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Post by tepidbread on Nov 4, 2018 21:39:59 GMT
I am not sure power draw really matters all that much. The smallest ship reactor I use is 400MW. The stock designs are really horrible when it comes to power output. Especially in terms of weight. So lots of coilguns is quite viable.
Also,that coilgun design looks quite wicked despite the low muzzle velocity. It seems really long though. Is the iron shattering if you try to decrease the barrel length? If not, you could increase the power consumption and shorten the barrel to achieve the same muzzle velocity.
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Post by airc777 on Nov 4, 2018 22:00:12 GMT
One 50 MW reactor could drive ten or more of those 50 MW non capacitor coilguns. The loaders only draw 10 KW of power, the guns don't draw 50 MW at all times because they aren't filling capacitors. You should be able to half the size of the reactor. Electric actuators should greatly reduce the power draw of aiming the turrets so they can all turn and shoot at the same time. That does not work since the gun fires every frame, and hence draws 50 MW constantly. If I drop reload speed by a factor of 10, I can support 10 guns with one 50 MW reactor, which is interesting. I never thought the game would take that into account, since having a faster loader than firing time allows you to shoot at maximum firerate without increasing your power draw, effectively allowing efficiencies above 100%. Are they not all firing? How do you tell?
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Nov 4, 2018 22:39:16 GMT
That does not work since the gun fires every frame, and hence draws 50 MW constantly. If I drop reload speed by a factor of 10, I can support 10 guns with one 50 MW reactor, which is interesting. I never thought the game would take that into account, since having a faster loader than firing time allows you to shoot at maximum firerate without increasing your power draw, effectively allowing efficiencies above 100%. Are they not all firing? How do you tell? Maybe it actually takes firing time into account for coil guns? Looks like about half of your guns are firing, which would correspond roughly with a 33 ms simulation tick divided by the ~1.5 ms firing time. If that's really how this works, non-capacitor coilguns are far better than I've thought previously.
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Nov 4, 2018 22:59:58 GMT
Ran a quick test that seems to confirm my previous theory. 10 guns, 33 ms reload, 23 ms firing time; only one gun at a time fires due to power not being sufficient: 20 ms reload, 1.1 ms firing time, all 29 guns fire with each gun having 1 GW draw and only having 1 GW mounted on the ship: This is big news, since this means non-capacitor coilguns are not made useless by their extremely short firing times. You can get significantly lighter gun loadouts with coilguns at 20 km/s muzzle velocities than you could with railguns, assuming you want an absolutely massive rate of fire. Plus you'll be firing needles for free without losing efficiency to having a separate armature.
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Post by airc777 on Nov 4, 2018 23:21:42 GMT
I tend to use non capped rail guns as ciws in addition to having capped railguns for anti capital. (When not just using conventional guns or lasers for ciws.) Capped railguns are great, but they don't make the volume of fire to guarantee that a large formation of missiles won't destroy my ship. Having a few GW of capped guns supplemented by even just 100 MW of non capped guns makes for a good all round gunship. I haven't tried coils in a while, I'm going to have to give them another try. Plus now that I know that firing time is the actual limiting factor I can go back and re optimize the number of ciws guns on my ships.
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Post by doctorsquared on Nov 5, 2018 1:05:09 GMT
I've been tinkering with my 1kg Autocannon design and applying some of the lessons learned from my ultralight ~500g total mass drone gun design. - Replaced the original chromium vanadium steel barrel with one made of high-grade carbon fiber epoxy composite to save weight.
- Switched barrel armor from diamond to boron nitride for improved heat transfer
- Changed the propellant from nitrocelluose to octogen to increase weapon efficiency.
End result reduced a 13 ton gun down to 3.64 tons.
I'm pretty sure carbon fiber epoxy is a "future tech" mod, but nonetheless, a good improvement. One question though, why not use a harder projectile. Iron is nice and all, but it shatters pretty easy against any actually tough bulkhead armor. Iron was just the cheapest thing that wouldn't shatter in the barrel. I've since switched to vanadium chromium steel and plan on also trying tungsten and depleted uranium. The carbon fiber is from the Community Materials Pack. While not currently used in ship and armored vehicle cannons, carbon fiber barrels are currently gaining acceptance in high-end small arms, they usually consist of a thin stainless steel/high strength steel alloy inner layer to hold the rifling and serve as a wear layer that resists the friction of the bullet leaving the barrel and any corrosives generated by the propellant with a carbon fiber epoxy composite sleeve bonded around it to provide stiffness and heat dissipation, leaving you with a lightweight barrel that's a fair bit stiffer than a conventional steel one. Part of the problem with such a design in a CODE gun is that we're making heavy machine guns/autocannons which generate tremendous amounts of heat. Since we can't take a page out of Sir Hiram Maxim's playbook and build a jacket filled with a coolant that allows the barrel to act as a radiator we need a heavy barrel to soak up that heat, which is something that a VCS barrel with a carbon fiber epoxy is ineffective at doing at a reasonable thickness. Ideally, my construction would be VCS inner sleeve, carbon fiber epoxy composite stiffening layer, and then a CVD outer layer of boron nitride to act as a heatsink but we're limited to two layer barrel designs.
