Holy crud those USF ship names: Cosmic Abortion Naked Singularity Faraday Prison Maxwell's Demon and allied ships like "The God Machine". What madbeing's been naming these things?
The USTA really does seem to have embraced the "War is Evil and So Are We" style of naming ships. The RFS on the other hand tend to pick names on the "Scientific injoke" end of the scale.
Because the author is a communist sympathizer as can easily be seen from the story texts. Usually i pass a game over it but this particular product happens to have a monopoly on this niche market that has been waiting for a game for a decade.
The extraction mission isn't that bad, but it helps to look at the Gunship's layout ahead of time. Gunships are easily the most dangerous ship in the vanilla game, those 286 coilguns shred ships like nobody's business, *and* they have 8mm railguns for early engagements, plus flak missiles, which pack a remarkable punch. However, all their reactors are located just ahead of the engines, with the quarters amidships and at the bow. A good barrage of flak or striker missiles (or similar) will lock on to the enemy's tail, and destroy their engines plus most or all of their power generation. Once their power is down, their guns are useless. And remember, one of the perks of missiles is that you can launch them *before* you get to the enemy... at this point, just laser down the remaining weapons and collect your victory. The Gunship has 3 sets of radiators, the 14 large radiators at the rear for the main reactor, a pair of smaller radiators forward for the lasers, and a single very small radiator for the cabins. Don't destroy the 18m radiator. Vesta has a Reputation as one of the hardest missions in the game. It's pretty well deserved, but I didn't have *terribly* much trouble with it. My fleet consisted of three privateers, and, I think, a support carrier? If not that probably a laser schooner and gunskiff. My privateers spent the majority of the mission flying around lobbing Sniper missiles at the target. Small volleys at first to bait out the decoys, then big ones to cripple. Privateers are more than fast enough to evade pretty much any counterattack. Once the enemy was sufficiently softened (and some of them lost propulsion) I sent in the rest of my ships to finish them. Unfortunately the privateers got tagged by an enemy drone fleet and died, but it otherwise went pretty well. Now? I could probably beat the mission with a single good ship. The Vanilla designs are... not great. Though, sadly, I'm *pretty darn certain* the Quasar Lance will be too big. Vanilla drones should never be used against lasers. Ever. They will die. This remains problematic with custom drones due to their propensity for having open bits at the front. This can be countered against the AI by mixing your drones with missiles (for customs, try making micromissiles you can launch *from the drones*), but that only works as long as the missiles are present. Relatedly, this makes the Support Carrier's Beam Drones an incredibly effective means of neutralizing enemy drones. But they're expensive.
Dear youtube. Today I discovered some very interesting things about this game. 1: Did you know that the 'skybox' visible in the ship design screen is actually just the inside of a capsule? I discovered this because... 2: If you build a sufficiently large ship, you can zoom out *outside* of the sky-capsule, and look at it from the outside. It's 'solid' on both sides, oddly enough. 3: However, if you build a *very* large ship, you can go through the capsule with no problem. However, when dealing with a ship of this scale, it's very difficult to move modules around because movement is proportional. 4: Given the necessity, the game will display turnaround time and/or total thrust time in petaseconds, of all things. Ships large enough to 'break through' the capsule can indeed cause this to be necessary. It will also resort to displaying a ship's mass in scientific notation. It doesn't do that for anything else, for some reason. 5: Attempting to actually *play* a vessel around, say, nineteen kilometers long, causes the game to immediately crash, and it will not load until you restart your computer. The point at which this phenomenon begins to occur is somewhere above 1 kilometer, since that works just fine and may actually be good, though you can never ever ever use something like that in campaign on account of both tonnage and price being measured in the billions.
I just discovered this game the other week and it is SO goddamn fun and already I want a sequel so, so bad. I have dreamed about a game like this since I was a teenager and it deserves to be properly beautiful. (What we got is pretty great for programmer art tho) I wanna see fluffy thermal blankets, crinkly foil, and chalky tiles, some nice subtle lighting effects, maybe some depth of field, and I wanna hear some unit voices augmenting the popups and putting me in the action... We gotta start a kickstarter or SOMETHING and get the guy who made this a proper team to bring it to crackling life~
New patch just came out. Thus far, it seems to have added additional details to intercepts (closest approach and parallel/perpendicular velocity), and changed homing. 'Full homing' has been eliminated'. You can now manually select from: Boost Phase - Accelerate along an intercept trajectory Midcourse Phase - Adjust course as needed to maintain intercept, but do not accelerate towards target. Terminal Phase - Accelerate directly towards target. Or you can let the AI do it. Accuracy *seems* to have improved significantly, even with this option. I attempted five fairly basic 500 m/s intercepts on the sandbox. All hit. Next, I moved to Jupiter and did five very aggressive intercepts at high speed and distance. Four out of five hit. A few of the hits did relatively minimal damage, but most scored at least a mission kill.
Update: Seem to be some changes to module design. First of all, modules are seperated into Vanilla and User Designed categories. Lasers may have a higher maximum range. Modules can be given custom names. (YES) ... and Remote Controls are now customizable. You can change the aspect ratio, which is boring, but you can *also* customize how much the guidance. For instance, you can adjust how much delta-V will be spent boosting to the target, what targeting algorithim will be used, whether the missile will attempt to always accelerate, and a damping factor based on the engine's power. So yeah...
