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Post by David367th on Jan 20, 2017 1:28:47 GMT
Part of me want's to "haha" and keep my silence/let you retain your innocence... but I'll explain. My MPD drones will eventually catch your caps when they run out of fuel, as long as I have more dV. if your caps have 20 km/s dV and 2G accel, while my drones have 50km/s dV and 0.1 g accel, you'll be able to outrun me while your fuel holds out... which won't matter, because I'll still have 60%+ of my fuel just to match velocity with you when you hit 0% fuel. Thrust is important, but more so from breaking free of low orbit/dodging stuff. Raw dV efficiency will beat thrusty craft at sufficient dV advantage. But is that fun? People constantly debate whether the game itself is fun, so I guess it's up to the pilot.
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Post by newageofpower on Jan 20, 2017 1:36:53 GMT
Fun is crushing my enemies, seeing them driven before me, and hearing the lamentations of their women.
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Post by theholyinquisition on Jan 20, 2017 1:43:28 GMT
I mean, that removes all strategy or tactics: it's a contest of who can eke more delta-v out of an MPD.
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Post by David367th on Jan 20, 2017 1:43:32 GMT
Fun is crushing my enemies, seeing them driven before me, and hearing the lamentations of their women. Basically it's equivalent to how humans used to hunt. Yeah sure, we can't outrun you or chase you down super quick like some cheeta. Yet, when you think it's safe to take a nap, we'll be there. When you stop to take a drink, we'll be there. When you need to stop to eat, we'll be there. When you gave out because you haven't slept, drank, or eaten and only tried to run away from humans and you finally lost consciousness, guess what you shitty ass deer, we gon be there nerd.
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Post by newageofpower on Jan 20, 2017 1:51:42 GMT
I mean, that removes all strategy or tactics: it's a contest of who can eke more delta-v out of an MPD. No. The correct mix of armaments, armor, and design is extremely important as well. There are situations where an NTR fleet can have more burst/short range firepower than the Ion Drive fleet, in which case the NTR fleet can run down and kill the MPD fleet before their efficient but anemic thrusters let them escape. Which is why you should always have secondary drive systems to compensate for weakness.
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Post by jasonvance on Jan 20, 2017 2:56:19 GMT
Part of me want's to "haha" and keep my silence/let you retain your innocence... but I'll explain. My MPD drones will eventually catch your caps when they run out of fuel, as long as I have more dV. if your caps have 20 km/s dV and 2G accel, while my drones have 50km/s dV and 0.1 g accel, you'll be able to outrun me while your fuel holds out... which won't matter, because I'll still have 60%+ of my fuel just to match velocity with you when you hit 0% fuel. Thrust is important, but more so from breaking free of low orbit/dodging stuff. Raw dV efficiency will beat thrusty craft at sufficient dV advantage. But is that fun? Efficient warfare is usually not fun...
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Post by theholyinquisition on Jan 20, 2017 3:24:56 GMT
Actually, do resistojets have better Isps than NTRs?
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Post by David367th on Jan 20, 2017 3:26:31 GMT
Actually, do resistojets have better Isps than NTRs? They should be similar, since they both use the same basic idea of heating a gas to the melting point of a chamber and spewing it out a de laval nozzle. Resistojets have a higher velocity since they can operate at higher temperatures since they aren't held back by Uranium Oxides. Efficient warfare is usually not fun... I love using drones and missiles as much as I hate launching and planning each and every one of their burns.
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Post by darthroach on Jan 20, 2017 15:20:29 GMT
Actually, do resistojets have better Isps than NTRs? They should be similar, since they both use the same basic idea of heating a gas to the melting point of a chamber and spewing it out a de laval nozzle. Resistojets have a higher velocity since they can operate at higher temperatures since they aren't held back by Uranium Oxides. Efficient warfare is usually not fun... I love using drones and missiles as much as I hate launching and planning each and every one of their burns. Indeed, fissile fuels rarely make for the best structural materials. Now, if only there was a way to circumvent that pesky temperature limit - we could use atomic rockets the way god intended them! 🤔
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Post by tukuro on Jan 20, 2017 15:55:31 GMT
Drones need to have the acceleration to catch Capital ships (like 2g is the minimum), I think of them as missiles with guns Part of me want's to "haha" and keep my silence/let you retain your innocence... but I'll explain. My MPD drones will eventually catch your caps when they run out of fuel, as long as I have more dV. if your caps have 20 km/s dV and 2G accel, while my drones have 50km/s dV and 0.1 g accel, you'll be able to outrun me while your fuel holds out... which won't matter, because I'll still have 60%+ of my fuel just to match velocity with you when you hit 0% fuel. Thrust is important, but more so from breaking free of low orbit/dodging stuff. Raw dV efficiency will beat thrusty craft at sufficient dV advantage. What matters is not just deltaV but also closing velocity. If your drones intercept a ship at over 20 km/s using an MPD, all the ship has to do is step aside at the last moment, and those drones won't have either the deltaV or the acceleration to continue the intercept. It's the same thing with missiles. Flak/NEFPs/Nuclear missiles intercepting at dozens of kilometres seems effective, until the targeted ship can just fire its engines for two seconds and dodge the entire salvo. If you spread the missiles out or have them travel in a line they can be countered by selectively destroying parts of the swarm so the ship can pass through. Combined with module redundancy this makes high-velocity intercepts much less effective.
