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Post by newageofpower on Dec 9, 2016 2:48:01 GMT
That laser looks digustingly efficient (I have a hard time bringing my own lasers above 3.2%), but you should really aim for a 3m+ Mirror to maximize intensity at range. got a chuckle out of that XD. For mirror size, i deliberately tuned it to make a 1m diameter spot at 3/4 my desired engagement range. at this range, the Halcyon will burn through all stock missiles in about half a second per missile. Anything close than ~100 km gets pinprick-lasered to death, anything between 100 and 200 km loses aerogel at an alarming rate, unless it is several meters thick, and i can snipe any and all turrets, regardless of armor, at every range i have tried it so far. Stock missiles are trash. I can pop 20 of them with a 100MW laser, in the same time and at twice the range it takes my 1 GW laser to pop 5 of my own missiles.
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Post by shurugal on Dec 9, 2016 2:58:13 GMT
TBH the lasers are mostly for drones and sniping components. If I have a wall of missiles inbound, i'll just use a drone with a hot flare to decoy it, or a sextuple of coilgun boosted flares from the Hal's sister ship. I'm not even remotely concerned about missile attacks.
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Post by jasonvance on Dec 9, 2016 3:00:09 GMT
I did quite a bit of testing on armor when designing my laser drones I think these two videos I took from that testing pretty much make the point on if you should put armor on your ship:
1 meter of fiber (best laser defense)
50 meters of fiber:
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Post by dragonkid11 on Dec 9, 2016 3:01:17 GMT
Armor are good for telling your crew that you care about them. (Do you have any idea how fucking hard it was to recruit crew for space warship, Commandeer?! Nobody would join the Navy if all the ship has for armor is vacuum space.)
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Post by jasonvance on Dec 9, 2016 3:03:00 GMT
Armor are good for telling your crew that you care about them. (Do you have any idea how fucking hard it was to recruit crew for space warship, Commandeer?! Seriously, stop sending them in suicide run!) heh give them 1um of graphite aerogel and claim it works (it actually isn't bad for hiding modules in general on a serious note)
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Post by amimai on Dec 9, 2016 3:09:53 GMT
Our deluxe armour is 1mm carbon, 6m empty space, and another mm carbon! Our thickest armour yet!!
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Post by newageofpower on Dec 9, 2016 3:18:14 GMT
TBH the lasers are mostly for drones and sniping components. If I have a wall of missiles inbound, i'll just use a drone with a hot flare to decoy it, or a sextuple of coilgun boosted flares from the Hal's sister ship. I'm not even remotely concerned about missile attacks. I think, your preconceptions come from fighting AI. The AI is horrible at using missiles. I don't attack with walls of missiles. I use a continuous tidal wave of them. Four carriers weigh less than 2 KT and can sustain over 60 missiles per second. Sure, you decoys will draw off the first thousand. Maybe you have a sick flare/coil setup that continuously pumps out 2-3 flares per second with no gaps in between. Even when you drain their dV with decoys, the sheer amount of out of dV "dead" missiles will Kessler you to death; it's how my missiles still carried through back when I left their guidance on default and 60% (100% of the light missiles) of them never stopped boosting. Heh. Decoys might be great, actually, missiles from different angles will have different trajectories, making it a sort of rocket shotgun. The AI is also awful at using drones. How well armored are your ships? Heavily armored? They're far more expensive than mine. A paper-thin layer of Sillica Aerogel? I'll send a few waves of minidrone dronecarriers with the drone missile buses, hundreds of minidrones per carrier, with launch rates approaching my missiles. Three out of four will be firing 5mm sand. The others will be firing higher caliber, light-medium armor piercing cannon.
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Post by amimai on Dec 9, 2016 3:29:18 GMT
Err we were looking to see if it's at all possible to be fend your boat with armor, but go ahead on a crusade of your own...
