Rail gun ready for testing

[darkvoid1998]

It will work like this, each block placed that is connected uses 25 energy, adds 5m/s to the projectile thats 1/2 meter tall and wide and 1 meter long. For each m/s it does 20 damage. It will do half damage to sheilds and if it gets through then it will damage the blocks behind it in a strait line with an AoE of 1 block to each side ( top, bottom, sides, and courners). The reload will have a base of 0-6 seconds depending on tester balencing. Then you can not fire this weapon untill you have the required charge to do so( witch will be alot).

So lets say you have a 800 block array of railguns, the projectile will go at 4,000 m/s cost 20,000 energy and do 80,000 damage in kenetic energy. for each block it hits it will subtract the blocks health from the total damage and destroy the block. It will do this in a strait line untill it either hits the core, overheats it and " shatters" doing AoE (because cores are invincable and the left over kenetic energy has to go somewhere) or misses the core and keeps going untill it runs out of kenetic energy and damage and stops.

So if it hit a ship with 100,000 sheilds, it will be left with 60,000 left. It fires again, leaves the sheilds with 20,000. fires one last time getting through the sheilds with 20,000 DAM left and continues through the ship untill has no DAM left (witch is 22.22 long but 200 block total blocks). now all we need is for the dev to have people test it, and balence it out more.

this came out of the discution from this thread. http://star-made.org/content/how-about-covanet-glassing-beam-halo-or-maby-mac-cannon-unsc-halo please read this before commenting.

 

[PwnerTrainee]

We also have a rought working of the damage equation if that would of interest to anyone

 

[Qweesdy]

Hi,

It\'s relatively easy to get 1 million e/second power regen. This means it\'d be easy to have a rail gun with 40k blocks (e.g. a 34*34*34 cube) that fires once per second (especially as you wouldn\'t be moving/using thrusters while trying to fire this thing). 40k rail gun blocks would work out to a projectile moving at 200 km/s that does 4 million damage.

Assuming 60 frames per second, a projectile moving at 200 km/s will travel 3.333 km per frame. This means that when its fired the projectile will be past the rendering distance before the next frame is drawn; effectively making it an \"instant damage\" weapon.

Of course (even for massive capital ships) its very unlikely the target will have enough shields to sustain 4 million damage. You can effectively guarantee that the projectile will kill the shields, pass through a few thousand blocks, then still have enough damage left over to disintegrate the target\'s core. Basically you\'re talking about an instant kill.

Now imagine a ship with 4 large turrets; where each turret is about 80*36*36 (40K rail gun blocks, plus more blocks for power regen, power tanks, shields and a hardened hull outer layer). These turrets would never miss and instantly kill.

Can you see how this might be a little over powered?

 

[darkvoid1998]

to yweak it untill it makes sense. in this case increase power consumtion.

 

[Qweesdy]

Hi,

Well; to start with the fomulas for speed and damage need to be non-linear. E.g. \"damage = 10 * blocks**0.3\". That way you end up with diminishing returns (much like the anti-matter cannons).

EDIT: Grrr - superscript doesn\'t work on these forums. \"blocks**0.3\" means \"blocks to the power of 0.3\".

 

[NeroNeala]

why not make it so that there has to be a reloading sequence, or physical ammo? like you have to load projetiles, and the projectile could have different mass doing different effects,like a vector round that would spread as it went along doing more damage to sheilds(a shotgun effect) and then like a light medium and heavy mass round with different damages and such. of course this could also lead to torpedoes and such lol(please note i suck at math so im just throwing ideas out in th wind hoping someone catchs them and it takes off)

 

[arrowwolf2]

Can the railgun have ammo types a soild round and shell. I know the someone has started work on railgun mortar. Maybe thier could be a mode firing for shell or something.

 

[Bock]

With this stats noone would ever use another weapon...

Hope yours testing will result in something less op.

 

[SpacezG]

this weapon is made op and plus if you miss the target depending on the mass of the target... you would have to wait a while like about a good 3-4 secounds like a regular BB-missile array then you can fire again but thats the least amount of your worries though the one thing your going to have to look out for is the shields because railgun VS shields shields would win untill 4 of these shots landed then the shields would be gone if the shields are at 100k.

 

[PwnerTrainee]

The exact equation for damage is as followed (thusfar)

p2=p1-(.5*p1)s-s-h
p2=power left
p1=power at hit
s=shield strength
h=health of block
The shell does become weaker with each block, there was another theory that with each layer the power lost would increase by 10^(n-1), n= the number of blocks it has gone through

as for how they should work for damage, I believe that it shouldn\'t have diminsihing returns like with the AMC, The point of railguns is to be one, big gun. so you need to make 1 big gun thus effectively limiting your shots to one projectile instead of a frigate having like 4 shots effectively making a form of scatter gun that scewers things (that would make it far more powerful, becuase the necessity of careful aim would be diminished).

