Naval Battle League 2016-2018

[Canberra_Gaming]

15 hours ago, ScriptKitt3h said:

My computer's been sounding like a tiny turbine for the past hour+...

Just about 1500 parts.

Let me guess what it's called. Titan? Also I'm still alive, just very, very sick.

[ScriptKitt3h]

1 hour ago, Canberra_Gaming said:

Let me guess what it's called. Titan? Also I'm still alive, just very, very sick.

Nope, Prometheus. However, I am working on a ship called the Titan for someone right now...

Hope you feel better dude, it sucks to be under the weather.

[Canberra_Gaming]

1 hour ago, ScriptKitt3h said:

Nope, Prometheus. However, I am working on a ship called the Titan for someone right now...

Hope you feel better dude, it sucks to be under the weather.

I know who the Titan's for. I talk to him quite a bit. Thank you, I hope to start recording again soon enough. I might force myself to get off of my bed to finish episode 2. I'm also hoping to finish the Vindicator Mk-VII tomorrow for a Combat trial.

[sdj64]

11 hours ago, Sharkman Briton said:

Anyone wanna test my latest ship? 35 Tons, this is the SAPON-01 Globe.

download SAPON-01 Globe

Did you ever try flying it yourself?  That's the first step in making a better ship.  You would discover, for instance, that there's no good forward-facing control point (except the torpedoes) which makes it tough to fly and aim.  Also the staging was messed up.  Both very quick fixes.  I would also add a probe core in case your pilot gets shot, and an RTG and maybe some RCS too.  The delta-V counter is also wrong, it only gets about 1500 m/s with all engines on.  There's some empty space inside so you can add more fuel if you want.

I also tested it against my Aqua destoryer.  Armor is pretty good against shots from the sides/top/bottom, but leaves the engines unprotected, making it easy to leave it dead in the water with a shot or two.  The ion engines do help if the nuke is destroyed.  Then I shot at my ship with yours.  The I beam missiles are very accurate since they're right at the center of your ship, and could be good for sniping engines and exposed bits.  The torpedoes I found surprisingly weak for their size, but I may have been using them wrong.  They might need more thrust.  Can you kill my ship or your own reliably with them?

[Three1415]

I know I posted about this before, but does anyone know of a way to recover craft files from a persist containing them? There used to be a tool to do so, but it is broken as of 1.0+. I ask because my computer perished horribly a few months ago, and with it my entire fleet (I know, back up files, blah blah blah); however, I still have the persists in cloud-storage, and it would be nice not to have to rebuild entirely from scratch (although this might be advisable with 1.0+ anyway). 

In any event, nice to see some new blood in these threads...

Edited May 3, 2016 by Three1415

[ScriptKitt3h]

45 minutes ago, Three1415 said:

I know I posted about this before, but does anyone know of a way to recover craft files from a persist containing them? There used to be a tool to do so, but it is broken as of 1.0+. I ask because my computer perished horribly a few months ago, and with it my entire fleet (I know, back up files, blah blah blah); however, I still have the persists in cloud-storage, and it would be nice not to have to rebuild entirely from scratch (although this might be advisable with 1.0+ anyway). 

In any event, nice to see some new blood in these threads...

I think the guys behind HyperEdit have a tool, it's experimental, but it should be on the website for their mods (kerbaltek).

[ScriptKitt3h]

Welp, I'm guess I'm in a warship-building mood today.

Comes out to over 1000 parts with weapons loaded- though the firepower it can carry is more than worth it. (Plus an utterly MASSIVE internal fuel reserve and respectable TWR will hopefully make this a strong, if a bit laggy heavy hitter for my fleet of ships I've amassed.)

I'm trying to figure out a way to take it to orbit without hyperedit, which is broken in 1.1.2 as of now (causes a few bugs relating to decoupling/EVAing for me).

[panzer1b]

13 hours ago, ScriptKitt3h said:

Welp, I'm guess I'm in a warship-building mood today.

Comes out to over 1000 parts with weapons loaded- though the firepower it can carry is more than worth it. (Plus an utterly MASSIVE internal fuel reserve and respectable TWR will hopefully make this a strong, if a bit laggy heavy hitter for my fleet of ships I've amassed.)

I'm trying to figure out a way to take it to orbit without hyperedit, which is broken in 1.1.2 as of now (causes a few bugs relating to decoupling/EVAing for me).

I like it, although id like to know where you got the idea for such a thing.  Looks 100% identical layout to my old and obsolete SK-CRV-II (not that i mind u using my ship's layout as inspiration, especially since it never worked all that well and was never deployed in any role besides command ship where it is still useful).

