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Post by luxardens on Dec 10, 2018 17:42:19 GMT
So I just discovered this, after many hundreds of hours playing: having a chemical gun with a bore radius larger than the projectile size makes it extremely vulnerable to laser sniping.
I couldn't for the life of me figure out why my payload firing guns kept exploding as soon as the laser touched. Had plenty of turret armour, so that couldn't be it. Then I reduced the bore radius to fit the payload nice and tight and voila! A horribly inefficient gun that doesn't get sniped in a nanosecond.
I'm guessing it could also just be that large bores are more vulnerable to lasers in general; I'm not sure.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Dec 10, 2018 18:10:37 GMT
Interesting. That would mean that lasers shining down the barrel are a thing.
Did you run the tests with large bore solid slugs of the same mass as your payload+sabot, preferably different (thick) slugs made of different, laser resistant and laser vulnerable materials, to rule out some discretized turret scaling?
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Post by dragonkid11 on Dec 11, 2018 1:26:46 GMT
Have you tried to armor up yoyr payload? I found some laser resistant armor is required to make sure my payloads don't die off in seconds.
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Post by luxardens on Dec 11, 2018 12:59:01 GMT
Have you tried to armor up yoyr payload? I found some laser resistant armor is required to make sure my payloads don't die off in seconds. Yep, the payload was made of nitrile rubber and could easily survive minutes at the distances involved. |
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Post by doctorsquared on Dec 12, 2018 2:23:04 GMT
So I just discovered this, after many hundreds of hours playing: having a chemical gun with a bore radius larger than the projectile size makes it extremely vulnerable to laser sniping. I couldn't for the life of me figure out why my payload firing guns kept exploding as soon as the laser touched. Had plenty of turret armour, so that couldn't be it. Then I reduced the bore radius to fit the payload nice and tight and voila! A horribly inefficient gun that doesn't get sniped in a nanosecond. I'm guessing it could also just be that large bores are more vulnerable to lasers in general; I'm not sure. Given that there's no mention of an extraction system on conventional guns (never mind the mass requirements for cased rounds) odds are that CoaDE chemguns use caseless ammunition similar to the HK G11:  From left to right you have the solid block of propellant, the primer, the projectile itself, and then a polymer cap that centers the bullet in the propellant block. One of the major stumbling blocks HK ran into was that the propellant (compressed nitrocellulose) would cook off and detonate within the magazine due to the heat of repeated firing. Brass or polymer cased rounds don't run into this issue since the case serves as a heat shield for the propellant. It could be possible to induce multiple failure modes in a conventional gun using a laser: - Detonation of the round prematurely by shining a laser down the barrel.
- Cook-off of the round due to a laser being used to heat the barrel to the ignition point of the propellant.
- Reducing the rate of fire of the gun by using a laser to overheat the barrel. This would cause the risk of the second issue of the round cooking off inside a heated barrel.
Possible solutions:
- Anti-laser PDC guns that fire fuses/remotes with a small dummy projectile. This causes the 'target ships/shots' section of the AI's gunnery code to prioritize the incoming payloads as a threat, thus causing enemy lasers to ignore your ship's systems.
- Armored shutters that seal the barrel from incoming laser attacks.
- Implement a Maxim Gun-esque liquid cooling system that cools the barrel through the use of a radiator to prevent overheating due to laser fire.
- Payloads armored in such a way to prevent laser ablation.
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