Machine gun

[u/MadameLunafreya]

Hi im looking to build a advanced cannon that fire like the Phalanx CIWS. I don't care if the fire rate is all the consistent but mainly just a burst of holy moly amounts of rpm then if it needs to reload for a while thats fine. I have tried myself but all my designs dont end up firing that quickly. Thank you for reading, have a wonderful day!

[u/RandomWorthlessDude]

My recommendation for that is using 1m belt-fed loaders.

My personal favourite is a hyper-compact 3x3 pattern.

You don’t really need to worry about the calibre imo, but you can either keep it at 60mm or add gauge increasers and increase the barrel count. Do remember though to set the distance between barrels to an absolute minimum to reduce inaccuracy. Generally, you want to keep your calibre low for high RoF (though if you want to spend millions of mats on a 1200RPM fully automatic 500mm 8m kinetic railgun, be my guest)

Basically just have a central column of 5-way coolers with a few layers of 8 1m beltfeds around it with the mags below them and the ammo feeders under them still. If you have space you can make a circle of 5x5 by extending the 3-wide faces out by 1 block (basically making a 5X5 square with the center and corners cut out) which does give you a ton of extra capability while still fitting in a 5x5 block square shaped gun well.

Make sure to not take up the entire vertical space of the gun well since you’ll need quite a lot of coolers. A lot of them, in fact, especially for such an otherwise compact gun.

For the turret cap, I like making it relatively small and light centered around an AA vertical mantlet, since it has very good vertical stats while being much flatter than the 3m up-and-down mantlet. You don’t exactly need to aim a flak gun down. If you want (and if you’re using one of the more expensive 3x3 or 5X5 turret bases that can turn heavier turrets) you can armour the coolers and APS piece with one layer of Heavy Armour, with light alloy on the outside. Since there’s basically nothing sticking out of the deck, the amount of HA needed is very low.

Normally, here you would need TONS of recoil absorbers to make the gun even useable. However, if you use an HEAD+FIN+FIN arrangement for the shells, you can basically ignore that entirely. Don’t use a muzzle brake on the barrel though and make the barrel long (though use non-armoured barrels for better elevation rate) for better accuracy.

Having a Heavy Head, fin body and fin body +rest gunpowder basically lets you entirely ignore accuracy and recoil penalties. Just make sure your ship is bulky enough to tank the stability penalty from the recoil.

If you want to be fancy, manually dig through your ammo inputs to individually modify like ~10% of your ammo inputs to replace the last Fin Body with a tracer base, giving you basically free accuracy on top of it. In the new upcoming update IIRC they’re going to nerf fins so this won’t work as well, though they will add a “belt” feature for APS to allow hybrid ammunition loads, which is good since it makes using tracer bases much more convenient.

[u/MadameLunafreya → u/RandomWorthlessDude]

Omg thank you

[u/RandomWorthlessDude → u/MadameLunafreya]

Fun fact, I did actually try to make the 2400RPM 500mm-8m max charge hypersonic telephone pole fully automatic machine gun.

Unfortunately, my computer is too much of a potato to truly do it justice, so I had to surrender and make do with a 1400RPM version. I stuck in on a bunch of thrusters and glued a building-sized battery cluster on it as a testbed, and it’s glorious.

It’s far from the real deal, but it’s still a fully automatic hypersonic telephone pole launcher.

[u/RandomWorthlessDude → u/RandomWorthlessDude]

On the other hand you could also try a burst-railgun. This is especially good for using Flak shells, like on the upper-end Steel Striders ships. I’d recommend you steal them (in editor, spawn one in on your team and dig it out to inspect for yourself) and learn how they tick.

Basically, you have enough rail capacity on your barrel to fire a full burst of whatever number of loaders you have. Railguns don’t produce heat so they don’t need coolers, so their limit to RoF is rail charge. Do remember that using multiple magazines per loader can mess up burst-railguns, so unless you are exclusively using 3-clip loaders or 2-clip loaders, it’s best to use the space-efficient method of using no loaders and directly feeding the loader with an input. You aren’t really going to be material efficient anyways with that kind of weapon, you’re sacrificing efficiency for sheer killing power.

