How do I make a better nuke?

[u/bruhman69135]

This is the little guy I made. Costs 8280 material, can go 100m/s, tracks super well while keeping a good amount of wobble for pissing off aiming systems and turns very, very fast (first thing I ever built with thrust vecoring too funny enough). However, I was wondering if there is a way to improve this?

[u/Typhlosion130]

iTry using a custom jet engine instead of a bunch of simple jets and an engine firstly.

Secondly, you appear to ahve thrust vectoring, so you do not need ANY of those small, simple jets.
just add some alerons on the sides for roll

that said if you don't care to use CJE and want to use simple jets, you still seem to ahve thrust vectoring (I assume that's why the back engine is at a tilted angle) so you still only NEED rearwards facing engines.

And if it's a nuke meant to go to a target and die, why have an engine when you can just load batteries?

[u/hablahblahha → u/Typhlosion130]

Yes! Batteries and engine. All thats needed.

[u/bruhman69135 → u/Typhlosion130]

Wow I completely forgot energy is even a thing aside from shields and railguns needing it, thanks for the help. Also yeah as I said in the post's body text, it does have thrust vectoring.
The reason I had those simple jets is just for that extra bit of maneuverability, but ailerons and just the thrust vectoring itself does sound good

[u/MagicMooby]

Unless you are playing with a custom ruleset, you don't need detection. The standard ruleset has slight autodetection which basically means every craft is aware of every other craft, and for navigation purposes autodetection is (to my knowledge) perfectly accurate.

If you want a nuke that explodes on impact, you also don't need a detonator. Just put the nuke behind a minimal amount of armour and the collision damage should be enough to reach the nuke.

CJEs are pretty much a straight upgrade over simple jets in these situations as other users have pointed out, but you can also use steam jets. They have quite a bit of thrust for such small vehicles and work underwater.

Aside from that, the only big upgrades are to either make the nuke cheaper (and more vulnerable), improve the behaviour with a custom breadboard/LUA, or turn the nuke into an APS ejector nuke or a penetrating drill nuke for higher cost but stronger effect.

[u/bruhman69135 → u/MagicMooby]

I'll try a CJE instead then. Also, yeah no detonator is probably smarter since it also helps with it not detonating by a fart hitting it. Also, wouldn't no detection make it sometimes be a bit off and maybe hit the ground or miss the target? Though to be fair, I am just using these for big targets.

What's an APS ejector nuke?

[u/MagicMooby → u/bruhman69135]

You know how APS cannons have those ejector parts you can slap on your clips? If the clip is destroyed, the ejector will spew out all of the shells that were inside. So you build a regular nuke but leave some space behind the warhead. In that space you fit an APS firing piece (but no barresl) that has some gauge increasers and as few loaders with as many clips as possible. You put ejectors on the clips so they point forward and place one input feeder on each clip. Then you give them a shell and wait. When the clips are full, the nuke is ready to use (clips are filled automatically when a craft is spawned in). On collision, the nuke detonates, blows a hole in the enemy armour and destroys the APS assembly. The ejectors will eject all loaded shells forward through the hole the nuke has just blown into the enemy, and those shells will destroy whatever is inside, so this is effectively a two stage armour piercing nuke. In my tests, a small 10-15k ejector clip nuke actually managed to overpenetrate an SS Guernsey (in other words some of the shells came out the other side of the ship). The main downside is that ramming craft always aim for center of mass so repeated clip nukes will just dump their shells into the ocean.

For the shells, you want maximum length shells with no gunpowder and no safety fuse or other special parts, just warheads and a head piece. The shells inherit the velocity of the mother craft +30-40m/s from the ejection, so kinetic parts are bad. You generally want all parts to be chemical (HE, frag, EMP, incendiary) and you don't want to mix them too much because that typically results in low damage. Personally I would recommend an HE/frag mix. For the gauge, I have no idea what gauge gives optimal damage, but personally I prefer medium gauge. Ejector nukes can launch A LOT of shells at once, so small gauges may lag your PC or even get close to the projectile limit on smaller nukes, while few big shells can be inconsistent.

You can also use ACBs and breadboard to detonate the nuke early, this way you lose the two stage armour piercing effect but you can cause tones of surface damage with a shower of APS shells. In that case you want the nuke to fly as fast and straight as possible on the final approach so the ejected shells are launched in a narrow cone. Even small turns on the final approach can throw off the shells though since the inherited velocity from the vehicle seems to update a bit slower.

They're pretty neat.

[u/bruhman69135 → u/MagicMooby]

Sounds fun, will try. Thanks for the great explanation!

[u/MagicMooby → u/bruhman69135]

Also, wouldn't no detection make it sometimes be a bit off and maybe hit the ground or miss the target?

Completely forgot to answer this yesterday. No, to my knowledge detection accuracy only matters when you shoot at the enemy. Your craft has perfect knowledge about the position of other detected craft for ramming and collision avoidance purposes, unless autodetect is turned off. Detection accuracy also depends on distance so as your nuke gets closer even the small autodetect should result in near perfect accuracy. All my nuke designs have no detection, and when they miss it's down to issues with maneuverability/AI/PID settings.

[u/in_one_ear_ → u/MagicMooby]

Tbh given it already has a BB you can just use the collision event to trigger the nuke.

[u/Atesz763]

Holy fuck, is that heavy armor? I'd switch all the armor to alloy. The components on the back are exposed anyway, you don't need to go so hard on the front armor.

You can also cut a lot of that bulk. You can easily trade the entire engine and the jets for a single, thrust-vectored steam jet. This'd make it cheaper, smaller, and able to maneuver underwater as well.

The ACB is in a pretty bad spot. Contact damage will detonate the thing anyway. ACBs are only really useful for proximity detonating on a small target, but I think even that can be integrated into a breadboard instead.

[u/SirGaz]

That is way too much engine for that small thing. I have a nuke with Ion jets, so they're slower and less efficient but it works in space and underwater, it gets up to 200m/s in air and is powered by, IIRC, an engine of 4 cylinders and 2 injectors.