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Post by ironclad6 on Mar 17, 2019 17:41:20 GMT
I seem to be having a hard time getting my nukes to detonate at a useful range. The missiles they're riding in are coming in really fast and I seem to be stuck with the missiles either acting as really expensive KKVs and slamming into the target before the payload can detonate, or detonating too far away to actually do significant damage. Does anyone have any useful rules of thumb for working out how to calculate hard range?
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Post by airc777 on Mar 17, 2019 18:30:08 GMT
I tend to let mine impact detonate. I would also be interested in hearing what other people set the hard detonation range to.
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Post by gyratron on Mar 17, 2019 18:47:03 GMT
On missiles hard range is tricky because the proximity detection seems to treat the spacecraft as a sphere, so say if your hard range is 1m approaching the nose or tail of a long thin ship will get your detonation about 1m from the hull, but if you come from the side your detonation might be 50m or more from the nearest bit of spaceship.
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Post by Rocket Witch on Mar 18, 2019 19:22:45 GMT
Hard range is precision-limited for lower values based on the update rate of the physics engine (max 30Hz). If you're propelling your nukes at something like 20km/s they're going to be unreliable no matter what you do, because they travel completely through the hard range bubble between the space of two frames.
Setting an activation range may help, or do nothing, but at least removes a variable in that one can be sure the nukes will be armed going in. I don't set a hard range on my own nukes, and just have an activation range set at whatever distance yields 333 kJ/m2 fluence; this is an arbitrary value that simply gives a 1kt nuke a 1km activation range, for simplicity.
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Post by gyratron on Mar 18, 2019 21:50:40 GMT
Hard range is precision-limited for lower values based on the update rate of the physics engine (max 30Hz). If you're propelling your nukes at something like 20km/s they're going to be unreliable no matter what you do, because they travel completely through the hard range bubble between the space of two frames. Setting an activation range may help, or do nothing, but at least removes a variable in that one can be sure the nukes will be armed going in. I don't set a hard range on my own nukes, and just have an activation range set at whatever distance yields 333 kJ/m 2 fluence; this is an arbitrary value that simply gives a 1kt nuke a 1km activation range, for simplicity. If hard range for nukes is precision limited by the simulation framerate that is very strange, because flak doesn't appear to have any such limit. If you launch a large number of flak payloads at a ship and then pause at the moment they detonate, you will notice all the detonation flashes will be aligned on the surface of a perfect sphere around the target. It looks like this: The flashes that appear closer are different payloads with a shorter hard range, so their sphere is smaller. However, reducing the activation range so it is the same as the hard range seems to cause fast payloads to sometimes detonate behind the ship, so this suggest that activation range is precision limited by the framerate. Perhaps the activation range, as well as doing what it says in the description, also activates a sub-frame range check which is used by the hard range. If this is true it means your activation range should be at least long enough to cover 33.3ms of travel at the expected relative speed between your payload and the target, and probably a lot more than that to be on the safe side. The only problem you might see from setting the activation range too large is if the payload might be activated by a flare or a nearby ship not directly in the payload's path, causing the payload to detonate when it is parallel with the flare or other ship but not close to any target. For anti capital ship weapons this is usually not a big issue and you can quite easily set it to 500m or more, for point defense weapons it might be more significant. There probably isn't much case for setting a hard range on nukes because you usually just want them to detonate as close as possible. Playing with the hard range in combination with the delayed trigger may allow you to get closer to the target's actual hull or even inside it though so that might be worth looking into.
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Post by Positively_Ionized on Feb 28, 2020 21:41:10 GMT
I have seen some creations on this forum about KKVs with a micronuke that detonates within the target. Would that be an impact detonation or a delay trigger option, as I am trying to replicate that.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Feb 29, 2020 23:05:11 GMT
I have seen some creations on this forum about KKVs with a micronuke that detonates within the target. Would that be an impact detonation or a delay trigger option, as I am trying to replicate that. Just contact should work. Note that impact will probably destroy missile so firing salvoes is recommended. Also note that it might need high velocity and guidance precise enough to put have remaining missiles thread the needle.
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