 

 

 

Also, does anyone know how to defend against RT5s?  Ive currently got a B-Corp warship which is armed with 8 RT5 missiles consisting of a decoupler on the front and a RT5 behind it with 50% fuel load.  This thing is able to RELIABLY SPLIT ANYTHING (including the entirety of the warships ive downloaded from you guys) when set at a 1000km orbit and the target is rendezvoused with a 0.1 lead using hedit.  Not a single ship can survive it.  Given i cant have B-Corp fielding such overpowered weaponry, i think ill need to redesign that warship (B-Corp lacks super high end weaponry).

Anyone have any hulls that are resilient vs RT5s?  Im completely stuck as none of my own nor anyone else's ships seem to be capable of doing so.

 

 

Edit:

Not going to get my hopes up prematurely but i think i have something that can sortof tank RT5s and ibeams without taking excessive damage in the process.  Now i just need to figure out a way to make the internals not get gutted instantly...

Edited May 3, 2016 by panzer1b

[ScriptKitt3h]

1 hour ago, panzer1b said:

I like it, although id like to know where you got the idea for such a thing.  Looks 100% identical layout to my old and obsolete SK-CRV-II (not that i mind u using my ship's layout as inspiration, especially since it never worked all that well and was never deployed in any role besides command ship where it is still useful).

I saw a certain just-announced game's ships in its trailer and felt like somewhat imitating them- I'm not sure I've ever even seen your older ship.

[Canberra_Gaming]

1 hour ago, ScriptKitt3h said:

I saw a certain just-announced game's ships in its trailer and felt like somewhat imitating them- I'm not sure I've ever even seen your older ship.

Speaking of imitated ships...

God. I just want to absolutely pretend the Titan doesn't exist now... I'll just blow it out of existence for the time being.

[panzer1b]

Well development of new armor is going well.  Still not quite tough enough, and it is a tad high part count (200 part hull), but its the first hull since 0.90 that seems to be very resistant to anything ive thrown at it.  Apparently strut spam (used correctly) can give you a near invincible core structure from which you essentially use brached off hull design.

The whole idea behind it is to have one root part that has around 8 branches attached to it.  Then you use those 8 parts to branch the rest of the ship out offa.  Ofc those 8 parts are so heavily strutted to each other and the core that its virtually impossible to loose anything there.  Really the only killer issue is when that core piece gets destroyed, but ive yet to pull that off.

Hopefully ill have a workable hull by the end of the day...  Still need to solve the issue of internals being vaporized even if the hull as a whole remains intact most of the time.

[curiousepic]

So, a few days ago I did a bunch of weapon vs armor testing similar to this previously posted video, but more exhaustive, with gravity hacked, etc. I recorded the results in this Google Sheet.

Keep in mind this is a very restricted domain:

• range is 100m
• impact velocities only reached 80-200 m/s
• atmosphere likely caused some drag
• everything (except in the armor angle trials) was perpendicular to the armor
• the armor and target do not accurately simulate an actual vessel
• the full range of armor designs were really only tested with lighter weapons
• the target did not involve structural elements in the line of fire, only the armor and the target fuel tank
• etc. etc. etc.

But there were some interesting results.  Here are some highlights:

• Most armor designs were roughly %50 effective.  This is kind of disheartening because it may mean that survivability is influenced more by the Kraken than by design.
• With a single plate of armor, unattached fairly close to a fuel tank, weapons almost always phased through it and destroyed the tank.
• A single plate of armor attached to the fuel tank was destroyed by non-light weapons

The most survivable armor designs against the initial test weapons were:

• A plate unattached to the target tank, and an empty 2.5m fuel tank outside of that.  Survivability of the target tank was 10/10 against 650 I-Beam Sepx2 and FLT-200 Full Sepx10, but only 6/10 for Long I-Beam Sepx4.
• 1.25m empty tank, attached to target tank: 10/10 vs 650 I-Beam Sepx2 and Long I-Beam Sepx4, but 3/10 vs FLT-200 Full Sepx10.
• wing attached to plate, unattached to target: 10/10 vs 650 I-Beam Sepx2,  8/10 vs Long I-Beam Sepx4 but 0/10 vs FLT-200 Full Sepx10

After determining the best armors, I did a larger variety of weapon trials vs that design (2.5m empty tank and 1 plate).

• RT-5 with a plate warhead was indeed 100% effective.
• Runners up were: Oscar-B Empty Sepx10, Triple (spammed stack) 650 Sepx2, RT-5 short I-Beamx2, and Short I-Beam Sepx10
• Oscar-B Empty Sepx10 and Short I-Beam Sepx10 almost always phased through even the large empty tank (not destroying it, but destroying the target tank), and everything that phased had impact velocities greater than 175 m/s.
• The plate armor itself almost always survived. The only thing that (occasionally) destroyed it was a  Long I-Beam propelled to 185 m/s by a Vector engine and FLT-100.
• The highest impact velocity was the Cubic Strut Sepx2 at 200m/s. It also had the highest reached max speed, almost 1km/s even in atmo. But it was only about 30% effective.

