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Post by The Astronomer on Jan 15, 2017 8:25:30 GMT
Anyone with railgun designs shooting at more than 200 km/s?
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Post by dragonkid11 on Jan 15, 2017 8:26:57 GMT
Also, I tested out to see how far I can push conventional cannon before practicality pushed back.
For a simple conventional cannon with projectile speed of around 1.8 kmps, you need a one to one ratio of explosive propellant and projectile.
But for an overengineered hypervelocity round at 3.2 kmps, you need.... 15 to 1 ratio of explosive propellant and projectile.
I only tested it by making a 1 gram conventional cannon so far but really, that's the limit of conventional cannon.
I really hope we can have ETC (Electrothermal-Chemical) gun so we can achieve a higher ballistic efficiency.
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Post by newageofpower on Jan 15, 2017 8:28:34 GMT
Anyone with railgun designs shooting at more than 200 km/s? 194 or 197 (forgot which) was my limit for non-braced, 1GW max input power designs; probably the best you could get with the CoADE game in it's current state. However, that requires a 'fragmentation' package with almost 0 fragmentation mass, which is unlikely to do any damage due to the quirks of of the CoADE engine. Does anyone else think FRUIT BY THE FOOT™ is a staple of every kids lunch box!
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Post by deltav on Jan 15, 2017 8:31:04 GMT
Also, I tested out to see how far I can push conventional cannon before practicality pushed back. For a simple conventional cannon with projectile speed of around 1.8 kmps, you need a one to one ratio of explosive propellant and projectile. But for an overengineered hypervelocity round at 3.2 kmps, you need.... 15 to 1 ratio of explosive propellant and projectile. I only tested it by making a 1 gram conventional cannon so far but really, that's the limit of conventional cannon. I really hope we can have ETC (Electrothermal-Chemical) gun so we can achieve a higher ballistic efficiency. Bet someone will make a mod eventually.
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Post by The Astronomer on Jan 15, 2017 8:34:45 GMT
Is it just me, or is this conversation turning into a fight?
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Post by kitten on Jan 15, 2017 8:40:35 GMT
What you're missing is that for all ranges practical in the game, we can brute-force the problem by throwing more energy at higher frequencies at the problem. newageofpower gave a good summary of why KE guns suffer at longer ranges. In the case of lasers, the major limitation is power and the assumptions behind CoaDE of no hangups about nuclear power (nothing like what killed Project Orion for instance), all the fissiles in the solar system available (so practically abundant), and simplifications about the handling of radiation, reactor service life, and thermocouples mean we can throw a lot of power into our lasers. Electromagnetic launchers suffer from severe overheating and pressure issues if you try to just scale up their power but lasers scale far better, so the solution to all laser problems in the game is to throw more of those cheap, cheap gigawatts at them. TL;DR of this page: power is cheap in CoaDE, when power is cheap lasers win.
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Post by newageofpower on Jan 15, 2017 8:41:53 GMT
So I'm a troll because I don't see why the inverse square law will disappear if you just play around with the designs? I really don't know what to say. Maybe you just have a funny sense of humor or something. You must be kidding. Let me try to take you seriously. I literally said: The fundemental problem with guns in space is that dodging drops the effectiveness of the gun at delivering energy to the target to 0% (so guns are useless until they enter a range where their duty cycle allows them a non-trivial possibility of hitting the target), hence high velocity guns firing light projectiles are preferred over lower velocity weapons firing heavy slugs. So, lasers have (effectively) 100% accuracy, and (effectively) 0% chance of getting dodged. My 823t laser setup (with reactor, fuel, propulsion, radiators) deals 423MW at usable intensities out to light seconds. At 1000km the intensity exceeds 260 Gigawatts/m2, about a thousand times more intense than required to ablate any armor material; at 10,000 km even my fastest gun would need almost 1 minute to hit my laser (and the gun itself weights over 500t, before we even consider a turret assembly, reactor, radiators, fuel. The smallest "practical" gun setup i have around it masses >1.4kt), and the laser could easily kill my gun drone at over 1,000,000 km, where a shot from my gun would take 83 minutes and 20 seconds to travel the distance!
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Post by jasonvance on Jan 15, 2017 8:42:57 GMT
All of the stock laser designs are terrible: Even if the Stock laser designs could be improved, how does that solve the fundamental problem with lasers, that their power drops off exponentially with range? Over range the laser will defract and become weaker until it is useless from a military perspective. Isn't this a fundamental quality of lasers that better designs will not solve? A laser is only a small fraction as powerful a 100 km as it was a 1 km, this is a fundamental quality of all lasers isn't it? The fundamental limitation of lasers is you can never build a perfect beam, it always comes out somewhat cone shaped and degrades over distance. You can counter that by brute force and pump more and more energy until it is useful again at whatever range you were aiming for, or you can build a better optic to focus the cone tighter (most likely you will do both). There is very little in space to defract a beam (the loss in intensity you see on the stats is the beam divergence over distance or how coney it is at certain ranges) So now that we have covered the fundamental problem of lasers lets talk about projectile weapons. They are limited to whatever velocity they can be imparted by the weapon that fires them (and possibly some sort of missile attached to the projectile for guidance but to keep it simple lets just talk about mass drivers etc as it would be unlikely a missile would impart much extra delta-v for anything other than steering). The fundamental limitation of projectile weapons is their muzzle velocity. Targets can move, even though you imparted 10GW of power to a projectile more efficiently than a laser can impart power to your ship hull and got it up to an impressive 300km/s. If the target can move out of the way in 5 seconds your effective range is only 1500km. If that round lands it will for sure devastate what it hits. Meanwhile a laser has a muzzle velocity of 299,792 km/s which gives it a maximum effective range against the same target of 1,485,000. You for sure have to pump a lot of energy into a lasers with a really large focusing aperture to do any damage at that range but I can assure you that the requirement to get a projectile weapon to preform at even 10% that range is many orders of magnitude greater.
