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Post by whiteweasel on Nov 21, 2018 13:55:50 GMT
While pocket nukes are the economical choice, there's always something satisfying about a big boom that one hit kills a ship. When playing around with the editor, you can get more yield by increasing the core mass, but that adds a lot of mass and size, which makes it harder to reach it's target. So I got two questions:
1) What are the tips for making effective nukes?
2) Practicality be dammed, what's the biggest yield you've gotten?
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Post by airc777 on Nov 21, 2018 14:36:34 GMT
Take a look at Apophys designs, they're pretty cheap and light relative to their yield. As far as cost no object largest, multi hundred gigaton devices used to be possible but in the current patch it's around 10.2 or 10.3 megaton I think.
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Post by Pttg on Nov 22, 2018 1:50:16 GMT
I upped the limits and had fun making a multi-kiloton nuke.
No, the warhead itself weighed several thousand tons. The actual detonation would crash my computer.
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Post by luxardens on Nov 22, 2018 14:46:04 GMT
While pocket nukes are the economical choice, there's always something satisfying about a big boom that one hit kills a ship. When playing around with the editor, you can get more yield by increasing the core mass, but that adds a lot of mass and size, which makes it harder to reach it's target. So I got two questions: 1) What are the tips for making effective nukes? 2) Practicality be dammed, what's the biggest yield you've gotten? I really wanted to use Teller-Ulam designs, so I modded in some superpowered fission fuels a while back to simulate their vastly larger yield. By adding zeroes to the fission energy, you can end up with arbitrarily large yields. Single digit gigaton-yield thermonuclear bombs should be very easy in CDE's context. Of course you can go completely of the rails as well; I built a bomb with some nonsensical 247-Pu isotope that had Yotta-tons of TNT equivalence Dubbed it the "system destroyer" because it would utterly wreck even the largest capital ships when detonated at the maximum engagement range, by virtue of turning its crew, hull, and any nearby planets into a gamma ray- and neutron soaked, billions of degree plasma soup.
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Post by whiteweasel on Nov 27, 2018 9:40:45 GMT
Take a look at Apophys designs, they're pretty cheap and light relative to their yield. As far as cost no object largest, multi hundred gigaton devices used to be possible but in the current patch it's around 10.2 or 10.3 megaton I think.
Weird that 10 Mt seems to be the cap, when they made castle bravo exceed that yield by accident. But none the less, those are nukes you really don't want to get hit by.
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Post by airc777 on Nov 27, 2018 17:06:07 GMT
Take a look at Apophys designs, they're pretty cheap and light relative to their yield. As far as cost no object largest, multi hundred gigaton devices used to be possible but in the current patch it's around 10.2 or 10.3 megaton I think.
Weird that 10 Mt seems to be the cap, when they made castle bravo exceed that yield by accident. But none the less, those are nukes you really don't want to get hit by. That's because the bombs modeled in game are single stage devices, very high yield bombs like castle brovo and tsar bomba are multistage devices. They have an entire second cylinder of fissile materials next to the primary implosion device to boost the yield, sometimes even a third stage in the case of tsar bomba. They were constructed in a fundamentally different way, plus erring on the side of a conservative estimate is good for realism.
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Post by cerberusti on May 7, 2019 19:17:27 GMT
My best in the current version is 11.0 Mt, but it is a cost is no object device.
The advice would be to look at detonation fluence more than yield, in most cases you want a spike of activity, not a burn.
Also, if mass is less important than size or power, osmium is a pretty good reflector.
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Post by dragon on May 8, 2019 21:20:14 GMT
10Mt is a fairly big nuke, actually. Only one operational warhead (that of the old R-36), to my knowledge, ever exceeded it, and only a handful of tests did. There might have been some Soviet air-dropped nukes that big that went into service, but info is scarce and it's unlikely they've been kept around, as they're actually very inefficient for atmospheric deployment. At any rate this is an incredibly powerful weapon. The real advantage of the Teller-Ullam design is lighter weight than a single stage device of the same yield, which would admittedly help, but I didn't really feel the need for a larger device at any point. Multiple smaller nukes tend to be a better choice.
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Post by Rocket Witch on May 23, 2019 14:08:31 GMT
I made a 2 Gt nuke with limits.txt editing once and it didn't achieve anything, like it was no more (or even less) damaging than a single 1 Mt warhead.
Large nukes don't scale well in CDE, like how large lasers don't, and large multi-ton gun shots can glitch through ships or bounce off literal paper armour. All of these things get large effective ranges/radii with lots of power pumped into them, but the damage model just breaks down outside the single-digit-joules to hundreds-of-megajoules energy range, and nukes as a whole are a large can of worms labelled 'best guess'.
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Post by H3792 on Jun 28, 2019 13:30:38 GMT
So my 982 Mt nuke would be useless...
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Jun 28, 2019 16:44:34 GMT
The main problem with nukes is that they hit the ablation cap real hard and that there is no radiological damage model.
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Post by airc777 on Jun 28, 2019 20:51:21 GMT
More importantly what is the optimal delivery vehicle? If the height of the effect on target to mass and yield bell curve is around 1mt then the next logical thing to do is either increase the intercept velocity to the point where the targets ciws can't be brought to bear or to saturate the targets ciws with shear volume of fire. Problem with intercept velocity is it's hard to outrun electromagnetic guns and impossible to outrun lasers. Problem with volume of fire is crashing the simulation. How I beat Vesta Overkill the first time was making a craft that launched 5 or 6 volleys of about 600 missiles at a time, and then flying my suddenly very light missile carrier away from the enemy drones. I have no idea at all how to make a nuke have the desired effect on target against a player optimized fleet. Current best guess is building armored missile-drones that radially blast launch swarms of nuke mirco missiles during terminal homing. Haven't had much success yet, you need so many stages and so many missiles to make so many targets that are moving so fast to overwhelm a laserstar or hundred km/s railgun ship.
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Post by tepidbread on Jun 29, 2019 20:46:44 GMT
Here is my biggest nuke and its respective delivery system. I optimized the nuke for cost and weight whilst still trying to maintain a respective yield. I have found that this seems to work a bit better than optimizing purely for yield.
The missile is made for maximum closure rate. I have found that closure rate is a good substitute for armor when targeting laser stars. If the target is particularly resistance to ablation a delay trigger can be used to turn the missile into a potent kinetic impactor.
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Post by airc777 on Jun 29, 2019 23:44:25 GMT
Unrelated to topic, please ignore.
tepidbread how are you able to post images? I'm still getting a forum attachment limit error.
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Post by tepidbread on Jun 30, 2019 0:09:32 GMT
Unrelated to topic, please ignore.
tepidbread how are you able to post images? I'm still getting a forum attachment limit error.
It wasn't easy. I had to downscale the images by half to do so. The forum only seemed to have room for 680ish kbytes. This is the first time that I have experienced this issue. I thought it was somehow unique to me.
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