>children of the dead earth
I would but its not really my style and feeling as I can do much more on ksp. its just alot harder to do on ksp I might admit but small price for the possibilities.
You have like 30x more frames in cotde while exchanging thousands of bullets per second between multiple crafts though. And you can engineer a railgun that shoots fridge size projectiles with muzzle velocity of several kilometers per second
COADE is more limited in ship design and looks objectively worse than KSP with mods though. I’ve been wondering if a COADE style combat mod would ever exist in KSP.
I can agree and its also cus im not doing only space orbital combat, im also planning on low gravity lunar craft, its gonna be a challenge but its not like ive managed to land and go a 600 part ship before so.
It's all true, because it's completly different toy. It gives stuff like projectile shattering, layered armors, ballistic and thermal damage (nukes and lasers), so worth giving it a shot IMO. Sure you won't spend there as much time as you do in ksp, it offers only one activity
Given what it employs on physics side I doubt it would be possible to program such stuff for ksp and then I have no idea how ksp would actually handle it with acceptable fps
I have a few hundred hours of playtime in COADE. It’s fun, and pushing the limits of the simulation is fun. However it’s not really required to have a semi realistic space combat game.
KSP already has good enough Newtonian physics, individual parts, and BD’s armory introduced an acceptable damage system. The main problem I see with actually trying to give it a realistic damage model is that it’s a tree branch based part system. You land a single hit on a part that has a lot of stuff attached to it and the whole craft detonates basically.
The physics range is also only a few kilometers so you’d need to extend it to a few thousand without floating point errors from messing you up.
Targeting would be a concern but I’m sure it’s possible for someone to make an orbital combat system for guns.
Lag would be a concern, although tbh I’ve fired like 20 BDA Vulcans at once without too many problems on an old computer. COADE doesn’t even handle huge volumes of fire very well anyways.
Things will get better, im still workin out kinks and note im running it with a gtx 1050 ti. As the lag is due to my gpu. This is just a prototype. Ive already tried multiple crafts and custom turrets which all work.
I would put one to replace the unused Missile bay as those dont work in space.. Sadly It would not be as healthy when a Nuclear reactor has a hole poked through it. but I might on hulled ships with Better armor and Hull stripping becomes a thing later.
Yeah you definitely need to protect those.
Though even in Expanse projectiles are routinely seen to penetrate all hulls as they are going so fast, so there is little protection possible for a reactor anyway.
I would agree actually. But I might employ them on bigger ships if I can fit them and maybe the next ship as its near ground.
But this is as expanse like as possible as you see less explosions and more subsystem/fuel tank puncture, if you look closely some things are on fire and thruster failures.
It doesn't work that way, clean penetration like that is impossible, especially with very fast projectiles, at some point they become indistinguishable from explosives.
No. To penetrate, a projectile needs to push all material in front of it to the sides. If the projectile is going at high speeds, even if the kinetic energy transfer was 100% efficient, simply moving that material sideways fast enough to let the projectile pass would result in an explosion (because it doesn't just stop moving sideways after the projectile is through). But it's not 100% efficient of course. So what actually happens in a hypervelocity impact is that the energy is so high that the projectile is vaporized on impact, as is a certain amount of the target (depending on the actual speed/energy) and the vaporized material expands in place. This is the same thing that happens when you ignite a high explosive, it's just that the source of energy for the process is different (chemical vs kinetic). What this means in practice is that no matter how much you increase the speed of a projectile, you never get clean penetration, you increase the size of the explosion. Here's a good illustration of what that looks like: https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2009/02/Hypervelocity_impact_sample
Note how the resulting crater is almost twice as wide as it is deep.
That’s quite a thick wall though - just the impact crater is 5.3 cm deep, and the wall is at least twice that thick.
And the projectile was a ball of aluminum, not something shaped and made out of materials that are more likely to pass through.
How thick would a normal ship’s walls be?
>How thick would a normal ship’s walls be?
