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Post by AtomHeartDragon on May 5, 2019 16:58:22 GMT
Ok, the challenge is to build lightest, 100% stock module design that can fairly reliably solo Vesta entirely in gun range combat - it can have missiles or drones, but is not permitted to launch any on separate trajectories in Vesta scenario. Materials used (for armor) must be stock as well.
Additionally, it needs to be a general purpose ship with enough delta-v for some orbital manoeuvres in deeper gravity wells than Vesta's - at least 4km/s is required but more will be looked upon favourably.
The cost is of no importance as long as it fits within mission's budget.
I have not devised any sort of scoring scheme, but lighter is better, although I don't want to penalize designs that have more than required 4km/s delta-v.
The ship must survive till the very end of the mission with live crew, and operational offensive weapons, power, and propulsion - zombieship trick (RC on crewed ship) will not be accepted, neither will be deploying massive cloud of missiles/drones and perishing.
The ship must actually engage and destroy enemy fleet.
If the ship requires any special handling, provide details.
For the reference, my current lightest VO proven design (two versions, in fact) is at 2.5kt, with healthy delta-v reserve (pushing it closer to 5km/s).
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Post by airc777 on May 6, 2019 9:34:47 GMT
The ship must survive till the very end of the mission with live crew, and operational offensive weapons, power, and propulsion - zombieship trick (RC on crewed ship) will not be accepted, neither will be deploying massive cloud of missiles/drones and perishing. What if when combat starts we blast launcher a crew module away from the fighting with equal to the required crew of the combat ship? |
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Post by samchiu2000 on May 6, 2019 10:57:00 GMT
Glad to see another new challenge!
It seems that this is a challenging one!
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on May 6, 2019 17:00:24 GMT
The ship must survive till the very end of the mission with live crew, and operational offensive weapons, power, and propulsion - zombieship trick (RC on crewed ship) will not be accepted, neither will be deploying massive cloud of missiles/drones and perishing. What if when combat starts we blast launcher a crew module away from the fighting with equal to the required crew of the combat ship? Custom blast launcher is custom.  |
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Post by airc777 on May 7, 2019 19:17:32 GMT
Haven't looked at your specific design for VO yet, but I'm guessing the lower bounds for success in this endeavor is either the xenon mpdt with one tank or the helium mpdt with two tanks and two 60.4mw reactors and however many of whatever the best stock EM gun is in a needle ship if we aren't doing any out of combat launches. Possible caveat being combat launching flak missiles as chaff.
So what exactly does your design look like, and have you done this with fewer then two 60.4mw reactors?
I toyed around with one 60.4 reactor and four 11mm railgun and five 60mm cannon, but the stock turret armor just doesn't seem durable enough for that few total weapons. Might try again in a bit with the addition of many, many flak missiles.
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on May 7, 2019 19:46:27 GMT
I tried plain old missile spam earlier but it gets too laggy to be fun in the final fleet combat. They do help with getting there, since missiles easily destroy both enemy missiles and drones. So I ditched that and went for EM gun spam:  The 60 MW reactor can run ~33 of the guns at once. I put on a few extra ones for redundancy too, and in case overheating limits the fire rate. There's a few nukes for PD use, and some 60mm guns to punch through armor faster. The coilguns shoot really small rounds with a lot of spread, so they tend to just melt radiators but are fairly slow at going through armor. Adding the 60mm's increases the kill speed against more armoured targets so might as well put them there. For armor, I a fairly light scheme with a little bit of everything. Against ballistics, most of the protection comes from mounting the guns far away from the ship's centerline. Since the AI only shoots at guns, this will make most shots to pass through the empty nose cone but not hit anything vital inside the main hull. Design export: jt Fun Gun.txt (1.54 KB) Combat report with screenies below: Mission start burn:  I don't want to go too fast to have more shooting time, but not too slowly to give the enemy time to spam more missiles. 2.5 km/s seems to be a good balance, and gets rid of the drop tanks too. After that is done, I pop out 15 PD nukes in case I run into enemy missiles. Against drones the guns and armor are enough protection, but devastators have enough armor to usually get through the gun spam. Against both missiles and drones, I disable the engines on the ship and set all guns to ignore range. Against drones, the PD missiles can idle, but against enemy missiles they need to be used. The capital doesn't have enough armor to survive devastators point blank, so sending nukes against them means they detonate a lot further away, making them harmless. For devastators, it might also make sense to fold radiators so that you can use your missiles as flares. Enemy drone fleet intercepts me, but ends up just flying past without doing any significant damage:  That's the only drone/missile intercept I get. Thanks to the fast intercept burn, you can often get away with 1-2 missile/drone fights before you hit the main fleet:  At the start of combat, I again set all guns to ignore range and launch any remaining missiles. They won't live to impact, but at least they'll keep the enemy lasers busy for a while. Pews:  After a minute or so of fighting, two ships are down and the remaining two are pretty much helpless:  Finishing off the corvette at close range:  Winner winner chicken dinner:  |
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on May 7, 2019 21:12:58 GMT