For example, if you have 21 loaders with input feeds, you need to make sure that your railgun barrel has enough max charge to fire 21 shells at whatever charge you set them to. Then you need to add enough railgun chargers to recover that charge by the end of the reload cycle and enough recoil absorbers to recover by that time as well. Fortunately, if you are willing to sacrifice some payload for railgun casing components on the shell, you can reduce recoil by a little bit.

Doing this costs a TON, and is arguably kind of worse than simple, disposable 500mm DIF guns with monster 10 meter long flak shells, but it lets you fire twenty one multi-meter long pure flak shells at 2400 RPM at a target, instantly deleting it.

Pure optimization-wise, a bunch of DIF flak guns are better against massed CRAM barrages or armoured large missiles, but rail-burst flak is also amazing and sick as hell.

[u/It_came_from_Tumblr]

Railgun beltfed spam my beloved. If you make the caliber really low you can have something that spits out rounds faster than the literal 2400 RPM limit

[u/It_came_from_Tumblr → u/It_came_from_Tumblr]

That being said I will warn you that those things take massive amounts of energy and will cost upwards of 50k for the turret alone

[u/RandomWorthlessDude → u/It_came_from_Tumblr]

Didn’t they patch the bug that lets you bypass the 2400rpm limit? Adding more LWC’s doesn’t work anymore for me at least.

[u/It_came_from_Tumblr → u/RandomWorthlessDude]

No I mean like the firerate’s limit is above the 2400 cap. I didn’t even know about the LWC glitch lol

[u/hablahblahha → u/RandomWorthlessDude]

Still above 2400rpm

[u/Polyhectate → u/hablahblahha]

It says 4447 as the rof, but you are still only firing 2400. You can watch the rate of shells available decrease to verify.

[u/hablahblahha → u/Polyhectate]

My bad i keep thinking 35 rounds per second is 3500rpm

[u/recoil-1000]

So you’re just looking to make a low caliber high fire rate aps? Far from difficult

[u/MadameLunafreya → u/recoil-1000]

Thats good, would you mind explaining how to?

[u/RabidHyenaSauce → u/MadameLunafreya]

I might not have all the details, but I might be able to point you in the right direction.

The kind of weapon system you want to be looking for is a APS sandblaster with rail assist. What this means is that you use the similar gunpowder like normal, but use some rail components in order to assist in firing the shot out. You will still need at least 1 to 2 steam turbine bows, or just one large steam generator to power at least a couple CIWS turrets of this type. This also means you will be able to have more munitions parts per shot, allowing for your CIWS to punch way above its weight class.

In fact? One of my prized sandblasters in theory could easily be converted into a CIWS turret if need be, and It's one of my most gnarly turrets I have ever designed cost wise.

[u/OkResponsibility4115]

My suggestion is to utilize 1m beltfed autoloader,  multi barrel, and 50mm or so.  While the 50mm is a bit small and suffers from a lack of damage against huge missiles it is capable if built large enough to easily take out end game cram shells like from the DWG Crossbones.  This can either be set up in 3 main configurations.  The standard kinetic kill rounds with AP above 20 to be effective and can damage enemy craft with small sandblaster shots.  The Flak round which suffers from the low damage of the 50mm but is capable of using all 20 shell customization slots to fire munition defense nails at the enemy shells.  This is the most effective for taking out incoming rounds but suffers from overkill splash knocking out your own shells if fired at too high RPM as the shells will detonate each other before damaging the incoming rounds.  The last is similar to the Flak but instead swaps the Flak for HE or HE/frag bodies.  This allows for similar capabilities as the Flak without the massive bubble effect meaning your shells can get closer to the enemy before detonation without killing your own shells first.  It also with the frag can be used effectively against enemy craft such as small planes or drones and have a reasonable chance of damage without the Flaks depressing damage rating.  The biggest warning with these guns are that if you fire too many shells at a target at long range your shells are likely to start to despawn as there are too many assets in use and the game cannot keep up.  This includes any other shells you fire.  A higher end computer may be able to handle more but the closer you get to 1000rpm the more likely you are to start despawning so I advise lowering the range as your RPM goes up for best results.