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Post by Amistad on Nov 16, 2018 22:51:13 GMT
Hi all,
I've been plying around the web, but I can't find a reliable "formula" for designing anti-kinetic armor for warships. I don't really know what to put for armor in general - I usually stick with alternating chunks of VCS/RCC with some highly reflective material on top.
However, I've seen that there's a bunch of other options, IE formulas of composite armor that include spaced armor, spall lining, whipple shields, et cetera.
What would be the best armor for use against bursts of conventional gunfire, IE 5-10 gram projectiles, 30-50 MS reloads, and 2.5-3.5 projectile velocity? Is there any?
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Post by Pttg on Nov 16, 2018 23:53:33 GMT
You'll probably want a stuffed whipple backed up with a nice sturdy resitant layer, and finally a spalling-resistant layer on the very inside. I go for a nice carbon allotrope like Amorphous Carbon B/W spidersilk. For the whipple, magnesium is an excellent shield, especially stuffed with graphite areogel or, with some basic mods, expanded polystyrene.
Reflectivity is useless for laser armor. Go for stuff that eats up the energy. Nitrile rubber is a good choice.
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Post by airc777 on Nov 17, 2018 1:07:43 GMT
It’s also worth mentioning that it depends a lot on what shape the projectile is. 3 Mj of projectile in the shape of a needle is an entirely different monster then 3 Mj in the shape of a coin. Tin and platinum make good whipple shields, the problem is nuke flashes will remove them from your ships. Because of this I use amorphous carbon. Amarib fiber performs better than nitrile rubber if you don’t care about cost. Boron filament is also a good spall liner. It generally makes the most sense to armor your turrets against lasers specifically but you may find special use cases. Having the thinnest possible radiators and just carrying extras makes more sense than armoring them. Depending on the temperature required boron nitride or reinforced carbon carbon or calcium or lithium makes the lightest radiators. Amarib fiber is good blast launcher armor because it can hold pressure and it’s strong against lasers. Some internal redundancy is nice but it makes sense to treat penitrations as total losses and make internals as thin as possible, having said that go ahead and use fuel tanks as last resort shields for more mission critical internals. Vanadium chromium steel makes the thinnest fuel tanks. Denser fuels like rp1 make more sense in armored ships to reduce the crafts total size. Armor sloping is also very important. I think that’s about everything?
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Post by Pttg on Nov 17, 2018 1:13:14 GMT
DO NOT make radiators out of lithium or other very-low-temperature metals unless you want nuke flashes or flashlights to melt them off. Otherwise it makes good sense so far.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Nov 17, 2018 11:13:19 GMT
I usually go with boron filament/amorphous carbon/PBO fiber sandwich (most of the time sub-cm each, you'll pay through the nose for PBO anyway) as my bulk layer and spall lining (PBO is immensely strong AND deforms before shattering); MgAlZn (lighter than Al, more ductile than Mg, I won't do Sn on the outside in space because of how it reacts to temperatures high AND low and I have my doubts regarding practicality of covering entire spacecraft with Pt, no matter what CDE's cost system says) covered with increasingly partial layers of B4C, TiN, and Diamond to total bulk thickness of 5mm (I space them out to 1cm to avoid z-fighting so actual thickness is more) as whipple shielding, spaced out enough to actually avoid having struts visibly protrude out of the nose (because fugly) with additional layer of graphogel somewhere in between, as thick as I can accommodate without noticeably cutting into my mass budget.
I may limit coverage of some bulk layers if I struggle with the mass too much and I typically add thin layer of TiO2 around midsection (on top of TiN) mostly for cosmetic reasons, but it also helps a bit against flashes and kinetics.
It actually performs quite well for its mass, with superhard ceramics on the top doing a good job both deflecting light kinetics and resisting nuke flash, and bulk layer coping well with brief bursts of heavier kinetics (for which my main defence is getting out of the way anyway, especially if they are slow - it's better to have "armour" that adds to your delta-v instead of cutting into it) even though it's shaped by cosmetic considerations about as much as by practical ones.
I was thinking of incorporating some UHMWPE fiber into the top of
my bulkhead or bottom/middle of whipple layer to help distribute shocks
from hyper-velocity impacts better and prevent spalling, but I ran out
of layers. Ultra thin (because of its immense density) layers
of Os are also worth consideration as momentum catchers (because of its
immense density AND strength).
I could use some 5 more layers. 
For the context:
I usually deal with stock-like designs and use methane as my propellant. My designs can typically handle analogous stock ones at 5-10:1 numerical disadvantage at gun range, while staying within their mission envelope (acceleration and dV), credit and mass budgets (rounded up to the nearest kt), using stock modules only.
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Post by bigbombr on Nov 17, 2018 12:33:49 GMT
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