Cluster Bomb ARE DEADLY !!! Testing - Space Engineers 

I really love the attention to detail put into this cluster munition, specifically how some of the munitions don't blow up right away, and will lie dormant until they are accidentally detonated by some innocent children at a later date. Very well designed.

Nothing like a death-lotus cluster bomb to clear out a base. In theory, with drone AI and sequence blocks, you could make it able to return to base after it releases its payload automatically.

Even on a "failed" zero G launch with minimal momentum, you do still get some decent use out of this design. Those floating charges are now a mine field that 100% deters enemy retaliation. Even when this cluster bomb setup fails, it still serves a purpose. Very useful.

Even had the unexploded ordinance detail! Realistic.

Dear LSG I have been using a weapon on my server for a long time, Cluster turrets. 8 or so turrets with parachutes hand loaded with 4 decoy bombs and cluster bombs mixed in. I take the main body of the cluster weapon with parachutes as well put a big glass window or LCD screen up front and put a self welding armor system on it faced into the lcd or window to act as a riot shield with a container full of bullet proof glass. 4 assault cannons on the main missile loaded from a container. This hybrid system is more expense and time consuming to make than a cluster bomb but its ability to reach out to 900 meters area of effect makes it useful in all scenarios as a space minefield, a dropped bomb, or as an anti capital ship weapon. Use your own judgement on best release strategies. Often use these in lieu of fighter drone squadrons. I would classify it as a utility weapon because I often don't launch it at my enemy but into an asteroid or to rapidly secure a ground position near the enemy .cluster at 10 M/S to make a sort of safe spot for our fleet to retreat back into to change the battlefield. I have made a version with a survival kit with rifles and launchers in for ground invasions.

The design is fairly simple (not to be confused with easy), and lets you fit a lot of warheads in a small space. You could of course also make a much bigger ship, and cover the belly of it with warheads to achieve a similar effect, but you wouldn't get the same spread pattern. For use in space, I think you're still better off using a swarm of "missiles" with their own thrust, though they may not need any AI blocks if you can build an efficient launch platform.

Love your guys content been watching you for like 10 years now or something like that big hype. Happy to see you still moving.

Reminds me a lot of w4stedspace's Lotus design.

I initially read the title as Clutter Munition which would probably be a good name for using it in space to clutter up a commonly traveled area and waste some of the ammo for their point defense systems or get in some cheeky damage before an actual fight.

You could use this as a mine ejection system during a fight. Dangerous though 😂

I imagine that with long-range space engagements, a similar tactic could be employed. On final approach to target, begin decelerating, and rotating. As you rotate, release missiles. Since each missile carries the current momentum of your ship, you'll create a large cone of dormant missiles, with your ship at its point. Then on your command, have the missiles activate, and home in on your target. Depending on the range and approach, you could get dozens of missiles out before you are even within range! And this being space engineers, mixing some decoy blocks as chaff probably couldn't hurt!

You could deploy the barrage and use the ship to spear an opponent. Maybe a modified version where the ship itself is segmented and loaded with warheads that can snap off and launch themselves...

I really like this "new format". Like the calm way of talking, pretty low volume and crispy.

A couple of things to note: - This most likely isn't as effective in a real PVP scenario. Unfortunately, railgun turrets are a thing and those may intercept the bomb before it has a chance to fire, giving it a minimum safe firing range of 2 km, which means there's a higher chance of missing as you need to be really precise. Especially considering the spread seems to be quite weak. - This is most definitely not effective in spaceship-to-spaceship combat, considering the enemy ship can just move out of the way. - I don't know if the script also primes the warheads, but if they have been primed before activating the script, it makes this thing extremely vulnerable. If one warhead gets hit, it will destroy the entire craft. This makes it very weak against even something as simple as a fighter or a defensive drone. - This might actually work really well against underground bunkers, considering warheads destroy a lot of voxels as well. Or at the very least, expose a big portion of it for other ships to fire on. That said, can we do an A.I. cluster missile next?

I could see a set of petals on hinges to shield the warheads to provide extra defense before the weapon is actually activated. Something of an umbrella-like design

Experimental weapons are just the funnest things. Reminds me of those missiles that used gravity suspended rock chunks as penetrators back in the day, and the breacher drones. It's the same appeal as looking at early tanks or planes, and seeing all the exotic and interesting ideas that were put forward to get around limitations of the resources and tools available.

