Spinal Mount & Fire Control: More Range, Please

[Paul M]

A very quick comment...lasers are not affected by the r^-2 law.  They are coherent as was mentioned. 

As I always comment laser damage should scale with frequency (for a given throughput UV photons will pack more punch then IR photons) but the range should be determined by the Focal Diameter of the lens array.   It is the limit of your ability to focus the beam that limits a laser's effective range.  Fusion, Fire and Steel has a nice discussion about this.

In Renegade Legion Leviathan, lining up for a crowbar shot..."Thunderstrike" as I called it was awesome sause.  In the games I played I manged it twice...hit once, missed the other time.  A ~2.5 km rail gun round....wow...  Launched from a Battlecruiser in this case.  There is no obvious reason though you could not have multiple spinal lasers, though a particle beam or guass weapon likely would have more limitations.  But if you look at "On Basilisk Station" the CL in question had spinal chaser laser mounts, they were common on all ships in that setting.  A spinal rail gun or a spinal accelerator weapon are clear wins but a spinal laser is both sensible and not, in strict sense making a "spinal mount" is unnecessary, there is no reason the lasing cavity has to be along the ships spine but a larger lasing cavity volume would produce more photons and a larger diameter would give a longer range...but the relationship between the emitter mirror/focus array and the lasing cavity is not required to be "spinal".  I'd not mind seeing Leviathon like spinal rail mounts or honker particle beams...but lasers likely aren't the best weapon to use for a spinal mount in the classic meaning of the word.

The 5 LS range limit on beam weapons is the real issue.  That missiles are probably too good is another aspect of the situation.   But I don't think the game is built around the concept of all weapons are equal. 

[boggo2300]

I really hope Steve does go in for the Spinal Railgun,  no range advantage for the obvious reasons, but apocalyptic damage,  hell a big enough railgun should be able to do planetary bombardment as enough of the slug should survive the atmosphere...

[Steve Walmsley]

I really hope Steve does go in for the Spinal Railgun,  no range advantage for the obvious reasons, but apocalyptic damage,  hell a big enough railgun should be able to do planetary bombardment as enough of the slug should survive the atmosphere...

I have no objection in principle to other spinal weapons - I have just haven't got around to it yet

[GreatTuna]

I have no objection in principle to other spinal weapons - I have just haven't got around to it yet

That's good.
Please consider adding spinal plasma carronades (or just higher-caliber carronades), because in late-game they become smaller than spinal lasers, becoming kind of useless.

[Thundercraft (OP)]

Interestingly way back during the first versions of aurora missiles had ranges similar to energy weapons, at least from what I've read of Steve's campaigns. In fact in the patch to 2.6 steve mentions an increase in range of a factor of 100. http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=1017.0

This is interesting... Granted, missiles should be capable of ranges significantly further than beams or projectiles. But, perhaps, at that time Steve shifted the balance of missiles a bit too far?

While obviously missiles with ranges under a million kilometers is severely deficient, does anyone else think that fuel consumption might possibly be too low? I'm wondering if theres a balance to be found, if at a certain tech level a missile can easily reach a range where it matches a fire control or active sensor which was extremely expensive to research and is very heavy, shouldn't the fuel required also be significant?

I also felt that way. To pack all that fuel, engine, guidance, sensors, and warhead into such a small package is quite a feat, esp. at the ranges and speeds we see.

Realistically kinetic missiles will probably be the weapons most used in space because they will do a lot of damage, in fact more damage than equivalent explosives would do...

We can't have kinetic missiles in Aurora. This was suggested in the AMM doesn't need warhead topic, but shot down for several reasons:

The other reason for warhead requirements is that the original idea was that rather than make a direct kinetic hit (hard) it was far easier to fry the electronics (targetting computers and sensors) of an ASM by detonating a nuke close by. So, its not really necessarily a direct hit, but a proximity kill rendering the ASM inert, blind, or scrambled. Or it could be close enough to vaporize the missile.

Another words, AMMs may need a warhead because they don't have to actually impact the missile to disable it. Anyway, even if kinetic missiles are arguably effective with today's technology, that may change as technology changes.

