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Post by concretedonkey on Mar 5, 2017 20:33:40 GMT
 So this is my attempt at redesigning the stock ships, keeping them mostly stock. Its ment to be a more practical point of view from what Tukuro is doing in his thread. The first one is the everbody's favourite Gunship. And surprise, surprise its my favorite double cone design with the radiators behind and most of the guns rearanged around the waist. As you can see here this is quite effective in keeping you safe from the front. The radiators are behind the cone from most angles and the guns are just peeking around the rim to be protected from most of the fire but still have a decent field of view. In a broadside engagement you still have the upper hand since your radiators are more compact and your crew is either way back or in front, safely away from anything interesting for the enemy.  Most of the crew and the reactors are around 1/4 of the length from the back. Away from the engines if the enemy decides to shoot them and away from the guns. There is a redundant crew module at the very front. Strangely this is kind of safe - even if this ship is designed for a frontal engagement most the fire is concentrated towards the guns at the rim. It trades all heavy coilguns for 4 additional autofire railguns. The idea is that it doesn't matter how much is your weight of fire if you cannot shoot because you just lost all your radiators (which mostly happened during the tests) Almost twice as heavy but this is mostly fuel, I just favour more delta V, and the whole design is naturally "fat" to be able to hide the radiators behind the cone. There is an additional armor belt at the whole frontal half of the ship. The non-stock parts are mostly the radiators and the engines which are essential to make the design work. The radiators are similar to the ones on the stock ship , they are just turned sideways and are made in 3 destinct heights to fit the design. The engines are a smaller bell version of the stock ones - trade exaust velocity for compactness ... otherwise they would not fit. The other departure from the stock are modified standalone version of the stock 400kw laser - sort of a wannabe anti-laser cluster. I did not modify the range and the apperature in order to keep it as fair as possible. So it mostly did nothing in the AI tests. I've tested it extensively AI against AI and even the worst versions never lost against the stock gunship. The shots above with the hit patterns are from earlier versions where the gun positions were too far behind the rim and the AI wasn't shooting most of the time. The last few tests it was much more one sided :   Next will probbably be the corvette or the laser frigate. |
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Post by Easy on Mar 5, 2017 21:06:29 GMT
A minor optimization for conventional cannons is to separate the ammo storage from the cannon. It prevents lasers from detonating the ammo on gun destruction.
Not super realistic due to the lack of ammo feeds but all weapons and modules have similar abilities. Especially goofy when you separate a drone launcher from the drone ammo storage.
For hellfire and stinger drones it results in the disarmed vehicles setting a collision course.
I'm sure future ammo could be designed to cook off in a less energetic manner. Not entirely safe, but better. Lots of real life examples of both.
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Post by concretedonkey on Mar 5, 2017 21:12:37 GMT
Yes I was thinking that this will be the next "modified stock" part, for the conventional guns for sure. I'll probably separate the drone magazines too to be able to link two redundant launchers to the same magazine. I'll just keep them close for realism.
p.s. just noticed that the attached design file has the modified stock laser 3 times? I'm not sure if it will work. Anybody else had any problems with the export function ?
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Post by vegemeister on Mar 5, 2017 22:29:03 GMT
It looks like the reactors might be close to the center-of-radiators danger zone. Have you tested to see where missiles aim for?
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Post by David367th on Mar 6, 2017 1:41:27 GMT
A minor optimization for conventional cannons is to separate the ammo storage from the cannon. It prevents lasers from detonating the ammo on gun destruction. Not super realistic due to the lack of ammo feeds but all weapons and modules have similar abilities. Especially goofy when you separate a drone launcher from the drone ammo storage. For hellfire and stinger drones it results in the disarmed vehicles setting a collision course. I'm sure future ammo could be designed to cook off in a less energetic manner. Not entirely safe, but better. Lots of real life examples of both. It would be nice to see something like Mechwarriors CASE or a contemporary main battle tanks blow out panels. For the cost of capacity and mass perhaps. |
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Post by concretedonkey on Mar 6, 2017 4:50:23 GMT
It looks like the reactors might be close to the center-of-radiators danger zone. Have you tested to see where missiles aim for? Good observation, its exactly spot on there , thing is I just didn't see any good way out of this. I can push them further back, some of my other ships are like this. But those are made for manual control and I usually turn towards the missiles and have more substantial missile defence - laser drones for example. And it is still too close for confort. A way back we had this discussion with someone on the board , one of my ships had all the crew and the reactors behind an armored cap at the front , this may be a better arangement but back then someone correctly pointed out that the game doesn't simulate piping and that could be hit too on its way further back to the radiators. A few times the AI managed to sneak half a salvo of frag missiles but those resulted only in partial radiator loss. I tested it against a small fleet of corvettes and missile schooners and those managed to hit it with 3 4 strikers too. Didn't get through the armor as well. After work today I'll test it against devastators, might be a bigger problem with that armor , however they have notoriously low delta V so we might get away from them. Thing is that its better at intercepting missiles too. I'm not sure if its the small lasers working finally or the additional rapid firing railguns. But yeah , against a high speed interception from a minmaxed non-stock missile its dead meat. |
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Post by concretedonkey on Mar 7, 2017 6:55:18 GMT
Sorry for the delay boys and girls , I wasn't able to finish yesterday with the corvette, work and all.