Love the destruction theme of the past several videos! Keep em coming!

In space aim from a distance, get to 100m/s, turn on thruster override 1 tick

I had spawned that UN ship after you showed it off last time. It took a solid minute to finally load up. I was completely blown away by the level of detail and the time it must of taken that guy to build it. I doubt any server owner would allow a grid that large to be built but it does give you ideas on smaller builds. Now I am waiting for you to test it out on a train :)

Oh hey, it's a variation of W4stedspace's Lotus designs, about the only difference on this one is that no part of the main body of the weapon is part of the payload and it doesn't weld up more munitions on the way to the target for a bigger impact field.

You can use the cluster bombs in larger numbers in space to attack slow fleets. Or to cover even faster or small fleet formations with a large field of cluster ammunition, in which you start 5 pieces at a certain distance from each other to cover an area.

for the base defence, if you add AI fight blocks to it, the AI can target grids up to 2km away, so the turret range gets increased from 800m to 2km

This would be a very nasty mass mine layer. Imagine dropping a bunch of these, floating in space as area denial

the OG death lotus use same concepts but printed extra warheads to add to the rain, it also had multiple decoy nodes to help draw fire away from the legit warheads. when i was toying around with it i found if you set the core of the missiles gyro to a slightly different rotational speed on all three axis (higher speed increases spread) you end up with a spherical cloud of warheads all traveling at roughly the same speed as the core. if your working in space, it gets even nastier if you use small grid smart mines. you could even be a real bastard and use the new ai blocks to tell it to stay at stand off range and just spam smaller sucide drones as it spins and runs away from them lol ive played around with building AI mine field layers that use a rotor with 4 merge blocks basically spinning in front of a welder wall. they spit out these things, which are on a timer to activate their inertial dampers after a set delay based on how dense you want the field to be. you can add additional spinners and set those to longer delays and spread a really big field if your pc/server can handled the 100s of ai mines lol

6:15 - With very little momentum you can use it to spread out a slowly moving minefield. It makes for EXCELLENT area denial, and the combination of flying your ship(s) at the enemy and this will make sure that either A - the enemy turrets shoot your ship (targeting priority) and end up ignoring the bombs, possibly flying into them later or allowing them to strike their target, or B- they shoot the bombs and decoys, allowing your ship to shoot them with little retaliation.

In space it’s be more like a wandering minefield lol.

I like these "search for deadly weapons systems" videos. Moar plz

In theory, this is the kind of weapon one would bring in on a dreadnaught/super carrier, and launch several at the same time. That way it would not only overwhelm, but compensate for no aiming. On top of that, one could make the dropper its self a massive missile/bomb to follow the warheads.

space engineers' capacity for large-scale combat is really fun. This is super cool, and would make a great weapon to start/end a fight with.

I think the potential to use this in space or have several set up in a perimeter to activate when ships approach as a mine field is a great idea.

Could be useful for setting up a minefield in space. It would make enemies very cautious of blindly accellerating through it, especially in a combat situation with other ships firing at them. Likewise, it can deter persuit if your trying to escape

i would say that the first style of Zero-G attack is probably most effective for space combat use, while otherwise extreme range bombing from the edge of a gravity well makes best use of this

I've done one of these with only 8 bombs as a disposable drone launched from a carrier in groups of 3, never used it in space, but my god can it be devastating to surface bases

For ship-to-ship, U need the bomblets to have propulsion & targeting, but it really delivers on sky-to-ground.

Replace the warheads with gyroscopes. They will slice through a ship like-butta. Weapons can alter their courses but generally can't damage or alter their courses fast enough to effective at stopping the majority. If there are computer components still in them when they stop, the turrets will treat them as decoys.

this is also great for deploying a minefield out into space from surface, Surface-to-Orbit.

I actually developed a grid in January. Very minimal in design. Thrusters, frame, merge blocks warheads. I grouped the sent items and gave them to an enemy faction so they wouldn't be targeted. Very effective. I spaced all the warheads about 15 blocks apart from each other to maximize the damage radius of everything. The grid itself was a giant targeting reticle. Simple and destructive.

