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Post by airc777 on Nov 20, 2018 1:48:02 GMT
So Apophys needle railguns are amazingly lethal and amazingly light, but they cause an unplayable amount of lag on my system. I've been trying to build railguns that fire solid shot instead of needles or flak because it causes less lag, but I can't seem to approach Apophys effective range without them being orders of magnitude more massive. So in short, how correctly coin railgun optimization? Attached are comparative pictures of mine and Apophys railguns, pictures of how I've built mine, and a picture of my 500Mw / 200 ton railgun which is the most massive gun I'm willing to put on my ships.
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Nov 20, 2018 3:01:50 GMT
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Nov 20, 2018 17:28:53 GMT
So Apophys needle railguns are amazingly lethal and amazingly light, but they cause an unplayable amount of lag on my system. I've been trying to build railguns that fire solid shot instead of needles or flak because it causes less lag, but I can't seem to approach Apophys effective range without them being orders of magnitude more massive.
Not helpful, but possibly relevant: One more case for saboted projectiles: While chemguns don't really care about the shape and composition of the projectile, only its mass and whether it maintains the seal while firing, EM guns rely on electrical and magnetic properties of the armature to work. Having a non-magnetic, electrically insulated core will dramatically alter their properties in ways using payload+sabot VS simply heavier slug in a chemgun doesn't. It would be nice if it didn't require the overhead of chucking entire miniature spacecraft at the enemy, not to mention the lack of pretty tracer light-show. (I am currently coping with the latter issue by putting dinky, slow burning flares and 0s fuses on my non-ordnance payloads and making shooting noises with my mouth.)
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Post by smithblack on Dec 5, 2018 0:50:18 GMT
I have three primary, nonexperimental designs which are in combat usage right now. These are the 25 km/s drone "Frantic" spinal gun, the 50 km/s "Fury" railgun, and the 100 km/s spinal "Requium II" railgun. In general, my design philosophy has been similar to yours; however, I tend to try to build outwards, rather than longer. By using a wider bore, and a LOT of aerogel, it is possible to build weapons which are wide, short, cheap, and light. The fury railgun fires at 50.1 km/s, masses 3.64 tons, costs 146 kc, and reloads very quickly. In addition, it is short and stubby, perfect for roles such as point defense. My Rebuke II frigate has six as a standard armament, and can reliably annihilate any stock ship:  At a higher speed, the 100 km/s Requium II spinal gun weights in at 16.5 tons, costs 759 kc, and is only 14.5 meters long. If you added a turret, you could likely get a well performing package for under 20 tons.  Finally, the "Frantic" spinal gun is currently in use as part of my "Goose" microdrone series. It shoots at 25 km/s, weights in at 460 kg, and costs 23 kc. It is likely the most optimized gun I have.  All designs are attached as files |
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Post by airc777 on Dec 6, 2018 5:30:11 GMT
I increased the loader and capacitor power on your design to bring it in line with my designs fire rate and then I put it in a turret with my usual anti laser armor. Can confirm it is somewhere between twice and four times as mass efficient as my most comparable guns at a loss of only about 5% power efficiency and probably negligible projectile density and contact area. Will be doing some fire testing against my normal anti solid shot armor. (5mm amorphous carbon, 1m graphite aerogel, 2cm nitrile rubber, 2cm boron filament) Though it might be a moot point now that I've figured out how to armor against needle railguns, and I still have doubts about the mass effectiveness when scaled the 150 to 200 km/s range. (In case you're wondering: 5mm amorphous carbon, 1m graphite aerogel, 3cm vanadium chromium steel, 2cm nitrile rubber, 2cm boron filament, with 2cm amorphous carbon crew modules, and with 30cm vanadium chromium steel turrets seems to have reasonably high survivability against 150 km/s needle railguns. Still testing turret armor though.)
