so many questions

[aristotel_2020]

ok, yay I bought the game, now I have some questions, to start:
1 What makes a good reaction wheel material? I see some give more deg/s than others..
2 Lasers... how do they work, I have been looking at default designs, but some materials there seem useless. Like ytterbium silica fiber as a medium or Helium as a lamp gas, can I customise what frequencies the medium uses? higher, lower etc
3 Nuclar weapons, they are hard, I finally managed to design a weapon that works and has a decent yeld, but at 10 times the weight and 100 times the cost of a default design, I feel I'm missing something, what about that explosive compression ratio, it seems rather arbitrary when I do manage to get a number there lower than 1, I mean, pure TNT and Octogen works, in large quantities, but I know there are better designs than the default ones.
4 I have been testing out large layers of armor, and the default HE cannon goes through 10m of tungsten or anything else, is that a feature, bug, lucky ship nose hit? I do not know.

PS: Game is amasing.

[ulzgoroth]

1) I think density (to allow the wheels to be heavier in the same space), tensile strength (so they can spin faster without breaking apart) and of course low cost are your friends there.

2) Haven't done much with lasers, but I don't think you can customize the lamp or excitation spectra in any way, other than chosing different materials. Most combinations are going to be bad, and I could easily believe that only one or two are good.

3) Nukes can be improved a lot over stock, probably in more than one way. The way I've found is maximizing fusion yields, rather than relying on fission. But I suspect other paths exist. Not sure why you think compression ratio is random. I will note that as far as I've seen fission efficiency never goes above 50%, so trying to tweak compression to get past that is a waste of time.

The most likely big thing for you to be missing is enrichment, though. Always set that to the maximum allowed - the label claims it costs more, but it doesn't really and it generally makes everything better.

4) ...the HE cannon actually works? Huh. I have no idea why, it seems like it should be useless in space...

[Cuddlefission]

I'd assume they'll fix the enrichment cost noneffect eventually...

[Rocket Witch]

1: Ideally, reaction wheels greatly resist changes in inertia. Simply, they should be dense, though at high speeds their yield strength also comes into play. Very dense materials are often expensive and not particularly strong, however, and they are of course heavy. This mass can be an unnecessary burden if lighter wheels would suffice for a desired rotation rate; the question of best reaction wheel material for a weapon turret is nonobvious. The wheels are always the same size in relation to the turret, but adjusting turret size also changes rotation angle, so you may want a large turret to maximise field of fire, but dense reaction wheels will make that turret very heavy, expensive and turn far more quickly than is required.

I often use titanium and vanadium-chromium-steel wheels due to mass-strength ratio and average density, though for light applications even simple aluminium may suffice perfectly (protip: magnesium is lighter than aluminium, so always check it as an option if you're using aluminium for anything, it may be cheaper and lighter while still adequate for the job; I've found it to be a good replacement for aluminium in turbopumps). I think a good starting point for dense wheels is molybdenum since it is cheap. Though other materials like tantalum & hafnia-based ceramics, depleted uranium, and tungsten are nearly twice as dense, none of them are cheap and some are extremely expensive.


3: For modules you're not familiar with, like nukes, a good starting point is to modify the stock ones to try to optimise them; once you see what effects the handles have on something that works and note what sorts of ranges the warnings start to appear at, it's easier to set up the initial parameters on your own designs. An exception to this rule is fission reactors, as hot (2500K+) ones cooled by sodium (though I've seen and replicated an ethane-cooled 2600K design) are preferable as they reduce required radiator mass substantially, but no stock reactor is built like this.


4: More armour is not always better. The dev blog has a lot of interesting articles, including this one about armour: https://childrenofadeadearth.wordpress.com/2016/08/04/raw-steel/

"Too much armor can get shocked into plasma or spallations and inflict even more damage than a thinner armor plate."

I very much doubt a mere 20kg of octogen would cause that sort of effect though, may well be a bug.

[aristotel_2020]

Thanks for the tips, btw, do you know how to finely tune variables by less than times 10 logarithmically?

[Rocket Witch]

I don't. If you can find the UserDesigns.txt file you may be able to tweak things manually though.

[aristotel_2020]

Originally posted by String Witch:

I don't. If you can find the UserDesigns.txt file you may be able to tweak things manually though.

ofcourse, I was hoping an easier way to do that..., but now I know how to make a human cannon MUAHAHAH!

[SievertChaser]

PSA: Even though Neil Armstrong was used to lay US claim to space superiority instead a multimegaton explosion on the Moon, there is no human that is as good as a nuclear cannon shell.

We don't have a Hulk.

[Cuddlefission]

... why would we ever nuke the moon?

[Rocket Witch]

I think it's a response to OP being able to modify the designs.txt to make a cannon to shoot out the space suit you can use for scale reference in the editor.

Also being able to launch nukes at the Moon was a military concern back in the day (like if one side of the Cold War set up a moonbase or something, plus space was for a time viewed as 'the new high ground' with the Moon being the highest you can practically be, but of course these notions proved unfounded and being in space actually makes you quite vulnerable instead) and ultimately the basis for the technology that put people there.

[unwinged]

Originally posted by aristotel_2020:

1 What makes a good reaction wheel material? I see some give more deg/s than others..

Somehow I found Tungsten Carbide wheels to be good in terms of low power consumption.

[aristotel_2020]

Originally posted by unwinged:

Originally posted by aristotel_2020:

1 What makes a good reaction wheel material? I see some give more deg/s than others..

Somehow I found Tungsten Carbide wheels to be good in terms of low power consumption.

thanks, but I have been using polyethylene as reaction wheels, I don't know but it substracts alot from the end mass of a turret and that lowers the power cost of actually turning the thing, win win.

[unwinged]

Originally posted by aristotel_2020:

Originally posted by unwinged:

Somehow I found Tungsten Carbide wheels to be good in terms of low power consumption.

thanks, but I have been using polyethylene as reaction wheels, I don't know but it substracts alot from the end mass of a turret and that lowers the power cost of actually turning the thing, win win.

I have to check that, maybe will work fo rme too.