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Post by bdcarrillo on May 11, 2017 4:38:12 GMT
In 1.1.1 I've built several viable needle guns again. Nothing yet to fit this challenge, but without exploiting anything we can get 500 km/s capital ship weapons.
Even with an enemy that ignores range, we can adequately armor ships against the random railgun projectile or two that may connect over 1 MM
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Post by vegemeister on May 11, 2017 12:13:24 GMT
In 1.1.1 I've built several viable needle guns again. Nothing yet to fit this challenge, but without exploiting anything we can get 500 km/s capital ship weapons. Even with an enemy that ignores range, we can adequately armor ships against the random railgun projectile or two that may connect over 1 MM Without exploiting anything? It was my understanding that all needle guns exploit the game not applying pressure limits to the payload, while also using the full length of the payload + sabot to calculate the barrel pressure.
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Post by vegemeister on May 12, 2017 13:24:14 GMT
I didn't start out designing something to compete with the Hellfire, but the mass came very close, and it follows a similar "very high volume of fire" philosophy (though with far lighter bullets). Meet the PD-2 point defense drone: Less than half the cost of the hellfire, and about the same mass. Details: Engines, radiators, and propellant tanks are redundant. The reactor, alas, is not. The PD-2 is intended to take advantage of the new independent gun targeting. Because guns are only assigned to separate targets within each ship, it's best to have a lot of guns on a small number of ships. The starting point for the design was this railgun. It has large enough muzzle velocity and low enough dispersion to be useful against missiles without ignore range, and the low rate-of-fire allows many guns to be powered from a reasonable reactor (and also keeps my computer from dying). Kinetic point defense is actually good now. This salvo started as 100 missiles and was launched in slightly less than 2.5 seconds. Today is a bad day to be a missile.
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Post by ash19256 on May 12, 2017 16:41:16 GMT
I didn't start out designing something to compete with the Hellfire, but the mass came very close, and it follows a similar "very high volume of fire" philosophy (though with far lighter bullets). Meet the PD-2 point defense drone: Less than half the cost of the hellfire, and about the same mass. Details: Engines, radiators, and propellant tanks are redundant. The reactor, alas, is not. The PD-2 is intended to take advantage of the new independent gun targeting. Because guns are only assigned to separate targets within each ship, it's best to have a lot of guns on a small number of ships. The starting point for the design was this railgun. It has large enough muzzle velocity and low enough dispersion to be useful against missiles without ignore range, and the low rate-of-fire allows many guns to be powered from a reasonable reactor (and also keeps my computer from dying). Kinetic point defense is actually good now. This salvo started as 100 missiles and was launched in slightly less than 2.5 seconds. Today is a bad day to be a missile. I imagine that's also fairly effective at killing ships.
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Post by AdmiralObvious on May 12, 2017 17:30:16 GMT
One thing I can't help but notice is that pretty much every submission had a significantly higher heat signature than the stock Hell fire does.
Not really a bad thing since it's mostly irrelevant, but still. Using drones as flares is a good idea though I suppose.
(P.S. Internet is dying apparently, this might get double/triple posted.)
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Post by darkwarriorj on May 12, 2017 20:29:51 GMT
Here's an entry on the upper end of the size allowance. The only thing it really has optimized for it is it's precise railgun. Water remass because I like it, thematically, but really most other remasses are better. Hopefully this should outrange everyone else's railgun drones. And the railgun it mounts, scaled up in power to 100MW (previous version ran on 25MW).