Haven't looked at your specific design for VO yet, but I'm guessing the lower bounds for success in this endeavor is either the xenon mpdt with one tank or the helium mpdt with two tanks and two 60.4mw reactors and however many of whatever the best stock EM gun is in a needle ship if we aren't doing any out of combat launches. Possible caveat being combat launching flak missiles as chaff. So what exactly does your design look like, and have you done this with fewer then two 60.4mw reactors? I toyed around with one 60.4 reactor and four 11mm railgun and five 60mm cannon, but the stock turret armor just doesn't seem durable enough for that few total weapons. Might try again in a bit with the addition of many, many flak missiles. I have two variants of the same craft that prompted me to issue this challenge after I found out that they can quite comfortably solo Vesta. Both use 1x 60.4MW reactor, backup RTGs (I think 3x17kW), 4x 13MW laser with 5 turrets, 5x 60mm cannon, 3x flak missile blast launcher (mostly laser baits and reserve interceptors, but I have scored kills with them), 4x 60MW coilgun, and tiny decoy launcher (just in case, to be used with backup RTGs). One is additionally equipped with a pair of autofire railguns and a 39MW one, the other with a sniper coilgun and additional 3x 60MW CGs. Both use 2x triple methane NTRs for propulsion. They are very lightly armoured and mostly rely on mobility while broadsiding enemy (even though they are a bit less manoeuvrable than my typical craft of this size), though they have pretty nice slope and can survive some punishment in nose forward mode if necessary. Most of the time it's sufficient to just put them in broadside, sit there waiting for intercepts, and do the usual ignore range, focus lasers, fire some laser baits routine (also disable droptanks jettisoning for the sake of framerate). Since they don't really have the firepower of larger ships, homing when starting to move away to prolong engagement, or reintercepts might be required. Against drones the best tactics is to switch to nose forward homing* when the entire flight starts firing to move out of the line of fire and minimize damage. Later, it might be good idea to conserve delta-v and, if the ship has suffered too much damage or is intercepted too fast to defend itself against leftover missiles, to scram reactor and NTRs, fold its radiators and launch decoys. 60mm cannons can fire with reactor scrammed if other weapons are powered off. Using flaks as interceptors is also viable but beware of Devastators with their huge splash. Main risks are running out of delta-v due to prolonged loitering required and taking lucky hits in critical systems (engines, reactor, multiple radiators) while facing drones and not switching to nose-forward at the right moment.  Edit:Ships added to workshop. *) Homing tends to also orient more or less nose forward, while changing rotation and thrust vectors more dramatically. End effect is that pretty much the entire tail end gets thrown on the opposite side and the ship gives stream of incoming 33mm fire a wide berth. |
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on May 7, 2019 21:29:08 GMT
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on May 7, 2019 21:36:07 GMT
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on May 8, 2019 6:32:25 GMT
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Post by airc777 on May 8, 2019 11:24:01 GMT
Thought I'd be silly and take the lead in the category of lightest ship to use 34mm heavy coil gun as a primary weapon, turns out game does not tolerate silly. File this one under How Not to Make a Battleship, primary turrets do not survive the first drone wave. Might try again in a bit using exclusively 60mm cannon and the homing order, they seem to work great. The 2cm of VCS is just over the front quarter of the ship in case your wondering, was using an overly strong armor profile that I know would not fail against 30mm cannon for testing purposes with the intent of leaning it out later.
Edit: Huh, my second screenshot was attachment size limited, that's weird.
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Post by airc777 on May 8, 2019 12:20:22 GMT
Can I use non standard radiation shields as armor bulkheads, our would it cost to much to retrain the crews how to use a 2cm thick monolithic disk of boron filament or VCS as a wall?
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on May 8, 2019 18:25:22 GMT
Can I use non standard radiation shields as armor bulkheads Nah.  If you find a worthwhile use of 34mm CG do let me know. From my experience it's even more hopeless than the nuke cannon. |
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on May 8, 2019 22:26:51 GMT
I tried plain old missile spam earlier but it gets too laggy to be fun in the final fleet combat. They do help with getting there, since missiles easily destroy both enemy missiles and drones. So I ditched that and went for EM gun spam: The 60 MW reactor can run ~33 of the guns at once. I put on a few extra ones for redundancy too, and in case overheating limits the fire rate. There's a few nukes for PD use, and some 60mm guns to punch through armor faster. The coilguns shoot really small rounds with a lot of spread, so they tend to just melt radiators but are fairly slow at going through armor. Adding the 60mm's increases the kill speed against more armoured targets so might as well put them there. For armor, I a fairly light scheme with a little bit of everything. Against ballistics, most of the protection comes from mounting the guns far away from the ship's centerline. Since the AI only shoots at guns, this will make most shots to pass through the empty nose cone but not hit anything vital inside the main hull. Design export: Combat report with screenies below: Mission start burn: I don't want to go too fast to have more shooting time, but not too slowly to give the enemy time to spam more missiles. 2.5 km/s seems to be a good balance, and gets rid of the drop tanks too. After that is done, I pop out 15 PD nukes in case I run into enemy missiles. Against drones the guns and armor are enough protection, but devastators have enough armor to usually get through the gun spam. Against both missiles and drones, I disable the engines on the ship and set all guns to ignore range. Against drones, the PD missiles can idle, but against enemy missiles they need to be used. The capital doesn't have enough armor to survive devastators point blank, so sending nukes against them means they detonate a lot further away, making them harmless. For devastators, it might also make sense to fold radiators so that you can use your missiles as flares. Enemy drone fleet intercepts me, but ends up just flying past without doing any significant damage: That's the only drone/missile intercept I get. Thanks to the fast intercept burn, you can often get away with 1-2 missile/drone fights before you hit the main fleet: At the start of combat, I again set all guns to ignore range and launch any remaining missiles. They won't live to impact, but at least they'll keep the enemy lasers busy for a while. Pews: After a minute or so of fighting, two ships are down and the remaining two are pretty much helpless: Finishing off the corvette at close range: Winner winner chicken dinner: Ok, you've got some tanky ship there with some serious firepower. It's pretty much the polar opposite of mine in terms of combat characteristics, but nonetheless very effective and - if I brought mine down to 4km/s - still some 20t lighter. Nice. |
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