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Post by gedzilla on Sept 4, 2018 7:46:15 GMT
Better ?
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Post by gedzilla on Sept 4, 2018 7:10:08 GMT
This is like what i started (and i really need to stop being lazy and update), with the stock ships.
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Post by gedzilla on Sept 3, 2018 5:37:59 GMT
thorneel: At those acceleration values, I kind of want to see put that together as a chariot -- RTG, propellant and engines up ahead, and then a *long* chain connecting it to a crew module far behind. Better yet, have 2 of those dragging the crew module, and go podracing
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Post by gedzilla on Sept 2, 2018 12:50:40 GMT
Indeed, these railguns don't seem realistic, as they are. However, using a plasma armature (and pushing a payload) might allow similar performance values, since plasma shouldn't have such issues with erosion, spot welding, or the velocity skin effect. It's hard to be sure though, because such things are classified. Electrically charging bits of metal and accelerating them as in a particle accelerator is a possible and interesting alternative, with which you can certainly get up to and beyond 200 km/s. Particle accelerators in general would be an excellent addition. I mean some of our current railguns seem like particle accelerators
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Post by gedzilla on Sept 2, 2018 8:11:49 GMT
Civilians without access to trained nuclear reactor technicians sometimes choose to use RTG-powered ships. This particular example is used by those who want to travel light and stay far from the most civilised ports. It is using hideously radioactive Cobalt-60 RTGs powering a pair of light resistojets and is using hydrogen deuteride as propellant due to its cheapness and good Isp. View AttachmentThe unusual length of the craft is due to the 200m space, helping decrease the radiations to the crew module, but it still needs several 1m-thick blocks of lithium-6 to stop the many remaining kilo-Sievert. The tapered lithium radiators are shaped this way to avoid back-scattering radiation, which would otherwise be reflected to the crew module. The skin is an extremely thin graphite aerogel film, to avoid showing the ugly plumbing between the tank and the resistojets. The crew module has two redundant radiators, because even for the kind of insane cheapskates using this model, they aren't expensive enough to justify the kind of risk a crew radiator failure represents. There has been at least one documented case of such a craft used in an attempted terrorist act against a space station, namely by putting it in automated mode and trying to fool traffic control into letting them dock. However it is still unclear whether it wasn't merely a misunderstanding, an accident, a false flag operation or just someone being really, really stupid about it, as it was very violently dismantled by nearby patrol drones. Also we shouldn't have to say that, but never, ever EVA outside the radiation shield shadow. Not only will you be fried, but the backscatter may irradiate everyone else still in the shadow. Remember, Darwin works only if you are only killing yourself. ResistojetModule 10.1 km/s 2.00 MW Hydrogen Deuteride Resistojet UsesCustomName false PowerSupplied_W 2e+06 Propellant Hydrogen Deuteride CoilComposition Tantalum Hafnium Carbide ChamberLength_m 0.01 CoilRadius_m 0.0001 ThermalRocket ChamberComposition Amorphous Carbon ThroatRadius_m 0.001 ChamberWallThickness_m 0.0047 ChamberContractionRatio 100 NozzleExpansionRatio 160 NozzleExpansionAngle_degrees 5.1 RegenerativeCooling_Percent 0 Injector Composition Lithium PumpRadius_m 0.033 RotationalSpeed_RPM 570 GimbalAngle_degrees 0