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Post by bdcarrillo on May 15, 2017 13:50:44 GMT
In 1.1.1 I've built several viable needle guns again. Nothing yet to fit this challenge, but without exploiting anything we can get 500 km/s capital ship weapons. Even with an enemy that ignores range, we can adequately armor ships against the random railgun projectile or two that may connect over 1 MM Without exploiting anything? It was my understanding that all needle guns exploit the game not applying pressure limits to the payload, while also using the full length of the payload + sabot to calculate the barrel pressure. I can still induce the pressure limit error for the projectile, and it has a very thick barrel with a stiff material for "armor" to help. I did speak in error about exploits, the projectile does include a massless spacer... Hrmph
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Feb 15, 2018 15:32:14 GMT
In the vein of my recent Dragonclaw and Firestorm I present Thunderbolt - heavy assault USCV (drone): It comes equipped with modified 33mm cannons also used on other two drones, as well as modified 60mm cannons typically used as warship CIWS further altered for drone use. Additionally, it mounts blast launched payloads used by the other two drones, except in greater numbers. All weapons have been tuned to share ballistic characteristics allowing any combination of them to be fired without reorienting the craft. To facilitate cost reduction main armour layer has been replaced with denser, but much cheaper amorphous carbon, expensive RTG used on hellfire has been swapped for five much cheaper RTGs used on Stingers, which, due to their widespread use, should ease the logistics considerably, although it came at a cost of having to mount much larger radiator surface - in the form of aluminium radiators also used on Stingers and the other two drones. Another change that should ease the logistics has been move from Hellfire's MethLOx based propulsion stack, to modified Stinger's Methane-Fluorine propulsion. To satisfy listed requirements and provide measure of redundancy four such engines are used, alongside an array of much smaller fixed vernier motors - together they allow craft to surpass Hellfire's manoeuvrability as well as giving it ability to roll which is rare in such small craft (granted, given spinal armament and limited delta-v rolling is only of situational utility). Because of craft's relatively large size and cost it's design feature some nods towards survivability, in spite of it being a semi-disposable drone. A number of Hellfire style SiC radiators have been provided in addition to new aluminium one to grant craft limited flash resistance - the area provided can effectively cool a single RTG and allow opportunity to continue firing single mounted weapon of choice. In addition four main engines (alone providing considerable measure of redundancy) for which fuel has been spread into multiple tanks arranged into mixed symmetry groups to minimize delta-v loss in the event of penetration. Control system have been made doubly redundant while ammo and power generation has been spread apart and moved to areas where penetration is statistically less likely. Craft's front features ballistic cap backed by generous 5.7cm of nitrile rubber. Armament also provides a measure of redundancy with four cannons of each type (on board powerplant provides enough power to fire any five weapons at the same time). The result is a relatively modest (with the exception of cost) improvement over Hellfire's characteristics that can however do one thing Hellfire cannot: Quite reliably solo a Gunship. Yes, this drone too conforms to my self imposed challenge of trying to do things with vanilla power generation if possible. As for the radiators, my menu is cluttered enough as it is.
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Post by dragonkid11 on Feb 16, 2018 4:19:24 GMT
I really liked how you keep staying to standard strength level without going overboard in stuff.
The actual effective usage of blast launcher in launching projectile is also an exciting weaponized aspect I would like to learn on in my future design but..
There is WAY TOO MANY radiators on your drones.
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Post by AdmiralObvious on Feb 16, 2018 6:26:48 GMT
I really liked how you keep staying to standard strength level without going overboard in stuff. The actual effective usage of blast launcher in launching projectile is also an exciting weaponized aspect I would like to learn on in my future design but.. There is WAY TOO MANY radiators on your art. Fixed that for you.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Feb 16, 2018 10:10:29 GMT
I really liked how you keep staying to standard strength level without going overboard in stuff. Well, I'm lazy, so I try to do the best with stuff I got or tweak it if I have some particular itch to scratch. I also think that excessive optimization exposes dubiously physical corner cases or would hit engineering issues IRL, plus it kind of misses the point - I think everyone agrees that an Empire States Building sized railgun supplied with adequate power supply would be freaking awesome, but so what? What does it tell us? Well, it did tell us that sandcasters are good, but that's a bit of a case of wanting your railgun to be a laser. OTOH how to build and lay out your vessel so it works is actually interesting because it has to solve more problems and weigh more trade-offs than just flinging stuff as fast as possible and has more interesting solution space (and you can get some spiffy looking ships with only minimal functionality concessions - often good form follows function). I'm not disparaging module design, especially given that many here have skills in it I can only wish I had, but I think it's kind of tangential to the main point of this game. Especially given that originally it got included because different module types weren't easily characterized and it wasn't obvious, for example, what a good and reasonable space railgun would look like, so the best way to parametrize was to dump whole numerical simulation on the issue and let players sort it out (which is awesome in its own right and certainly makes an unique selling point for the game - it certainly did contribute to me buying it), but it's really just the badge of legitimacy and a way to extend the available arsenal, the real fun starts once you have everything you need and can start building and engineering around particular problems. Since so far we can't aim blast launchers, you either need