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[Kot]

Yeah, I know, sadly. 7 km all around the planet is a lot of planet tho.

[n9103]

IRL, most strip mines are rarely more than 1km deep, often much less, since they cover a large area.
Regular shaft mines though, have gone over 3km.

[Kot]

I am not talking in the way of "realistic" strip mine.
I just want to remove as much of planet as I can.
EDIT:
Speaking of strip mining, but planets totally should have some ultra-rare resource (Unobtanium?) so you would actually want to have giant mobile mases, giant flying whatevers shooting rockets at blue kitty cats or something.

[Akura]

I put the transport gunship through a quick combat test consisting of one shooting at another.

Against rockets... it probably should avoid getting hit by rockets. Against guns, after a significant amount of direct fire(the shooting transport I was flying flipped over, limiting my aiming options) wrecked on of the rocket launchers(repairable), and shot out both of the feed lines for the machine gun. The passenger compartment which was strafed over a few times was mostly undamaged. Except the front-most seat, which needed a few interior plates of repairs. Not sure if the guy sitting in that seat would have been killed, though.

Flying it is still a bit tricky. It automatically pitches forwards, even when idling. Inertial dampers don't seem to slow it down enough, and it's hard to judge the correct pitch/roll to cancel momentum and slow down enough to land. It can land, if it's slow enough. Unfortunately, the test area I'm using is pretty rough terrain, making landing really difficult. I suppose the correct tactical use would be to drop troops when hovering low rather than risk a crash-landing.


EDIT: My latest attempt at doing something was a method to manufacture and launch torpedoes. The torpedo design itself is fairly decent, basically a large hydrogen thruster(and tank), a connector(for the fuel), a battery, a warhead, a sensor, and some plates to protect the warhead. Annoyingly, it takes a while to fuel, somewhere around 5 seconds for 1%. I don't know if I can speed it up using more oxygen generators or more connectors, or both.

The prototype for the fuel connector(from the launch platform) works, but the welder assembly needs a lot of work. I haven't learned to script yet, so I can't use a programmable block to set up a one-button system for that, but I figure with pistons and timer blocks it might be doable.

So far, I've yet to hit anything with the test launches(which are hard to set up, see above), but manually detonating the warheads is... underwhelming. The front blows away, but the armor surround the rest of the warhead just blows outwards. I may have inadvertently set up a shaped-charge armor penetrator but I'm not sure how much damage it'd really do. The test ship is one that's a box of heavy armor plates with guns and thrusters; I faceplanted one right into a planet at top speed and even the glass windows on the front weren't even broken.

Right now, the sensor just checks for a neutral or enemy ship in a short distance directly in front of it, and if it finds one, it detonates the warhead. I may want to change that to setting the timer on it instead to give time for ramming into the target's hull.

[PTTG??]

I kind of want jet engines and fuel cells. Fuel cells combine hydrogen and oxygen (and air filters set to suck would work just fine) to produce electricity. Jet engines combine hydrogen and oxygen to produce thrust, and require proportionately very little hydrogen per unit thrust, but they can't produce electricity and only work in atmosphere.

Existing atmospheric thrusters are apparently electric turbines, which explains the motor components.

[Akura]

I kind of want jet engines and fuel cells. Fuel cells combine hydrogen and oxygen (and air filters set to suck would work just fine) to produce electricity. Jet engines combine hydrogen and oxygen to produce thrust, and require proportionately very little hydrogen per unit thrust, but they can't produce electricity and only work in atmosphere.

Existing atmospheric thrusters are apparently electric turbines, which explains the motor components.

This comes close to that.

[BurnedToast]

EDIT: My latest attempt at doing something was a method to manufacture and launch torpedoes. The torpedo design itself is fairly decent, basically a large hydrogen thruster(and tank), a connector(for the fuel), a battery, a warhead, a sensor, and some plates to protect the warhead. Annoyingly, it takes a while to fuel, somewhere around 5 seconds for 1%. I don't know if I can speed it up using more oxygen generators or more connectors, or both.

The prototype for the fuel connector(from the launch platform) works, but the welder assembly needs a lot of work. I haven't learned to script yet, so I can't use a programmable block to set up a one-button system for that, but I figure with pistons and timer blocks it might be doable.