RadiatorModule 10x1 Lithium Radiator UsesCustomName false Composition Lithium PanelWidth_m 1 Height_m 1 Thickness_m 0.001 ArmorThickness_m 0.001 Panels 10 FrontTaper_radians 0 BackTaper_radians 0 SurfaceFinish null
RadiatorModule 20x2 Lithium Radiator 2 UsesCustomName false Composition Lithium PanelWidth_m 2 Height_m 2 Thickness_m 0.001 ArmorThickness_m 0.001 Panels 10 FrontTaper_radians 0 BackTaper_radians 1.4835 SurfaceFinish null
CrewModule 22 Crew Module UsesCustomName false CrewCapacity 22 Decks 8 StructureMaterial Calcium ShellThickness_m 0.01
PropellantTankModule 35.0 t Hydrogen Deuteride Tank UsesCustomName false Propellant Hydrogen Deuteride StructureComposition Diamond ReactionMass_kg 35000 HeightToRadiusRatio 20 AdditionalArmorThickness_m 0
RadiationShieldModule 80.0 cm Diameter Lithium-6 Radiation Shield UsesCustomName false Composition Lithium-6 Dimensions_m 0.4 1
RadioisotopeThermoelectricGeneratorModule 935 kW Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator UsesCustomName false FuelPellet Fuel Cobalt-60 Mass_kg 100 Height_m 0.041 Thermocouple PTypeComposition Osmium NTypeComposition Nickel Chromium Iron Length_m 0.0013 ExitTemperature_K 430 Coolant Ethane Turbopump Composition Lithium PumpRadius_m 0.056 RotationalSpeed_RPM 300
CraftBlueprint Unlicenced civilian craft Modules 22 Crew Module 1 23.567 null 0 0 10x1 Lithium Radiator 2 279.05 22 Crew Module 0 0 20x2 Lithium Radiator 2 2 116.47 935 kW Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator 0 0 80.0 cm Diameter Lithium-6 Radiation Shield 1 19.035 null 0 0 10.1 km/s 2.00 MW Hydrogen Deuteride Resistojet 2 0 null 0 1 35.0 t Hydrogen Deuteride Tank 1 23.317 null 0 0 25.0 m x 0 m Spacer 1 19.052 null 0 0 25.0 m x 0 m Spacer 1 19.061 null 0 0 25.0 m x 0 m Spacer 1 19.065 null 0 0 25.0 m x 0 m Spacer 1 19.067 null 0 0 25.0 m x 0 m Spacer 1 20.067 null 0 0 25.0 m x 0 m Spacer 1 21.067 null 0 0 25.0 m x 0 m Spacer 1 22.067 null 0 0 25.0 m x 0 m Spacer 1 23.067 null 0 0 935 kW Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator 1 19.006 null 0 0 935 kW Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator 1 19.021 null 0 0 935 kW Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator 1 18.991 null 0 0 935 kW Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator 1 18.998 null 0 0 80.0 cm Diameter Lithium-6 Radiation Shield 1 19.044 null 0 0 80.0 cm Diameter Lithium-6 Radiation Shield 1 19.048 null 0 0 80.0 cm Diameter Lithium-6 Radiation Shield 1 19.05 null 0 0 80.0 cm Diameter Lithium-6 Radiation Shield 1 19.051 null 0 0 25.0 m x 0 m Spacer 1 20.061 null 0 0 935 kW Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator 1 19.028 null 0 0 80.0 cm Diameter Lithium-6 Radiation Shield 1 19.052 null 0 0 Armor Shape Cylindrical Concave false ArmorLayers Graphite Aerogel 0.0005 0 0 1 1 0
This is the funniest thing i've read all day Also, obligatory "now this is podracing" comment
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Post by gedzilla on Sept 1, 2018 18:47:40 GMT
Here's a small carrier. 749t, and a shade under 5Km/s deltaV. Primary armament is 170 small railgun drones, with an additional 70 flak missiles and 7 50mm chemguns for point defense. The railgun drones are quite small and optimized for taking out laserstars (or really, anything with exposed radiators) - gun velocity is under 6 Km/s, but they can fire for an extended period, and the drones are small enough to be difficult to hit at extreme range, even with large laser arrays. Also of note, the carrier itself has a heat signature of a paltry 143Kw with main drive off; it's own drones are effective as flares. i just downloaded this, looking foward to trying it out. what AI should i put it on ?
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Post by gedzilla on Sept 1, 2018 18:46:08 GMT
nvm, im an idiot, i got it.
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Post by gedzilla on Sept 1, 2018 18:36:32 GMT
hey, can anyone help me find that box with all the data for custom ships and modules ?