to sync it with something that will get aimed (conventional gun, most of the time as it has similar performance characteristics and can be made small and not energy demanding) - sync exit velocity and put engagement range slightly below gun's expected firing range, put it on a dumb payload with some assumptions regarding how it hits the target (which may vary depending on the intercept) and fire it point-blank, launch guided projectiles in the approximate direction (for bigger ships you don't want to face enemy with 'splody array of blast tubes you can use side launched blast tube launch containers and nose forward orientation) or just scatter projectiles around in an effective pattern (there are some examples way beyond my league in the screenshot thread). Actually only slightly more than RTGs need. On Thunderbolt there is one extra aluminium panel over immediate cooling needs, and that's for Hellfire level of power generation (my Stinger replacement duplicated the original's powerplant). There is also just enough silicon carbide ones to cool at least one RTG if aluminium ones get flashed off, which seems to make sense to me given that Hellfire seems to be meant to be a tankier (armour thickness, radiator size, material and double redundancy), shootier (4x firepower) alternative to Stinger. Well, in this vein I also made something tankier and shootier than my Stinger replacements. On Firestorm there is one more than I would be able to get away with if I used the more effective pattern I used on Dragonclaw, but I decided to not tweak it further. Since I use vanilla power generation and vanilla RTGs run rather cool, and since I had to replace Hellfire's costly RTG with much cheaper, but also much cooler bunch of 3.5kW ones used on Stinger to meet the cost requirement, the radiator demands boomed. Yes, I could use less numerous radiators if I made custom ones, but since the crew requirements aren't sanely calculated for drones and radiators should probably scale crew requirements with total area first and individual panel mass * the number of hinges second, why bother? This way it at least looks like something made from standardized components and reasonably meant to replace commonplace military hardware. What IS really wasteful on this drone is the RCS, which got only added to satisfy turnabout time demands without rolling an entirely new engine. Without it it would be a bit more sluggish, but wouldn't eat delta v nearly half as fast - as it is losing all the delta v (and not from tank punctures either) is what tends to get it killed - even when soloing a gunship.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Feb 18, 2018 19:53:22 GMT
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Post by smithblack on Oct 18, 2018 23:28:57 GMT
I know this is an old challenge, but my newest drone just fits the bill too well to pass up. May I introduce the Vendetta II laserstar killer: The Vendetta II weights in at 34.4 tons, less than the 70 tons of the Hellfire, and posses 3.13 km/s of delta v, just a tad over the 3.01 km/s of the Hellfire. A single unit costs a mere 642 kilo credits. The craft is capable of accelerating at 3.64 G's wet, which is admittedly slightly less than the 3.94 G of the Hellfire drone; however considering the range the craft is meant to engage at, it is felt this will have a negligible effect on performance. It is hoped this requirement can be waived by the admiralty in light of the craft's numerous other benefits. The primary armament consist of three 50 km/s "Fury E" railguns. These are designed to engage at 1 Mm and first strip enemy turrets plus guns, then bombard the target until it is destroyed. The secondary armament consists of four 5 MW laser tubes feeding into six turrets on the front of the ship; this provides some level of antimissile protection along with the ability to eliminate lightly armored enemy modules. The drone is designed to operate in an environment lacking the laser "ablation cap:" as such both the craft and the turrets are armored with amorphous carbon. Doctrine for engagement is to send ten of these craft against an enemy battle group and open fire with all turrets at 1 Mm. Even with the ablation cap off, the craft usually wins against laserstars. Additionally, considering the craft's propensity for stripping enemy turrets it can be safely presumed that it will give more conventional enemy ships a difficult time as well. Set the AI to Ranged or Launcher for best results. Combat performance may be categorized as "Devastating." A wing of 10 successfully nullified two Deep Fryers, a Ring O' Death, and one other 10 GW laserstar while retaining four survivors at the end of the engagement. This, mind you, occurred with the ablation cap off. Due to the craft's ability to strip turrets, it can also be reasonably expected that the ship would perform as well, if not better, against enemy gunships and siloships as against enemy laserstars. Since testing was performed in a no-ablation-cap environment, it would be expected results will be far better in an unmodified version of the game verses laserstars. The craft file is attached, along with a carrier for the drone
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Post by typetester on Aug 2, 2019 23:09:06 GMT
Late to the party, but this is the drone design I came up with. Combination of NTR and MPD gives it a good Delta-V and high manoeuvrability, and a 10 MW needle type railgun gives it some serious punch. I also learned that a nitrile rubber "radiation shield" aka bulkhead between the cannon and the main tank will improve survivability against lasers drastically, as the tanks will overheat and blow long before the cannon itself is disabled. 3cm of rubber and 30cm of air will cure this.
Downside, all those payloads and layers of armour will bring the game engine to its knees pretty fast.
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Post by gedzilla on Aug 4, 2019 17:19:28 GMT
Late to the party, but this is the drone design I came up with. Combination of NTR and MPD gives it a good Delta-V and high manoeuvrability, and a 10 MW needle type railgun gives it some serious punch. I also learned that a nitrile rubber "radiation shield" aka bulkhead between the cannon and the main tank will improve survivability against lasers drastically, as the tanks will overheat and blow long before the cannon itself is disabled. 3cm of rubber and 30cm of air will cure this.
Downside, all those payloads and layers of armour will bring the game engine to its knees pretty fast.
Nice bulkhead trick
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