A disconnect between kinetic weapons and "Artillery"

[carmenara]

I like the hard-science approach to classifying different classes of spacefaring weaponry.

Early game there are distinct performance differences between kinetics, energy and missile weapons leading to doctrines raised around employing weaponry of different sizes and ranges.

Later on, fancy long range weapons start to appear and by the advent of kinetic batteries and heavy launchers there is little to no reason to use the L sized railguns, plasmas and lasers. Alpha strikes from clear across solar systems would do so much damage there was no more reason for maneuvering or evasion.

While this simulates well the evolution of naval warfare from line-of-battle ships to the advent of HMS Dreadnought, my mind can't get around the huge gap between the firepower of a Large Railgun vs a Kinetic Battery. What's the reason for this huge disparity - in a scientific sense?

 

[MK1980]

L gauss cannon has more dps (but shorter range) than kinetic battery and both are tier 5 weapons. kinetic artillery is a tier 6 weapon that outperfoms the generic massdriver line simply because there is no tier 6 mass driver ("advanced gauss cannon" or whatever).

don't know if there is a pseudo-scientific reason for any of this.

 

[Badesumofu]

You won’t find any hard science fiction answers for this (or for most things in Stellaris). Kinetic Artillery, Mega-Cannon, Giga-Cannon - they all shoot stuff, they shoot very fast, very heavy projectiles a very long way and do massive damage.

 

[TheDungen]

Large railguns are built for a higher rate of fire compared to a kinetic artillery piece. One step further is the autocannons and so on which have an even greater rate of fire.

Most railguns I have seen (a friend built one as a project when we studied engineering) do the "crossbow" or trebuchet thing they pull the "casing" backwards to throw the projectile forward, a smaller one can complete a cycle much faster while a larger one generate a much larger momentum but takes longer to complete a cycle (without adding to the stress). Heck the railguns may even be solid state while the kinetic artillery and mega cannons clearly aren't.
Another friend worked on the systems for flipping the magnetic field in a local mass accelerator it's similar. When your particle is on the approach you wan the magnetic field pulling the particle but then when it passes by you want it pushing it from behind instead. But if another particle is on the approach then you'd be repelling it on it's approach while repelling the last particle on it's way away from that magnet.

Anyway the point is if you want to get super high velocities you have to lower rate of fire.