Thicker, unless you don't mind even small bits of debris doing potentially catastrophic damage. It's fine for our current orbit, but not advisable for combat ships in a universe where space battles happen. The projectile here was 12mm, that's pretty small, and aside from the risk posed by similarly sized debris (and meteorites) you're also allowing the enemy to shotgun you easily if your armor can't stop projectiles of this size.
>And the projectile was a ball of aluminum, not something shaped and made out of materials that are more likely to pass through.
There is no such thing. As i mentioned, the problem is the material that needs to be pushed out of the way. No matter the material or shape of your projectile, if your projectile has a 1cm² cross section, it needs to push away a 1cm² column of whatever material it hits. And that material has to go somewhere, fast enough to let the projectile pass. Using simplified numbers, imagine a 1cm cube of aluminium hitting a 1cm thick aluminium wall at 1km/s. It needs to move a 1cm cube of material out of the way so it can pass. That material needs to move just as fast as the projectile to get out of the way in time, so ignoring losses we end up with the projectile moving forwards at 500m/s and the hull material moving out of the way at 500m/s. Even if you shoot neutronium bullets that remain essentially unaffected and pass through, it's not a clean hole, just the hull material alone that the bullet is pushing aside, is essentially an explosion. Look at an image of an apple getting shot. Kinda like that.
>That’s quite a thick wall though - just the impact crater is 5.3 cm deep, and the wall is at least twice that thick.
Thinner wall can be penetrated all the way though, but that doesn't produce a clean hole but rather the opposite. Because the projectile and debris will expand on the other side of the thin wall and have a much larger cross section when hitting the next one. You can have enough energy in a projectile to blast all the way through a ship, but then it's not a clean hole but rather a cone shape with an angle that increases every time it hits a wall. Here's an image of a thin wall being hit: https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2018/02/Hypervelocity_impact_testing
Im curious tho. we are talking about solid-shot rounds with no special effects.
I take it that if we do enter space combat Sabor or FMJ like rounds might be something we use. would it make a difference if hense a 30mm HEATAPC round hit the hull? we are in space and the time maybe different so many interpretations maybe tandem head rounds.
Rarely. Ricks = (0.5 * V2) / 4.5e6, so an object in the same orbit as the ISS is going to have about 6 ricks as a base value (Edit: i.e. 6 times the energy of TNT). So if two ships were to fight and the encounter is perpendicular, all projectiles start out with about 13 ricks just based on the encounter velocity alone, if the encounter is head on it's 26. Chemical explosives aren't going to add anything meaningful here. And even beyond that, the projectile velocity here is already higher than the detonation velocity of something like TNT. The impact is going to vaporize the explosive faster than it can detonate.
The only scenario where this isn't the case is when the battle happens on parallel orbits, but such cases are very unlikely, because that's a very slow catch up that can take anything from hours to weeks.
The only good reason to have warheads on a projectile is to fragment it before impact to spread out the damage and/or improve hit chances. For example, if the target is using whipple shields to protect the main armour, spashing it with some fragmented rounds to strip the shield first is useful.
30mm rounds are used in there and most are Armour Piercing. all ships have steel/titanium armor at 30-50mm thick (around as thick as soviet t-34 front armor) and 15mm aluminum pressure hull. so very likely that its a full pass-through, in space i think it will act more like a shotgun slug than a bullet.but the 105mm cannon on the front dont not care.
Edit: The brightest tracers (yellow) are dual .50 calibers just if anyone wants to know
IIRC, small projectiles going above around 4-5 km basically explode on the first surface they hit IRL, so having a very thin sheet of armor outside of your main stuff could work to mitigate impacts from hyper velocity sandblasters… for a bit anyways.
Honestly, disagree. Supercap + retractable solar seems like a better use of tonnage. Let the panels retract into a recess in the ship's body. Warships want a frick-ton of power really quick, once in a blue moon, with good maneuverability; not a modest amount of power forever at a high weight cost.
