APS shells.

[Ham]

I need help. I'm still somewhat new-ish but I just cant seem to make an effective/good aps shell. A lot of them just seem to do nothing.

[Javelin99]

Nah fam I got you:
HESH for soft targets, HEAT for the rest. Later or heavier armored targets you intentionally make over or hyper overpen, which can be useful on them and softer targets in the right circumstances. Use base bleeders to pump the speed, and supercavitators are also good against the other targets that are pain to deal with. Accuracy is crap or the gun you need has to be very small, take a risk on the stabilizer components.


The argument/point goes as follows:

It depends on the target and the gun, both are fixable. For example a 5 heavy armor slab murder machine and the structural bonuses let alone anything else onto it makes shells crap. But there is a way to fix this with normal and electromagnetic APS guns.

For every low level or soft target something like this works:
Just adjust the gun settings [either in the built in menu or the weapon shell component modules.] guage to see reference statistics, primarily aspects like reload rate, accuracy, and magazine size. Exploit it pretty much. You can have more modules for guages depending on what is on there. You primarily for most of these want a speed of at least 500 meters per second, an AP rating of at least 40 or above that since 40 is a full single metal beam, and 60 is heavy armor. Finally, you want to try to be accurate so you don't need to make a bigger gun for cooling. Things like that are optional though.

For a railgun-type, it is easy:
If your craft is small, you will want to first set up as many components as possible to have as many modules to make a shell with. Let us say, you are making a 380mm gun, so following this, if I remember right it might be 2 4 module pieces, and maybe a one, or two and then a one. I have not been on in some time to deal with it again though. So if you cannot generate or handle recurrent energy pulls, maybe three gunpowder cases. Length isn't a thing to care about unlesss making a shell for custom-shell using limited length shells to load in and use. You can find out what the maximum is via using single-piece components, and removing excess ones. Same as the normal guns.

You want in normal cases:
AP head, secondary shape charge component, and then you fill it to the brim with HE and set the charge to maximum for thicker small targets, or not much at all for wooden targets or minimally armored to none at all.

For a standard battle cannon:
A gun with each barrel having at least 5 magnets on two or more sides,
a AP or sabot [super heavy armor targets.] head, secondary charge, HE. Maximized charge. AP of a minimum of over 40, or AP of 60+, speed in the bare minimum thousand range, more helpful at higher ranges like 1,600 meters per second.

You may want to either add stabilizer fins, or gunpowder cases to improve statistics. This is because cannons that use gunpowder increases speed, and combined with shell design can make this more insane. If it over penetrates, this is fine. The idea is gutting the innards out like the guns anyway. If it overpenetrates before it is gone, this means with good enough angle, you could gut a gun, the engine block, and potentially detonate a magazine before it is done with. Over or hyper over pen is bad on softer targets, more useful on radical things like the eyrie or the alien dawn.

HESH shells, which I believe is the thumper/ramming damage equivalent, can also be pretty good. It also uses I believe HE on it and shoots in pellets through the wall as if it was a fragmentation missile. This usually is supreme on softer targets and surface level details or damaging weaker barrels and detection equipment though. Against planes it can prove better. But don't have too many high hopes of intensive damages on things like a eyrie.

The first shell type is also good on hybrid/Anti-surface and air guns as well as interceptors merged with normal use guns aka general purpose. Gut incoming munitions, and then the guy that fired them when none are in sight. But it is more finnicky.

Finally:
For a normal gun, I would say 4 - 5 gunpowder casings, and a similar technique to munitions. Flak is meh, pure explosives seem better on max guns, pure solids without piercing components are wastes of materials. You may also want to experiment with replacing some solid bodies with sabots, those can also enhance or even degrade performance. You can also add things like supercavitators which are vital for some targets and low-floating ones. I also recommend always using a base bleeder. Pump the speed as high as possible, it also means it is harder to intercept by conventional means.

[Ham]

Wow, thanks.

[Ham]

Based on what I read, Im using a AP-HEAT-HE-SFIN for a 120mm cannon with 4 gunpowder casings. Is it sorta decent?

[The man, the myth, the leg]

i think that for a 50/50 shell to propellant split chemical shells(HE,HESH,HEAT,EMP...) are better

AP(including AP with playload) usually needs more gunpowder than shell since more speed usually means more kinetic damage-> can pen more layers.

[Ham]

Alright.

[The man, the myth, the leg]

also with AP shells you can change the ratio of shell to propellant and see how the resulting damage changes to find the optimal ratio
when i did it (on a 125 mm shell) i think it was around 1:3(2:6 components) shell to gunpowder

[Flotch]

Originally posted by ham.:

Based on what I read, Im using a AP-HEAT-HE-SFIN for a 120mm cannon with 4 gunpowder casings. Is it sorta decent?

AP-HEAT is pretty good for most targets, although I'm not sure it can do much with such a small 120x480mm shell. The AP of your shell is not enough to penetrate even 1m into most targets, so having AP head ends up being mostly useless.

If it has to be that small, it's usually better to make it purely kinetic with solid bodies, or pure HEAT (pure frag can also be good). If you make it kinetic, use AP head with only 1-2 solid bodies, rest should be gunpowder.

Fins are ok, but make a shell slower, waste component space, and don't add much accuracy per fin. If you need more accuracy, it's usually better to just make the barrel of the gun longer.

If you want the individual shots to reliably do something besides slowly whittle away armor, a MUCH bigger shell is usually the solution. Something like AP-HEAT or AP-Frag would typically require at least 3m or 4m loaders to really penetrate anything and still deliver a payload, though railguns can make do with shorter loaders.