From the Depths

[Wellenbrecher]

You can do that if you know how to do LUA, or just go to their forum.
And yeah, it's overpowered.
For me, now, my trade-off is to make them longer or have really slow short-range ones.


Also I realised you can give the Naval AI cards parameters on how to operate. Like turning circle, min range to friendlies, how far to keep away from enemies, at what distance to open fire.
How did I find this out? My missile barge without any close-range weaponry went head-on with a DWG base and head-butted it.

 

[Rujasu]

It's good to know, yeah 

I actually made a dirt cheap rammer once, by setting the broadside angle to 0. And it worked too, to an extent.

 

[Roran 13]

Capsizing ships? No need to fear! Slap a PiD on and some downward thrusters on both sides of the hull and let the AI autobalance your ship for you as you swivel your oversized gun turrets around!


I also scrapped my existing prototype hull for a bigger version that has more bulkheads and more buoyancy.

隐藏

Protip I discovered: When you need to shorten a hull for example but want to keep your bow, make a PREFAB of the bow, cut out the undesired parts, put the bow back on. Tada!

 

[Wellenbrecher]

Capsizing ships? No need to fear! Slap a PiD on and some downward thrusters on both sides of the hull and let the AI autobalance your ship for you as you swivel your oversized gun turrets around!

Aye. But remember that you need to actually tell the PiD to do so.
It can also balance Pitch and Yaw in addition to Roll. Planes and boats both.

 

[Roran 13]

I feel that my current ship is not armoured enough to justify its speed. It has 1m belt armour extending to just 1m down the waterline that catches most close range shells. Then there's an air gap for buoancy and messing with several sorts of AP penetrators after which there is the citadel which is 2m thick with a heavily angled roof (4m slope) to make direct fire hitting above the waterline and most dangerous plunging fire less dangerous (high angle plunging fire has not been a threat in most tests so far) around the engine, storerooms and turret barbettes, and 3m thick around the AI, ammorack and fuel tanks.

This seems to be enough armour to keep a few big calibre direct hits from taking out my ship, but any serious sustained fire will inevitably blow up the ammorack or turrets within the minute.

My ship isn't streamlined under water yet and I still need to thinker over screw placement so that might increase the current abyssimal top speed of 5-10m/s.

Any experiences with playing with armour thickness/angling?

 

[Wellenbrecher]

Leave a... three block space (I think) of anything important in each direction around the ammo things and you should be fine in case they blow up at least. You can also stop them chain-reacting that way.
Spaced armour in general, maybe.

Other than that... I guess you could store them under the water line, which will make you more vulnerable to submarines but will help with most encounters.

 

[Rujasu]

隐藏: My day so far

I can't wait to put guns on it and watch it completely fail against really basic ships just like all my other designs. 

 

[Wellenbrecher]

Does it float properly? If so, that's half the battle! And what I fail at more often than not when trying my hands at metal plating.
You can probably save a good few of those armour blocks with a few strategically placed shields. Like really small but hella strong shields around the ammo supply or something. Efficient engines are easy to make and with a few ACBs turning shields off and on at the right moments the power drain (and thus fuel consumption) is really manageable as well.
Also, if you're going to have that many gun emplacements you should probably make it wider towards the top though, beginning roughly above the waterline.
Not below it, that'll increase drag to annoying levels.



Speaking off, drag is a mystery to me. What to me looks like a sleek design will somehow turn out to be drag-tastic, and yet every now and then having something weirdly protrude from all over the place actually makes me faster.

 

[AreJohn]

I never seem to have an issue with drag with my ships, maybe because I make mine with a generic hull-shape. Pointy'ish at front and flat at back.

 

[Roran 13]

Update on my cruiser design:

隐藏

It's a beast now.

Nine 360mm guns with a rate of fire of 4 shells per minute. I tested the guns by putting two of these beauties before the third turret was added against a Kingstone or something from the Onyx Guard or whatever, those guys with castle ships. My two barely armed 8k block cruisers decimated the 17k block ship by punching it full of holes under the waterline and disabling nearly all turrets, after which it sank.


The problems presenting themselves now; ammo storage! Every salvo eats 1/3rd of my ammo storage. I'll have to incorporate parts of my fuel tanks into the engine compartiments (fuel tanks need not be as protected as mine currently are anyways) so I can get more ammo.


To do:
Bridge, conning tower, spotting devices, AA guns, anti missile system, some missile batteries and/or torpedo batteries and programming each weapon group's engagement range properly.


What have I learned from this project so far? Citadel armour works! My armour layout features a wooden hull with belt armour and a metal bow and butt-end (becaue naval terms) for structural integrity do wonders in allowing the ship to stay combat effective after a good beating. When designing large (and small) advanced custom cannons guns you can REMOVE the weakness of their ammoracks by just placing four ammo inserters on the firing piece itself. For every shell to rack period in the shell customizer you load 4 shells directly into the firing chamber, and RoF of those four shells is decided by how quickly you can have your barrel cool down.

 

[Rujasu]

隐藏: Work in progress test firing. Note the rear cannons shooting through each other without problems

Widened the hull to keep it stable while unloading it's SUPERIOR FIREPOWER at the enemy. Can't wait to actually get to painting it so it doesn't look ugly as sin.