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Post by The Astronomer on Jan 20, 2017 15:58:42 GMT
Part of me want's to "haha" and keep my silence/let you retain your innocence... but I'll explain. My MPD drones will eventually catch your caps when they run out of fuel, as long as I have more dV. if your caps have 20 km/s dV and 2G accel, while my drones have 50km/s dV and 0.1 g accel, you'll be able to outrun me while your fuel holds out... which won't matter, because I'll still have 60%+ of my fuel just to match velocity with you when you hit 0% fuel. Thrust is important, but more so from breaking free of low orbit/dodging stuff. Raw dV efficiency will beat thrusty craft at sufficient dV advantage. What matters is not just deltaV but also closing velocity. If your drones intercept a ship at over 20 km/s using an MPD, all the ship has to do is step aside at the last moment, and those drones won't have either the deltaV or the acceleration to continue the intercept. It's the same thing with missiles. Flak/NEFPs/Nuclear missiles intercepting at dozens of kilometres seems effective, until the targeted ship can just fire its engines for two seconds and dodge the entire salvo. If you spread the missiles out or have them travel in a line they can be countered by selectively destroying parts of the swarm so the ship can pass through. Combined with module redundancy this makes high-velocity intercepts much less effective. To put that all in summary: just find a good balance for your missiles.
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Post by newageofpower on Jan 20, 2017 17:28:24 GMT
If your drones intercept a ship at over 20 km/s using an MPD, all the ship has to do is step aside at the last moment, and those drones won't have either the deltaV or the acceleration to continue the intercept. It's the same thing with missiles. Flak/NEFPs/Nuclear missiles intercepting at dozens of kilometres seems effective, until the targeted ship can just fire its engines for two seconds and dodge the entire salvo. If you spread the missiles out or have them travel in a line they can be countered by selectively destroying parts of the swarm so the ship can pass through. Combined with module redundancy this makes high-velocity intercepts much less effective. I don't buy your statements either way. Missiles with overtuned drives can break 20G of acceleration, and can hit (or close enough, for standoff payloads) manouvering targets even with a closing velocity >10 km/s. For warships/drones with MPD, you can always do a deceleration burn prior to entering combat envelope. In fact, by taking a fuel mass ratio closer to a NTR/other fuel warship you can easily exceed 100 km/s; in this case, if you want an extended combat window you burn 25km/s to close the distance, then spend another 24.5 km/s to bring the approach velocity down to 500m/s for some lovely 200+ second engagement window. In this scenario, you still have half your dV remaining even after chasing down (and presumably crushing) the NTR fleet.
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Post by tukuro on Jan 20, 2017 18:13:05 GMT
If your drones intercept a ship at over 20 km/s using an MPD, all the ship has to do is step aside at the last moment, and those drones won't have either the deltaV or the acceleration to continue the intercept. It's the same thing with missiles. Flak/NEFPs/Nuclear missiles intercepting at dozens of kilometres seems effective, until the targeted ship can just fire its engines for two seconds and dodge the entire salvo. If you spread the missiles out or have them travel in a line they can be countered by selectively destroying parts of the swarm so the ship can pass through. Combined with module redundancy this makes high-velocity intercepts much less effective. I don't buy your statements either way. Missiles with overtuned drives can break 20G of acceleration, and can hit (or close enough, for standoff payloads) manouvering targets even with a closing velocity >10 km/s. For warships/drones with MPD, you can always do a deceleration burn prior to entering combat envelope. In fact, by taking a fuel mass ratio closer to a NTR/other fuel warship you can easily exceed 100 km/s; in this case, if you want an extended combat window you burn 25km/s to close the distance, then spend another 24.5 km/s to bring the approach velocity down to 500m/s for some lovely 200+ second engagement window. In this scenario, you still have half your dV remaining even after chasing down (and presumably crushing) the NTR fleet. I'm not contesting that missiles/drones can catch up to a ship for an intercept. What I am referring to is what happens when the intercept actually takes place. As in seconds before impact. In this frame of reference the ship is effectively standing still, and the missiles are traveling at high velocities to overcome the laser death zone (especially with Cerium doped lasers), interceptor missiles, interceptor drones and and array of cheap sandblaster CIWS. What a ship can do in those few seconds before impact is fire it's engines, and assuming it has a sufficiently high trust to weight ratio change its relative position by dozens or even hundreds of meters. Those missiles now have to change course. But this takes time, and when you are already traveling at 10+ km/s, takes a lot of deltaV. Notice how difficult it is to change course if a multi-G enemy ship evades minutes from the intercept when your missiles are traveling at over 10 km/s? This is even harder if this happens two seconds before impact. Even more so if their relative velocity is dozens of kilometres per second. Even if your missiles can pull 20Gs and have a few kilometres of delta V left they're going to miss. Now, of course we could spread out the missiles or have them travel in a line. In the first case we can just focus on the missiles that are most likely to impact the ship, and then repeat the last second manoeuvre and combine it with front and rear mounted directional thrusters to further reduce the chance of a successful impact. In the second case we will have an easier time to destroy the missiles individually, because for this formation to be effectiveness you need significant distance between the missiles for them to still reliably get an intercept with their multi-G propulsion. The formation system is difficult to test in the first case, and highly impractical in the second case (Unless you have the time to space a thousand or so 1 missile fleets 1-2 kilometres apart). But the whole act of dodging at the last second is already possible in game.