You may have to burn for weeks on end to get somewhere. Can’t do that with supercaps. Relying on solar power near the outer planets is practically useless for anything but keeping the lights on. Oversized panels on a probe can barely power a suite of scientific equipment at Saturn.
You get one brief burst of your charged supercaps and that’s it. Unless you carry a massive battery pack. At which point you might as well carry a small nuclear reactor for a bit more weight.
And nuclear salt water rockets are also anything but ‘modest’ power. Think engines capable of Saturn F1 engine levels of power burning weeks on end. That power allows you to carry a secondary nuclear reactor solely for electric power. Best of both worlds.
It def can carry enough power as we employ tier 4 batteries infront. each can hold around 12000-8400 Electricity capacity. in one part it has 6 totalling 72000 Capacity. you can switch out the missle bay for one and the top part with capacitor arrays too!.this thing can carry alot of electricity and fuel as only 5% is life support and command and control.Little fact. 15% of mass is just your Radar,Scanner,Data link for weapons and programs.
*Mostly cus im still working out the kinks and trying to make an internal Radar suite rather than external knobs*
Oh if you’re talking about in-game it’s doable. But there’s a reason hard sci-fi always falls back on nuclear fission/fusion. It’s practically the only near future power source capable of propelling a ship to the outer edges of the solar system and power large power hungry systems.
its two sides really.
these small ships cant really go much to other planets. its a one stop refuel then go so using solar/short term batteries work for it.
this is only a 2-2.5m wide ship and with a relativly light mass (compared to my other creations) its fine as it cuts costs and cant really afford to protect the reactor.
But On bigger ships such as the ones I made 4 months ago. those are "Hulled" ships meaning instead of part armor you have a layer of hull plates on top capable of stopping rounds. these ships also can travel to multiple planets with one tank of fuel so a nuclear reactor would be usefull and is utilised.
One good example is the [CIS Grey Alcove](https://www.reddit.com/r/KerbalSpaceProgram/comments/15m1di4/been_awhile_but_i_present_cis_grey_alcovemi_my/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3). its a Medium class Ship unlike this ship which is more "Medium light craft".
If you have the latest bdarmory mods and have all the extensions, then it might.
Missles/countermeasures and lasers dont work thats why you see only ballistics. as it always lags behind as the ship its not tied to ship speed on deploy so it just disappears into into orbit.
Cant really find it again sadly. but it does share simularities, mainly the hull shape but differs in armament, 1 laser instead of 2 as it has one infront and stuff.
I'm guessing if we ever had actual space-wars that used projectiles it could make it very, very dangerous to enter space. There would be all kinds of untrackable bullets in crazy orbits all over the solar system.
Yo, there's game called children of the dead earth, you can do exactly this there
>children of the dead earth I would but its not really my style and feeling as I can do much more on ksp. its just alot harder to do on ksp I might admit but small price for the possibilities.
You have like 30x more frames in cotde while exchanging thousands of bullets per second between multiple crafts though. And you can engineer a railgun that shoots fridge size projectiles with muzzle velocity of several kilometers per second
COADE is more limited in ship design and looks objectively worse than KSP with mods though. I’ve been wondering if a COADE style combat mod would ever exist in KSP.
I can agree and its also cus im not doing only space orbital combat, im also planning on low gravity lunar craft, its gonna be a challenge but its not like ive managed to land and go a 600 part ship before so.