8 років тому+9
"Nuclear Drive By Shooting", I think you have the title of your book there.
it's really disappointing how poor the missile navigation is, given that at close ranges, modern missile guidance tech (proportional navigation) is so simple yet so effective.
Rose Whittle It's a single equation these days, computed by a 5$ - 50$ chip depending on high frequency update you want. Quadruple the cost if you want redundant system resistant to DE ECM.
Wow, that was a cool way to handle Vesta Overkill! I ended up making some cheap disposable ships with no armor so I could fit as many guns in as possible; a design that only worked because I knew beforehand the enemy behavior.
I tried this "mass armada" method (among many) but it failed miserably for me. :-/ In the end I ended up making a single battleship that used up all my tonnage and money for the mission, loaded down with nukes to wear the enemy down first (plus intercept their drones and missiles before they reached my ship) and a ridiculous amount of armor so I could simply last longer than they could in the slugfest. As long as you have a way to prevent missiles and/or drones from getting behind you, you can put all of your weapons on one side of your ship, only have 1 layer of armor that covers the entire ship, and then put several really thick layers of armor with 50% radius on the same side as the guns. You need to disable Dodging for these types of ships - if not they will wobble around and expose their rears to the enemy eventually - but otherwise it makes for close-combat vessels that (even with stock modules) are much more powerful by tonnage as compared to any stock ships.
I end up designing ships with many lasers and railguns and put ALL of them on 'Ignore Range' This method works very well, especially when you are talking about fleet of motherships!
I made a fleet of space technicals. 4 of them had a pair of coilguns on the front, 8 of them had a pair of lasers on the sides. End result was a fairly effective point defense grid when you set the lasers to ignore range, and a very effective means of shredding the enemy fleet when you flipped the coilgun armed ships to ignore range. Once the enemy capital fleet was knocked out, I just left the coilguns on ignore range mode to maximise my point defense fire. Could have probably built a fleet of space stations armed like that due to the fact that I didn't really bother maneuvering.
+ScienceRules118 I'm not sure if anyone has addressed it yet or not on the forums (I'm guessing so...), but the "ignore range" problem is just that - a problem. Although I think there might be some exceptions, it seems that the #1 determinant for starting engagement range is the max distance that at least 1 weapon on any ship in the battle can fire; for slug-throwers that number is based on several factors, but for lasers it's literally whatever range the module designer sets it to...all the way up to a 250km cap. :-| Although it's not the same as "ignore range", even if you're not exploiting module design, a bunch of lasers set to "ignore range" accompanied by at least 1 long-range railgun will still give you a very unfair advantage against the AI. Case in point: I just copied the 100MW laser, didn't do anything except increase the range to 200km, slapped it (and *only* it) onto a test ship, and engaged an enemy Gunship. Intercept was at ~20m/s..and at the full 200km laser range (with a whopping 3.75MW/m^2 :D). While he slowly accelerated towards me I was able to take out all 4 coilguns, all 4 8mm railguns, 1 flak missile launcher, and apparently 1 crew compartment as collateral damage before he got into shooting range. And the stock lasers are far from optimized! I'm not sure what the solution is, but the way it stands "ignore range" and laser ranges in general should definitely be added to the "desperately need to be fixed" ToDo list. :-/
True enough. I actually found a fairly decent laser ship design on the forums and have been using that (with some modifications, mostly upgrading it's engines) as a point defense backbone of all the fleets I build. Look for the Newton in the Post your designs thread.
(I know that this comment is 5 years late, but oh well) Just discovered this game, and I love it! Unfortunately, I check it's steam page, and it's been 4 years since it last received an update. But despite that, I am thinking about picking the game up, as it looks like it is a lot of fun!
I wonder if there will ever be somthing like intersteller quest. Now that there is 64 bit you can load more mods then ever before, and much more stabily too. You could have the entire MKI suite with intersteller extended, and it would barely even effect the FPS. A sort of colonization series by the one and only Scott Manley. That would be awesome.
that vestra overkill mission was impossible until I found out about the AI not wanting to create trajectories that destroy themselves. I don't know how I would've complete that mission without abusing that "bug"
Mr.CheekiBreeki You can also intercept their missiles/drones with your own; the AI is dumb and will waste all their Delta V dodging and/or chasing the single Stinger drone you sent to intercept Devastator nukes can work for interception too. Beam drones also really good for this; they can actually kill stock drones and missiles quite well.
Oddly, I found that the AI is quite adept at playing Space Chicken with you - if you have a ship with high delta-V but low thrust, they'll tend to hug a planet and will move into a collision course as you close in, and set things up so that if you continue the intercept, *they* can recover but you can't.
I completed the mission without the exploit. I waited for them to launch all their drones and missiles, then I kept changing direction to make them run out of delta-v, and then finished the mission by deploying all my drones and missiles and then let the enemy fleet intercept me.
