- [Trivial] An integrated smaller-scale Aether Reactor Mk.2 to power the cannon, CAF, and anything else that could need powering. Considering that we already know the power requirements of a HA1 to be muuuch lower than the power produced by an Expensive Aether Reactor, there should be considerable downscaling possible without sacrificing performance.
- [Trivial] A pneumatics system for quickly and easily aiming the cannon, based on the one implemented in another cannon - the Lightning turret.
- [Easy] Implementation of the KPD4 as the propellant instead of 3x PSF-Cs. The KPD4 is already tried-and-proven and is much stronger than a measly 3x PSF-Cs. That and its minor directional capabilities should allow for easily harnessing this power while reducing recoil and strain on the barrel. Just slap the KPD4 in, change a few config settings in the circuitry, and bam. Brand new. Should just increase the range/power/etc. of the HA2.
- [Moderate] The CAF2 and main purpose of this design. The CAF2 is straightforward in its upgrades. The CAF1 is full of needless complexity. It's simply a fabricator unit glued onto a barrel. A fabricator unit contains enough circuitry to print the most complex crystal designs possible. Enough energy consumption to make the biggest ever crystal design we have available. Circuitry just to interpret the current inputted crystal design circuitry. We can cut out this excess. The CAF2 has the shell/bullet hardwired in the circuitry and is only big enough for just what it's making. It only needs to be as complex as a shell. It directs all power into making the projectile as fast as possible (much faster than the CAF1, hopefully), and the newfound simplicity of the circuitry should greatly reduce its size+complexity. Making a cheap and very fast more-energy-efficient (not that it needs to be particularly energy efficient - we do have the Reactor here) CAF.
- [Trivial] (Low Priority) "Weightite" - while working on the CAF2's hardwired crystal design, we pull some hacks on the design to increase the density of conjured crystal, making a new, heavier, variant of Crystal. To avoid unnecessary time spent developing this, Weightite only needs to be as good as an existing shell (better in range than a regular nonaeryodynamic shell with the recent aerodynamic upgrades).
Please do tell me if you genuinely think I'm being too ambitious.
I genuinely think it to be too ambitious. In my experience you typically want one dramatic new item in a design and the rest should be rearranging things that already exist. This seems to be dramatic improvements to many things. Some of which may not be entirely pre-existing.
I believe that a small reactor would be a revision of its own, so not trivial. The last I heard they were about the same volume as an HA1, although box-shaped so much smaller by dimensions. Probably a significant amount smaller but, well, it is only an 80mm gun last I heard, which is big but not crazy. So getting it small enough to be mounted on the gun directly seems much much much more than trivial. I imagine that you are looking for something man-portable, perhaps the size of a, umm, microwave oven? I could see a size reduction that dramatic being a bit much for a single revision. We are probably looking at a volume reduction to about 5%... It feels like something that could be the focus of a design and not get much else done.
The only pneumatics that I can find is on a door, and that is, like, a piston. It is a big jump in complexity to freely rotate a sphere, and I don't feel that pneumatics are particularly agile or precise. It feels like the wrong technology to use for turrets. It might be better to revisit steam-power and get some gear-work involved...
I see no evidence that K.P.D.4 is suited for sudden bursts of power. It is a little more powerful at lifting an aircraft than P.S.F.Cs on a per-second basis, but over the fraction-of-a-tenth-of-a-second that it propels a projectile? There is no evidence to suggest that any progress at al has been made there. There is also evidence that the drive covers a much larger area, so it is possible that it gains its additional power by deploying many spells in parallel rather than being more powerful over the same area. I am simply unaware of any improvement in raw power made by the propulsion efforts. It seems to me that all of the efforts were made in control, safety, and averaging the output. Given that a tube already provides control there is no gain from directing the forces. Given the limited space, the force will be deflected off of the bullet no matter what we do, so there will be losses regardless of how focused the force is, so there really is no gains there. Safety would be nice, but, again, it is an extremely quick explosive reaction, so the safety is all explicitly removed to make the thing work as a gun. Averaging the output is, well, mostly the polar opposite of what is wanted. There is something to be said for using it to continuously explode for as long as the bullet is in the pipe. Sort of like with those guns that had multiple firing chambers along the barrel... It would let more total force be applied, but the majority of it is put into constantly accelerating the bullet, which means getting your big values of force right at the beginning to not miss out on the opportunity. So basically it needs the full instantaneous force of 3 P.S.F.Cs right at the beginning to match the current performance, and we have seen no evidence that it can do that much. To improve performance it would need to maintain that for the full duration of the blast. At the moment, I would say that it would be generous to assume that it can generate 10 P.S.F.Cs per second, and I think that it would need to be ten times more powerful than that to be useful in that role.
K.P.D.4 is not "better" than P.S.F.C, it is "more controlled". We put a very large amount of effort into getting a high-explosive to work like a fuel. It has a lot of benefits but none of them apply to guns. So I would say that this is again non-trivial because it is asking for an order of magnitude improvement. But I could be wrong. If you can find a source that suggests that an eighty millimetre diameter circle of K.P.D.4 can output as much force as 3 simultaneous P.S.F.Cs in the same timeframe as the fireballs can push a bullet a short ways into a rifle barrel the I will concede that we already have enough technology there to see improved firearm performance. I honestly do not know for certain, but my impression is that it is much less than that.