i want to import someones ship they showed
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Post by gedzilla on Aug 31, 2018 15:30:39 GMT
I guess. I imagine anti laser protection will become an entire area of military study in an of itself. But tbh, the range disparity between the enemy laser and my counterlasers might not be as big as you suggest. I wouldnt use a 10MW agianst a GW. id prob use something 3-5 times smaller (like a 1GW against a 5GW). One more thing to consider, steel is a pretty shit antilaser armor. Have you tried this agains PE or Graphogel, or Silagel ? Isn't graphogel kinda the opposite of laser armor? In the past, anything I have coated in it has popped faster than a balloon in an iron maiden (turrets especially). Im under the impression it and silagel are great antilaser armors
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Post by gedzilla on Aug 31, 2018 14:54:34 GMT
this is true if both lasers are open,aand firing at each other. of course the stronger one is going to get into effetive ranch first, and knock out the other. i thought the general idea was that the weaker laser has multiple turrets (now that one lasing rod can be directed into multiple turrets), and that those turrets are protected by a thick shutter that only opens when the enemy laser is in range. theorectically the very thick PTFE shutter protects the weaker laser until its in range, and then the weaker laser opens up (and has multiple turrets anyway). we still have shutters, no ? this would obviously be greatly buffed if we had retractable turrets (god i want them so much), and could hide behing the full mass of the ship's (relativly) heavily armored nosecone. What is stopping the stronger laser from drilling through the shutters of the weaker lasers before the weaker lasers get into range? What's to stop it from drilling through the engines so that the weaker lasers not only never get into range but don't have a power supply?
Increasing the power by a factor of 100 increases the effective range from the same size aperture by a factor of 10. Increasing the aperture size by a factor of 10 increases the range by a factor of 10 if frequency and power are kept constant. Increasing the frequency (aka decreasing the wavelength) by a factor of 4, increasing the range by a factor of 4. So a 1 GW laser firing from an aperture 10 times wider at a frequency 4 times higher, will have 400 times the effective range of a 10 MW laser firing from the smaller aperture and lower frequency. And the ship carrying those smaller, weaker lasers will take a long time to cross that range. Time during which the big bad laser will get to drill through said ship.
A 1 GW, 200 nm, continuous wave laser firing through a 20 meter diameter aperture has a 1 meter diameter spot size at 81,967 km. It will drill a 1 meter wide hole through steel armor at a rate of 2.08 cm/s at that distance. If closing velocity is 100 km/s and your weaker lasers aren't effective until 1967 km, then your ship will have to get hit for 800 seconds before you get to fire back. During that time, said laser can drill through at least 16 meters of steel by adjusting its focus to maintain a 1 meter wide spot size. However if the spot size drops to .5 meters then the drill rate increases to 8.1 cm/s. At 0.2 meters the drill rate increases to 47.1 cm/s.
If the laser power goes up to 10 GW, then at 327,868.852459 km, the beam is 4 meters in diameter. It will drill a 4 meter diameter hole through steel at a rate of 1.3 cm/s. Change it to a 1kilohertz pulse laser firing 10 MJ, 10 nanosecond pulses and the laser will drill a 4 meter wide hole through steel at a rate of 9.74 cm/s. Now pump the power up to 100 GW by running the same pulse laser at 10 kilohertz and the drill up goes up to 97.4 cm/s with a 4 meter wide spot size. Or at 2.5 times the range, the spot size of the 100 GW version goes to 10 meters wide and the drill rate goes to 18.3 cm/s.
Welcome to the laser problem of space combat.
I guess. I imagine anti laser protection will become an entire area of military study in an of itself. But tbh, the range disparity between the enemy laser and my counterlasers might not be as big as you suggest. I wouldnt use a 10MW agianst a GW. id prob use something 3-5 times smaller (like a 1GW against a 5GW). One more thing to consider, steel is a pretty shit antilaser armor. Have you tried this agains PE or Graphogel, or Silagel ?
