. Want to put your blast launchers on your nuke and adorn it with a few microturrets? Fire the whole thing out of a gun. In fact making a huge cannon firing massive slugs is a complete waste of a gun - when individual slug's mass is no longer an issue it's much better to fire complex payloads than dumb slugs. And, when firing missiles, the exit velocity is less important than having missile oriented right, going in the right direction and the fact that every little bit of extra delta-v helps - even something the size of stock strikers and flaks can be fired out of guns (and that's without velocity warning) and firing even stock flak missile (which is rather bad) out of a cannon really improves its direct combat effectiveness.
- Chemguns become devastating as intercept velocity increases. 20km/s railgun will easily outrange and destroy a conventional gun armed ship no matter how large those guns are simply by spraying it with sufficient number of its tiny 1g pellets - unless the intercept happens in low orbit around something like Uranus and instead of 20km/s VS 2km/s slugs, you are dealing with 40km/s 1g pellets VS 20km/s tens of g or even multi-kg slugs. Fired at high rate. Possibly dispersing submunitions. Using only a tiny fraction of railguns reactor power and requiring much smaller ship with much smaller radiators.
- Third advantage of chemguns is making lemonade of the lemons life gives you - making their low velocity an asset. High velocity round vaporizes when impacting whipple shields - it can be stopped effectively by very lightweight armor. Heavy, low velocity projectile won't even notice the whipple shielding and might not even think much of the bulkhead armour. Of course this assumes low closing speed, otherwise even low velocity projectiles on launch become high velocity ones on impact, but then see #2 so it's win-win.
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Post by AdmiralObvious on Oct 29, 2018 1:00:26 GMT
I very much like conventional guns. Overall, for their niche, they are very useful, and as mentioned, make exceptional payload throwers. (The stock nuke cannon is an example. A bad one, but still an example.)
As for how you use the armor, you're going to need to do multiple different types of armor based on what you're getting shot at by.
The only good way to stop a 1 ton shell is at least another ton of armor (or something dense/hard enough to bounce the shot, but you're still going to need armor). Chemguns are best beat with acceleration and rate of direction change. Of course throwing the gun at high speeds adds an additive boost to the normal velocity, and can make conventional guns devastating, like the stock stinger drones.
Sandblasters for energy weapons on the other hand are easily beat with thin layers of most materials. You usually aren't going to he able to dodge hypervelocity sand, but you can usually armor against it fairly easily, as long as you don't mind ballooning the armor profile.
Lasers are going to need more than 1 MW of input power. They aren't very useful with less than that, except occasionally as point defense, but even then the target it's trying to melt will matter significantly.
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Post by Apotheon on Oct 29, 2018 14:45:26 GMT
And what do you mean by "dew"?
Dew = deuteride... it's hip!
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Oct 29, 2018 16:11:08 GMT
(The stock nuke cannon is an example. A bad one, but still an example.) The stock Nuke cannon is more of a case of a hilariously awful turret. The gun itself isn't that bad. And that's the part people who dismiss chemguns too often ignore. It's not the exit velocity that matters, it's closing rate and impact velocity, and you can carry quite a lot of that in your propellant tanks (along with part of your anti-kinetic armour) not to mention whatever you can milk out of your current gravwell. For conventional gun it's better to think the actual gun as terminal guidance system for your kinetic slugs rather than thing that deals damage.
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Post by bigbombr on Oct 29, 2018 17:14:24 GMT
And that's the part people who dismiss chemguns too often ignore. It's not the exit velocity that matters, it's closing rate and impact velocity, and you can carry quite a lot of that in your propellant tanks (along with part of your anti-kinetic armour) not to mention whatever you can milk out of your current gravwell. For conventional gun it's better to think the actual gun as terminal guidance system for your kinetic slugs rather than thing that deals damage. At that point, why not just use missiles though? KKV's can be dirt cheap, have a respectable dry mass that will punch through most armor when it hits at several km/s. And it can adjust it's course, and it can be use for indirect fire on top of that. And blast launchers mean you can have ludicrous rates of fire at no power cost (even less than conventional cannons). IMO, there is no reason to go with cannons firing fragmentation warheads, nukes or inert slugs over fragmentation missiles, nuclear missiles and KKV's. You could of course launch a missile out of a cannon, but I get the impression that increasing delta-v through drop tanks is less expensive than launching them out of a gun. There might be a break even point from where cannon launched missiles are more cost-effective than missiles with drop tanks, but I suspect that said break even point would be thousands of missiles. Cannons are expensive when compared with blast launchers.