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Post by shurugal on Dec 9, 2016 3:34:35 GMT
TBH the lasers are mostly for drones and sniping components. If I have a wall of missiles inbound, i'll just use a drone with a hot flare to decoy it, or a sextuple of coilgun boosted flares from the Hal's sister ship. I'm not even remotely concerned about missile attacks. I think, your preconceptions come from fighting AI. The AI is horrible at using missiles. I don't attack with walls of missiles. I use a continuous tidal wave of them. Four carriers weigh less than 2 KT and can sustain over 60 missiles per second. Sure, you decoys will draw off the first thousand. Maybe you have a sick flare/coil setup that continuously pumps out 2-3 flares per second with no gaps in between. Even when you drain their dV with decoys, the sheer amount of out of dV "dead" missiles will Kessler you to death; it's how my missiles still carried through back when I left their guidance on default and 60% (100% of the light missiles) of them never stopped boosting. Heh. Decoys might be great, actually, missiles from different angles will have different trajectories, making it a sort of rocket shotgun. The AI is also awful at using drones. How well armored are your ships? Heavily armored? They're far more expensive than mine. A paper-thin layer of Sillica Aerogel? I'll send a few waves of minidrone dronecarriers with the drone missile buses, hundreds of minidrones per carrier, with launch rates approaching my missiles. Three out of four will be firing 5mm sand. The others will be firing higher caliber, light-medium armor piercing cannon. How fast do your drones close to launch range? what is the flight time of your missiles? Can you kill my ship before i get a few salvos off from my coilgun? At 1Mm engagement range, I can maneuver in a tight spiral to waste the aim of your 150 km/ railgun, but my missiles don't become less accurate against maneuvering target as range increases. The best case scenario for one of your drone carriers against one of my coilgun launchers is MAD: we both die. If you're launching missiles from more than a few hundred km, I can keep up the flow of flares long enough to play the endurance game, and closer in i can disarm your missile carriers as fast as you can throw them at me. If you wish to rely on Kessler Syndrome to kill me, you could certainly make it work eventually, at the cost of denying yourself the space you just wrested from me. I'm not even slightly concerned about your gun-drones, because until barrel armor becomes a thing, my lasers are already sufficient to manage milisecond kill times on any gun. And, as you pointed out, there is a whole shitton of room to improve my lasers. There's no reason I couldn't make a laser that will strip you of drone launchers and needleguns from 1Mm in a handful of seconds. True, you can do the same thing, but now we are literally just waiting to see who runs out of laser turrets faster, and that is boring. Err we were looking to see if it's at all possible to be fend your boat with armor, but go ahead on a crusade of your own... shhhh, I'm having fun.
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Post by dragonkid11 on Dec 9, 2016 3:37:20 GMT
Hmm, I'm mostly shifting towards using armored drone now with zero armor on the crewed drone carrier.
Heck, this gave me an idea on making a single sub-capital drone launcher that launch drone with same capability of a full sized warship on search for cheapest design.
Anyway, I currently mostly armored up my ship against stock design.
Against player design, I would most likely strip off armor or cover everything in silica gel.