Scott, You don't seem to get it, so I'll spoil it for ya: 1) make a 9.5:1 Fluorine:Methane drone out of stock 3-rail-bearing one. Make an Osmium-nozzled engine and small light THERMONUCLEAR reactor with 1kg of RICH fuel and HOT OUTLET, place it in its NOSE. Divide each UHMWPE tanks by 7 so there's 14 TALL tanks total. Edit rails so there's 2 ARMORED GIMBALLED railguns (25 degrees per second will do, make barrel shorter if needed) on each drone with PLENTY of SEPARATE ammo (best is to divide ammo by 6 Reinforced Carbon disks, placing 5 radially and then 1 above - works as a shield). Add 2 layers of armor - thicker layer at nose as pointy as gimbals allow. Put 2* or 3* LIGHT (not armored) Gamma-Titanium-Aluminide radiators on it (outlet must be not too hot). 2) make a launcher and ammo for those drones, edit some stock carrier and put them there - 2 launchers are usually overkill. Lighten the reactor and divide tanks by 7 while on it. 3) launch 20 of them with "none" order (!) practically anywhere (5km/s dV and 4g maneuvers are easily attained if drones are made by my recipe). Make a LOW-SPEED INTERCEPT (not flyby). 4) upon entering battlefield, prioritize enemy modules TAKING LEADING INTO ACCOUNT, also prioritize ONE ENEMY LASER CRAFT 1st. Tell drones to broadside. *5)* and this is *_CRUCIAL_*: tell railguns to >>>>> *IGNORE RANGE*
Scott, use missiles covered with at least 3 mm of silica aerogel, don't intercept with ships. Send a fleet of missiles to intercept instead. Increase their turnabout time to more that one second. Currently if your missiles are agile, they tend to not correct their path soon enough.
Basalt Fiber Composite is a much better bang for your buck; it conducts heat so well (or should that be "doesn't conduct heat"?) that even 1mm is often enough to prevent enemy lasers from disabling it, especially if you back it with some carbon. That little trick alone allows you to essentially reduce the size of your missile swarms by an order of magnitude.
Basalt Fiber Composite, huh? I haven't even seen that in the list. Wikipedia says it has 4.something GPA tensile strength? That sounds pretty great, and could be an all-purpose armor. Though, admittedly, I'd expect that 3mm of silica aerogel is probably lighter than 1mm of basalt fiber, and it works. If you're talking expense, most if it's going to come from your warhead and engine, so a few percent more aren't worth compromising delta-V. Besides, why would you reduce the size of your missile swarms by an order of magnitude when you can instead *increase* the size of your missile swarms by an order of magnitude? (Also, you can't really score a kill with 2-5 missiles, at least not against most ships).
Brandon T 15mm diameter? That's a pretty tiny missile. Or 15mm armor? IME a volley of 20 vanilla flak missiles will take out a gunship no problem. Make a better missile and it becomes that much easier. So I tend to go with numerous light missiles, which also increases the chances of a hit. Unless you're flying straight into a Laser Station or equivalent, very few will be lost with 3-5mm of silica aerogel and it adds maybe 10kg to the weight. These lightweight missiles can then be carried in big bunches. I have a ship which carries over six thousand missiles, mostly short range (only 2 km/s or so) but a few longer ones. I have a 30 km/s multi-stage missile, though it's only the standard 2? MT warhead. Because sometimes you've just got wreck someone from a different planet entirely. Also, why Maraging Steel instead of VCS? It's lighter, higher strength, and cheaper. UMHWPE is what I prefer for full armor. Offers almost as much protection for a mere fraction of the mass. RCC isn't awful, but UMHWPE offers more durability for less mass. You need quite a bit less of it to reach the next protection point.
Sorry, typeo there; I meant ~15 meters long (with 2 to 5 cm of layered armor of varying types). As for armor types, I'll have to mess around with UMHWPE versus Marging Steel, VCS or otherwise. As it stands, against vanilla ships it doesn't matter anyway as my custom slug-throwers and missiles outrange the stock weapons by such a huge margin that the enemy doesn't even get a chance to shoot at me in campaign scenarios, but I still like min/maxing for the sake of, well...min/maxing. :) UMHWPE seems to be a good material for gyros in the weight-ranges I apparently like to make my weapons, but I hadn't thought of it as an armor material. I try and take into account the cross-section of my ships when designing them, since it determines AI attack ranges and all, so Marging Steel seems to be a good material to use as a 1-2cm layer of high-density, cheap cost, good-general-armor properties...but VCS could be just as viable, there's just so many materials available that you'd have to spend days testing in Sandbox mode to really know. I've been using VCS for railgun rounds - it works quite well in that regard - so I'll take a look at it for armor purposes and perhaps swap out my heavy-arse MS for it if the numbers seem to justify it. :D
VCS isn't *much* lighter than MS. But it's the strongest material in the game, at 5.17/5.21. I mainly use it for turbines and things that need to endure extremely high stresses, but it's incredibly tough as an armor. "UMHWPE seems to be a good material for gyros in the weight-ranges I apparently like to make my weapons," Huh. I use tungsten, mainly, more weight = more momentum for same RPM. And it's reasonably strong, so you make a small, fast-spinning gyroscope out of highly dense material. As for using it as armor... well, it's tensile strength/yield strength are *higher than Maraging Steel*. Terrible melting point, but that just means you need an anti-laser layer/don't put it on turrets. "I try and take into account the cross-section of my ships when designing them, since it determines AI attack ranges and all" That's true, but the effect of armor thickness on cross section is generally so small having 2cm instead of 10cm will give you a hundred meters at most. That could matter, sure, but I think the additional 8cm of armor will be of more use in surviving the twenty-something kilometers *after* that. As long as your armor isn't *super huge* compared to the ship... (in which case, I question how it moves), it shouldn't be much of a problem. The *big* breakpoint is with some armor vs no armor at all. On a gunship, going from 5 microns to 1 cm increases cross-section by 20 meters. Going from nothing to 5 microns increases cross section by 400 meters. Presumably because the naked ship has variation in its thickness, while the armor is relatively uniform.
