FreeOrion

IMO accuracy should be a problem for lasers, although I agree with you that it should be easier to hit with them, than it would be with mass drivers.

Lasers should be easier to hit with, but their damage should decrease over range.
With mass drivers it is harder to hit, but if you hit, you do full damage.
That's the way it was handled in moo2, and it's a good one.

Problem with the missiles is that they can be also shot down by anti-missile laser guns, decreasing their efficiency.

Don't forget - Lasers are also affected by gravity. Unless you are fighitng in deep space, there will be some small tugs / deviations of where the laser is fired and where it lands. Hence a targetting computer won't necessarily need to "factor in" where the enemy will be. It will, however, compute the small deviations of the laser, based on what it knows to act as gravitational pulls from different celestial bodies.

Hence, why fighting at close range would need less computing power.


Oh, and I believe the distance between the sun and the earth is 8 minutes. So if the sun went supernova or something, say right now, well we'd have a full 8 minutes to mass-evacuate the planet. Not too hard a feat, but it would require some cooperation.

guiguibaah wrote:Don't forget - Lasers are also affected by gravity. Unless you are fighitng in deep space, there will be some small tugs / deviations of where the laser is fired and where it lands. Hence a targetting computer won't necessarily need to "factor in" where the enemy will be. It will, however, compute the small deviations of the laser, based on what it knows to act as gravitational pulls from different celestial bodies.

Hence, why fighting at close range would need less computing power.


Oh, and I believe the distance between the sun and the earth is 8 minutes. So if the sun went supernova or something, say right now, well we'd have a full 8 minutes to mass-evacuate the planet. Not too hard a feat, but it would require some cooperation.

Except for the fact that if the sun went super nova right now, we wouldn't know for (altogether now)... 8 minutes.

As for Gravity's effect on lasers, Very minimal likely, not enought to worry about, but as long as Lasers are Lightspeed, and ships can move more than a few thousand miles an hour, 1 light second means that you have to guess were the ship will be when the laser gets there... if you shoot at Exactly where it was when you shot the laser, the ship will have totally cleared that spot by the time the laser gets there.

(Which is why I think combat should be much less than 1 light second at least with early techs... ie missiles only at that range]

Missiles should be the most accurate because they can correct course as they get closer.

That's correct. Go read up on Gravitational lensing if you don't believe me.... Lensing caused by objects the size of the Andromeda Galaxy is barely noticable in most cases. so in an area the size of a planet we'd need very advanced sensors just to detect it....

Hmm... I just thought of an interesting idea. Make the distance the ships start out at a function of how well the defender is able to detect the attacker.

Ships could have something like "operational area". A radius it is able to defend and fight.
Huge, heavy cruisers would be slow, and their operational area could be small too, but when finnaly it catches something, it has big advantage. On the other end, we could have tiny, maybe even unmanned ships, weak, but very fast, with huge operational area.

About the gravity affecting the lasers: it goes both way. Imagine you are trying to shoot a ship which is not moving (in your reference system). You look at it and fire your lasers. Surely, you cannot miss, no matter what gravitational distortions are on the way, because the light you detected comming from the enemy ship is distorted in the same way as the light of your laser beam heading thowars him.

CygnusX1 wrote:Ships could have something like "operational area". A radius it is able to defend and fight.
Huge, heavy cruisers would be slow, and their operational area could be small too, but when finnaly it catches something, it has big advantage. On the other end, we could have tiny, maybe even unmanned ships, weak, but very fast, with huge operational area.

What affect would this operational area have? I don't see the point of it.

Yes, the operational area idea is not needed. Weapon range and movement range per turn will do. And we don't need a feature that is only there to make laser accuracy behave properly.

I think no matter what scale we are going to fit to, we are not going to emulate physics perfectly and the science will be loose. If anyone demands an answer as to why the lasers in our game don't get affected by gravity and other realism well just give them some fluff.

utilae wrote:Yes, the operational area idea is not needed. Weapon range and movement range per turn will do. And we don't need a feature that is only there to make laser accuracy behave properly.

I think no matter what scale we are going to fit to, we are not going to emulate physics perfectly and the science will be loose. If anyone demands an answer as to why the lasers in our game don't get affected by gravity and other realism well just give them some fluff.

I think the "Operational Area" idea was a way of graphically rendering the speed/range capabilities of the ship.

As for lensing..... you'd pretty much have to shoot at something on the other side of the sun for it to be an issue. And it's something your targetting computer could probably calculate. So it's a non-issue.

Lasers are lightspeed weapons, as long as your weapon aiming mechanism is good, they're the most accurate type of weapon you'll get. lensing effects would work both ways, so you aim your laser at the image of the enemy and the laser will hit it as long as it doesn't move.

to overcome the problems of accuracy with massdrivers I'd expect weapons scienticians to create massdriver shotguns which fire a cannister of projectiles. as range increases the projectiles spread out to cover a cone of potential destruction. That's just my evil scientician mind going to work tho.

Just thought I'd throw this out there... In my own personal mod for MOO3 a while back I latched onto and used an interesting distinction in the "rail gun" family: projectile size.

Rail Gun: lowest type tech-tree-wise. Fires average-sized bullets (whatever 'average' is). No particular advantages.

Gauss Cannon: Fires very small, possibly microscopic bullets. Low mass -> less inertia -> easier to accelerate -> higher launch velocity -> more kinetic energy (1/2 mv^2) -> better piercing (however you end up implementing that) and higher accuracy.

Mass Driver: Borrowing a page from the Babylon 5 ep where Londo is watching his people use mass drivers on the Narn homeworld: fires extremely LARGE projectiles. Say asteroid-size. Makes the weapon system itself really large/heavy, which is always fun to do. Low piercing, low accuracy, high base damage since it will affect a huge area of the target's hull if it hits. Also a good low-tech planet-bombarding weapon.

LithiumMongoose wrote: Gauss Cannon: Fires very small, possibly microscopic bullets. Low mass -> less inertia -> easier to accelerate -> higher launch velocity -> more kinetic energy (1/2 mv^2) -> better piercing (however you end up implementing that) and higher accuracy.

solidcordon wrote: to overcome the problems of accuracy with massdrivers I'd expect weapons scienticians to create massdriver shotguns which fire a cannister of projectiles. as range increases the projectiles spread out to cover a cone of potential destruction. That's just my evil scientician mind going to work tho.

Why not combine these? We'd have the Mass Driver (big), Rail Gun (medium), and Gauss Shotgun (small).