Ship size vs. weapons

[Puke]

quote:

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Originally posted by Nitram Draw:
Another thought along these lines would be to make the large mount guns fire slower. Maybe 2 turns for large, 3 turns for massive etc. This would give an incentive to build secondary guns.

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that would make alot more sense. you would have to up the damage numbers when you do that, but you would still want a smaller weapon since the larger one would waste its shot on a small ship when there might be bigger targets about. I do not think there is a way to make the use of such combinations work effectively in strategic combat without actually making extensive changes to the games code, but it would be a good mod for all the TAC players out there.

[Sinapus]

quote:

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Originally posted by Nitram Draw:
Another thought along these lines would be to make the large mount guns fire slower. Maybe 2 turns for large, 3 turns for massive etc. This would give an incentive to build secondary guns.

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I made a similar request. One for a flag to alter reload times for weapon mounts. Basically, I wanted to make either rapid-fire or increase the reload times for some overloaded mounts...

...hey, you could always get some role-playing aspects and get stuck with a "lowest-bidder" mount.



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--
"What do -you- want?" "I'd like to live -just- long enough to be there when they cut off your head and stick it on a pike as a warning to the next ten generations that some favors come with too high a price. I would look up into your lifeless eyes and wave like this..." *waggle* "...can you and your associates arrange that for me, Mr. Morden?"

[Baron Munchausen]

In SE3, there was a "range attenuation" setting for each weapon. Now SE4 has an exact damage setting at each range so you have even more control of that. But the decreasing ACCURACY of all weapons per square range is the same. It's set in settings.txt for every single direct fire weapon in the game. This doesn't seem right to me. Some weapons ought to lose accuracy FASTER than others. A DUC is firing a solid projectile, for example, while the Meson BLaster and APB are firing atomic particles -- at least, according to their respective names though the fields they are researched in are called ENERGY weapons... Anyway, particles can be accelerated close to the speed of light. A huge chunk of "depleted uranium" probably cannot without very advanced technology. By simple ballistics, the DUC ought to become less accurate much faster than the particle beam weapons but it has the SAME loss of accuracy. How about a seperate setting for each direct-fire weapon for accuracy lost PER SQUARE or range instead of the flat "to hit modifier" thing that we have now? And once you do that you could have a modifer in "mounts" to change it as weapons get larger. The combination of the two settings could allow for a good simulation of larger "ponderous" weapons vs. smaller weapons with quicker tracking.

[Seawolf]

Some basic points.

1) the smaller ships have a built in negative modifier to hit no matter what the weapon.

2) We have a time scale issue here. If you make larger mounts slower then you have to have the weapons that take more than 1 turn to relaod would take longer. Really screwing with the game mechanics.

3) larger weapons don't have to hit a small target to do damage. A 16" shell landing near a DD would usually do damage. Besides it was the inability to target the weapon that caused them to miss not the weapon it's self.

4) this is not a naval sim. Using wet navy rules just throws things out of whack.

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Seawolf on the prowl

[apache]

Just want to mention some things.
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.
2) The comparisons with naval units are not totally valid, but they do have merit. The idea here is that the smaller ships can get to areas that make the bigger mounted weapons much less likely to hit them.
The field of fire of any weapon is always limited by ship design. The naval comparison notes that a PT boat can get under the field of fire of a BB's guns. In the same vein, it can get behind the ship, putting it beyond the reach of the forward guns.
So make a few assumptions that the larger mounts have areas where they cannot fire because A) the target is too close, or B) there is a field of fire area which a small ship can 'hide' in and not worry about the big guns being able to rotate/elevate to fire at them.
Perhaps more advanced design which would allow you to place guns with fields of fire would solve this problem. This way you could decide how many guns face forward and how many face rearward. If you happen to be running from your opponent, you would not be able to shoot your forward weapons.

[Puke]

quote:

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Originally posted by apache:
Just want to mention some things.
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.

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almost. there are balistics as far as internal ballistics and terminal ballistics are concerned, and they are darned near the same as those in atmosphere. as far as external ballistics go, space is mostly a vaccum, but there is a heck of alot of stuff floating arround in it. another thread discusses how many millions of TONs of particulate matter the earth runs into from space on a daily basis, and there certainly is some gravitational effect too. not enough to make a big change really, but the RANGES man. a range 4 weapon has a greater range than the diamater of a huge planet, which should be a couple hundred times the diamater of the earth, significantly far to be influenced by gravity. presumeably though, any super-technology targeting control could plot a fireing solution to account for any native gravity. and as for partical dissipation, not only does it depend on the microscopic stuff it runs into over a few million miles, but it would depend even heaver on the beam attenuation. the death ray will lose focus after a while.

quote:

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Originally posted by apache:
2) The comparisons with naval units are not totally valid, but they do have merit. The idea here is that the smaller ships can get to areas that make the bigger mounted weapons much less likely to hit them.
The field of fire of any weapon is always limited by ship design. The naval comparison notes that a PT boat can get under the field of fire of a BB's guns. In the same vein, it can get behind the ship, putting it beyond the reach of the forward guns.
So make a few assumptions that the larger mounts have areas where they cannot fire because A) the target is too close, or B) there is a field of fire area which a small ship can 'hide' in and not worry about the big guns being able to rotate/elevate to fire at them.
Perhaps more advanced design which would allow you to place guns with fields of fire would solve this problem. This way you could decide how many guns face forward and how many face rearward. If you happen to be running from your opponent, you would not be able to shoot your forward weapons.

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I like this. but even tactical combat is not like a true space sim where velocities are significant, so facings would be a bit hard to modle without having velocity. maybe SE5 will have a feature for weapon mounts having a + or - to hit ships of a certain size (or of a certain defensive bonus)



[This message has been edited by Puke (edited 31 January 2001).]

[BKrani]

quote:

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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.

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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.