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Post by Enderminion on Oct 17, 2017 18:57:45 GMT
most of this thread is pre-nerf which means boron filament was not a thing and normal boron had 3.1GPa of yield strength So now boron filament is basically old boron? yes, just slightly stronger and slightly heavier
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Post by shynung on Dec 14, 2017 7:39:43 GMT
I'm experimenting with a double layer armor composed of 3cm reinforced carbon-carbon (ablative) above 2cm vanadium-chromium steel (primary) above 5mm aramid fiber (anti spall). This works well enough until a turret gets blown, but costs something like half of the ship's price.
Any suggestions for some improvement? After reading the thread, I'm thinking replacing the RCC with nitrile rubber, and adding an aluminium whipple shield backed by a meter of aerogel.
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Post by Enderminion on Dec 14, 2017 14:28:50 GMT
decent enough, RCC is expensive but can do everything except wipple shielding and spall lining
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Post by shynung on Dec 14, 2017 16:43:38 GMT
Swapped RCC for silicon nitride, far cheaper but performs just as well. Also swapped aramid fiber for spider silk. Slapped a 1mm aluminium sheet on top, because I hate black ships.
Considered adding a meter thick silica aerogel, but stuff's expensive.
Also, by the gods, the pointy nose helps a lot. Somehow, if I gave my ship a 100m long empty space in front, a flimsy aluminium sheet can withstand a full barrage from multiple stock gunships for almost an hour without any scratch on it.
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Post by Enderminion on Dec 14, 2017 16:50:46 GMT
Graphite Aerogel is much cheaper and less dense, also remember that cost is per kg not per m^3, so while it is more expensive per kg then steel it is far cheaper per M^3
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Post by shynung on Dec 14, 2017 17:32:11 GMT
Should I replace the VC steel layer? I reduced the thickness to 1cm, but that one layer takes a quarter of the finished ship's asking price.
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Dec 14, 2017 17:54:42 GMT
VCS is hella expensive but it's still decent on the cost-effectiveness. By far the best material for armor plating, even if it does cost a fortune. For a budget solution, you can replace it with titanium, though it's quite a bit less durable.
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Post by Enderminion on Dec 14, 2017 17:59:29 GMT
Beta Titanium is better then normal titanium
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Post by shynung on Dec 14, 2017 18:21:20 GMT
So I settled on a composite armor that has, from the innermost layer: - 5mm spider silk, 10cm spacing - 1cm VCS - 3cm silicon nitride - 1m of graphite aerogel - 1mm of aluminium Then I gave the ships enough spacers on the front to make a pointy nose, much like the missiles. At every engagement, I make sure they are ordered to point nose at the opponent.
I haven't seen a single engagement (vs stock ships) where a slug manages to get past - armor status display shows green tiles all over, despite having endured minutes of 11mm railgun barrages being thrown at my ships. Only when I get into knife-fight range (under 10km), when 60mm cannons start firing, do I see orange on the armor status display.
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on Dec 15, 2017 1:42:00 GMT
It seems that sloped armor is actually really stupidly effective. A Gunship with a sharpened nose can usually survive my tournament submission ( link) with 140 or so autocannons firing 250-gram projectiles. Even targeting the engines to get a focused stream of bullets doesn't work very well, since the stream just ricochets off the RCC plate, or is sufficiently deflected by the whipple shield so that it never connects in the first place. I tried various kinds of guns against it and it seems to be almost totally immune to kinetics. Even a gun that fires 13 kg rods at a rapid rate takes forever to penetrate the modified Gunship when it's head-on, and only manages to do damage when hitting the sides. I had some wins against the ship, but it was fairly unreliable, and mostly happened due to a fuel tank rupturing and sending the ship on a spin, exposing it to shots coming perpendicular to the armor plate. Out of all the guns I tried on it, it seems nuclear weapons are the only choice that can reliably beat a design like that. I designed a rapid-fire nuclear autocannon firing 5 100t nukes per second. 20 of those cannons melt the entire armor and everything inside the ship as well inside a second or two, and they're pretty cheap as well. I guess the sharp nose is so effective at distributing kinetic energy over the armor plate that only pure energy output matters, and that's obviously where nuclear autocannons really shine.