Maybe, but I dunno if that small a layer would do it, it'd probably ablate off pretty quick. Possibly a decent solution for missiles, but I dunno about a *good* one. Silver isn't super expensive in terms of Spacebux, but it is quite heavy, and, as stated, .5mm probably won't do much. Generally what you want is a lightweight substance with poor heat conduction and relatively high vaporization energy. Put it in a reasonably thick layer, and the enemy laser will have to spend a lot of time gradually burning through it. Time they won't have if it's on a missile. Silicon Aerogel works pretty well. It's very light, so you can put on a few centimeters and I guess just sort of absorbs the laser into its bulk. Boron Carbide is apparently good. Pyroclitic carbon has a bit too much conduction, but it's incredible melting point does make it a reasonable option. Consider it for radiators as well, just hope you're *only* facing lasers. The problem with lasers isn't the hull - even the weak
BaseDeltaZero thanks, but when I said outer layer, I meant putting a layer of silver over any of the layers you just talked about. Silver is the most visible light reflective element, so I figure it would do something to prevent heating in the first place.
Definitely some problems with this game. A simple deactivation code should disable smart munitions still in flight... But it's definitely not a common concept. It's in my 'one day' basket.
TheArklyte Ganymede is in the second mission in the Game. Jointly owned by most factions (but Jovian space is mostly USTA) population of 109 million. Compare that with Mars, RFP capitol, with 788 million, Titan w 61 million, Callisto with 161 million, Europa w 36 million and Io with 29 million madmen. Ceres has 2 million, Vesta .7 million. There's 75 million still in Earth orbit, with 155 million on Luna, plus another three million in Lunar orbit. 84 million in orbit around Venus.
5:07 - Those 'kinks' are not gravitational perturbations, are they? I thought you said this game had 3-body gravitational modelling, but that would seem more like the product of _n_-body modelling... 5:55 -Oh, so they're math errors or overcorrections from being so far out from F.O.R. I guess. 9:50 - Reminds me of the psychedelic lightshows on the bad space Sci-Fi movies from the '70s... So this game has essentially all the aesthetic beauty and agonizing seafreight pace of _2001_.
The game does have n-body modeling, or at least some approximation. I think the 'kinks' are caused by subtle 'wobble' in the station's orbit relative to Mars.
When he changed the Frame-Of-Reference all the wobblys went away; I suspect they were overcorrections for math errors caused by using Earth as F.O.R. that far out and close to another planet.
No it was because the reference body was the station not the mars. the station moves around mars at a certain period, in accordance with the oscillations observed.
Human nature The excuse to start it doesnt matter that much, humans have foumd the stupidest reasons to start wars. Greed, pride, racism, stupidity, those are your causes
...man, the grammar used in the briefings and such has some problems. The most glaring is that it apparently doesn't understand what "it's" and "its" mean. But it also uses "a USTA" rather than "an USTA"--which would make sense if you are pronouncing the acronym by its individual letters (like we do "US" or "USA"), but it doesn't work if you're pronouncing it like a word "Usta".
the combat in this game looks p dull maybe if there was in atmosphere combat with your very own designed weapons it would be better but this just looks like smashing 2 tubes together that fire laser beams until one snaps
It is quite exciting if you have the right mindset. I quite enjoy the combat, if you read the wiki you will find that there is a lot of strategy involved.
Holy crud those USF ship names:
Cosmic Abortion
Naked Singularity
Faraday Prison
Maxwell's Demon
and allied ships like "The God Machine".
What madbeing's been naming these things?
The USTA really does seem to have embraced the "War is Evil and So Are We" style of naming ships. The RFS on the other hand tend to pick names on the "Scientific injoke" end of the scale.
Faraday Prison? Was a Faraday Cage inadequate?
Well that would be just _too_ obvious, wouldn't it?
Sometimes, you need to imprison a lot of Faradays. So much, in fact, that they wouldn't fit inside a cage - you need an entire prison.
Because the author is a communist sympathizer as can easily be seen from the story texts. Usually i pass a game over it but this particular product happens to have a monopoly on this niche market that has been waiting for a game for a decade.
The extraction mission isn't that bad, but it helps to look at the Gunship's layout ahead of time. Gunships are easily the most dangerous ship in the vanilla game, those 286 coilguns shred ships like nobody's business, *and* they have 8mm railguns for early engagements, plus flak missiles, which pack a remarkable punch.
However, all their reactors are located just ahead of the engines, with the quarters amidships and at the bow. A good barrage of flak or striker missiles (or similar) will lock on to the enemy's tail, and destroy their engines plus most or all of their power generation. Once their power is down, their guns are useless. And remember, one of the perks of missiles is that you can launch them *before* you get to the enemy... at this point, just laser down the remaining weapons and collect your victory.
The Gunship has 3 sets of radiators, the 14 large radiators at the rear for the main reactor, a pair of smaller radiators forward for the lasers, and a single very small radiator for the cabins. Don't destroy the 18m radiator.