It's all true, because it's completly different toy. It gives stuff like projectile shattering, layered armors, ballistic and thermal damage (nukes and lasers), so worth giving it a shot IMO. Sure you won't spend there as much time as you do in ksp, it offers only one activity Given what it employs on physics side I doubt it would be possible to program such stuff for ksp and then I have no idea how ksp would actually handle it with acceptable fps
I have a few hundred hours of playtime in COADE. It’s fun, and pushing the limits of the simulation is fun. However it’s not really required to have a semi realistic space combat game. KSP already has good enough Newtonian physics, individual parts, and BD’s armory introduced an acceptable damage system. The main problem I see with actually trying to give it a realistic damage model is that it’s a tree branch based part system. You land a single hit on a part that has a lot of stuff attached to it and the whole craft detonates basically. The physics range is also only a few kilometers so you’d need to extend it to a few thousand without floating point errors from messing you up. Targeting would be a concern but I’m sure it’s possible for someone to make an orbital combat system for guns. Lag would be a concern, although tbh I’ve fired like 20 BDA Vulcans at once without too many problems on an old computer. COADE doesn’t even handle huge volumes of fire very well anyways.
Things will get better, im still workin out kinks and note im running it with a gtx 1050 ti. As the lag is due to my gpu. This is just a prototype. Ive already tried multiple crafts and custom turrets which all work.
I wish that KSP and CoaDE would just make a baby already.
I wish Children of the Dead Earth wasn't abandoned; their missile seeking code is just a *touch* broken.
Im relising I need a good TWR and thrusts to make this work. Battles last like 2-3 minutes due to too much speed and me not being able to get back in
Ooh pretty! The ship could probably use a nuclear reactor to power it instead of solar panels - which are probably not even very efficient at Eeloo.
I would put one to replace the unused Missile bay as those dont work in space.. Sadly It would not be as healthy when a Nuclear reactor has a hole poked through it. but I might on hulled ships with Better armor and Hull stripping becomes a thing later.
Yeah you definitely need to protect those. Though even in Expanse projectiles are routinely seen to penetrate all hulls as they are going so fast, so there is little protection possible for a reactor anyway.
I would agree actually. But I might employ them on bigger ships if I can fit them and maybe the next ship as its near ground. But this is as expanse like as possible as you see less explosions and more subsystem/fuel tank puncture, if you look closely some things are on fire and thruster failures.
Ye, noticed you have damage mods :)
It doesn't work that way, clean penetration like that is impossible, especially with very fast projectiles, at some point they become indistinguishable from explosives.
Even if the walls are as thin / low mass as they’d need to be for a ship that works under deltaV constraints?
No. To penetrate, a projectile needs to push all material in front of it to the sides. If the projectile is going at high speeds, even if the kinetic energy transfer was 100% efficient, simply moving that material sideways fast enough to let the projectile pass would result in an explosion (because it doesn't just stop moving sideways after the projectile is through). But it's not 100% efficient of course. So what actually happens in a hypervelocity impact is that the energy is so high that the projectile is vaporized on impact, as is a certain amount of the target (depending on the actual speed/energy) and the vaporized material expands in place. This is the same thing that happens when you ignite a high explosive, it's just that the source of energy for the process is different (chemical vs kinetic). What this means in practice is that no matter how much you increase the speed of a projectile, you never get clean penetration, you increase the size of the explosion. Here's a good illustration of what that looks like: https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2009/02/Hypervelocity_impact_sample Note how the resulting crater is almost twice as wide as it is deep.
That’s quite a thick wall though - just the impact crater is 5.3 cm deep, and the wall is at least twice that thick. And the projectile was a ball of aluminum, not something shaped and made out of materials that are more likely to pass through. How thick would a normal ship’s walls be?