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Post by lol on Dec 9, 2016 3:46:51 GMT
Inner 3mm osmium 3m graphite aerogel 3cm boron 1m gap3cm amorphous carbon 2cm diamond Outer This should work, at least for a bit. I have seen boule thick layers of these take hits from NEFP and come out fine. <emphasis mine> I missed an important feature. adding the 1m gap allowed this armor package to withstand the first shot. The second, however, went in through the same hole and made the kill. Use spacer to make nose pointy. Also try this: Inner 5cm gap 2-3cm spallation liner of your choosing e.g. aramid or UHDPE 2cm gap 3cm boron 3m graphite/silicon aerogel(test both) 1m gap 5cm amorphous carbon 5mm silver(lasers are to be mirrored and conducted away, not ablated). Outer I'd say armor engineering is, chances may be, the hardest discipline in space murder engineering. But it is revarding, if someone can actually remember that best kkv defence is a lot of rapid-firing high-caliber convential guns with small flat high-explosive payloads. Go for coils and high-density if you are wary of turrets exploding. Also, when coilguns with 500% efficiency, no overheat and no recoil will be unbroken, lot's of those megacannon designs are going to die out. Should adversary still go for it, it would require Gc ship to handle it, and then stakes are these high, budget permits armor to start from 5m range. Remember, that expencive capships have to have maximum nosecone opening of 30 degrees to radius(60 total) and always face enemy with the nose. If your armor is too heawy for full coverage of the nose, vital components(crew module stack in the middle) projection in the most central part of the cone should be covered in full while less important modules such as guns and multiply redundant fuel tanks frontal projection should have even steeper cone if their protection is less. Note that since you have less space to place your guns in front, kkv interception should be managed by support corvettes dedicated for that. Also separate your frontal area in 2-3 isolated compartments with custom radiation shields bulkheads and each ring of turrets have to sit from their own compartment. Also note that you can make any sort of composite armor bulkheads with composition of multiple radshielding parts. Bulkheads are generally great for big ships. Also, try this for capships: Inner 5-6m aerogel(test both) 1m gap 5cm spallation catcher 1m gap 1cm osmium 10cm diamond 3cm silver Outer Feel free to play with gaps +-50% and adjust silver to protect your ship up until 90% of your main caliber range. Osmium backing might need to be 2cm, but then gap befor it should be increased and spallation catcher must become tougher. I've had a ship that alone managed to kill a 1.5 Gc fleet(it cost about 1100-1200 Mc itself) before they managed to kill it and still had 3300 dV(it had 5000 at engagement) to return home(obviously ignoring range), the armor was the one described but doubled everything exept gaps and 7m of silicon aerogel. It survived with exploded fuel tanks between first and second mainbody bulkheads(after the cone bulkheads), one penetration killing fuel tank beyound that and crew still intact beyound forth bulkhead, and it was still fighting with 1 coilgun surviving between second coil bulkhead and first mainbody bulkhead, while launching drones from compartmant between 5th and 6th bulkhead where cylinder was alredy a receding cone and so this compartment was nearly invincible for fire from the front. Main reactors are between 6th and 7th, backups between 3rd and 4th, crew compartment(already receding cone have backcup radioisotopics and everything has it's all triple-redundant radiators all over receding cone. Drone launchers eject at 7 m/s just to avoid radiators and all drones have railguns and resistojets and are totally nonexplosive. Engines have bell much thicker than nesessary to increase surviveability and running at suboptimal temperatures 200-300 degrees lower to protect from stray gigaton nukes. 5th to 7th bulkheads were just explosionproof to survive compartment detonation. And this design was severely underoptimised, I've managed to increase dV to 11k by engine optimisation alone and switching to semiheawy water, but then my HDD apparently thought that this thing was too awesome to ever fly and died. Note that that was a patch ago and so may not work now. Also, is it ok for me to shill my other posts which I think require greater attention and replies? It is about advertising COADE to a specific(but numerous) audience with wide pockets and it is not going to cost us any money.