Vesta has a Reputation as one of the hardest missions in the game. It's pretty well deserved, but I didn't have *terribly* much trouble with it. My fleet consisted of three privateers, and, I think, a support carrier? If not that probably a laser schooner and gunskiff. My privateers spent the majority of the mission flying around lobbing Sniper missiles at the target. Small volleys at first to bait out the decoys, then big ones to cripple. Privateers are more than fast enough to evade pretty much any counterattack. Once the enemy was sufficiently softened (and some of them lost propulsion) I sent in the rest of my ships to finish them. Unfortunately the privateers got tagged by an enemy drone fleet and died, but it otherwise went pretty well.
Now? I could probably beat the mission with a single good ship. The Vanilla designs are... not great. Though, sadly, I'm *pretty darn certain* the Quasar Lance will be too big.
Vanilla drones should never be used against lasers. Ever. They will die. This remains problematic with custom drones due to their propensity for having open bits at the front. This can be countered against the AI by mixing your drones with missiles (for customs, try making micromissiles you can launch *from the drones*), but that only works as long as the missiles are present. Relatedly, this makes the Support Carrier's Beam Drones an incredibly effective means of neutralizing enemy drones. But they're expensive.
Scott, just to let you know... WE ARE WATCHING THIS SERIES! Now, to your battleship.
Dear youtube. Today I discovered some very interesting things about this game.
1: Did you know that the 'skybox' visible in the ship design screen is actually just the inside of a capsule? I discovered this because...
2: If you build a sufficiently large ship, you can zoom out *outside* of the sky-capsule, and look at it from the outside. It's 'solid' on both sides, oddly enough.
3: However, if you build a *very* large ship, you can go through the capsule with no problem. However, when dealing with a ship of this scale, it's very difficult to move modules around because movement is proportional.
4: Given the necessity, the game will display turnaround time and/or total thrust time in petaseconds, of all things. Ships large enough to 'break through' the capsule can indeed cause this to be necessary. It will also resort to displaying a ship's mass in scientific notation. It doesn't do that for anything else, for some reason.
5: Attempting to actually *play* a vessel around, say, nineteen kilometers long, causes the game to immediately crash, and it will not load until you restart your computer. The point at which this phenomenon begins to occur is somewhere above 1 kilometer, since that works just fine and may actually be good, though you can never ever ever use something like that in campaign on account of both tonnage and price being measured in the billions.
The light shows in this game are mesmerizing XD
I just discovered this game the other week and it is SO goddamn fun and already I want a sequel so, so bad. I have dreamed about a game like this since I was a teenager and it deserves to be properly beautiful. (What we got is pretty great for programmer art tho)
I wanna see fluffy thermal blankets, crinkly foil, and chalky tiles, some nice subtle lighting effects, maybe some depth of field, and I wanna hear some unit voices augmenting the popups and putting me in the action... We gotta start a kickstarter or SOMETHING and get the guy who made this a proper team to bring it to crackling life~
New patch just came out. Thus far, it seems to have added additional details to intercepts (closest approach and parallel/perpendicular velocity), and changed homing. 'Full homing' has been eliminated'. You can now manually select from:
Boost Phase - Accelerate along an intercept trajectory
Midcourse Phase - Adjust course as needed to maintain intercept, but do not accelerate towards target.
Terminal Phase - Accelerate directly towards target.
Or you can let the AI do it. Accuracy *seems* to have improved significantly, even with this option. I attempted five fairly basic 500 m/s intercepts on the sandbox. All hit. Next, I moved to Jupiter and did five very aggressive intercepts at high speed and distance. Four out of five hit.
A few of the hits did relatively minimal damage, but most scored at least a mission kill.
Update: Seem to be some changes to module design. First of all, modules are seperated into Vanilla and User Designed categories. Lasers may have a higher maximum range.
Modules can be given custom names. (YES)
... and Remote Controls are now customizable. You can change the aspect ratio, which is boring, but you can *also* customize how much the guidance. For instance, you can adjust how much delta-V will be spent boosting to the target, what targeting algorithim will be used, whether the missile will attempt to always accelerate, and a damping factor based on the engine's power.
So yeah...
"Nuclear Drive By Shooting", I think you have the title of your book there.
MOAR CHILDREN OF A DEAD EARTH DESIGNER PRETTY PLEASE
it's really disappointing how poor the missile navigation is, given that at close ranges, modern missile guidance tech (proportional navigation) is so simple yet so effective.
Rose Whittle It's a single equation these days, computed by a 5$ - 50$ chip depending on high frequency update you want. Quadruple the cost if you want redundant system resistant to DE ECM.
Fantastic maneuvering at Vesta. Your only real mistake was sending in the drones while the Cutter (and its lasers) was still alive.
Love the component design, if only this game had more of a strategic layer to tie the missions together in a meaningful way.
what if we modded it
Really enjoying this LP. Thanks Scott
The game has seen some significant enhancements since 2016, give it another go :-)
Wow, that was a cool way to handle Vesta Overkill! I ended up making some cheap disposable ships with no armor so I could fit as many guns in as possible; a design that only worked because I knew beforehand the enemy behavior.
I tried this "mass armada" method (among many) but it failed miserably for me. :-/ In the end I ended up making a single battleship that used up all my tonnage and money for the mission, loaded down with nukes to wear the enemy down first (plus intercept their drones and missiles before they reached my ship) and a ridiculous amount of armor so I could simply last longer than they could in the slugfest.
