Advanced Cannon Shooting Low

[Watercrown123]

So I'm building a really large bunker for Ashes of the Empire, but my main gun consistently fires low and just hits the ground. I have a Grav. compensator on my shells, yet it didn't seem to do a thing to the trajectory. This is really inconvenient since my entire idea was to make an accurate long-range triple-barreled frag cannon. Any ideas?

[Watercrown123]

Originally posted by rotgtie:

Post your turret to the workshop and link it here. Without being able to see it, I can only make some blind guesses:

1) Given that you're going for long range, maybe you're trying to shoot at targets which are beyond the effective range of the shell, causing the shots to lose velocity and fall short. Either that, or you're still within effective range, but only just, and thus you may be stretching the limits of the gun's accuracy.

2) You may be shooting at targets which are or were on an approach vector at the time of firing, causing the cannon to try to "lead" the target to a spot that is closer than it was at the time of firing, and in the time the shell was in the air, the target speed was reduced or it slightly changed bearing.

Better troubleshooting will come once we can see the actual design, I'd wager.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1398950324

Be warned, it's more of a testing thing than something I plan to use (it's obviously too large for the campaign anyway).

Addressing your two points, neither were true at the time, and after further testing it usually seems to work, but oddly it seems to shoot low whenever the target is stationary.

Thanks for any help you can give.

[Craigy]

Rotgtie your my hero your book..cough... i mean post helped me out a lot to

[Watercrown123]

Originally posted by rotgtie:

*snip*

Well, I was mainly just looking for help on the low aim, but all that advice is certainly useful! Honestly that bunker was mostly a test of theoretical potential on land and I knew I couldn't use it in the campaign due to the volume limit.

With regard to the ammo, I thought inertial and pendepth fuses had enough of a difference to make it worth it. Additionally, my main idea was to just make these fairly high-penetration shells that can punch through even a fairly heavily armored target and then detonate with frag inside. Do you definitely think that's extremely inefficient?

I've never really used lasers much for anything except for shooting down missiles, so I never thought of any ratios, thanks for letting me know. Also, thanks for reminding me of tranceivers, I honestly completely forgot they existed.

Addressing the missiles, I didn't realize the fins provided more agility in the back, I probably should've paid more attention to the statistics.

I actually don't use detection myself, I find it sort of that "one more thing" that takes the complexity a bit too far, but are you saying there is still a benefit to having them?

Honestly the way I built my turret was just for looks. When I started planning the thing I thought about having the lower and upper thirds being stationary while the center rotated, but I realized there'd be no way to hold the top so I just made everything turn.

For the materials, I use centralized storage and never really planned to have this in a campaign. In my "actual" designs I have far fewer repair bots and ammo makers.

Overall, thanks a lot, I might fool around with this design a bit more and see what I can improve with your suggestions.

[FourGreenFields]

Originally posted by rotgtie:

Inertial fuses are mainly for triggering HEAT and Frag shells when enemy Reflect Shields try to bounce them, but they will trigger on anything that affects a shell's trajectory, not just being reflected. The consequence of this is that it directly conflicts with the pendepth fuse, which specifically wants to resist detonating until a delay after contact.

The idea behind pendepth, or APHE (in your case AP-Frag) is very interesting in theory but in practice you will probably notice that the AP values of your typical APHE shell are very hard to get up to a level where they can actually penetrate even a single layer of metal armor (30 AP to pierce 15 armor value), let alone properly layered armor as seen on anything that doesn't belong to DWG. Worse, pendepth relies on the shell to make direct contact with the target's hull, carry enough kinetic load to punch through the hull, and carry enough payload to deal significant damage after bypassing it. The problem here is obvious - it has to do everything. On top of that, because it relies on kinetic impact to start doing its work, it is easily bounced by reflect shields. Sadly, APHE-style rounds are only really effective against DWG designs - and frankly, what isn't effective against the DWG? You just can't get enough power into an APHE shell to be competitive against the other kinds of shells you could build for the same purpose.

Just tested and inertial does not appear to conflict with pendepth. It obviously will trigger the shell if it bounces - but if it bounces, the chance is quite damn close to 110% that it wouldn't pen anyway.

And you do not need 30 AP for APHE. You need to maximise AP * kinetic_damage. Effective damage multiplier is AP/(2 * effective_AC) (or 1, whichever is smaller). But even a 1AP shell can pierce several metres of HA, if you have a ridiculous crapton of kinetic damage to make up for it.
Specifically, compare "AP * kin_damage" to "Sum" in this table, and you know how much it can pen.

Metal: layer |   AC    |  2 * AC * health   |    Sum    |
        5m:  |  61,50  |      258,300       |  850,500  |
        4m:  |  53,25  |      223,650       |  592,200  |
        3m:  |  42,75  |      179,550       |  368,550  |
        2m:  |  30,00  |      126,000       |  189,000  |
        1m:  |  15,00  |       63,000       |   63,000  |

E.g. a shell with 10 AP and 19000 kinetic damage could just barely pierce 2m metal.



But yes, APHE is still not usually a good choice. Outperformed by other shell-types, usually.