The C.A.F. uses power. We already know that Mundanes are slow. A reactor would help, but it is being crippled by the size reduction, so it is unwise to rely upon a large increase in power, and we could probably revise the reactors to be plugged into mundanes as they are with some cables and just wheeling some reactors into the field with the Mundanes. Ut may well be much faster, but given that it is an untested change to the power-source and an increase in power requirements, it really isn't reliable to expect rate-of-fire increases. Also, we know that crystals don't fly so well, the revised air-repellant crystals may be enough to get the range. Possibly better, if they really do repel the air it could completely negate the defensive spells(unless that would be a hard-counter, but if complete immunity to our frost towers and fire spells for all of their vehicles and armoured soldiers isn't a hard counter than this shouldn't be either.) and thus fully return our original range(minus one from crystals being too light and plus one from wind being a normal factor in accuracy regardless of magic).
It feels a bit silly to name crystals that are as heavy as iron when we already have crystals that are, like, 60% as heavy as iron. It is just a revision applied to excise the primary advantage that crystals have. There is nothing dramatic here, and getting performance back to original is, well, it is low-impact, which is good for getting things working right away, but it has terrible potential. At 8-or-so times the density of water, it is pretty much redundant, we may as well try to summon lead instead(Which might be a good idea. Lead into gold is one of the classical alchemical goals. Lead should be intrinsically easy to magic-up due to its inherent low-value from a classical magic perspective...). Weightite has always been envisaged as being dramatically heavier. Well above the scope of a solid mass as one would expect in a black-hole, so pathetically low-density in an absolute sense, but it would be taking advantage of magic to give us something that makes depleted uranium shells cry in shame. Mix it up with some dematerialising sabot rounds and we would open up a massive avenue for future expansion. Something that dense could laugh off most of the friction that is currently plaguing our range. It would, however, require more force to push it. I really ought to put in some detail about smaller barrels and thicker walls and more explosion spells, but I kind of just hope that the engineers are not complete robots and would sort of figure that stuff out and save of, well, writing endless paragraphs of description... We fundamentally need an excuse to have our bullets summoned faster. And not just a little faster but lots faster. Summoning all of our crystals faster would be nice, but if we can say that the complexity of crystals was slowing the summoning process then we can get much faster summoning by giving up on the crystal advantages of high strength for its density and wind resistance. I suspect that the regeneration is a component of the process used to summon it rather than the crystal itself, but that might go too. It would be sad to lose this stuff, but it is only of minor value for the purposes of bullets, whereas density is the primary factor and summoning them ten times as quickly by making sacrifices would be more practical than upgrading our crystal fabrication which is already highly optimised.
In short I suspect the following:
: the size reduction of the reactor is too severe to be considered trivial. And even at dramatically reduced size it would likely be a significant added burden to construction, mobilisation, and operation of the gun.
: our pneumatics are not that developed and are ill-suited to aiming a gun. Getting something sufficient to be an improvement would likely be nontrivial and steam or K.P.D. operating a mechanical system would probably be better.
: K.P.D.4 is not any more powerful than existing methods within the context of propelling bullets out of a gun. If my assumptions are correct then making it so would be very difficult. Developing something new using the experience gained might be the only practical way of seeing any improvement here, maybe some sort of instantaneous pressure adjustment or something... But, again, new stuff is difficult...
: C.A.F. is not necessarily an upgrade. Especially when the power supply is untested in its new form. Ensuring that it be an upgrade would require shoring up multiple design threads(C.A.F., aerophobic crystal, reduced reactor), which would likely require a revision to get the disparate elements of the design to cooperate.
: iron is not a great bullet, and crystals are primarily good due to their low weight. It would be nice to improve our bullet fabrication in this way, but if we are going to invest a name into it, then it should be a dramatic shift. Also, crystals are kind of inherently bad bullets due to being crystals. Making crystals heavier is really difficult because they are crystals. I am not sure what the heaviest crystal in the world is, but I suspect that our crystals are already well beyond it. Finally, crystals tend to shatter, which is about the worst thing that a bullet can do unless you want it to turn into shrapnel, which can be really good, but they have this troubling tendency to shatter outside of the armour and then the shards suddenly have difficult with penetration. Harder is better, but everything smooshes at those speeds, and smooshing into a puddle is better than smooshing into bits. But this bit does genuinely seems trivial as written!
Advice:
: Armour+mobilise the existing reactors and transfer power, either using magems or cables or Tesla Transference.
: Use a hand-operated crank-and-gear system(which we are presumably already using), but replace the "hand-operated" with magic steam or pressure systems. I would stick to mechanisms to hold it in place rather than messing with sustained pressurisation and pneumatics that, unlike steam, do not lose fluid, will tend to do poorly if you try to rotate something much. Pneumatics is good at pushing and pulling but kind of bad as spinning and rotating.
: Don't change much with the propellant unless it is the focus of the design.
: Summon common lead instead of crystals. Or gold. One of the two is bound to be easy to summon...
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Topic: Wands Race - [Arstotzka] {COMPLETED} (Read 391722 times)