As long as you have a way to prevent missiles and/or drones from getting behind you, you can put all of your weapons on one side of your ship, only have 1 layer of armor that covers the entire ship, and then put several really thick layers of armor with 50% radius on the same side as the guns. You need to disable Dodging for these types of ships - if not they will wobble around and expose their rears to the enemy eventually - but otherwise it makes for close-combat vessels that (even with stock modules) are much more powerful by tonnage as compared to any stock ships.
I end up designing ships with many lasers and railguns and put ALL of them on 'Ignore Range'
This method works very well, especially when you are talking about fleet of motherships!
I made a fleet of space technicals. 4 of them had a pair of coilguns on the front, 8 of them had a pair of lasers on the sides. End result was a fairly effective point defense grid when you set the lasers to ignore range, and a very effective means of shredding the enemy fleet when you flipped the coilgun armed ships to ignore range. Once the enemy capital fleet was knocked out, I just left the coilguns on ignore range mode to maximise my point defense fire. Could have probably built a fleet of space stations armed like that due to the fact that I didn't really bother maneuvering.
+ScienceRules118 I'm not sure if anyone has addressed it yet or not on the forums (I'm guessing so...), but the "ignore range" problem is just that - a problem. Although I think there might be some exceptions, it seems that the #1 determinant for starting engagement range is the max distance that at least 1 weapon on any ship in the battle can fire; for slug-throwers that number is based on several factors, but for lasers it's literally whatever range the module designer sets it to...all the way up to a 250km cap. :-| Although it's not the same as "ignore range", even if you're not exploiting module design, a bunch of lasers set to "ignore range" accompanied by at least 1 long-range railgun will still give you a very unfair advantage against the AI.
Case in point: I just copied the 100MW laser, didn't do anything except increase the range to 200km, slapped it (and *only* it) onto a test ship, and engaged an enemy Gunship. Intercept was at ~20m/s..and at the full 200km laser range (with a whopping 3.75MW/m^2 :D). While he slowly accelerated towards me I was able to take out all 4 coilguns, all 4 8mm railguns, 1 flak missile launcher, and apparently 1 crew compartment as collateral damage before he got into shooting range. And the stock lasers are far from optimized!
I'm not sure what the solution is, but the way it stands "ignore range" and laser ranges in general should definitely be added to the "desperately need to be fixed" ToDo list. :-/
True enough. I actually found a fairly decent laser ship design on the forums and have been using that (with some modifications, mostly upgrading it's engines) as a point defense backbone of all the fleets I build. Look for the Newton in the Post your designs thread.
(I know that this comment is 5 years late, but oh well) Just discovered this game, and I love it! Unfortunately, I check it's steam page, and it's been 4 years since it last received an update. But despite that, I am thinking about picking the game up, as it looks like it is a lot of fun!
I wonder if there will ever be somthing like intersteller quest. Now that there is 64 bit you can load more mods then ever before, and much more stabily too. You could have the entire MKI suite with intersteller extended, and it would barely even effect the FPS. A sort of colonization series by the one and only Scott Manley. That would be awesome.
I like how the name of the gunship is THE GOD MACHINE at 11:06
Homecoming mission no longer possible like this. The maximum allowed cost is now 140, not 170. But you can do it with a small methane tanker.
This game is amazing and I by Odysseus beard I hope they keep improving it. We need more space combat like this, its exotic and scary and intense.
that vestra overkill mission was impossible until I found out about the AI not wanting to create trajectories that destroy themselves. I don't know how I would've complete that mission without abusing that "bug"
Mr.CheekiBreeki You can also intercept their missiles/drones with your own; the AI is dumb and will waste all their Delta V dodging and/or chasing the single Stinger drone you sent to intercept Devastator nukes can work for interception too. Beam drones also really good for this; they can actually kill stock drones and missiles quite well.
Oddly, I found that the AI is quite adept at playing Space Chicken with you - if you have a ship with high delta-V but low thrust, they'll tend to hug a planet and will move into a collision course as you close in, and set things up so that if you continue the intercept, *they* can recover but you can't.
I completed the mission without the exploit. I waited for them to launch all their drones and missiles, then I kept changing direction to make them run out of delta-v, and then finished the mission by deploying all my drones and missiles and then let the enemy fleet intercept me.
Scott, You don't seem to get it, so I'll spoil it for ya:
1) make a 9.5:1 Fluorine:Methane drone out of stock 3-rail-bearing one. Make an Osmium-nozzled engine and small light THERMONUCLEAR reactor with 1kg of RICH fuel and HOT OUTLET, place it in its NOSE. Divide each UHMWPE tanks by 7 so there's 14 TALL tanks total. Edit rails so there's 2 ARMORED GIMBALLED railguns (25 degrees per second will do, make barrel shorter if needed) on each drone with PLENTY of SEPARATE ammo (best is to divide ammo by 6 Reinforced Carbon disks, placing 5 radially and then 1 above - works as a shield). Add 2 layers of armor - thicker layer at nose as pointy as gimbals allow. Put 2* or 3* LIGHT (not armored) Gamma-Titanium-Aluminide radiators on it (outlet must be not too hot).