The solution for the obvious problem with the stock one - lack of power and thus inability to fire more than one of its weapons - introduced a new one - the small flares were no longer working leaving it without any protection against missiles. The large flare launcher sucked even more power and reintroduced the old problem immediately ... (didn't help that the AI insisted of firing it continuously during combat without any missiles around).
Yesterday I was stuck with the dilemma of introducing new lower powered flare launcher, small flak missiles, introducing a CIWS railgun (1g 14/15km/s 12MW) or something more exotic like a flare cannon.
But I initially wanted to leave the new weapons for much later and to avoid exotic solutions completely ...
Alternatively I can just go to a 3x13MW reactor version and hope that the large flares will still work with it.
Without the missile problem however the ship is shaping up pretty good on the offensive front. Most of the direct combat tests were done against 2 corvettes , one wasn't even a competition.
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Post by Enderminion on Mar 7, 2017 12:16:01 GMT
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Post by concretedonkey on Mar 7, 2017 20:31:06 GMT
  OK here is the Corvette. Ok, as Enderminion suggested I tried slow very innacurate flare cannon and it worked well - if there was someone to click "ignore range" - otherwise the AI wasn't firing untill it was way too late. Initially the solution to the missile problem was a version of one of my normal railguns - new clean one , without any payloads be it a frag or a rad shield one. And without aluminum zing magnesium. However it occured to me that there is already a gun quite good for a CIWS role in the stock it just needed some modifications :  This is simply a more rapid firing turreted version of the stock 4mm 400kW railgun. A few of those were chewing up salvos of 20 missiles very effectively. They are also very usefull in direct combat - otranging everything the stock corvette has to offer, even if a 1g projectile with that speed didn't do much damage on its own it was still disabling turrets with multiple hits. Most of today's tests were done against a small fleet of 2 corvettes and a missile schooner. Most were successful, with the only loss to a surviving 60mm cannon from the missile schooner. Those turned out to go through the armor like butter. In most cases however they were disabled before coming in range. p.s. She also looks very nice in Nippon colours, very Imperial Japanese Navy...  |
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Post by Enderminion on Mar 7, 2017 20:38:20 GMT
maybe swapping a few of the gunships guns for 4mm railguns and removing flares could be useful? I don't like soft-kill missile defense anyway
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Post by concretedonkey on Mar 7, 2017 20:43:22 GMT
Yes at one point I'll probably go back and rearm the already done ships with the new weapons as they become available. I'll also need to reorganize the thread too... .
Edit : Thing is that the gunship has a 100MW laser and its working quite well in that role, but I can swap the horrendous 400kw small lasers with some of the new guns... they are way more effective.
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Post by gedzilla on Mar 7, 2017 20:52:23 GMT
Yes at one point I'll probably go back and rearm the already done ships with the new weapons as they become available. I'll also need to reorganize the thread too... . Edit : Thing is that the gunship has a 100MW laser and its working quite well in that role, but I can swap the horrendous 400kw small lasers with some of the new guns... they are way more effective. Maybe the gunship's 400kw small lasers are supposed to be counterlasers ? Current meta has proven small cheap counterlasers to work |
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Post by concretedonkey on Mar 7, 2017 21:06:53 GMT
Yes at one point I'll probably go back and rearm the already done ships with the new weapons as they become available. I'll also need to reorganize the thread too... . Edit : Thing is that the gunship has a 100MW laser and its working quite well in that role, but I can swap the horrendous 400kw small lasers with some of the new guns... they are way more effective. Maybe the gunship's 400kw small lasers are supposed to be counterlasers ? Current meta has proven small cheap counterlasers to work Yes however my real counterlasers have two things the stock ones don't have : 1 Smaller apperature / wider beam and a much smaller turret - I was amazed after a 20/30 minutes of battle against multiple ships I had only one or two turrets disabled - it seems 11cm turret is very very hard to hit even with another laser. 2 I'm the one usually aiming them. It the designs is like some of the stock ships - 6/8 turrets on one laser, I'm even playing a kind of a whack-a-mole game targeting specifically the firing turret since the AI will just continiue to drill the first turret it decides to go to, even if its passive. Also the AI always targets sub-systems, never lets the lasers just roaming around which turned out to be a great anti laser tactic. The focus here is to be able to win close to 80% AI against AI, to prove that the design itself is superior.
So the 400kw stock lasers kill other lasers just fine, but do not survive well enough because of its large turret and do not have a beam wide enough for this specific role. Also the damage on the lenses is currently under discussion in the bugs section - I'm not competent enough to give opinion there - my guts feeling is that the current state seems too extreme, but the older pre 1.1.0 - no damage at the lenses at all, was also too extreme. And this is just my impression - its not supported by any facts.
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Post by Argopeilacos on Mar 8, 2017 12:25:37 GMT
I like these designs, my only concern is the placement of the crew modules far away from the center of mass. How difficult is it to kill the crew with an impact sending the ship spinning?
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Post by The Astronomer on Mar 8, 2017 13:11:07 GMT
I like these designs, my only concern is the placement of the crew modules far away from the center of mass. How difficult is it to kill the crew with an impact sending the ship spinning? How difficult? Not so much. |
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