Inside one light second, no amount of lateral motion will generate that miss. At 10 light seconds? I don't know but if the object is large enough I doubt it. I don't know enough math to calculate the vectors and the lateral forces necessary to generate a radical enough course change, while still maintaining the base vector.
At one light second range, the laser will take one second to cover the distance. A ship moving at 4000 km/s can cover four thousand kilometers in that time, or about the distance between Los Angeles and New York, so there should be a very good chance of generating a miss, especially when Aurora ignores those pesky newtonian mechanics.
Steve
Hi Steve,
Here's a realistic but not serious question: Ummmm so how do beam weapons ever hit anything? Let's say I can jink with velocity of 1% my max velocity , i.e. 40 km/s (even though I cringe at the non-Newtonian nature of what I just said - I should really be talking jink acceleration). Let's say I'm 0.1 light second range, so my "jink sphere" has a radius of 4km. If my ship size is ~100m, then the odds of the beam (assume it's much smaller than 100m) hitting me are about (100m/4km)^2 or about 1 in 1600. At 1 light second it would be naively be 10^2 or 100 times worse, i.e. 1 in 160000. A more sophisticated argument would say "in order to be unpredictable, the jinking needs to be a random walk, so on average the distance only grows like the square root of the time. In this case the jink sphere radius would be roughly L*sqrt(t/t0) where L is the length of a jink leg and t0 is the time spent on each jink leg. So (sqrt(10))^2 is only 10 times as bad or 1 in 16000.
The reason this is "not serious" is that we need beam weapons for game mechanics reasons, so we need to make up some technobabble to make it work
I vote for "sophisticated pattern analysis computers that try to correct for the jink pattern". This brings up a more serious thought though:
It seems like dodging beam weapons at long range should be an engine tech, rather than an ECM tech. You could bundle it up into a single "agility" parameter or be more fine-grain:
A "jink amplitude" engine tech which represents the velocity of the jinking (this should probably be proportional to the max velocity, i.e. rating "1" on a 4000 km/s ship would be twice as good as rating "1" on a 2000 km/s ship).
A "max jink rate" engine tech which represents the maximum frequency of direction changes in the jink.
A "course prediction" fire control tech which counteracts the jink rate - this might be something like the number of course changes that can be predicted, i.e. for a course prediction rating of "10" shooting at a target at 1 light second, the target would have to have a jink rate better than 10 jinks/s in order to get any gain from jinking - otherwise the prediction software would "know" exactly where the target would be. At 0.1 light second the jink rate would have to be better than 100/s in order to generate any uncertainty.
A few ramifications of this idea:
Long range beam (or anything without terminal fire-control) engagements become a lot more difficult. This moves balance towards terminal homing missiles and away from beams at long ranges.
The rate at which you want your ships to jink would be range dependant - you want to jink frequently enough to be unpredictable, but you want your individual jink legs to be as long as possible (to fight the sqrt(t) effect). This in turn means that long-ranged beam fire can be improved by getting another beam-armed combatant close to the target, forcing the target to jink more rapidly.
It also hurts point defense at long range, since missiles will be fairly agile.
High engine speed can become a defensive tech (if jink rate is researched), but it there are more research and manufacturing costs to developing and building the engines to take advantage of it.
Fighters become more survivable at medium range.
Jinking might also be used to reduce missile hit probabilities - high agility targets would be harder to hit.
Even though the "tracking speed" and turret techs were designed to abstract away a lot of the above, I think one could argue that those ideas are complementary to the jinking idea - I think tracking speed represents having to physically shift your aim point while jink represents knowing where to aim.
Let me know if you are interested in the above - if you are then I can write down some equations for how the various techs mentioned above would affect hit probabilities at different ranges and send them to you offline.
John