2) make a launcher and ammo for those drones, edit some stock carrier and put them there - 2 launchers are usually overkill. Lighten the reactor and divide tanks by 7 while on it.
3) launch 20 of them with "none" order (!) practically anywhere (5km/s dV and 4g maneuvers are easily attained if drones are made by my recipe). Make a LOW-SPEED INTERCEPT (not flyby).
4) upon entering battlefield, prioritize enemy modules TAKING LEADING INTO ACCOUNT, also prioritize ONE ENEMY LASER CRAFT 1st. Tell drones to broadside.
*5)* and this is *_CRUCIAL_*: tell railguns to >>>>> *IGNORE RANGE*
Scott, use missiles covered with at least 3 mm of silica aerogel, don't intercept with ships. Send a fleet of missiles to intercept instead.
Increase their turnabout time to more that one second. Currently if your missiles are agile, they tend to not correct their path soon enough.
Basalt Fiber Composite is a much better bang for your buck; it conducts heat so well (or should that be "doesn't conduct heat"?) that even 1mm is often enough to prevent enemy lasers from disabling it, especially if you back it with some carbon. That little trick alone allows you to essentially reduce the size of your missile swarms by an order of magnitude.
Basalt Fiber Composite, huh? I haven't even seen that in the list. Wikipedia says it has 4.something GPA tensile strength? That sounds pretty great, and could be an all-purpose armor.
Though, admittedly, I'd expect that 3mm of silica aerogel is probably lighter than 1mm of basalt fiber, and it works. If you're talking expense, most if it's going to come from your warhead and engine, so a few percent more aren't worth compromising delta-V.
Besides, why would you reduce the size of your missile swarms by an order of magnitude when you can instead *increase* the size of your missile swarms by an order of magnitude?
(Also, you can't really score a kill with 2-5 missiles, at least not against most ships).
Brandon T
15mm diameter? That's a pretty tiny missile. Or 15mm armor?
IME a volley of 20 vanilla flak missiles will take out a gunship no problem. Make a better missile and it becomes that much easier. So I tend to go with numerous light missiles, which also increases the chances of a hit. Unless you're flying straight into a Laser Station or equivalent, very few will be lost with 3-5mm of silica aerogel and it adds maybe 10kg to the weight.
These lightweight missiles can then be carried in big bunches. I have a ship which carries over six thousand missiles, mostly short range (only 2 km/s or so) but a few longer ones.
I have a 30 km/s multi-stage missile, though it's only the standard 2? MT warhead. Because sometimes you've just got wreck someone from a different planet entirely.
Also, why Maraging Steel instead of VCS? It's lighter, higher strength, and cheaper.
UMHWPE is what I prefer for full armor. Offers almost as much protection for a mere fraction of the mass.
RCC isn't awful, but UMHWPE offers more durability for less mass. You need quite a bit less of it to reach the next protection point.
Sorry, typeo there; I meant ~15 meters long (with 2 to 5 cm of layered armor of varying types).
As for armor types, I'll have to mess around with UMHWPE versus Marging Steel, VCS or otherwise. As it stands, against vanilla ships it doesn't matter anyway as my custom slug-throwers and missiles outrange the stock weapons by such a huge margin that the enemy doesn't even get a chance to shoot at me in campaign scenarios, but I still like min/maxing for the sake of, well...min/maxing. :) UMHWPE seems to be a good material for gyros in the weight-ranges I apparently like to make my weapons, but I hadn't thought of it as an armor material. I try and take into account the cross-section of my ships when designing them, since it determines AI attack ranges and all, so Marging Steel seems to be a good material to use as a 1-2cm layer of high-density, cheap cost, good-general-armor properties...but VCS could be just as viable, there's just so many materials available that you'd have to spend days testing in Sandbox mode to really know. I've been using VCS for railgun rounds - it works quite well in that regard - so I'll take a look at it for armor purposes and perhaps swap out my heavy-arse MS for it if the numbers seem to justify it. :D
VCS isn't *much* lighter than MS. But it's the strongest material in the game, at 5.17/5.21. I mainly use it for turbines and things that need to endure extremely high stresses, but it's incredibly tough as an armor.
"UMHWPE seems to be a good material for gyros in the weight-ranges I apparently like to make my weapons," Huh. I use tungsten, mainly, more weight = more momentum for same RPM. And it's reasonably strong, so you make a small, fast-spinning gyroscope out of highly dense material.
As for using it as armor... well, it's tensile strength/yield strength are *higher than Maraging Steel*. Terrible melting point, but that just means you need an anti-laser layer/don't put it on turrets.
"I try and take into account the cross-section of my ships when designing them, since it determines AI attack ranges and all"
That's true, but the effect of armor thickness on cross section is generally so small having 2cm instead of 10cm will give you a hundred meters at most. That could matter, sure, but I think the additional 8cm of armor will be of more use in surviving the twenty-something kilometers *after* that. As long as your armor isn't *super huge* compared to the ship... (in which case, I question how it moves), it shouldn't be much of a problem.
The *big* breakpoint is with some armor vs no armor at all. On a gunship, going from 5 microns to 1 cm increases cross-section by 20 meters. Going from nothing to 5 microns increases cross section by 400 meters. Presumably because the naked ship has variation in its thickness, while the armor is relatively uniform.
If 5 doesn’t do it, 240 will
does anyone know if the fire effects mod for KSP has been updated to 1.2? Games kinda lame without it...