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Post by airc777 on Nov 5, 2018 2:55:39 GMT
I'm pretty sure carbon fiber epoxy is a "future tech" mod, but nonetheless, a good improvement. One question though, why not use a harder projectile. Iron is nice and all, but it shatters pretty easy against any actually tough bulkhead armor. Iron was just the cheapest thing that wouldn't shatter in the barrel. I've since switched to vanadium chromium steel and plan on also trying tungsten and depleted uranium. The carbon fiber is from the Community Materials Pack. While not currently used in ship and armored vehicle cannons, carbon fiber barrels are currently gaining acceptance in high-end small arms, they usually consist of a thin stainless steel/high strength steel alloy inner layer to hold the rifling and serve as a wear layer that resists the friction of the bullet leaving the barrel and any corrosives generated by the propellant with a carbon fiber epoxy composite sleeve bonded around it to provide stiffness and heat dissipation, leaving you with a lightweight barrel that's a fair bit stiffer than a conventional steel one. Part of the problem with such a design in a CODE gun is that we're making heavy machine guns/autocannons which generate tremendous amounts of heat. Since we can't take a page out of Sir Hiram Maxim's playbook and build a jacket filled with a coolant that allows the barrel to act as a radiator we need a heavy barrel to soak up that heat, which is something that a VCS barrel with a carbon fiber epoxy is ineffective at doing at a reasonable thickness. Ideally, my construction would be VCS inner sleeve, carbon fiber epoxy composite stiffening layer, and then a CVD outer layer of boron nitride to act as a heatsink but we're limited to two layer barrel designs. Diamond is far superior thermal diffuser and reasonably strong for its mass and will probably make a better barrel jacket in most cases. At this scale N.I.B. electric actuators will have a far lower power draw then momentum wheels at the expense of a slightly larger turret. 1.2 MJ sounds like a colossal amount of projectile energy and you probably could get away with less, but I don't know what your target is. If you do need 1.2 MJ you can achieve that with half the projectile and propellant mass by getting a higher muzzle velocity, which would also increase your effective range. I would strongly recommend not having an attached ammo bay and having a separate ammo module in a different location, if your turret gets destroyed it will detonate any attached ammo. Here is an example gun with the same projectile energy, more effective range, and more than double the fire rate, I also put more armor on it but I don't know what you are getting shot at by. It's heavier and has a higher power draw because I increased the fire rate, but you could decrease it as necessary. But really 1.2 MJ sounds massive.
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Post by AdmiralObvious on Nov 7, 2018 6:01:18 GMT
1.12 MJ is a piddly amount of projectile energy to the cannon I made not too long ago.
It's a 500mm cannon, firing 5 total half ton carbon steel slugs.
I've put a small turret on it, stuck it onto the nose of a drone, and had those drones fired from a blast launcher.
Needless to say, when you get a high enough intercept speed, and avoid the counter battery, this thing anhilates anything it touches with its 300+ MJ of projectile energy.
I'm just gonna need time to remember to upload it tomorrow.
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Post by dragonkid11 on Nov 7, 2018 9:05:17 GMT
How big are those drones to pack such a big cannons in them?
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Post by AdmiralObvious on Nov 7, 2018 17:11:12 GMT
How big are those drones to pack such a big cannons in them? About the size of the vanilla 50 man crew module. Though half of that size is the cannon.
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Post by airc777 on Nov 7, 2018 17:20:38 GMT
Cool, but how many meters of osmium are you trying to penetrate? I dig the efficient, low ammo capacity though.
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Post by AdmiralObvious on Nov 7, 2018 17:24:21 GMT
Cool, but how many meters of osmium are you trying to penetrate? I dig the efficient, low ammo capacity though. So far I've just tested it against stock ships. One shot, right now splits a gunship in half, assuming the round connects. Things with cheaper armor don't stand a chance.
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Post by AdmiralObvious on Nov 7, 2018 19:04:44 GMT
Aand... my hard drive died... I turned off cloud sync because it tended to mess up the game, so that's gone... Edit: Turns out sync was on! I removed the turret, since it seemed largely pointless and counter productive for keeping the DeltaV to keep the drone on target. It also sucked up a TON of power. I'm aware the muzzle velocity is poor, but look at that projectile energy! The only issue I've got with it is that the cost of the cannon rivals the cost of most high power nuclear weapons.
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Nov 7, 2018 23:52:53 GMT
You can do a bit better than that with perfectly legal coilguns:
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Post by AdmiralObvious on Nov 8, 2018 0:59:58 GMT
You can do a bit better than that with perfectly legal coilguns: My favorite part is that firing the thing sets it's temperature to absolute 0.
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