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Post by vegemeister on Jan 20, 2017 19:34:49 GMT
I don't buy your statements either way. Missiles with overtuned drives can break 20G of acceleration, and can hit (or close enough, for standoff payloads) manouvering targets even with a closing velocity >10 km/s. For warships/drones with MPD, you can always do a deceleration burn prior to entering combat envelope. In fact, by taking a fuel mass ratio closer to a NTR/other fuel warship you can easily exceed 100 km/s; in this case, if you want an extended combat window you burn 25km/s to close the distance, then spend another 24.5 km/s to bring the approach velocity down to 500m/s for some lovely 200+ second engagement window. In this scenario, you still have half your dV remaining even after chasing down (and presumably crushing) the NTR fleet. I'm not contesting that missiles/drones can catch up to a ship for an intercept. What I am referring to is what happens when the intercept actually takes place. As in seconds before impact. In this frame of reference the ship is effectively standing still, and the missiles are traveling at high velocities to overcome the laser death zone (especially with Cerium doped lasers), interceptor missiles, interceptor drones and and array of cheap sandblaster CIWS. What a ship can do in those few seconds before impact is fire it's engines, and assuming it has a sufficiently high trust to weight ratio change its relative position by dozens or even hundreds of meters. Those missiles now have to change course. But this takes time, and when you are already traveling at 10+ km/s, takes a lot of deltaV. Notice how difficult it is to change course if a multi-G enemy ship evades minutes from the intercept when your missiles are traveling at over 10 km/s? This is even harder if this happens two seconds before impact. Even more so if their relative velocity is dozens of kilometres per second. Even if your missiles can pull 20Gs and have a few kilometres of delta V left they're going to miss. Now, of course we could spread out the missiles or have them travel in a line. In the first case we can just focus on the missiles that are most likely to impact the ship, and then repeat the last second manoeuvre and combine it with front and rear mounted directional thrusters to further reduce the chance of a successful impact. In the second case we will have an easier time to destroy the missiles individually, because for this formation to be effectiveness you need significant distance between the missiles for them to still reliably get an intercept with their multi-G propulsion. The formation system is difficult to test in the first case, and highly impractical in the second case (Unless you have the time to space a thousand or so 1 missile fleets 1-2 kilometres apart). But the whole act of dodging at the last second is already possible in game. If the missile acceleration is at least equal to the target acceleration, it can follow the target in all its moves. At least within the limitation of it's turnabout time, so your "put engines on both ends so that the direction you're going to dodge can't be known" strategy could actually work, at least against a single missile. Faster intercepts actually help, assuming the target starts dodging 1000 km out, because then the missile doesn't need as much Δv. If the missile acceleration is much greater than the target acceleration, and the missile guidance can perfectly predict how the target will dodge, it only needs to expend half the Δv. But in practice, the guidance can't perfectly predict the target, so the target can force the missile to piss away it's Δv. Also the attitude controller isn't stable with very short turnabout times, so a higher acceleration missile can't turn proportionately faster, so it spends a lot more of its fuel on turning.
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Post by Enderminion on Jan 20, 2017 19:42:38 GMT
Another problem with MPD missiles/drones is that while they can catch anything given enough time, if that time is longer then a few days (easy to do with Gas Giant systems) then I could resupply and reinforce my units and absentmindedly lob single atomic rockets at your missiles/drones till they die. this is of course beyond the scope of the game... For Now
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