But my point is that having lasers be faster than light, to maintain the whole "lasers hit in one increment" thing, wouldn't really be a detriment to the realism much at all, considering the game's already pretty unrealistic.

And yes, I get that its the fire control limiting it, but I'm saying that limit is arbitrary and unnecessary.

Now the only problem with my position is that it wouldn't necessarily change much.  People almost never get to the final techs anyways, so few people would ever see a difference.

I dunno, just something to consider I guess.

What it comes down to is that this is a hard limit that Steve wants in the Aurora-verse.  The subject has come up several times without change.

But my point is that having lasers be faster than light, to maintain the whole "lasers hit in one increment" thing, wouldn't really be a detriment to the realism much at all, considering the game's already pretty unrealistic.

And yes, I get that its the fire control limiting it, but I'm saying that limit is arbitrary and unnecessary.

Now the only problem with my position is that it wouldn't necessarily change much.  People almost never get to the final techs anyways, so few people would ever see a difference.

I dunno, just something to consider I guess.

Currently what actually limits beam weapon range is the fire control.  There are lots of weapons that if you check the design screen have a theoretical range greater than 5 light seconds.  All of them are limited by the fire control which does not exceed the 5 light second range.

Brian

Yes, and considering that they're lightspeed weapons(generally speaking), and the smallest time incriment is 5 seconds, I suspect that's rather deliberate and simply the place where Steve chose to impliment the lightspeed cap for beam weapons. It doesn't mean beam weapons are going to be FTL.

A bit arbitrary, but it probably beats coding delayed-impact mechanics for high-end super-lasers.

Really I don't see the problem with having lasers be faster than light.  Yeah, it's unrealistic given the Theory of Relativity, but nothing else in the game follows Relativistic physics.  It's not that hard to get missiles, or even ships up to a significant fraction of c, yet my ships and missiles don't get heavier at higher speeds.  I can communicate in real time with aliens who aren't even in the same system as me.  Enemy beam weapons don't hurt more if I am moving towards them.

Missiles are capped at lightspeed, too(no, the design wasn't practical. Also a few versions back). And presumably so would ships.

The rest actually makes sense for an inertialess drive(and would explain why kinetic kill missiles aren't a thing and ramming does so little damage), which Trans-Newtonian engines seem to be, in terms of function and the idea of trans-newtonian mechanics(with matching real velocities handwaved; presumably there's an inertial drive mode or something with much lower performance, or they just loiter in the gravity well or something). Well, except for FTL communications, but that's something rather different than FTL beam weapons. FTL beam weapons would probably be their own technology, possibly an exotic one you have to discover before you can research it, assuming super-long-range beam weapons were desirable from a game design perspective.

But if you give out extra range for any reason, then either will the effect wear of with higher tech grades, or some beam weapons and the spinal mounts will eventually break light speed.
Right now everything is set up so that at maximum tech you exactly hit that barrier.

I am not suggesting going beyond the range of the fire control, which is what limits beam weapons to light speed, just making spinal mounts more accurate at their longer ranges.  Something on the order of an extra 10% or so of accuracy.  Currently if you are firing at max range's the chance to hit is very low (down to 1%)  If the spinal weapons get a flat bonus to this then they open up some new possibilities (say 10% minimum).  This would make firing at long range more appealing to a player without making a huge difference overall.  The actual range would still be limited to your fire control, the damage would still drop off fairly quickly at range as well.  Using the max tech example above the damage difference would be 28 points currently vs. 33 points with my modification.  This is not a big difference, and there would be more of a spread at closer ranges as well.  The damage however would not go above the base damage that exists currently.  The main difference would be that at a range of 1.4m km I would think about taking my first shot as I would have a 10-12% hit chance vs. a 1-2% chance.

This is a very complicated game where the fun is having lots of different design choices.  If this is fairly easy to code then I think it would be an advantage.  If however it is hard to code in then the results are not worth the work.  Ultimately this is a choice for Steve to make.  The more we talk about an option and the better refined it gets, the more likely he is to follow up with it, if he likes it in the first place.

Brian

Proposed easy solution: Spinal particle beams.

Lets your particle beam tech keep up with your spinal lasers, range-wise.

All for spinal weapons being applied to all beam weapons.  I don't think anyone would want to bother to use them for mesons or microwave beams but the others could all benefit from the technology.

In fact I would like to see something added to spinal weapons.  For a regular spinal weapon add 1 to the weapon range modifier, and for the advanced spinal's add 2 to the weapon range modifier.  This would make them more effective at range without a lot of tinkering.  For carronades it would almost double the range they can be used at.  Railguns would get a smaller improvement as would lasers.  Particle beams would not be effected as their damage is constant.  Mesons and HPM's would also get a small boost to range, but no increase in damage.

Brian

Snip

In theory the larger lasers will have longer ranges, but in practice my lasers often seem to keep getting clipped down to particle beam ranges by my fire control range limits.

Damage does drop off fairly quickly.  It is not linear as I just learned so even when a beam weapon like a large laser looks like it has a range much longer than the fire control range limit gives, you still are not doing all that much damage at the maximum beam weapons ranges.  I did a test with the 80cm advanced spinal laser which does 337 damage up close.  With max tech the damage it does at max range (1.4m km) is only 37.  On a linear scale the damage would have been over 300.  This is one of the reasons I said that particle beams still have a place in the beam weapons arena.  They do not have the flexibility that lasers have so they are only good in one area, which is the long range beam area.  Lasers are far more flexible with the ability to use them for point defense as well.

For reference here is the fomula that I was just given for beam weapon drop-of rates.
Effective Range (in units of 10k) = Contact Dist / Weapon Range Modifier
If Effective Range < 1 Then Effective Range = 1
Weapon Damage = Round Down (Weapon Damage Output / Effective Range)

One of the main weaknesses normally cited for particle weapons is the lack of flexibility that is present while still costing as much to research.  This is not always true as it is quite easy to stop researching the weapon size while continuing to research the range for particle beams.  This end up giving you the long range light weapons with only 1 major research path to follow.  These light weapons end up doing quite a bit of damage because they are light-weight, which results in a high rate of fire.  Lasers need both the weapon size and range modifiers to get the flexibility that people want.  Mesons are another weapon where this works out as well.  This results in only slightly more research, but gets two weapon systems that are mutually reinforcing.  As a note. most players end up having to research mesons if they want planetary beam weapons because of the effects of atmosphere.

Brian

I am sure this has been asked a thousand times but….  Particle Beams or Lasers?

the opportunity cost of researching energy weapons is too high, I think, for you to do anything but go lasers. All of the other options are simply too specialized, though base line mesons and railguns are good out of the gate at their roles.