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Post by gedzilla on Aug 30, 2018 16:00:23 GMT
5 kg at 10 km/s every 0.2 sec is 1.25 GW. Even assuming 50% efficiency, that's only 2.5 GW draw. More concerning is the cost of what must be 5 kg of expensive magnetic metal glass every shot. Depending on what power generation tech you use 2.5GW could be an awful lot. I mean, i use apophys reactors too (thanks), but for most of my ships (10< kt) 2.5 GW is a lot
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Post by gedzilla on Aug 30, 2018 10:30:33 GMT
Aren't our loading mechanisms presumed to be linear induction motors anyways? When you're using grains of sand, it would be pretty easy to get the projectile moving, and then us the barrel. The thing about light micro projectiles is that they can usually, fairly easily be stopped by a particularly well designed armor scheme, which coincidentally happens to be an extremely poor armor scheme for any other type of larger projectile. Take our standard 1-4mm railgun defeating armor, then try shooting at it with the stock 60mm or 33mm autocannon. The autocannon will shred the armor and destroy the ship. The key issue is at which ranges you can actually take advantage of these. Railguns and coilguns significantly outclass standard guns in terms of practical ranges. Conventional guns, however can deliver literal tons of kinetic energy, but at the cost of much less reliability in hitting the mark. If you're using a slug thrower, you want the thing to actually HIT where you point it at. That's primarily velocity doing that. Fire rate needs more mass, and therefore more ammo cost. The actual mass of the projectile seems to be an afterthought, but that's due to the way armor, especially for turrets works in this game. Missiles are much lighter than conventional cannons though. A turreted cannon launching 10 kg slugs at 2 km/s with 1000 rounds of ammunition tends to be much heavier than a blast launcher launching 1000 kinetic missiles with an inert mass of 10 kg and over 2.3 km/s of delta-v. Tbh, i think cannons are only useful for small, super cqc drones ( which i love making lol)
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Post by gedzilla on Aug 30, 2018 6:22:26 GMT
First off, the total end km/s of the projectile dont matter to it shattering in the barrel (1g or no). Only the RATE of acceleration matter to it shattering. Realistically, you could get the velocity up to 100km/s and be fine, or you can have a 5km/s that shatters in the barrel. The only thing that matters is the length of the barrel aka how much acceleration the projectile is being subject to. Obviously longer barrel for same speed equals lower rate of accel. In railguns at least you are forcing hundreds of megawatts through a tiny needle at less than 50% efficiency without super-conductors. Where do you think the other half of that energy goes? Even much more massive projectiles, like in the navy railgun suffer a lot of heating. I don't think 1g projectiles are able to withstand that much current going through them, and sub-gram grains of sand even less so. An example from here: "If full power was to be applied to a static armature the rails and whatever was between them would instantaneously melt under the intense localized heat produced by Ohmic heating as 100thousand amperes tried to make it through the contact resistance. In order to prevent the Rail Gun from becoming a spot welder it is necessary that the armature be moving with some initial speed prior to electromagnetic acceleration. Most amateur designs fail because of lack of knowledge of this." They propose to inject the projectile with some initial velocity using pressurized gas, but I suspect there is a limit on how small you can make your projectile without it becoming plasma even using this method because as the inital speed increases the efficiency of your railgun should decrease. Besides there are no such systems in the game. The game checks projectile melting conditions, but I don't think it works correctly. You are saying that the round heats up due to the eletric currents running through it. Fair enough. Im just saying the shattering doesnt depend on the final km/s, only on the stresses (through accel or electric heating) on the round at any given time.
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Post by gedzilla on Aug 30, 2018 4:48:16 GMT
For starters, I find it highly unlikely that 1g projectiles could be accelerated to 30km/s or higher by a railgun without annihilating the projectile. But even ignoring that, I've actually had more success with heavier projectiles, rather than lighter. There's probably a sweet spot in the game, and I'm absolutely certain it's not 1g projectiles. Secondly, although the projectile mass and overall kinetic energy matters, so does the rate of fire - at least in gameplay terms. 20 guns firing peashooter rounds in the same place end up sandblasting through armor - especially whipple shield designs - extremely fast. From what I've seen in the game my design philosophy for projectile weapons would be: 1. Maximize rate of fire 2. Maximize projectile mass 3. Maximize projectile velocity I'd say that as long as your velocity is above 10km/s you're good. Higher dispersion/inaccuracy isn't even necessarily a bad thing if it only takes one hit to punch through. I think the present meta of 50km/s or faster sand grains is overexaggerating the benefit of velocity and sacrificing too much in other areas to achieve it. I've been using a railgun design with a 15g projectile and it has dramatically outperformed 1g projectiles at higher velocities. First off, the total end km/s of the projectile dont matter to it shattering in the barrel (1g or no). Only the RATE of acceleration matter to it shattering. Realistically, you could get the velocity up to 100km/s and be fine, or you can have a 5km/s that shatters in the barrel. The only thing that matters is the length of the barrel aka how much acceleration the projectile is being subject to. Obviously longer barrel for same speed equals lower rate of accel. Second, your (non PD) guns only have 10km/s ?!? What ranges are you engageing in ? Second, what standards are you judging your guns at ? Yes your gun may be better at killing stationary nose in ships, but can it take down a (anti-laser armored) run-and-gun ship that is constantly dodging ?
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Post by gedzilla on Aug 28, 2018 20:09:03 GMT
You conspicuously omitted your coilgun's power reqs. Who needs to state power requirements? With the right capacitor, you can fire your gun on watts of power once every few weeks! *cough* MAC *cough*
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