[snip]...and with guidance and propulsion they can mitigate the problem of having tiny angular issues.

I would disagree. Conventional missiles flying at supersonic speeds is one thing. But trying to precisely aim a missile at speeds approaching relativistic to hit a target in the vastness of space is probably more complicated, esp. when fired in large volleys and when massive amounts of AMMs and point defense is involved. (No GPS to navigate by, for one thing.)

Now in Aurora the missiles have the range they do because their engines use the exact same formula, at least as far as I am aware, as every other engine in the game. I don't think that needs to be change...

Missiles are much smaller in scale than a starship. It could be argued that starships should get a size bonus for efficiency or something along those lines.

Realistically, how much fuel can you compact into a missile's frame? How much can you shrink a rocket engine or power plant before you loose efficiency or run into issues?

Aurora already relies on fictional Trans-Newtonian elements and a bit of hand waving to explain certain things. Yes, it is very impressive how detailed and how realistic Aurora tries to be. It's very good at that. But it's not as hard core as one of NASA's space simulators.

Anyway, as with games in general and many other forms of media, there comes a point where you have to balance realism with the entertainment value. I think where one draws the line is a matter of preference and opinion.

Missiles are better than lasers which holds true in the current world and should hold true in the future with space.

Actually, I agree. I was not trying to suggest that beams should be given equivalent or greater range than missiles. Nor do I want to see beams replace missiles. I simply want to give more strategic reasons to use beams - in particular, Spinal Mount. I want more options - to see them used a bit more often, but not at the exclusion of missiles.

[sloanjh]

Interestingly way back during the first versions of aurora missiles had ranges similar to energy weapons, at least from what I've read of Steve's campaigns. In fact in the patch to 2.6 steve mentions an increase in range of a factor of 100. http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=1017.0
While obviously missiles with ranges under a million kilometers is severely deficient, does anyone else think that fuel consumption might possibly be too low? I'm wondering if theres a balance to be found, if at a certain tech level a missile can easily reach a range where it matches a fire control or active sensor which was extremely expensive to research and is very heavy, shouldn't the fuel required also be significant?

A historical note:

This (low missile ranges in the early days) is correct.  The reason is that Aurora evolved from SF Assistant, and in Starfire missile ranges are very close to beam ranges.

What caused the change was actual Steve's drive towards having a unified "physics" explanation for parameters of systems.  He wanted missile and IIRC fighter drives to play by the same rules as ship drives.  What he came up with was the idea of having levels of engines - higher level engines were much (2x per level?) smaller than lower level engines, but burned fuel at a much higher (10x per level?) rate?  When he did that analysis two things popped out: missile ranges were MUCH too short, and (IIRC) there was an engine level that wasn't in Aurora yet - that's where gunboats/FAC came from.

(Obviously) This completely change the character of the game - away from Age of Sail (Wooden Ships & Iron Men) to Modern Naval Combat (Harpoon).  I remember discussions at the time that it was kind of cool that applying "realism" forced the game into the same transition (to the moral equivalent of ultra-long-ranged targeting and missile combat) that the real world went through.  I think Steve was happy with this qualitative difference, so I suspect it isn't likely to change.  Another principle here that Steve has pointed out over the years is that missile combatants are tactically superior but logistically inferior - they're expensive to support.  I think he likes this dichotomy too. 

So I draw the following conclusions from the above:

1)  Steve's pretty keen on the speed-of-light limitation.  Even if he does break it a little for TN physics, I don't expect he'll increase beam ranges by 10x or 100x.  So the only likely effect a change on beam range will have is to make point defense beam weapons more effective by giving them a bigger engagement range.

2)  Any suggestion to change the fuel consumption for missiles would need to change the entire engine model, i.e. make the efficiency penalty of small powerful engines worse.

3)  The underlying game balance discussion will be a major driver for any decision Steve makes, and it will relate to the logistics cost of missile combatants.

John

[Emrus]

Before I begin my first post: I love this game!