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Post by newageofpower on Dec 9, 2016 3:59:47 GMT
How fast do your drones close to launch range? what is the flight time of your missiles? Can you kill my ship before i get a few salvos off from my coilgun? At 1Mm engagement range, I can maneuver in a tight spiral to waste the aim of your 150 km/ railgun, but my missiles don't become less accurate against maneuvering target as range increases. The best case scenario for one of your drone carriers against one of my coilgun launchers is MAD: we both die. If you're launching missiles from more than a few hundred km, I can keep up the flow of flares long enough to play the endurance game, and closer in i can disarm your missile carriers as fast as you can throw them at me. If you wish to rely on Kessler Syndrome to kill me, you could certainly make it work eventually, at the cost of denying yourself the space you just wrested from me. I'm not even slightly concerned about your gun-drones, because until barrel armor becomes a thing, my lasers are already sufficient to manage milisecond kill times on any gun. And, as you pointed out, there is a whole shitton of room to improve my lasers. There's no reason I couldn't make a laser that will strip you of drone launchers and needleguns from 1Mm in a handful of seconds. True, you can do the same thing, but now we are literally just waiting to see who runs out of laser turrets faster, and that is boring. In a modern war between equals, there is no fight to wrest ground or gain; there is only deny the opponent and destroy his assets. If I spend 2-5 kt mass to wipe out 20 kt of yours, I consider that an overwhelming victory, and damn the orbital space. Even below 2kps closing speed, I find that my missile carriers do not run out of medium/small missiles before flyby (I leave them on cancel orders during combat, otherwise there's a chance they explode from object collision) even if I queue up all missiles for launch upon entering combat. The best case scenarios for your flareguns/laser fleet is either I approach at maximum speed (forcing me to 'predeploy' most of my missiles) and a few flares drag off my entire missile wave, or I approach at minimum speed and you have all the laser time you need to burn out the drone launcher's missile bays. Having not actually played your designs yet, I suspect the sweet spot (for my fleet) is somwhere between 2.5 km/s and 6 km/s. I suppose I could try to cheese you by manually leaving my missiles on Cancel Orders until within terminal manouvers range against your ships, but that is highly dependent on lag. In real life, missiles would be far less vulnerable to simple IR decoys, anyhow. The laser is a wonderful weapon. I use tons of them, from 1 GW massed drones to massive 2000m 2+ 10 GW drones (that are sitting ducks to my own needleguns at 3,000+ km, but whatever). However, massed missiles have a huge role in the arms triangle even in their current highly limited state. For pure lasergun vs lasergun fights... much of it is RNG. I've tried this vs AI (employing identical laserstar fleets), and it's almost a coinflip at who shoots out whose laser turrets first. I've found 20cm Boron and Sillicon Carbide to buy some time for my medium turrets, but it's just not enough. While testing equal cost in needlegun fleets, I don't know if the AI is dodging correctly but I can almost always connect (and kill) the opponent before I die; I'm uncertain if this behavior is true at higher numbers because massed needleguns crash the game quite consistently.
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Post by amimai on Dec 9, 2016 4:05:18 GMT
That's some thick armour there lol, how many tones per m2 is that even...
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Post by jasonvance on Dec 9, 2016 4:07:12 GMT
imo doom laser fleets or 100+ MT instant detonation nukes at 1,000km are the only real contenders atm if there were PvP. 2GW drones with 20x 1,000km lasers only cost 2mil credits (which is about 20Mt worth of nukes). Armor won't be effective against doom laser fleets, and nukes large enough to counter laser drones get countered by splitting off individual laser drones to intercept. I know from testing there is not a cost or mass effective amount of armor you can put on a ship to survive 800x lasers. Nukes are less known to me, but from the way armor scales I doubt it is even worth more than a token measure there either.
**What i mean by cost / mass effective counter to lasers is the time to kill you gain per mass and credit does not offset the time to kill of adding extra drones of the missing mass / credit value (obviously adding armor makes you last percentages longer but time to kills are near instant and most of the lost time in dps is actually during turret retargeting so more drones = better armor in most cases even with turrets that rotate at 1,000 degrees / sec**
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Post by newageofpower on Dec 9, 2016 4:31:48 GMT
Err we were looking to see if it's at all possible to be fend your boat with armor, but go ahead on a crusade of your own... We got into a tangent from... Er. The Laser Range thread. Some people there are like "nerf lasers OP" and personally, I think Lasers are not OP. Very important, yes. Maybe, even the most important weapon, if you agree with Shurugal. But pure laser fleets (or almost-pure laser fleets) are less efficient and less effective than a combined arms fleet, that is my analysis. Conflict makes us stronger! Instead of me and Shurugal shooting each other IRL, we shoot at each other's virtual ships with virtual weapons!
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