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Post by tepidbread on Oct 29, 2018 17:15:23 GMT
After cannons, I’m gonna move on to railguns and coilguns, but question is whether I should just move on directly to the lasers instead? I’ve heard lasers win against everything, but is that valid even in the 1 MW range?
Lasers are tough to get right. And even then, they are underwhelming in my opinion. Even with 12 Gw worth of lasers I am still not able to beat some of my rail gun designs. Specifically my 1GW 303km/s [0.001c] rail gun. It shoots 1g projectiles at insane velocities and can engage targets at 1.68Mm. With 50 MJ of energy per impact Whipple shields tend to disintegrate pretty fast. And monolithic armor is just begging to be shattered and spalled everywhere.
However, since I made that railgun I have decided that my more modest 150 km/s gun is better due to higher accuracy, less weight and much faster rate of fire. And it can still mess up a significantly more massive laser setup.
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Post by airc777 on Oct 29, 2018 17:30:14 GMT
Lasers are tough to get right. And even then, they are underwhelming in my opinion. Even with 12 Gw worth of lasers I am still not able to beat some of my rail gun designs. Specifically my 1GW 303km/s [0.001c] rail gun. It shoots 1g projectiles at insane velocities and can engage targets at 1.68Mm. Spam lots and lots and lots of 100 mw lasers with 50 cm apertures, have lots of redundant turrets, set the engagement range to whatever distance your laser makes 200 mw/m^2, have backup kinetic guns for when your turrets get shot off, prioritize targeting the enemies weapons. They're far better at swatting drones and missiles then burning through capital ship armor but you can make them work. More is better then bigger.
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Post by tepidbread on Oct 29, 2018 18:22:54 GMT
I think I am doing it wrong then... I will have to try this later:
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Post by airc777 on Oct 29, 2018 18:37:08 GMT
Let me know how it goes. I haven't had much luck building high power lasers because massed low power lasers have always be able to snipe my high power lasers turrets before they can be useful, but just having a lot of low power turrets has a far faster time to kill against drones massed drones then any big laser or rail gun I've built. Your laser dreadnought looks scary though, maybe you've had more luck then me with big lasers.
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Post by bigbombr on Oct 29, 2018 18:58:07 GMT
Let me know how it goes. I haven't had much luck building high power lasers because massed low power lasers have always be able to snipe my high power lasers turrets before they can be useful, but just having a lot of low power turrets has a far faster time to kill against drones massed drones then any big laser or rail gun I've built. Your laser dreadnought looks scary though, maybe you've had more luck then me with big lasers. The low power lasers sniping high powered lasers was especially bad a few updates ago thanks to a bug. Many small lasers being more effective than few powerful lasers is thanks to the ablation cap. Laser damage isn't modeled accurately at all.
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Post by airc777 on Oct 29, 2018 19:37:32 GMT
I feel like we're getting off topic a bit but: I just re-ran some tests with my big lasers. My ship with three one gigawatt lasers with 3 meter apertures making 200 mw/m^2 @ 1 megameter can laser all the guns off a smaller railgun ship with worse range, but then it has no way of confirming the kill at that distance. The same ship against thirty 100 mw lasers with 50 cm apertures lost in seconds. If your's can do better then you know something I don't, which I don't doubt considering how bad my ship is.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Oct 29, 2018 20:18:07 GMT
At that point, why not just use missiles though? KKV's can be dirt cheap, have a respectable dry mass that will punch through most armor when it hits at several km/s. And it can adjust it's course, and it can be use for indirect fire on top of that. And blast launchers mean you can have ludicrous rates of fire at no power cost (even less than conventional cannons). IMO, there is no reason to go with cannons firing fragmentation warheads, nukes or inert slugs over fragmentation missiles, nuclear missiles and KKV's. You could of course launch a missile out of a cannon, but I get the impression that increasing delta-v through drop tanks is less expensive than launching them out of a gun. There might be a break even point from where cannon launched missiles are more cost-effective than missiles with drop tanks, but I suspect that said break even point would be thousands of missiles. Cannons are expensive when compared with blast launchers. In general? There are going to be tradeoffs between scaling down, cost, selectivity, re-usability and whether or not continuous guidance adds anything beyond certain point that dictate whether missiles or slugs are going to work better in given scenario. In game? Missiles are dumb and inflexible, drop-tanks are awful performance hogs, while adding blast launchers to a missile turns it into a drone and causes all kinds of AI antics, so putting blast launchers and microturrets on a warhead that has no say in where it is going can be favourable. Gun is effectively a reusable blast launcher which might be favourable if you want a large armour store, but don't want to put large, explosive targets on your hull - think torpedo tube. Also we have no turreted blast launchers.