Nice :D
Do you make the ISS in herbal space program?
herbal space program .... that is so fitting
noxabellus ehm.. I have not noticed ^^''
Would having a 500 micron thick layer of silver as the outer layer of armour be a cheap way to protect against lasers?
I did this on one of my ships but I dont know if it works or not.
Maybe, but I dunno if that small a layer would do it, it'd probably ablate off pretty quick. Possibly a decent solution for missiles, but I dunno about a *good* one. Silver isn't super expensive in terms of Spacebux, but it is quite heavy, and, as stated, .5mm probably won't do much.
Generally what you want is a lightweight substance with poor heat conduction and relatively high vaporization energy. Put it in a reasonably thick layer, and the enemy laser will have to spend a lot of time gradually burning through it. Time they won't have if it's on a missile. Silicon Aerogel works pretty well. It's very light, so you can put on a few centimeters and I guess just sort of absorbs the laser into its bulk. Boron Carbide is apparently good. Pyroclitic carbon has a bit too much conduction, but it's incredible melting point does make it a reasonable option. Consider it for radiators as well, just hope you're *only* facing lasers.
The problem with lasers isn't the hull - even the weak
BaseDeltaZero thanks, but when I said outer layer, I meant putting a layer of silver over any of the layers you just talked about. Silver is the most visible light reflective element, so I figure it would do something to prevent heating in the first place.
Definitely some problems with this game. A simple deactivation code should disable smart munitions still in flight... But it's definitely not a common concept. It's in my 'one day' basket.
And while we're here, can anybody explain to me what's the bid deal around Ceres, Titan and Europa and nothing around Ganymede?
TheArklyte Ganymede is in the second mission in the Game. Jointly owned by most factions (but Jovian space is mostly USTA) population of 109 million. Compare that with Mars, RFP capitol, with 788 million, Titan w 61 million, Callisto with 161 million, Europa w 36 million and Io with 29 million madmen. Ceres has 2 million, Vesta .7 million. There's 75 million still in Earth orbit, with 155 million on Luna, plus another three million in Lunar orbit. 84 million in orbit around Venus.
How many on Earth itself?
The Earth is Dead, Lovenought.
FlyingMonkeyDeathGod
O:
FlyingMonkeyDeathGod
wonder if we'll ever get anywhere near those numbers(minus screwing up Earth)...
is it just me or does the game make it seem like you are playing the evil side in the campaign?
Will you do any more CoDE videos?
When do you unlock the module thing
Does taking hits affect your velocity? Just thinking about the old project orion with all these nukes getting tossed about
yes, it does. Big nukes will shove stuff out of orbit. And also pulverise that stuff.
Sweeet
If your using a electric drive with a nuclear reactor how could you run out of delta-v?
5:07 - Those 'kinks' are not gravitational perturbations, are they? I thought you said this game had 3-body gravitational modelling, but that would seem more like the product of _n_-body modelling...
5:55 -Oh, so they're math errors or overcorrections from being so far out from F.O.R. I guess.
9:50 - Reminds me of the psychedelic lightshows on the bad space Sci-Fi movies from the '70s...
So this game has essentially all the aesthetic beauty and agonizing seafreight pace of _2001_.
The game does have n-body modeling, or at least some approximation. I think the 'kinks' are caused by subtle 'wobble' in the station's orbit relative to Mars.
When he changed the Frame-Of-Reference all the wobblys went away; I suspect they were overcorrections for math errors caused by using Earth as F.O.R. that far out and close to another planet.
No it was because the reference body was the station not the mars. the station moves around mars at a certain period, in accordance with the oscillations observed.
What would be the cause of a space war?
Water? Perhaps iridium?
Human nature
The excuse to start it doesnt matter that much, humans have foumd the stupidest reasons to start wars.
Greed, pride, racism, stupidity, those are your causes
Don't forget religion...
That too.
What the heck, I do everything exactly the same yet it's impssible to get my trajectory anywhere close.
That’s because it’s hard and the UI frequently lets you down.
500 views, 50 likes. I am the luckiest person in the world!
wait i just noticed i got here as view 171... does this matter? no, but it amused me enough to make a comment.
...man, the grammar used in the briefings and such has some problems. The most glaring is that it apparently doesn't understand what "it's" and "its" mean. But it also uses "a USTA" rather than "an USTA"--which would make sense if you are pronouncing the acronym by its individual letters (like we do "US" or "USA"), but it doesn't work if you're pronouncing it like a word "Usta".
play more
Is it me, or does scott sound a bit dissatisfied with this game?
seems like he never did another episode so....
it dosent even simulate fusion powered guns so thats probably why
Lol
the combat in this game looks p dull
maybe if there was in atmosphere combat with your very own designed weapons it would be better
but this just looks like smashing 2 tubes together that fire laser beams until one snaps
thegreenfaction you can design your own weapons. You can design every component of your ship except cargo containers.
+RiftandRend I know about the weapon design which is my chief interest in this game
Welcome to realistic space combat. This is the reason why most games stick to sci-fi tropes.
It is quite exciting if you have the right mindset. I quite enjoy the combat, if you read the wiki you will find that there is a lot of strategy involved.
Cant really understand this game.
Start off with Kerbal Space Program; it helps a lot.
Furst!
Second