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Post by deltav on Jan 15, 2017 8:48:04 GMT
What you're missing is that for all ranges practical in the game, we can brute-force the problem by throwing more energy at higher frequencies at the problem. newageofpower gave a good summary of why KE guns suffer at longer ranges. In the case of lasers, the major limitation is power and the assumptions behind CoaDE of no hangups about nuclear power (nothing like what killed Project Orion for instance), all the fissiles in the solar system available (so practically abundant), and simplifications about the handling of radiation, reactor service life, and thermocouples mean we can throw a lot of power into our lasers. Electromagnetic launchers suffer from severe overheating and pressure issues if you try to just scale up their power but lasers scale far better, so the solution to all laser problems in the game is to throw more of those cheap, cheap gigawatts at them. TL;DR of this page: power is cheap in CoaDE, when power is cheap lasers win. Since this is about space warfare, more power means more reactors and more radiators which equals larger targets for the enemy to shoot at, and less delta-v. Also, cost is a factor in game. Yes we have unlimited budgets to play around with, but cost is included in the game for reason. Cost = resources. The whole point is to find the highest lethality for the least cost, and for that lasers (if the laser station is any indication), are not it. What do you think?
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Post by The Astronomer on Jan 15, 2017 8:49:47 GMT
What you're missing is that for all ranges practical in the game, we can brute-force the problem by throwing more energy at higher frequencies at the problem. newageofpower gave a good summary of why KE guns suffer at longer ranges. In the case of lasers, the major limitation is power and the assumptions behind CoaDE of no hangups about nuclear power (nothing like what killed Project Orion for instance), all the fissiles in the solar system available (so practically abundant), and simplifications about the handling of radiation, reactor service life, and thermocouples mean we can throw a lot of power into our lasers. Electromagnetic launchers suffer from severe overheating and pressure issues if you try to just scale up their power but lasers scale far better, so the solution to all laser problems in the game is to throw more of those cheap, cheap gigawatts at them. TL;DR of this page: power is cheap in CoaDE, when power is cheap lasers win. Since this is about space warfare, more power means more reactors and more radiators which equals larger targets for the enemy to shoot at, and less delta-v. Also, cost is a factor in game. Yes we have unlimited budgets to play around with, but cost is included in the game for reason. Cost = resources. The whole point is to find the highest lethality for the least cost, and for that lasers (if the laser station is any indication), are not it. What do you think? If you look at the stock laser station, you would say that.
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Post by newageofpower on Jan 15, 2017 8:51:22 GMT
Is it just me, or is this conversation turning into a fight? It's not a fight; it's an utter TASTE-PHENOMENON deltaV is either: A) Someone who eats FRUIT BY THE FOOT™, from the bottom up like a champ! B) Someone who wads his fruit snacks up into a delicious ball and enjoys every FRUIT ESSENCE™ Holding drop of flavour!
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Post by kitten on Jan 15, 2017 8:54:48 GMT
What you're missing is that for all ranges practical in the game, we can brute-force the problem by throwing more energy at higher frequencies at the problem. newageofpower gave a good summary of why KE guns suffer at longer ranges. In the case of lasers, the major limitation is power and the assumptions behind CoaDE of no hangups about nuclear power (nothing like what killed Project Orion for instance), all the fissiles in the solar system available (so practically abundant), and simplifications about the handling of radiation, reactor service life, and thermocouples mean we can throw a lot of power into our lasers. Electromagnetic launchers suffer from severe overheating and pressure issues if you try to just scale up their power but lasers scale far better, so the solution to all laser problems in the game is to throw more of those cheap, cheap gigawatts at them. TL;DR of this page: power is cheap in CoaDE, when power is cheap lasers win. Since this is about space warfare, more power means more reactors and more radiators which equals larger targets for the enemy to shoot at, and less delta-v. Also, cost is a factor in game. Yes we have unlimited budgets to play around with, but cost is included in the game for reason. Cost = resources. The whole point is to find the highest lethality for the least cost, and for that lasers (if the laser station is any indication), are not it. What do you think? I'm repeating myself but power is cheap. Reactors are cheap. Radiators are cheap. If you consider range at all lasers are the cheapest way of delivering damage at long range, any KE solution of equal range beyond the few tens of kilometres that stock ships are designed for will cost more. If you do not consider range chemical guns probably win, but they are trivially easy to dodge and outrange.
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Post by The Astronomer on Jan 15, 2017 8:54:50 GMT
Okay, I would make a little point here: f**k the aramid fiber.
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Post by newageofpower on Jan 15, 2017 9:10:29 GMT
I don't understand your hostility. You obviously are a big fan of laser and are upset that I'm not convinced. First, I haven't once personally attacked you or called you names, so for starters why don't you focus on the topic or leave the discussion. Is this how you treat new members who try to come and add something to the board? Nobody is ENJOYING GREAT GENERAL MILLS FRUIT SNACKS MORE THAN ME!, DeltaV. I LOVE EM! YUM YUM™ FRUIT BY THE FOOT!
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Post by newageofpower on Jan 15, 2017 9:14:06 GMT
I normally detest cats, but at this moment I wish I could give you a hug.
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