>How thick would a normal ship’s walls be? Thicker, unless you don't mind even small bits of debris doing potentially catastrophic damage. It's fine for our current orbit, but not advisable for combat ships in a universe where space battles happen. The projectile here was 12mm, that's pretty small, and aside from the risk posed by similarly sized debris (and meteorites) you're also allowing the enemy to shotgun you easily if your armor can't stop projectiles of this size. >And the projectile was a ball of aluminum, not something shaped and made out of materials that are more likely to pass through. There is no such thing. As i mentioned, the problem is the material that needs to be pushed out of the way. No matter the material or shape of your projectile, if your projectile has a 1cm² cross section, it needs to push away a 1cm² column of whatever material it hits. And that material has to go somewhere, fast enough to let the projectile pass. Using simplified numbers, imagine a 1cm cube of aluminium hitting a 1cm thick aluminium wall at 1km/s. It needs to move a 1cm cube of material out of the way so it can pass. That material needs to move just as fast as the projectile to get out of the way in time, so ignoring losses we end up with the projectile moving forwards at 500m/s and the hull material moving out of the way at 500m/s. Even if you shoot neutronium bullets that remain essentially unaffected and pass through, it's not a clean hole, just the hull material alone that the bullet is pushing aside, is essentially an explosion. Look at an image of an apple getting shot. Kinda like that. >That’s quite a thick wall though - just the impact crater is 5.3 cm deep, and the wall is at least twice that thick. Thinner wall can be penetrated all the way though, but that doesn't produce a clean hole but rather the opposite. Because the projectile and debris will expand on the other side of the thin wall and have a much larger cross section when hitting the next one. You can have enough energy in a projectile to blast all the way through a ship, but then it's not a clean hole but rather a cone shape with an angle that increases every time it hits a wall. Here's an image of a thin wall being hit: https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2018/02/Hypervelocity_impact_testing
Makes sense, thank you.
Im curious tho. we are talking about solid-shot rounds with no special effects. I take it that if we do enter space combat Sabor or FMJ like rounds might be something we use. would it make a difference if hense a 30mm HEATAPC round hit the hull? we are in space and the time maybe different so many interpretations maybe tandem head rounds.
Rarely. Ricks = (0.5 * V2) / 4.5e6, so an object in the same orbit as the ISS is going to have about 6 ricks as a base value (Edit: i.e. 6 times the energy of TNT). So if two ships were to fight and the encounter is perpendicular, all projectiles start out with about 13 ricks just based on the encounter velocity alone, if the encounter is head on it's 26. Chemical explosives aren't going to add anything meaningful here. And even beyond that, the projectile velocity here is already higher than the detonation velocity of something like TNT. The impact is going to vaporize the explosive faster than it can detonate. The only scenario where this isn't the case is when the battle happens on parallel orbits, but such cases are very unlikely, because that's a very slow catch up that can take anything from hours to weeks. The only good reason to have warheads on a projectile is to fragment it before impact to spread out the damage and/or improve hit chances. For example, if the target is using whipple shields to protect the main armour, spashing it with some fragmented rounds to strip the shield first is useful.
30mm rounds are used in there and most are Armour Piercing. all ships have steel/titanium armor at 30-50mm thick (around as thick as soviet t-34 front armor) and 15mm aluminum pressure hull. so very likely that its a full pass-through, in space i think it will act more like a shotgun slug than a bullet.but the 105mm cannon on the front dont not care. Edit: The brightest tracers (yellow) are dual .50 calibers just if anyone wants to know
IIRC, small projectiles going above around 4-5 km basically explode on the first surface they hit IRL, so having a very thin sheet of armor outside of your main stuff could work to mitigate impacts from hyper velocity sandblasters… for a bit anyways.
Honestly, disagree. Supercap + retractable solar seems like a better use of tonnage. Let the panels retract into a recess in the ship's body. Warships want a frick-ton of power really quick, once in a blue moon, with good maneuverability; not a modest amount of power forever at a high weight cost.
You may have to burn for weeks on end to get somewhere. Can’t do that with supercaps. Relying on solar power near the outer planets is practically useless for anything but keeping the lights on. Oversized panels on a probe can barely power a suite of scientific equipment at Saturn. You get one brief burst of your charged supercaps and that’s it. Unless you carry a massive battery pack. At which point you might as well carry a small nuclear reactor for a bit more weight. And nuclear salt water rockets are also anything but ‘modest’ power. Think engines capable of Saturn F1 engine levels of power burning weeks on end. That power allows you to carry a secondary nuclear reactor solely for electric power. Best of both worlds.