Honestly a better imo cluster would be to have a face of these bombs so you aim at the target and drop/ fly towards and you would/should get a cleaner hit as all the bombs would be facing the target. Having them slightly staggered would be better to prevent a chain reaction to blowing them all up. Maybe another setup would be to give them each a thruster so they fly towards the target a little quicker, obviously it would have limited fuel but having a small hydrogen thruster would help increase the damage or have something set up for a guided missile

I would utilize it like... maybe putting a bunch of these above a base or even surrounding an entire plannet and creating giant space minefields

maybe it'd have some good use as orbital bombardment? two or three of them coming down from the upper atmosphere would probably catch a base by surprise, and if you really wanted to overwhelm defense turrets load one missile with decoys exclusively and have it go first.

Reminds me of a ship I should publish and you’re more than welcome to mess with if you want, dual arm bomber with 8 mini warheads on each side surrounding a welder, momentum propulsion only and works quite similarly to this in space or atmo

I saw a version of this weapon that was fitted on a ship with a jump drive. Line up, accelerate, jump out. That ship also used welders to have much more "ammo". Basically? Hit and run ship on steroids. Forget it's name though...

For an alternative, this ship could be used to make minefields in space if you don't have any ground targets!

I love orbital strikes like this. Can you make it so a big ship outside the planet deploys these automatically would be so cool.

Feel like it would be a good way to create a space between two battle fleets by creating a kind of mine field in the middle that prevents smaller spacecraft from going through. As seen in the video it does beat up a larger ship quite well but wouldn't render it useless but one hit to a small grid would result in a loss of the ship

how would it do against a fleet

Also looks like an effective way to make mine fields in space 😎

You could make a laser pointer with a projector to aim that thing up really good.

Besides as a base destroyer, I can see it being pretty good rapidly deploying a minefield in space if you have a handful of them. Sure they can shoot em down, but they'd have to spend the time to get rid of them. So many tactical uses besides.

The only thing more devastating than this, is the old school gravity cannon. Not sure that still works, though.

The launcher itself could be used as a battering ram. Its so hard... and long... and wide; and it looks like you could jam it in very deep!

No ship is just going to remain in place if a bunch of cluster munitions are coming towards it, this is only good against a static target, and only if no long range rail guns take out the carrier before it launches its bombs.

i have a missile for space that fires, and then splits into 3 projectiles that will travel at different speed to spread them apart, the first is decoy, 2nd is heavy armor and blastdoor, 3rd is a warhead. it has unlimited range but is unguided and only useful for stationary space targets. iv tried to put ai blocks in each section to make each section seek the target but because of how the missile is merged together i cant get it to work correctly after the sections separate. i also made large block heavily armored hydrogen missiles that you can use as a traditional guided heavy payload or just let it sit somewhere, if it ever detects someone itll automatically target them and turn on thrusters. its fun to leave these by space stations on the live servers lol

the only thing I can think that would make it a little better is to get it spinning a little bit faster before it starts releasing so that where it is in the middle would be best

The stabilization system will increase the accuracy for sure!

And a really dirty trick is to have it owned by "nobody" a little poetic bs

Smaller version, capable of punching a single hole in anything. Space Engineers version of that boarding pod from Astartes.

To be fair the OJT from ww2 did prive cluster munitions to be effective. Now we jsut need a bomber to do a run, maybe wven have a welder set up

i would add like multiple gravity generators to it and have the timer block turn on an extra like 5 while in space since your aiming for ships and stations which are much smaller than bases on planets usually so more gravity would make it for a tighter and much faster release in space which will be a better option with of course, artifitial mass blocks that get turned on with the timer as well...

wonder if it would be worth using something like this to lay mines in space to block a path for intercepting fighters or block an evacuation.

i remember watching w4sted space playing around with this concept , completely destroyed the alien planet starting base , totally ruined the sim speed to the point where it wasn`t registering some of the impacts , cool thing being he made it with different payloads and gave it the ability to print off fresh munitions

Arron I think using it as a mine laying ship would be neat too, maybe attaching a sensor on the warheads?

Interior turrets would be the best defense against cluster munitions

Throw in some decoy blocks to mess with the defenses.