So far, I've yet to hit anything with the test launches(which are hard to set up, see above), but manually detonating the warheads is... underwhelming. The front blows away, but the armor surround the rest of the warhead just blows outwards. I may have inadvertently set up a shaped-charge armor penetrator but I'm not sure how much damage it'd really do. The test ship is one that's a box of heavy armor plates with guns and thrusters; I faceplanted one right into a planet at top speed and even the glass windows on the front weren't even broken.

Right now, the sensor just checks for a neutral or enemy ship in a short distance directly in front of it, and if it finds one, it detonates the warhead. I may want to change that to setting the timer on it instead to give time for ramming into the target's hull.

Warheads are just not very good for torpedoes (even though that's probably the main reason they exist). Small warheads have too small of a damage radius and large warheads require a large block grid which is just way too bulky/expensive.

You also need to armor it because a single stray bullet will detonate it otherwise, but the armor also absorbs a good portion of the blast making it less effective. You also need a sensor to detonate it at just the right time - detonate it too far away and even more of the blast is wasted, set the sensor range too close and delays/lags will make it not explode before it rams the enemy - which is actually a bad thing.

You can't just ram the torpedo into the enemy to detonate it for two reasons. First because ramming damage is really random and unreliable, sometimes it will hit and explode correctly... but probably 80%+ of the time the warhead is destroyed without detonating. Second, because a warhead explosion WILL NOT set off another warhead - it simply destroys the block with no extra boom, so a sensor must set them all to detonate at the exact same time unless you only have a single warhead.

Finally, the main reason warheads are a waste is that just building super cheap blast doors and slamming them into the enemy does massive amounts of damage and iron is basically free. Why bother with an expensive, difficult to build powered torpedo setup when you can use inertia to fling a slab of iron at the enemy and do basically the same amount of damage? For example a 3x3x5 (iirc) small ship grid of blast doors (225 steel plates total) attached to a merge block (forget the cost, it's cheap) and nothing else flung at max speed punched straight through the heavy armor top of arventagis, took out the large reactor... and then kept going and punched straight out the other side.

TL;DR - warheads bad, make lots of blast doors and either fling them at the enemy with inerta or drop them on the enemy like bombs.

I kind of want jet engines and fuel cells. Fuel cells combine hydrogen and oxygen (and air filters set to suck would work just fine) to produce electricity. Jet engines combine hydrogen and oxygen to produce thrust, and require proportionately very little hydrogen per unit thrust, but they can't produce electricity and only work in atmosphere.

Existing atmospheric thrusters are apparently electric turbines, which explains the motor components.

The problem with fuel cells is we can only get hydrogen from ice right now, presumably through electrolysis. That would mean it would cost the same amount of energy to generate the hydrogen as you got from recombining it with oxygen (actually you'd get less back due to inefficiencies). So either they cheat and just magically make it generate more power, then discard the water that would be produced by the reaction so we can't reuse it (and why not? They've already thrown realism completely out of the window) or it ends up just being a battery with a different name.

[PTTG??]

Yeah, it's an energy storage method. That's fine; unlike batteries, we can recharge fuel cells instantly so long as you have hydrogen at your base, and fuel cells can have higher peak output and proportionately denser energy storage, perfect for higher-performance vehicles.

[n9103]

Apparently, you should be using blast doors...

[Kot]

The problem is they're going to be slowed down (how much? Someone should test) in atmosphere and might not deal that much damage.

[Akura]

I've yet to see anything (noticeably) slowed down by atmosphere.

[PTTG??]

Probably not worth modeling because top speed is less than terminal velocity.

[BurnedToast]

So, is orbital bombardment with warheads effective, or should I use some other payload?

If the enemy has no defensive turrets, just dropping warheads on them works great (remember warhead explosions destroy other warheads without setting them off, so stage your drops) but in that case you might as well just land and grind them down.

If they have turrets you could try dropping heavy armored decoys first, then dropping warheads right after. The problem is I've found decoys are very unreliable these days (not sure if it's a bug or a balancing feature) so they will probably end up taking a bunch of warheads out anyway.

I admit I have not tested dropping blast door blocks on planet bases yet, but it works really really well against ships so it should probably work great against bases too. Just remember with no AoE accuracy is very important so stick a camera on there somewhere to help aim. The big advantage here is if you use a grinder separation mechanism (instead of merge blocks) you literally only need steel plates so you can stuff your inventory full and if you miss a few times while perfecting your aim it's not a big deal.

[Kot]

no AoE accuracy

Cluster bombs.

[n9103]

no AoE accuracy

Cluster bombs doors.

FTFY