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Post by RA2lover on Oct 12, 2016 22:18:07 GMT
I was attempting to test the viability of a missile using RCS to guide itself to its target instead of gimbaling thrusters (a la MKV) in order to eliminate the need for turnabout time. However, its minimum size is significantly limited due to quirks related to thruster collision boxes. Apparently, they're considered solid boxes for intersection calculation purposes, which causes problems like this: Note fixing it by using multiple boxes still doesn't handle some edge cases like this one(which would be able to reduce that missile's diameter by about 2cm over the thruster layout in the first screenshot):
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Post by RA2lover on Oct 12, 2016 21:23:52 GMT
All of the ammunittion types would need to have consistent muzzle velocities (assuming they're fired from the same belt) so the gun can actually track targets. This is pretty difficult to achieve while still having different target effects.
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Post by RA2lover on Oct 12, 2016 18:21:49 GMT
note the linear motor force is only applied for as long as the projectile is accelerated. Efficiencies will still be off-the-charts regardless.
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Post by RA2lover on Oct 10, 2016 18:41:00 GMT
Switch to a boron barrel and you can get 10ms cooldown times.
In a different topic, has anyone figured out the sweet spot between projectile mass and velocity? My hunch is projectiles at high velocities like this gun has don't have enough cross-sectional density to penetrate armor and also get vaporized by whipple shields.
Another thing to consider are low power autoloaders for drones. How much projectile mass can you shoot in a single second with just 100W worth of loader power?
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Post by RA2lover on Oct 10, 2016 18:32:49 GMT
How close does it need to be? Seems like a flare destroys the ship using it once it goes out. I haven't tested whether other explosions occur when this happens.
Sandcasters are terrible ideas for both offensive and defensive weapons, though.
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Post by RA2lover on Oct 10, 2016 16:31:26 GMT
Have you considered mounting the gun to a turret instead?
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Post by RA2lover on Oct 10, 2016 5:48:32 GMT
Note UHMWPE has awful thermal properties and will limit your fire rate through overheating.
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Post by RA2lover on Oct 10, 2016 5:17:53 GMT
NTRs ingame are cooled through reaction mass and thus don't need radiators. However, there's no fuel line modeling implementation, which effectively prevents you from using a preheater (which isn't necessary because you can just make the reactor output more power to compensate).
Generating power out of a NTR is also impractical. Running turbines basically requires you to create a turbine that can contain a NTR's exhaust and collect energy from it (which would reduce its performance as a rocket). Using a thermopile als. is problematic in that they work on temperature gradients, meaning you still need radiators to keep one side cool. Putting one inside the chamber would likely destroy it due to thermal expansion stresses.
As for NTR boosters - they are possible, but not in a straightforward way. The game doesn't really allow staging (though it allows you to refuel vessels which enables the use of disposable tankers to go along with your fleet). You can also create a launcher to launch other ships, though this significantly limits your launched vessel's size.
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Post by RA2lover on Oct 10, 2016 2:40:22 GMT
Depleted uranium still has 0.3% worth of U-235 in it.
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Post by RA2lover on Oct 9, 2016 22:13:45 GMT
Confirmed to work on Windows 7 32-bit.
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Post by RA2lover on Oct 9, 2016 4:38:41 GMT
Gun-type nukes are extremely inefficient regarding mass. You're better off at getting direct hits by firing an equivalent mass of implosion-type nukes instead.
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Post by RA2lover on Oct 8, 2016 3:46:00 GMT
While attempting to optimize drone-sized flares, i've tested every single material available. Originally i thought there was a bug regarding energy density of flares where their energy corresponded to their total mass but this doesn't appear to be the case at this point (though i should probably do constant mass fraction tests later). Too long; didn't download the spreadsheet: At a burn rate of 2cm/s, Osmium is best at energy/volume and Lithium-6 is best at energy/mass. Attachments:FlarePerformance.ods (51.1 KB)
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Post by RA2lover on Oct 7, 2016 19:47:36 GMT
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Post by RA2lover on Oct 7, 2016 17:37:21 GMT
Was attempting to isolate the armor mass of a flare to test the mass efficiency of some delay compositions, but all of my educated guesses for it were wrong. Trying a different way to isolate it, i've found this: That molybdenum cylinder should weigh about 31.4t, but misses that mark by several orders of magnitude. In addition, the cylinder is only 1m tall, indicating armor thickness is halved at the caps. This also happens on neutron reflector thickness calculations: (side note: even with that much mass on it the reactor is still claiming a 16.6W radiation output despite no fuel being in it) and fuel tank mass calculations as well: EDIT: apparently the densities reported ingame don't match up to the densities reported on the game files. Molybdenum has a density of 10280kg/m³ on the ingame files, but a density of 10000m³ on the material tooltip and corresponding infolink page(which i was using for the calculations). Silver has a density of 10490kg/m³ on the ingame files. yay for finding another source of error! Some reverse engineering later, it seems like the game gets armor mass calculations wrong for this specific scenario. Right now it's counting the mass of the flare armor shell as: (CylinderVolume(R+Thickness/2,H+Thickness/4)-CylinderVolume(R-Thickness/2),H-Thickness/4))*MaterialDensity The proper formula should be: (CylinderVolume(R+Thickness,H+Thickness)-CylinderVolume(R,H))*MaterialDensity assuming you don't want half armor thickness on the bases as it currently has and also update the displayed cylinder model's height to reflect that as well.
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Lasers
Oct 6, 2016 3:29:01 GMT
Post by RA2lover on Oct 6, 2016 3:29:01 GMT
It can potentially change the center of mass and moment of inertia enough to reduce the time required to change heading.
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