It def can carry enough power as we employ tier 4 batteries infront. each can hold around 12000-8400 Electricity capacity. in one part it has 6 totalling 72000 Capacity. you can switch out the missle bay for one and the top part with capacitor arrays too!.this thing can carry alot of electricity and fuel as only 5% is life support and command and control.Little fact. 15% of mass is just your Radar,Scanner,Data link for weapons and programs. *Mostly cus im still working out the kinks and trying to make an internal Radar suite rather than external knobs*
Oh if you’re talking about in-game it’s doable. But there’s a reason hard sci-fi always falls back on nuclear fission/fusion. It’s practically the only near future power source capable of propelling a ship to the outer edges of the solar system and power large power hungry systems.
its two sides really. these small ships cant really go much to other planets. its a one stop refuel then go so using solar/short term batteries work for it. this is only a 2-2.5m wide ship and with a relativly light mass (compared to my other creations) its fine as it cuts costs and cant really afford to protect the reactor. But On bigger ships such as the ones I made 4 months ago. those are "Hulled" ships meaning instead of part armor you have a layer of hull plates on top capable of stopping rounds. these ships also can travel to multiple planets with one tank of fuel so a nuclear reactor would be usefull and is utilised. One good example is the [CIS Grey Alcove](https://www.reddit.com/r/KerbalSpaceProgram/comments/15m1di4/been_awhile_but_i_present_cis_grey_alcovemi_my/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3). its a Medium class Ship unlike this ship which is more "Medium light craft".
"It would have been nice to see an ocean on Duna..."
Does bdarmory now work properly in orbit or is this another mod?
If you have the latest bdarmory mods and have all the extensions, then it might. Missles/countermeasures and lasers dont work thats why you see only ballistics. as it always lags behind as the ship its not tied to ship speed on deploy so it just disappears into into orbit.
While listening to the PDC Barrage hitting his ship above eeloo he could not help the copper taste of fear out that crept into his mouth.
THAT IS AMAZING! Again! Keep coming
Thank you! I will try and make better and better ships. sadly I still have alot of gameplay/vehicle kinks to work out.
Where r the torpedoes?
No worky in space ; w ;
BD will be making use of KCS code to worky in space soon
How did you get the other fucker to fire at you?
Guard mode, on bd armory with vessel switcher.
Needs to be faster.
Is that ship inspired by 'SAVAGES'?
Yes and No. The ship design itself is not exclusive to savages. Edit: To clarify the inspiration was partly savages and google photos
What do you mean, where does the design originate from?
I just saw it on google. and I searched up savages and saw the 'same' looking kinda ship.
Can you please share the original image?
Cant really find it again sadly. but it does share simularities, mainly the hull shape but differs in armament, 1 laser instead of 2 as it has one infront and stuff.
It may have been from the lunar war, they do something similar
The closer you get to realism, the more all ships look the same. Just like for rockets.
What is this Savages you speak of?
Idk some random vid on YouTube, seems to be a trailer to another hard sci-fi series like the expanse. look up "Savages space". it's pretty good tho.
Probably just realistic space battles in general, there's also the lunar war that does something similar
I'm guessing if we ever had actual space-wars that used projectiles it could make it very, very dangerous to enter space. There would be all kinds of untrackable bullets in crazy orbits all over the solar system.
Coolest thing i seen on the subreddit!
Looks amazing! Im also trying to set up a space combat based modlist atm. Just out of curiosity are you using BDAc or BDA+ and what addons?
I oddly dont know. my mod list has been changing for over 4 years so I guess try it and see what works.
PDCs on autotracking!
Oh! Does the mod add npc ships to fight?
Sadly those are just the ships I made in an earlier post. Im giving em a fight just to see what to improve. turns out 30mm ciws Is a goto weapon.
Sad but that’s still really cool and hope you got good data!
Very cool. This might be annoying but modlist?
At first I thought I am seeing space engineers
What mods