The railgun is meant to be the SM equivalent to a sniper rifle, as it is in almost ever other universe that it is in (except halo, because it doesn\'t have a scope for the troop based one but I\'m rambling now)

 

[marcus87]

why not simply limit each weaponscomputer for the railgun to one projectile? And to give it a charging time. Like if I fire a missile I have to wait. What if I have to press the fire button then the gun will begin to load and drain massive power. When I release the firebutton the railgun will do equivalent damage to the percent it was able to charge.

Maybe make it so that it is necessary to link battery blocks to the weapon so it can save the needed energie.

And you could ever reduce the ships trust by a constant percent like say you want to charge the railgun you get only 10% trust. This way ridiculously big guns would never hit a moving target making smaller vessels more appealing.

 

[FlyingDebris]

cost at least twenty million? That\'d deter a lot of trolls.

 

[EpicFailLord123]

Uh i can get 10 trillion credits for every L5 ore I coarse. Soooo.

 

[refirendum]

Basically the railgun needs damage left after each destroyed block to decrease exponentially.

Let\'s make up some random #\'s shall we?

a railgun of length 200(avg 1600 blocks for 2 2x2x200 rails) gets speed of 200*10m/s=2km/s

damage of the 200m railgun = # of blocks multiplied by 25= 40,000 dmg.

damage bypassing shields(if present): 0%

aoe per block hit: radius of 1 block

damage reduced per 5 blocks destroyed(including AOE blocks) after shield hp subtracted from total damage: 50%-75%

hitting an unshielded target(50% reduction per layer):

layer 1 5 blocks: 40,000 dmg to each
layer 2 5 blocks: 20,000 dmg to each
layer 3 5 blocks: 10,000 dmg to each
layer 4 5 blocks: 5,000 dmg to each
layer 5 5 blocks: 2,500 dmg to each
layer 6 5 blocks: 1,250 dmg to each
layer 7 5 blocks: 625 dmg to each
layer 8 5 blocks: 312.5 dmg to each
layer 9 5 blocks: 156.25 dmg to each
layer 10 5 blocks: 78,125 dmg to each

including massive power drain and recharge time, this would balance the weapon out as people build them larger/longer. low rate of fire, but high damage and penetrating damage.

now to a physics approach:

take a ship with a total energy of 1,000,000 storage.

the railgun\'s efficiency would be 10%)

a 500 long railgun would have an efficiency of 10%

thus the energy in the projectile would be 50,000e

if each block absorbed energy by volume ( 10^3=1000 energy dissipated), then this shot could destroy 50 blocks.

the speed of the projectile would be 141.5 m/s if the projectile mass was set to 5.

it would use up all 1000000 energy in one firing, and then cooldown time would take Length/diameter seconds

 

[Incap]

Why not just have the reload times increase with the power and range? Magnetic coils do get hot, so the less power running through it, the more it can fire.



Just a thought. I just want a Rail Gun for the Scylla Frigate I\'m building.

 

[Kaelum]

First, have you ever thought that antimatter cannons WERE railguns? Second, a rail gun should be a certain block structure that launches a projectile, not a conventional weapon. Third, the projectile would be able to be shot, and the proccess disturbed, or even destroyed as the projectile would break up upon collision logically. I can even have my friend do some formulas and get it realistic. But this is not of great importance to StarMade, yet at least. Centrifical gravity would come before this, as this is not of immediate use.

 

[darkvoid1998]

AMCs are not rail guns. no matter how powerfull a single AMC shot can only ever get through one block. while a single railgun shot can go through many. Keep in mind that any weapon can be made OP if you use enough blocks. As it is also relitivly easy to make a stupid powerfull AMC array, i don\'t see why we should nerf rail guns out of existance before they\'re even here. The goal is to have them be just as effective as AMCs and missles.

 

[arrowwolf2]

how big of a hole is the railgun going to make.

 

[pqowie313]

No offense, but hasn\'t dawned on any of you that a railgun would be completeley useless if AMCs could pierce multiple layers? The beam would loose the hp value of each block it pierced, until it ran out. Since it\'s possible to make AMC arrays that can deal way more damage than hulls can take, not much else would need to be changed.

However, I still think a projectile weapon would be cool, as a \"finisher\", but there is no need for one that can be used continiousley.

 

[darkvoid1998]

one single shot will not pen as far as one shot from a rail gun. It will do more dmage but fire slower (minimum of 5 seconds) because it will use alot of energy. The point being it has the same dps but a differnt damage type.