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Dec 10, 2018 18:34:49 GMT
Has anyone tried making a high-mass, solid slug (just the armature, no payload) RG? I had some successes (say, 1kg) using relatively poor conductors (say, amorphous carbon) for armature (to saddle the oomph with as much extra mass as possible and don't let the armature tear itself or barrel apart by accelerating too vigorously), but the result is relatively massive, inefficient, and shoots all over the place. Any pointers? I really don't know how to railgun.
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Post by bigbombr on Dec 10, 2018 18:55:43 GMT
Has anyone tried making a high-mass, solid slug (just the armature, no payload) RG? I had some successes (say, 1kg) using relatively poor conductors (say, amorphous carbon) for armature (to saddle the oomph with as much extra mass as possible and don't let the armature tear itself or barrel apart by accelerating too vigorously), but the result is relatively massive, inefficient, and shoots all over the place. Any pointers? I really don't know how to railgun.
Not all that good at railguns myself, but I used osmium for the slug and vanadium chromium steel for the rails. A muzzle velocity of 72.2 km/s, an inaccuracy of 0.004°, a slug of 1 kg, a mass of 7.01 kt and a cost of 341 Mc. VCS and hafnia make for over 3/4 of the mass and cost. It's not mounted on a turret as it's too large for that (length: 201 m). |
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Dec 10, 2018 19:06:44 GMT
Has anyone tried making a high-mass, solid slug (just the armature, no payload) RG? I had some successes (say, 1kg) using relatively poor conductors (say, amorphous carbon) for armature (to saddle the oomph with as much extra mass as possible and don't let the armature tear itself or barrel apart by accelerating too vigorously), but the result is relatively massive, inefficient, and shoots all over the place. Any pointers? I really don't know how to railgun.
Not all that good at railguns myself, but I used osmium for the slug and vanadium chromium steel for the rails. A muzzle velocity of 72.2 km/s, an inaccuracy of 0.004°, a slug of 1 kg, a mass of 7.01 kt and a cost of 341 Mc. VCS and hafnia make for over 3/4 of the mass and cost. It's not mounted on a turret as it's too large for that (length: 201 m). >7kt and >300Mc?
Unless you build it on a moon it's not a practical weapon by any measure. |
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Post by bigbombr on Dec 10, 2018 19:21:16 GMT
Unless you build it on a moon it's not a practical weapon by any measure. You asked for a railgun firing 1 kg slugs and you expected something practical? If you go low velocity, you might as well use conventional cannons. And if you have both a high muzzle velocity and a high projectile mass, your KE per shot tends to be north of ridiculous. This means your barrel and capacitor tend to be insane. However, I made a slightly more sane iteration later on. As you can see, a very large part of it is capacitor, and since it has an ok efficiency, that capacitor size can't be reduced much. I suspect that you could shave of some mass here and there, but if you want to lob 1 kg slugs at a decent clip, this is about the ballpark you end up in as far as cost and mass go. |
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Dec 10, 2018 23:12:01 GMT
Unless you build it on a moon it's not a practical weapon by any measure. You asked for a railgun firing 1 kg slugs and you expected something practical? If you go low velocity, you might as well use conventional cannons. And if you have both a high muzzle velocity and a high projectile mass, your KE per shot tends to be north of ridiculous. This means your barrel and capacitor tend to be insane. However, I made a slightly more sane iteration later on. As you can see, a very large part of it is capacitor, and since it has an ok efficiency, that capacitor size can't be reduced much. I suspect that you could shave of some mass here and there, but if you want to lob 1 kg slugs at a decent clip, this is about the ballpark you end up in as far as cost and mass go. Nice. I see you've managed to get osmium armature to work, which I could not (which was one of my reasons for asking).
Personally I had to resort to amorphous carbon armature and sacrifice a lot of accuracy to make it work: On the upside, I could make it quite a bit smaller (still about as huge as stock 13MW 1mm coilgun), lighter and cheaper (on a second thought you could shave off a lot of mass by not including almost half a meter of armour).
You could also scale it down by reducing projectile mass, exit velocity, or both, while gaining some rate of fire:
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