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Post by RiftandRend on Dec 15, 2017 3:03:56 GMT
It seems that sloped armor is actually really stupidly effective. A Gunship with a sharpened nose can usually survive my tournament submission ( link) with 140 or so autocannons firing 250-gram projectiles. Even targeting the engines to get a focused stream of bullets doesn't work very well, since the stream just ricochets off the RCC plate, or is sufficiently deflected by the whipple shield so that it never connects in the first place. I tried various kinds of guns against it and it seems to be almost totally immune to kinetics. Even a gun that fires 13 kg rods at a rapid rate takes forever to penetrate the modified Gunship when it's head-on, and only manages to do damage when hitting the sides. I had some wins against the ship, but it was fairly unreliable, and mostly happened due to a fuel tank rupturing and sending the ship on a spin, exposing it to shots coming perpendicular to the armor plate. Out of all the guns I tried on it, it seems nuclear weapons are the only choice that can reliably beat a design like that. I designed a rapid-fire nuclear autocannon firing 5 100t nukes per second. 20 of those cannons melt the entire armor and everything inside the ship as well inside a second or two, and they're pretty cheap as well. I guess the sharp nose is so effective at distributing kinetic energy over the armor plate that only pure energy output matters, and that's obviously where nuclear autocannons really shine. Megajoule railguns firing at the rof cap can get through most armor, even sloped. Nukes are only necessary against armor angles near 90 degrees.
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Post by AdmiralObvious on Dec 15, 2017 7:40:56 GMT
It seems that sloped armor is actually really stupidly effective. A Gunship with a sharpened nose can usually survive my tournament submission ( link) with 140 or so autocannons firing 250-gram projectiles. Even targeting the engines to get a focused stream of bullets doesn't work very well, since the stream just ricochets off the RCC plate, or is sufficiently deflected by the whipple shield so that it never connects in the first place. I tried various kinds of guns against it and it seems to be almost totally immune to kinetics. Even a gun that fires 13 kg rods at a rapid rate takes forever to penetrate the modified Gunship when it's head-on, and only manages to do damage when hitting the sides. I had some wins against the ship, but it was fairly unreliable, and mostly happened due to a fuel tank rupturing and sending the ship on a spin, exposing it to shots coming perpendicular to the armor plate. Out of all the guns I tried on it, it seems nuclear weapons are the only choice that can reliably beat a design like that. I designed a rapid-fire nuclear autocannon firing 5 100t nukes per second. 20 of those cannons melt the entire armor and everything inside the ship as well inside a second or two, and they're pretty cheap as well. I guess the sharp nose is so effective at distributing kinetic energy over the armor plate that only pure energy output matters, and that's obviously where nuclear autocannons really shine. Megajoule railguns firing at the rof cap can get through most armor, even sloped. Nukes are only necessary against armor angles near 90 degrees. I'm not 100% on this, but I think the stream of sand approach might be a bug in the way the game handles how damage to the same area works. I'm not going to deny the fact that it's more than possible to do so with the right material, I'm just pretty sure the weapon will either break one way or another, or there will be enough miniscule spread to let the ship either deflect most shots, or simply absorb the damage, since you're basically turning 1 cm of armor into a whole meter in some cases.
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Post by linkxsc on Dec 20, 2017 5:36:18 GMT
Even a gun that fires 13 kg rods at a rapid rate takes forever to penetrate the modified Gunship when it's head-on, and only manages to do damage when hitting the sides. Instead of a rod shaped projectile (best against a target perpendicular to the projectile's path), try something shorter and larger diameter but the same mass. Another thought if sloping is really that much of a bother. Make large "explosive rounds" (ideally they'd travel until they were near the heavily sloped part of the armor and detonate throwing shrapnel at a better angle to penetrate the armor. Could possibly fudge it with blast launchers being fit to the projectile itself) IRL we do have some antitank warheads that do just this (although with a HEAT round, and the "explosion" only goes in 1 direction towards the armor, not the majority of it out into space)
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Post by gfarrell80 on Dec 22, 2017 17:21:52 GMT
Just going against stock weapons in the campaign, I'm enjoying highly sloped armor. On a long conical ship oriented nose-on, this seems to work quite well versus stock railguns, coil guns, conventional guns, and flak missiles:
1. Anti Spall: 5 cm Spider Silk 2. Malleable metal layer: 4 cm Beta Titanium 3. Rigid ceramic layer: 5 to 12 cm of Amorphous Carbon 4. Malleable metal energy absorbing layer - 5 mm Aluminum (just to slightly slow down things that get through the whipple shield before they hit layers 2&3) 5. Whipple gap: 40 cm empty space 6. Whipple shell: 5 mm Aluminum 7. Whipple outer hard shell deflection/reflective layer: 2 mm Diamond
Layers #2 and #3 I thicken up on the front nose cone area of the ship with an additional layer of same material. Plus I throw in a liberal amount of bulkheads, including like 10 bulkheads up in the nose area, and multiple bulkheads in front of major components. They seem to improve survivability quite a bit without much weight or cost sacrifice.
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Post by Enderminion on Dec 23, 2017 0:18:40 GMT
minor thing, instead of 40cm of empty space you could stuff that space with Graphite Aerogel to improve defense
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