quote:
Originally posted by apache:
1) There is no such thing as ballistics in space (vacuum, no gravity effects). All standard weapons will travel straight until they hit something else. I believe the range of weapons in the game is taken to be a range at which most ships cannot easily dodge them, rather than the point at which the beam dissipates or the particle has gone astray, since the beam will never dissipate, nor will the particle go astray.
Purely my opinion of course but, I'd always imagined that advanced, long-range, space based ballistics revolved around Navigation computers moving the ships in evasive patterns vs. Fire computers attempting to predict just where the target ship will be when the shells/beams arrive.
Depending on the range at which battles are fought, the delay between launching an attack, and it's arrival at the target could be measures in minutes, down to nothing. At 300,000 km (approx earth -> moon distance) range, even beams travelling at light-speed will take about 1 sec to reach their target. A ship capable of accelerating at 30Gs could be 300m away from the original location by the time the beam arrives. Slower munitions such as DU shells and missiles would presumably take longer.
Cheers.
Re: Ship size vs. weapons
Threaded Mode