Torpedos, which is the new best design?

Ok, thank you for your responses, lots of good stuff.

KE: I see lots of rod designs, are these noticeably better than solid blocks? How about composites?

HE: Where is the best place for the warheads? Right at the front, midsection or at the back? Any value in delayed fuse?

Ore Bomb: This is the concept of loading a cargo container right? Is ore the best option? Is the large conveyor requirement the reason people use ore? Has anyone tried anything else? Steelplates or iron ingots seem worth a go. Any particular things I should take into account? Is a delayed fuse worth it? Perhaps with a KE penetrator tip? Gravity shields seem like they might be an issue, is this true?

 

People use ore (stone) cause it's cheap

 

As far forward as you can get them and the lowest triggering distance possible before possible breakups. You want the epicenter to be right against or inside the hull. I'm also not personally a big fan of delayed fuses. I prefer a few side looking cameras or a sensor to get a good detonation inside of a ship w/o over penetrating from previous hits.

 

I use a light dual warhead. Front is on a arm. Warhead, sensor, blastdoors. Set to blow at 1.5m. then back far enough so the second sensor does not overrun the explosion is the second warhead and sensor. Then behind that is power, computer, cameras, gyro, remote and thrusters.

 

Huh? I think you got cut off.

Sensors only work at a 10Hz update rate which means that you are talking an error margin of + or - 10 meters at full speed.

• Grouped warhead missiles do insane amounts of damage, much more that kinetics.
• Kinetics are much more likely to make it to a heavily armed target because nothing on it can explode.
• A bunch of the 1x1x1 heavy armour blocks are best for small grid kinetics. Armor slopes have a high deformation ratio that makes the buckle easier.
• I like using cameras to trigger the warheads. I wrote a simple "tripwire" code to detonate missiles 2m away from the target and it works like a charm!

Paging @jonnytaco so he can show off his discoveries as well
Edit: Lol he is already here

 

Well that explains some of the odd hits and why some times the missile stops before the front warhead blows. Guess I need to change the front warhead to a script explosion.

On the first it was 10-45 degrees off axis from launching ship. Once you are outside visual and using Lidar the wider the field of view for lidar makes a big change in detection time.

 

A really simple raycast at 2m is super super reliable as whip suggested. For your tandem payload setup you could even have it separate like 150m from target and use some thrusters to slow the rear payload enough to get it out of the blast zone. This could theoretically allow you to shrink the length of your missile and up the blast radius.

 

Going to test tonight, but think I will keep the arm. Launch bay can handle 1.5m x 3.5m x 26m in normal, and 1.5m x 6.5m x 26m with a full load out of welders. And I want the follow up charge to go into the hole.

But I will do a complete redesign of the deployable submunitions missile, now that I know this issue.

 

I launch 90 degrees off axis

 

Sigh......the glory days when missiles did decent damage.

 

I am talking about the axis from the target ship to the launching ship. so the target ship sees the missile incoming and if they back fire or scan they will not see since the launch ship is 10-45 degrees off that angle.

the missile takes a dog leg from launch to the target.

 

to expand insurgent's question, do certain types of missiles favor different grid sizes? For example a small HE might be more effective due to packing more individual warheads than a large HE but a large Kinetic Impactor might be more effective than small ones due to how grid collisions work

 

Small grid warheads don't scale very well in my experience, a large grid warhead of the same size will do a lot more damage. The issue right now is that you don't want to have a large warhead sitting in the middle of your ship, this will be solved when they implement the new warhead safety feature. A large grid warhead is still a lot more expensive to propel though, since large ion thrusters cost a lot and hydrogen thrusters take a lot of space.

 

Detonate 125 small grid warheads against a 5 layer thick chunk of heavy armor then compare it to a single large grid warhead of the same volume. The large grid will have very slightly more blast radius but do FAR FAR less damage... You won't even breach the first layer of HA with the large warhead but the smalls will blast a hole almost all the way through with a 20m+ diameter.

Large grid warheads can't do this

 

I stand corrected

 

125 small grid warheads takes 42 times the explosive components and has 6 times the mass compared to 1 large. So you do have to pay for it

 

BEST TORPEDO DESIGN EVER - REFINERY TORPEDO

 

I would say kinetic missile is much more cost efficient
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They also make significantly denser damage.

 

Or you can use a mix,. Have launch bays that can make different missiles for different purposes.

 

Yeah, I wasn't just going to pick one

 

Rods seem to work well for small block torpedos. I'll have 4-5 prongs sticking out of a tubular design. Cubed blocks that have all six sides completely covered by other armor tend to disappear in collisions rather than deal damage.

For HE, you'll have to hide your warheads behind armor to resist early detonation. They'll have to be triggered by a sensor. That sensor should be protected as well. PLEASE NOTE that sensors can only detect OWNED blocks. So I tend to set my sensors just under the max explosion radius to the top, bottom, and side. I set the front to around 17 meters for all sizes of blocks. If the PWN strikes armor before triggering a detonation, there's a good chance that the warheads will be destroyed without going off. I usually stack multiple warheads together in order to vaporize as much PMW armor as possible.

Ore will eventually pop out of its cargo container and has a good chance of acting like a wrecking ball. But what it's also good for is amping up the mass of your PMW. F=m*a. So the more mass, the more force the PMW strikes the target with. This increases the chance of more of the missile being pushed through the target and consuming more of the target (and the missile).

The drawback is that the additional mass makes the missile less maneuverable and needing more time/distance to get up to full speed. Unless you have some gravity assistance, this may foil your attack as short range targets will have more time to defend themselves, track the missile easier, or simply dodge it.

 

Torpedo design has come a long way since the game was first released. Now we can build them via projectors, where before we had to custom build them on site at time of launch.

Here is some old PvP footage of a Grinder Torpedo:

And here is more footage of the ship in action launching attacks on other Players:

 

They used to be alot simpler back then.

 

In order to do that you need to know the exact range of the target from the launch point; else you might not even hit the target. At ranges of 10km, that's a pretty long wait time to get back information from the camera ray cast. It's better to send a salvo of missiles out rather than just one and overwhelm the defender. The chances of one missile doing any significant damage is pretty low anyways.

I always fire 2 to 6 missiles depending on the size of the missile. I have a universal weld-up missile bay and several different kinds of loads too choose from depending on the situation and the results I'm looking for.
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The missile is powered by a reactor. I didn't see any connectors or collectors. How do you fuel it?

 

We just published our ship. 17m kg and handles like i fighter with it's 6 axis grav drive script, and has 3 types of torpedoes that uses iron ingots to destroy everything. Systems are Lidar (lock and forget) wire guided and gps based. in the video we show tests and guides for all the weapons.

 

is there a goto workshop script for self guiding torpedos that work in the current update? There are tons from before the gfd change but not so much since.

 

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=807454034

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=546494746

 

thanks, i hadn't found the first somehow (second is just the optical player guided one though)

 

Which is obviously the best [No bias]

 

Whip's script is VERY easy to manage and use. I've not used the other one since there's a lot of modes and variables to be worked out. I've used Whip's script to create missile cruisers that fire perpendicular to the target then adjust course on to the target. There's a proper boost phase as well as a couple of treats with distance offsets, spiral trajectories, etc. I even rewrote a small portion of the script to be "fire-and-forget" so you can launch them while on the move then peal away.