Let me know how it goes. I haven't had much luck building high power lasers because massed low power lasers have always be able to snipe my high power lasers turrets before they can be useful, but just having a lot of low power turrets has a far faster time to kill against drones massed drones then any big laser or rail gun I've built. Your laser dreadnought looks scary though, maybe you've had more luck then me with big lasers. The low power lasers sniping high powered lasers was especially bad a few updates ago thanks to a bug. Many small lasers being more effective than few powerful lasers is thanks to the ablation cap. Laser damage isn't modeled accurately at all. I have actually been a bit guilty of abusing it recently as I modified my Dragon class (update still unpublished as I write this) by replacing the second violet laser with a whole bunch of extra green ones. In my defence the main motivation was more granular firing and targetting of the laser battery allowing more fluid switching between kinetic weapons and lasers and choice between firing at multiple targets at once (the goal was good 10:1 performance against stock gunships - partially achieved by targetting the crew radiators on multiple ships) and concentrated fire, rather than abuse of ablation cap.
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Post by bigbombr on Oct 29, 2018 20:45:41 GMT
At that point, why not just use missiles though? KKV's can be dirt cheap, have a respectable dry mass that will punch through most armor when it hits at several km/s. And it can adjust it's course, and it can be use for indirect fire on top of that. And blast launchers mean you can have ludicrous rates of fire at no power cost (even less than conventional cannons). IMO, there is no reason to go with cannons firing fragmentation warheads, nukes or inert slugs over fragmentation missiles, nuclear missiles and KKV's. You could of course launch a missile out of a cannon, but I get the impression that increasing delta-v through drop tanks is less expensive than launching them out of a gun. There might be a break even point from where cannon launched missiles are more cost-effective than missiles with drop tanks, but I suspect that said break even point would be thousands of missiles. Cannons are expensive when compared with blast launchers. In general? There are going to be tradeoffs between scaling down, cost, selectivity, re-usability and whether or not continuous guidance adds anything beyond certain point that dictate whether missiles or slugs are going to work better in given scenario. In a different thread I mentioned that lasers have endurance while missiles have burst damage potential. Cannons (and kinetic in general) are a jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none compromise. I suspect conventional cannons would IRL be a non-factor. Artillery starts getting inaccurate beyond 40-50 km. At longer ranges (60+ km) unguided munitions are almost useless unless used in insane quantities (making them inefficient to the point unguided long range munitions aren't in mainstream use). So IRL, conventional cannons might be close quarter weapons, but does this justify their mass? On modern naval ships, many gun-based CIWS are being supplanted by missile-based ones. I expect the same to hold true in space.
In game? Missiles are dumb and inflexible (IMO, dodge prediction has it's derpy moments too), drop-tanks are awful performance hogs (I don't have any trouble with them, but I tend to use fewer larger drop tanks rather than many tiny ones), while adding blast launchers to a missile turns it into a drone and causes all kinds of AI antics (true), so putting blast launchers and microturrets on a warhead that has no say in where it is going can be favourable (aren't gun launched guns more of a gimmick? Unless you're referring to drones, which are better launched by blast launcher). Gun is effectively a reusable blast launcher which might be favourable if you want a large armour store, but don't want to put large, explosive targets on your hull - think torpedo tube (regular launcher can be of use in that case, but at least blast launchers are easier to hide behind armor bulges without impeding it's function). Also we have no turreted blast launchers. Which is a shame. Externally mounted blast launchers that can be dropped (like drop tanks) would also be nice, and would allow for smaller arsenal craft.
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