I think the empty tanks work well because they are a larger cross section in which fast-moving weapons can be detected to collide with it, so there is a greater chance the weapon doesn't phase through it. But, that doesn't explain the 30% discrepancy between an empty 1.25m tank and a 1.25m structural fuselage.

Next I tested the same armor vs the three best weapons above, at varying angles of incidence.  Each trial increased the angle by 15 degrees away from perpendicular. For the lowest angles (60 and 75 degrees), some weapons may have hit the plate head on, some the target tanks, some the armor tanks. Head-on, I had them only hitting the armor tanks.

• Phasing was generally very rare, which makes sense.
• From 60 to 90 degrees, RT-5s destroyed plates, something that virtually never occurred at higher angles.
• Bizarrely, while striking perpendicular in the initial tests RT-5s were 100% lethal, at 15 degrees off perpendicular, they only destroyed the armor tank. This is promising if not a fluke.  Still, at lower angles, they varied somewhat randomly between 30-60% lethal.
• I'm not sure the data actually shows this, but while running the trials, the angled plate did seem to be pretty effective and glancing projectiles away after the armor tank was destroyed. I'm not sure but suspect that having the armor plate outside the armor tank would be less effective, but perhaps I should test that as well.

 

I feel like I'm on to something with empty tanks as armor. I built a test ship using it and found it somewhat successful (before it succumbed to the Death Wobble bug and I ragequit), but I'm still new to actual orbital combat.  I'd be interested to see practical designs using this armor from you all.

Something else I was experimenting with in that ship was redundant fuel systems.  Using a central structural truss, I attached 1.25m fuel tanks with 4x symmetry, but only attached to the truss, not each other.  Then, fuel lines between the trusses, and from each tank to the truss (not the tank) below it. Even RT-5s would only ever destroy one or two tanks per hit, but left all remaining tanks functional and their sweet, sweet Delta-V pumping to (any remaining) engines.

Edited May 3, 2016 by curiousepic

[Servo]

As for armor, I've had some pretty good success with simple structural girder frames, with plate armor and wing armor layered on top (the key is not to have the wing armor attached to the plate armor, both have to be independently on the structural frame). My high-end missiles (RT-5 + 4x landing gear on a separator) rarely KO-d the ship (On a hit, most light-medium ships just die), rather the armor and maybe a fuel tank broke. That said, 10-15% of the hits to the CoM shredded the ship regardless.

The bit of armor missing on the aft is the sum result of four direct hits from 4xsep+650Ibeam, and the armor missing in the midsection is from a direct RT-5+plate hit. While this may not be representative of advanced weapons, I think it's still pretty darn sturdy, as far as my standards go.

KerbalX link, if any of you want to test/critique it. If you do, tell me what you think of the anti-cap missiles I've got; I'm curious to see what some more seasoned people think of them.

https://kerbalx.com/servo/D-62

[ScriptKitt3h]

3 hours ago, Canberra_Gaming said:

Speaking of imitated ships...

God. I just want to absolutely pretend the Titan doesn't exist now... I'll just blow it out of existence for the time being.

Yup, the Forward Unto Dawn was indeed a major inspiration in terms of superstructure design.

Edited May 3, 2016 by ScriptKitt3h

[panzer1b]

1 hour ago, curiousepic said:

All of that...

So i see you also came to the conclusion that a RT-5 is the ultimate weapons in terms of mass/part count efficiency.  The weird thing is that this was NOT that case until 1.1 came out, where RT5s were so-so weapons, still effective but not exactly 90% kill rate on anything.  Now it seems that RT-5s are your best bet if you are concerned about part count, but are willing to deal with the RT-5s rather large size and inability to be used at long range.

 

 

 

In other news, my new hull (SK-CRV-IVg4) is super effective vs ANYTHING, although RT5s are still quite decent against it (though i have not been 1 shot obliterated once sofar from any angle by any weapon that isnt using XL3 wheels or is just excessively large and heavy).  Now if only i can solve the rather annoying engine loss problem i think ill have the lightest and lowest part count hull out here that is actually capable of eating enemy fire to some extent.

I'm especially proud of the cockpit which not only lets the kerbal get in or out (i dont even with squad's broken cockpit blocked bs) but is both heavily shielded (only a phasing round which gets very lucky or a direct hit into the upper drone bay can destroy it) and gives you a very nice view to the front of the ship for manually firing the forward facing weapons.

