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Post by dragon on Jan 22, 2019 0:17:42 GMT
I've got COADE around Xmas and been having a ball with it since. Haven't got to limits editing yet, but even within stock restrictions there's a lot to do. One thing I've never been able to get to work are electromagnetic guns in 0.5-2T range. I wonder if that can work at all, without inducing massive thermal stresses. I've also had bad experience with spinals (they tend to have trouble aiming, if they don't just get shot off). I did, however, make a really nifty 200km/s+ sandblaster, firing 1g rounds, which quickly become a main battery for my larger ships. I suspect that sloped, multilayer turret armor would kill it (it can punch holes in hull armor, but not if it's sloped), but right now the sheer distance at which it can engage generally makes it take out anything shooting slower rounds, because it's just so great (better than my laser designs) at shooting off turrets: So here's a challenge. Make a big gun. 200km/s sandblasters, school bus launchers, big spinals (those preferably with a ship capable of using them) and so on. If not an optimal choice, it should be at least somewhat useful in combat. Limit editing welcome. However, be wary of designs that exploit coilgun modelling breaking down at one point, resulting in efficiencies over 100% and negative heat production. Oh, and don't worry about cost. Big guns will cost, and COADE economic model is questionable at best, anyway.
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Post by airc777 on Jan 22, 2019 0:52:30 GMT
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Jan 22, 2019 7:06:59 GMT
Less of a long range option, but, speaking of Xmas, I have published this somewhat recently: Amorphous carbon makes for an interesting armature material. I also have a bunch of 10km/s variants in 0.5, 1 and 4.4kg flavours, long, but relatively lightweight spinal coilgun (with AC coil) firing 30 1kg slugs per second at around 7.5km/s, and relatively complex multi-launch artillery setup involving telescoping blast launcher packs synchronized with nose mounted gun (very inaccurate, and laggy, but will obliterate gunship at around 70km out) but haven't pushed them yet.
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Post by airc777 on Jan 22, 2019 9:46:46 GMT
Felt too lazy to put a 120GW mpdt on it, might do that later.
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Jan 22, 2019 11:31:01 GMT
Obligatory needler
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Post by dragon on Jan 22, 2019 22:03:46 GMT
Nice. I'm a bit worried about its 1.19 second reload time and lack of armor (lasers!), but at 4Mm you probably have enough time to pelt your target with it. Although let's not get into logistics of actually building a 200+ meter long barrel and mounting it on a turret. Less of a long range option, but, speaking of Xmas, I have published this somewhat recently: Saw that, even made some similar weapons. They're useful on short range, but they tend to get shot off (though that's a problem with any big gun) and I found that it's hard to set up an engagement that starts at 1Mm and ends in a pass close enough for those to work well. However, when they do hit, they tend to eviscerate their target, sloped armor or not. I tested it against my 2GW combat laserstar, and the thing was literally gutted from bow to stern once it got into range. It's not quite the extreme I thought of when making this thread, but it is a good design.
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Post by doctorsquared on Jan 23, 2019 3:19:29 GMT
A heavier 220mm conventional gun that uses a fluorine/hydrogen combustion reaction to propel a 1.5kg amorphous carbon pie plate at ~3.7 km/s. The result is a gun that packs a 10MJ punch with a decent rate of fire that consumes 3.3MW and fits into a 15-ton weight envelope. While I really enjoy railguns that can fire at velocities of hundreds of kilometers per seond, it can also be fun seeing how much kinetic energy you can wring out of a chemical reaction.
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Jan 23, 2019 9:52:09 GMT
Nice. I'm a bit worried about its 1.19 second reload time and lack of armor (lasers!), but at 4Mm you probably have enough time to pelt your target with it. Although let's not get into logistics of actually building a 200+ meter long barrel and mounting it on a turret. You could probably add a lot of PE on the turret without a significant increase in cost or mass to make it survive better against lasers. The game also lies about the reload time. As long as you have plenty of power, you can run the autoloader and charge the capacitor simultaneously, meaning the actual reload time is 600 ms.
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Post by gyratron on Jan 25, 2019 15:39:21 GMT
I copied jtyotjotjipaefvj's thing and played around with it a little bit. These needle railguns are nasty as hell. Rate of fire doesn't matter so much when you can eviscerate a gunship straight through it's sloped frontal armor with one shot. You need to hit fairly dead on the nose though so it doesn't deflect too much, which at maximum range with this accuracy seems to take about a minute.
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Post by cipherpunks on Jan 25, 2019 16:11:09 GMT
Wait a second. AFAIK 1 gram DU round can be set in stock game without limit editing. Why separate entity (rad.shield) is needed if 1g DU is 1g DU no matter how you look at it? Do you imply that the game thinks otherwise e.g. there's a bug?
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Post by AdmiralObvious on Jan 25, 2019 16:36:11 GMT
Wait a second. AFAIK 1 gram DU round can be set in stock game without limit editing. Why separate entity (rad.shield) is needed if 1g DU is 1g DU no matter how you look at it? Do you imply that the game thinks otherwise e.g. there's a bug? I'm 90% sure there is a bug. Payloads seem to ignore some of the physics when it comes down to actually impacting a spaceship. Like, as far as I'm aware, payloads don't shatter, they just penetrate as far as they can in one piece, then they get deleted. I'm also mostly sure that a payload won't bounce off armor.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Jan 25, 2019 16:44:46 GMT
Wait a second. AFAIK 1 gram DU round can be set in stock game without limit editing. Why separate entity (rad.shield) is needed if 1g DU is 1g DU no matter how you look at it? Do you imply that the game thinks otherwise e.g. there's a bug? I'm 90% sure there is a bug. Payloads seem to ignore some of the physics when it comes down to actually impacting a spaceship. Like, as far as I'm aware, payloads don't shatter, they just penetrate as far as they can in one piece, then they get deleted. I'm also mostly sure that a payload won't bounce off armor. Don't payloads also ignore some of the gun physics (like mechanical stresses, due to distributing them over armature+payload length - especially fun if you add some spacers)?
....Aaand that's why I generally don't use payloads unless I need specific functionality (blast launched long rod penetrators and radiator based continuous rods being the border case for me, as you can't do them in any other way despite them being dumb kinetic impactors). Plus the flipside is that even a GJ relativistic needle typically won't cause all the spalling and mayhem inside the ship that can be accomplished by a slug. It just punches a tiny hole.
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Post by gyratron on Jan 25, 2019 19:08:32 GMT
1 gram of DU in a wafer-thin disc 3cm across is very different from 1 gram of DU in a 1mm diameter needle. In practice I tried changing the payload to a 2.6cm 1 gram DU disc and against the same gunship it just splashed on the surface, making a lot of orange armor tiles but never getting through even when it hit right on the nose.
Like you say though there is definitely something weird about the mechanical stress calculation because I had to put a 10cm spacer on the disc in order to get it to work.
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Post by dragon on Jan 27, 2019 12:00:14 GMT
That's why I try to stay away from payload launchers (also, I'm rather partial to the tracers). In my own experiments, they seemed to be immune to mechanical and thermal stresses of the firing, while also stressing the barrel much less than monolithic armatures of similar parameters. I'm not quite sure how accurate this is.
I wonder, has anyone here ever made a practical 1GW+ kinetic weapon? It doesn't seem like it'd be an optimum strategy (COADE seems to favor more smaller guns), but I'm curious if that's even possible without thermal stresses tearing the thing apart.
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Post by tetraflon on Jan 27, 2019 14:38:04 GMT
although the gun itself is not accurate, my attempt.
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