But like any cluster weapon - the more of it there are, the more effective it becomes. This is just ONE of these cluster satellites opening up. Now imagine having 5-6 of them over a base

deploying mine fields would be kinda cool . just limiting space to move

two words: space mines. Hope you have a great day & Safe Travels!

looks great for anti fighter spacing. would hate to fly into one of those.

Great. But only against static targets.

Would be useful for creating minefields around asteroids as well.

Replace the warheads with a Blast door block or a mix of with the blast doors first.

Im definitely going to bring my combat ships into dry dock and equip them with this weapon system and I’m going to add more decoy blocks and war heads on timers and basically use it as a shield for my ship if i need to get past an enemy blockade and take as little damage as possible

This could be a very good mine laying system

Interesting vid, Classic SE type weapon. On a separate note, that station at 4:10 looks cool. Workshop link?

I think the space version functions pretty well as a mine field... not that you should use minefields in MP because performance will go BRR, but one day... one day.

This is one of my most favorite games ever created. I haven't been playing long and often i get frustrated at the steep learning process. But even though I suck at it, I absolutely love seeing you brilliant young men and women out their building some amazing things, showing me the possibilities. I think I may give up on the game until SE 2 comes out. Cause it's look way sexy. What do you guys think? Should i go ahead and put 1000 hours into SE1? or wait for 2? I'm old so learning does not come easy for me anymore.

the perfect mine field^^

Against bases wouldn't it be better to start rotation earlier? Better spread?

"Some warheads that haven't exploded" - It wouldn't be a true cluster bomb if they did

Havent seen a Lotus type munition in a while

w4stedspace had the best version of this kind of wep 9ish years ago called the lotus :)

add in projectors... and welders... start a run at an asteroid base at 15 km out... laucnh while decelerating from max to 80.. rebuild and accelerate again then launch decelerating... rebuild and repeat till i'm 5 km out :) then watch.

Hm. Wonder if the gravity alignment script could be utilized here to help line things up?

that is a really dangerous weapon it can cause serious damage better in atmosphere but good in space against a fleet of small fighters it makes a mobile minefield

It looks like you can get a variety of effects with just the one weapon which is not a bad thing. Burn in fast, trigger the weapon, and the warheads will not spread as much because they close the distance faster. Burn in slower and you get a wider pattern. You can even customize the loadout if you wanted with the front few projectiles having Decoys and heavy armor on them to soak defensive fire and let the next wave get through. How about a bigger ship with bigger projectiles? We've all seen gun pods dropped over an enemy (with parachutes, or not) and this thing could put a mess of those in the air. More expensive? Sure...but if you have the projectiles firing guns or missiles all over, you could wreck a shipyard or other large target. It makes the 'I missed by 20 meters' mean nothing because the weapons on the pods can reach out and touch people. Pretty scary, any way you slice it.

I'm going to make a stacked MIRV now.. with Thermonuclear Warheads Mod

I'd use printed gravity driven bombs but it makes Conrod cry. Warheads are great for bases but vs heavy armoured targets gravity thrown kinetic bombs are the way to go. Printed AI kinetic missile laumcher are next on my 'to do' list for LSG.

look at that. a Death Lotus copy. :D

Not gonna be surprised when we get "Railgun CIWS" for defending against cluster munitions

Even in Space Engineers, Clusterbombs leave behind UXO.

That looks like its based off one of my concepts

Seems like an okay idea for defence, with the idea of creating mine fields in space. A couple of these cluster missiles on a station could be used to quickly make a cloud of bombs to defend itself Too bad they added railguns though. God, I miss OG Spengineers before they added planets.

I would use a a gravity generator to accelerate the clusters.

one important factor is how its performance contents with production cost

I was so waiting to see the missile, after throwing the bombs at the target, to speed up and pierce through as a final nail in the coffin :(

this would be really good for creating minefields

Rods from God made from blastdoor blocks are still more effective and penetrate trough the lower levels, can be made stronger with artificial mass blocks. And you can stack them infinite. Easily produced and self replicating.

If the ship was made of heavy armor, and had active defenses it wouldn't do nearly as much damage. How about doing a highlight on the Artemis script?

i tried to build one myself a while ago tho its impossible to do with the vanilla blocks like AI timer and event controller

...10:31 I wonder if you can create a CLANG/Mini-Cluster Munition hybrid?