The question of speed of light is an interesting issue.  Especially when considering the relativistic effects.  But, to best understand it I think we should look at how each entity observes the laser and it's effect.

For the target/victim, little is known about the laser beam before it is hit.  Since all the important information about the beam travels at the speed of light along side the beam, the victim is effectively incapable of dodging a laser beam.  You, could argue that a victim may use old angular and positioning data to deduce the time, position and angle when the beam gets fired.  But, when working at ranges where we can only detect a rough size/em signature of objects, it's hard to imagine it is possible to detect angle of the shooter some time in the future with an accuracy of several decimal points.  The only viable tactic the victim has of avoiding lasers, is if it can detect that the enemy does indeed have a laser cannon, and execute randomized movements to lessen the change of getting hit.
I would assume there are also severe limits to how extreme this movement can be without killing the crew.  My assumption in this Trans-Newtonion world is that a ship is only capable of providing such g-force suppression once 5 sec.

In the view of the laser beam.  The target is utterly incapable of dodging the laser beam.  Thanks to the length contraction which happens when traveling at relativistic speeds, the target will be at near 0 distance away.

In the view of the shooter, is of cause the challenge.  Not only do we have to predict where the target is some time in the future, we have to do it based on data from the past.  But, at least once we have shot the beam, no one can act upon this event and dodge the beam.  So, the fire control has make this calculation.  But, the important thing about this calculation is that there is no fundamental difference in how it is done based on the distance of the target, only the fact that the accuracy will drop by a factor 1/(speed * distance)^2 given that the target may engage in randomized evasive maneuvers with 2 degrees of freedom.

The interesting part though, is that this miss chance factor applies just as well to sensor-less missiles and their fire controls.  If a missile doesn't have a sensor package capable enough to operate completely independant of the fire control, then the missile has to relay on the fire control to tell it where to be.  Thanks to information traveling at the speed of light, the missile fire control has use informations x seconds old, to predict where the target will be x seconds in the future.  The only difference is, if the missile is traveling faster then the ship, then it can try again and again, until it hits or run out of fuel.  But, it is effectively limited to one try every x seconds thanks to the delay in messaging.

However, at no point in this review did I stumble over 5 sec or 5 light-seconds, with leaves me rather puzzled with regards to why this a limit for the beam fire control.  The only reason I can see for this is that this lets the firing process and resolution happen within the same time-increment of the game.  But, there is a simple solution to this.  Just implement beams as an invisible homing missile traveling at the speed of light.  Since nothing can act on the knowledge of this beam before it's effect, it doesn't matter if the chance to hit is determined at launch, or at hit. 

With regard to the hit chance, the only significant factor is the targets ability to randomize movement to avoid getting hit.  With that said, a stationary target (i. e.  Orbital habbitat) should always get hit regardless thanks to it's inability to make unpredictable movements, so I don't see 5 light-seconds being a significant limit in this case.

[iceball3]

In the view of the shooter, is of cause the challenge.  Not only do we have to predict where the target is some time in the future, we have to do it based on data from the past.

Actually, either just functionally or also fluff included, communication of sensor contacts and the like are superluminal. So you know exactly where that contact is if you have a sensor bead on them.

[bean]

Weapon propagation must be superluminal.  Given the sort of speeds ships move at, imperceptible amounts of random walk (which would have no effect on the ship's forward progress) around the base vector would make it easy to dodge any sort of beam weapon.  There's no need to see the beam coming.  So long as you're moving, it would be trivial to just include the dodging at any time.

[iceball3]

Weapon propagation must be superluminal.  Given the sort of speeds ships move at, imperceptible amounts of random walk (which would have no effect on the ship's forward progress) around the base vector would make it easy to dodge any sort of beam weapon.  There's no need to see the beam coming.  So long as you're moving, it would be trivial to just include the dodging at any time.

I personally vote for the handwaving for this to be described trans-newtonian space-squashing, between the shooter and the target, and just have it referred to as a "trans newtonian necessity to make it so your shots will actually come close to hitting targets" at the beam engagement ranges present in the game, and upwards.