You can probably save a good few of those armour blocks with a few strategically placed shields. Like really small but hella strong shields around the ammo supply or something. Efficient engines are easy to make and with a few ACBs turning shields off and on at the right moments the power drain (and thus fuel consumption) is really manageable as well.

Or I could do the Steel Strider Valiant's method of defense: Cram 34000 engine power into the hull and coat the whole thing with shields. I have the room. Will probably end up just shielding the ammo though... After covering everything in ERA so it looks like a really expensive bouncy castle.

 

[Wellenbrecher]

I redid the engine on one of my designs because I realised I had forgotten the superchargers and it's supposed to run at low RPM.
So I wire evrything up and... I end up having 100 power less than before. The **** is going on?
Three cylinders, three carburettors and three turbochargers for both, on top of that three superchargers for the new one. Because of the extra space I needed a second crankshaft as well.
But they can hardly take 100 power each, right?

Ugh, I'm stupid.
In the old design one of the carburettors was touching two cylinders.

/edit II
Heh, balanced out the boat with a PID and gained 6 top speed. In fact the boat is so fast now that I need to weigh down the front. Which is to say more armor of course.
Funnily it was an accident. A misclick, set one of the values to 15 and all of a sudden it's rock stable.
Highly recommend to look into you, especially if your boats are doing that annoying zigzag thing instead of going straight.

Easy to follow tutorial here:
http://www.fromthedepthsgame.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=13829

TLDR version:

First make sure your craft actually flies/drives/hovers with normal AI
Set integral (I) gain all the way up to unlimited (= OFF)
Set derivative (D) gain all the way to 0
Increase kP (P) slowly until green curve is more or less following red curve
Increase D slowly until any oscillations are damped out
If you have large steady state errors (green and red line have a steady gap), reduce I until it's gone
Play around with the sliders till you get the your desired step response.

 

[Rujasu]

...So I managed to squeeze in a hundred hours of this over a week. Send help. 

Anyway, the ship's starting to look alright. In my madness I managed to add two separate laser systems, one for defense and one for a small AA gun. I also had room for a large electric engine so I should be able to cover the thing in shields for the duration of an average fight.

Tomorrow I'll figure out how to make it not capsize during post-combat repairs. And figure out what the hell is loaded into the main cannon of the Plunderer to make it punch large holes through metal in one shell.

Edit:And the magic mix is.... Gunpowder HE HE HE. Seriously, not even a nose cone. Wow.

 

[Roran 13]

In my guns the shells use composite tips, a penetration fuse set on 7 meters, three solid AP parts, one HE part, a base bleeder and then a ****ton of gunpowder thingies.

I also ran some tests with different AA guns. Only one of the guns actually has autoloaders, the rest uses shell inputs directly into the firing piece, making them hella cheap and space efficient while maintaining an acceptable RoF.

That CIWS minigun's RoF is easily five times that of its two neighbours combined however, and it's vastly more effective. The bigger guns are dual purpose with composite, HE, HE, HE, and gunpowder with a RoF of 16 shells per minute. The doube gun turret has a RoF of 32 shells a minute.


I plan on placing roughly six of those double guns and four of those miniguns on my cruiser, if I find the place for them.

隐藏: Capable of taking down Squirrels

 

[Beny]

Damn. All this autism porn is making me want to persevere and learn how this game works. I tried a basic destroyer and it just kept falling over and looked wank.

 

[Rujasu]

Gotta get that center of balance as low as possible. Lead beams on the bottom do wonders.

 

[Wellenbrecher]

I've come to the conclusions that I hate the campaign.
I love building and seeing stuff explode, don't get me wrong, but the campaign is ridiculously fiddly and needlessly obtuse. Let's hope he starts working on that once he gets a bit of time off from fixing/adding to the various blocks and modules.

 

[Rujasu]

Apart from localized resources which is kind of a hassle without some preplanning, and the interface being awful in general, it's quite straightforward. What's pushing you over the edge?

 

[Roran 13]

I tried the campaign just now as well, coincidentially. I rather liked it. Except when the DWG suddenly sent a stream of seven shrikes at me while I was refitting my damaged main ship with AA guns, which I had to AI wire etc during the fight, but my ship was bombed to hell. I did take down three of them though, my dual purpose turret design really makes short work of most things. They attacked my transport ship next, where my own AI shot me with a new AA gun, and the ship AI then promptly continued to flip itself upside down, making its new AA batteries completely useless.

I respawned just in time to attempt to place AA guns on my home fortress only to realise my fortress has no AI cards for gunnery. So I wired that mid-battle, but once again, AA guns didn't even start firing before my fortress was gone.


tl;dr:
I played the campaign and had my ass handed to me by a couple of high altitude bombers, stupidity, bad luck and believing that your starter fortress isn't absolute ****.

 

[Rujasu]

The fort will most likely change in the next patch. The replacement should be pretty highly rated in the workshop if you want to switch to it early.

Edit: That said I think I'll restart mine with global resources since localized resources is just a  huge pain in the ass until we get some method of making looping transport routes.