As for weapons, it comes in a few configurations, but all of them have 8 0.6m hardpoints in the upper and lower drone bay, and then a single HSG hardpoint inside an internally housed gun barrel (a stack of 2-3 RT-5s, 2 modified Tripedo-Ms, or a SRM-6 either S, M, or H type), and there are also 2 triple 0.6m hardpoints to each side of the gun barrel which can be optionally replaced with 2 single 1.2m hardpoints which can carry the same options the gun barrel mount would.  Firepower is less then the older SK-CRV-I models that carried 5 1.2m hardpoints (potential for up to 30 0.6m weapons total), but given its new role of a support ship (whereas the class-I was more of a generalist ship) i think its adequate.

The only killer issue is the relative ease of loosing engines (and to some extent weapons), but i dont see how one can solve that without actually making the ship itself larger, and thus defeating teh point of it entirely.  So yeah, it has an achilles heel even if the hull itself is superb in the armor protection and while its not quite my standards of part count at ~250 parts, it is still far better then the average ship i see on here if you look at parts.  350 parts armed, but most of that is from the excessively high part could Tribeam-S missiles which are my new WIP 0.6m shipkillers.

[ScriptKitt3h]

Decided to miniaturize the Infinity-Class' design, resulting in this prototype:

...which survived a direct high-speed 1.25 meter missile hit on its hull (I chalk it up to slightly offsetting the wing plating, making the "reactive armor" function of it actually work).

[panzer1b]

1 minute ago, ScriptKitt3h said:

Decided to miniaturize the Infinity-Class' design, resulting in this prototype:

...which survived a direct high-speed 1.25 meter missile hit on its hull (I chalk it up to slightly offsetting the wing plating, making the "reactive armor" function of it actually work).

I like it, looks great...

What is the part count of this thing, cause just looking at its exterior thats probably at least 300 parts for the hull.

[ScriptKitt3h]

2 minutes ago, panzer1b said:

I like it, looks great...

What is the part count of this thing, cause just looking at its exterior thats probably at least 300 parts for the hull.

700-ish, depending on weapons... however, in 1.1, 600/700's the new 400-450 (at least for me, and I'm referring to in-flight performance).

[Spartwo]

18 minutes ago, ScriptKitt3h said:

Yup, the Forward Unto Dawn was indeed a major inspiration in terms of superstructure design.

...That's not even what it is.

[ScriptKitt3h]

Just now, Spartwo said:

...That's not even what it is.

I know, but the concept art I utilized was of the the Dawn (think it was the Halo 4 version), and it heavily resembles the ship above (though the Titan isn't entirely a replica, it's more-so inspired by such ships_.

[max_creative]

I like seriously need to rebuild my big missile...

[Spartwo]

5 minutes ago, ScriptKitt3h said:

I know, but the concept art I utilized was of the the Dawn (think it was the Halo 4 version), and it heavily resembles the ship above (though the Titan isn't entirely a replica, it's more-so inspired by such ships_.

Strident class, completely changing every design and expecting it to be the overriding one after 10 minutes of use won't make it this...

http://vignette3.wikia.nocookie.net/halo/images/d/dc/H3_ForwardUntoDawn_Side.png/revision/latest?cb=20130912001213

...not the forward unto dawn.

And that is the first in a long list of reasons I despise 343

Edited May 3, 2016 by Spartwo

[Canberra_Gaming]

@ScriptKitt3h and @panzer1b Care to send me the designs if you're that sure of it?

[panzer1b]

Just now, Canberra_Gaming said:

@ScriptKitt3h and @panzer1b Care to send me the designs if you're that sure of it?

Im just theoretical testing for now.  Im not done yet and im rearming it as to lower part count as the Tribeams are just lousy part count efficiency, i think ill swap those for 2 stacks of 3 RT-5s each.  All my design has proven is that sofar its very solid vs anything i throw at it discouting tire impactors which i havent thoroughly tested.  Its heavily resilient vs RT-5s (the most ive done to it is blow off a solid chunk of the ship's outer armor and destroy all engines (vernors were still intact).  As for ibeams, the thing just doesnt care about those at all, and it seems that the Popper-H (a weapon i use to test armor more often the not) has excessively hard to to kill it (let alone neuter it for that matter).

 

Once its finished ill upload it here so you guys can try it and point out any flaws (as im sure i wont be able to find every weakness with the ship myself).

[ScriptKitt3h]

50 minutes ago, Canberra_Gaming said:

@ScriptKitt3h and @panzer1b Care to send me the designs if you're that sure of it?

I need to do a bit more testing before I'm ready for using it in combat- mainly simple things like testing the hull and whatnot, but that's something made more complicated with not having HyperEdit working in 1.1.2 yet, though I've been attempting to find a work-around...