Sliinty

Thats what you meant by kew, but baseball bat inflicts damage by virtue of its kinetic energy, ie a kinetic energy weapon. If you mean kinetic bombardment, say kinetic bombardment. I didnt say that there arent radiators that could withstand being shot at, I said that pumping heat sounds like reducing entropy! Its unrelated. Also, back on topic, note that project thor just involved weapons in space and not ships carrying weapons, as I keep saying.

Also id like to point out that a baseball bat is a kinetic energy weapon

if you want to trash cities.. use an icbm, a ship in orbit is a very roundabout and expense way of doing things. I you seriously think your railgun toting behemoth can maneuvre faster than a missile, thats fine, just sayin point defense might be a little easier Reading your posts, I dont think were on the same page, I mean space combat between nations around earth, so a logistics craft would be a lifter of some kind, like a Soyuz, and my point is that trying to control lower altitudes and orbits closer to home is easier done with ASATs than with death stars. Of course planetary invaders will win, what I keep trying to say is that an ICBM is cheaper than space fighter! if we're going to start referencing, "Close orbits are likely to be death traps for the attacker" "pump the ships heat" sounds suspiciously like reducing entropy, another good one to read is this

calling it "loki" is a bit of a giveaway *cough*EVE*cough* but those twin hulls are gorgeous

Consider that the surface-orbit weapon is likely a SCUD launched from the back of a truck, it really doesn't matter if it gets blown up. Again, its cheaper for a country to launch a missile than a ship holding missiles, as for evasion, firstly a ship that accelerates faster than a missile is gonna be expensive, and really, the missiles dont even have to hit the ship, you have to launch logistics craft to keep it supplied, and those are easy targets. Not to mention if you roll around the temperature of the ship on the whole is still increasing, you cant tank against lasers for long, and if you extend your radiators, goodbye radiators...

The thing is that the guy on the surface can hide, in space you are completely open. More simply its cheaper to put just a weapon in space than a ship carrying that weapon. (Only talking about planetary scale) My favourite defense system is the archimedes death ray style mirrors set up And if you're trying to think realistically, dont mention shields or crew!

Well if you were purely tactical im sure a surface to orbit missile is probably best

And for purely unsustained flight its around 78s, hybrids are obviously the way to go, but the theoretical max for them is harder to work out

I've done some rudimentary maths, (not going to bore you with too much working) I don't think its possible with the power density of stock solars and the TWR of stock ion drives The highest achievable electricity/second/ton in stock is 150 (from the smallest solars with no structure). The surface gravity on the mun is 1.63. So lets assume that you have so many engines per tank of xenon that the mass of the xenon tanks becomes negligible, and your craft is so big the mass of the probe also becomes negligible, your free mass (mass that isn't engines) is 0.0567*n=m where n is number of engines, m is mass, and the mass of a solar array to power a given number of engines is m=12*n/r where r is your elec/second/ton so combining those 2 equations, r=0.0567n/12n=211.5 ...which is quite a bit higher than the maximum possible ratio. (150) And not to mention we have an infinite number of engines per tank and a massless probe body and a massless structure holding the solars in place to give us 150. But its pretty easy on minmus http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/30329-Ion-Engines-Everywhere-My-Attempt-to-Land-As-Many-Places-As-Possible EDIT: apparently Ion engines actually use 14.5 e/s not 12, so the required ratio is actually 255.73... even further beyond the realms of possibility

it was a joke... using that many intakes is somewhat game-breaking, especially when they're all clipped into one another, some consider it cheaty.

*police sirens* do you know how many air intakes you're flying with sir?

ssto's are spacecraft

Isn't it just aeronautics if there's no spacecraft?

Ive had similar weird oscillations with a ufo style craft, not nearly as bad though.

I think you're right about the X-ray thing, I heard crazy ways to get gamma rays too. I was going to say how you can't get big lasers to move on turret mounts unless you have a ridiculously big ship, but I also heard about using reflectors to take one beam and split onto different targets. An antiproton beam is just wildly impractical, as is any antimatter weapon, I do like the side effect of particle beams that they'll make tons of gamma radiation and fry electronics and kill crew even if they don't cut the hull open.

So I made that more realistic craft, taking info from Atomic Rockets It's not perfectly realistic, the radiators are a very basic design for example, but I tried. Damned robotics and HSTW sunbeams used here. It has 1 weapon, a laser that it has to aim by pointing the entire ship at the target, I put sunbeams in the dish so that I can visually have it fire, but realistically it would probably be ultraviolet or even X-ray based due to the higher energy and penetration than with visible light. Firing, radiators extended. The radiators are necessary to dissipate the waste heat from the nuclear reactor and laser (large lasers get very hot), which would otherwise build up until it destroyed the ship. However they make a good target in combat, so they retract, and the ship just has to take the short term build up. view of 1 of 2 reactor cores, the scanners on the back also rotate to cover more sky area, the ship could roll very slowly whilst the scanners rotate to get a scan view of the whole sky.

yeah i thought the station looked low too

And here's a larger craft I made a couple of days ago, originally designed as a cargo hauler I realised having a big hangar allows for a lot of configuration options, so it could be kitted out as a carrier or filled with missiles and fuel as a battleship. The L-250B Lynx Strategic cruiser is mainly used to provide logistical support to more aggressively built vessels, but can be fitted out with heavy armaments if necessary. Shown here carrying fuel tanks

What do you need over 7000 m/s for in a ship that cant land? thats easily enough to go anywhere you would like and back. Also whats up with your units, megagrams? Who calls a ton a megagram... at that, remember Isp is in seconds and dV in m/s.

I might try working on something much more realistic, like with scanners and radiators and an adequate power source

I meant for the beast. After all, if its 100 tons asfar as possible then solar escape is as far as you can go

Is it take 100 tons as far as possible or take as much as possible to duna?

You would probably want to mount engines to the front rather than the back, tensile structure is a lot lighter than compressive structure, just a thought.

well, you can have a small ship with tons of parts... but i guess 400 parts would be a rough limit.

OH, and would somebody mind posting a .craft file of a mid sized ship for me to use in a cinematic? I'll give credit.