Kinetic weaponry rework (railguns)

[esavier (OP)]

I will start that this is a suggestion not a demand, but i refrained from posting this in suggestion thread Since this is something both big and would require a lot of thought put into this.

First of all, this idea was born because there are, in my opinion, to few decent high tier weapons in the game, and conventional munition is treated only in realm of either early game muskets or later as cheap but short range PD.
 
I think that Railguns, (as shown by army at to this day) should be more viable especially in vacum of space and tonnage of fleet we are working with.  Right now, rails systems are used only as low tier early weapon to play with natives.  Here is a proposition of changes to make those from being bigger copy-paste of gauss'es to be something between particle lance and conventional torpedo:

01.  Rail Cannon should negate shields, but do not negate armor, as all kinetic projectiles do.
02.  Rail Cannon should have the same pattern as particle lance (not 100% sure if its like that now, never used too many railguns in ship-to-ship combat).
03.  Since Rail Cannon could acquire the same energy as particle lance, so damage would be at least the same if not bigger.  However devastating to the internals, damage should be dampened by 1/3 or 1/2 to armor both for physics and balance reasons.  (composite and ablative armors are made to absorb the shock of kinetic projectiles, and that would fit railgun slug nature) 
04.  Rail Cannon should be single shot, with huge reload penalty (depending on size but starting at least with 60s for the smallest ones).  In real life each shot damages barrel rail.  I am not sure if that would be viable or possible but each shot would require some maintenance supplies.
05.  Not sure if this is possible to code up, but unlike gauss cannons that uses maglev system, Railguns uses electric system to propel the slug, and thus should require very specific projectile (this has also potential to designate rounds, similar to rockets, in the future?), an thus also would requiring magazines (although without warheads it would not contribute to explosions) even if only 1ms per projectile, it would be counterbalance to the effectiveness.  Also please not that difference between cannon and missile is that railgun require specific dimension of the projectile, not like in case launchers that can launch everything up to launcher size.
06.  Range - This would mostly depend on difference between railgun size and projectiles size times speed.  Now, since gauss system uses EM field to transfer energy, speed achieved is much lower, than rail system.  I would propose initially speed of around 100 000 km/s, and since aurora uses 5s intervals it would calculate base accuracy based on that (100 000km/s * 5s = 500 000km for shot without accuracy penalty, 750kkm for 50% penalty, capped at 1mln km with no chances at all) Although i would love to imagine railguns as long-range kinetic weapons.
07.  further counterbalance would require at least sizes like spinal mounts (800-1000t for the smallest ones), no turret mounts, and no usage in point-defence scenarios.
08.  A lot of EM echo on each shot.
09.  speed may be adjusted based on rail cannon size, launch velocity speed, projectile (mass, maybe composition in future?). 
10.  There is also potential to add new component - energy capacitor - as a separate entity from all the weapons - that would play nicely with all weapons for example having two capacitors would speed up energy weapon recovery, in exchange for additional mass.  Also it would determine performance of the rail system (shooting from multiple capacitors, or only one, using capacitors form other weapons if those are out of range).
11.  Reload penalty should be related to size of the cannon and mass of handled projectile.
12.  and the last thing - great from pounding ground units from orbit.

please give it a thought

[xenoscepter]

01.  Rail Cannon should negate shields, but do not negate armor, as all kinetic projectiles do.

- That isn't how shields work in Aurora. Shields in Aurora are most akin to the Omnidirectional Barrier Shield found on the SDF-1 from Superdimensional Fortress Macross. I haven't played Traveller or Starfire, so I can't comment on their lore. Railguns cannot simply go through such shields. Another analogy to Aurora shield technology would be the Particle Shields from Star trek, albeit those have the caveat that energy weapons like phasors and such go right through them. That doesn't happen in Aurora, so it's a poorer analogy. Think of the shields as a solid object that is projected as a bubble around the ship, a force field so to speak.

02.  Rail Cannon should have the same pattern as particle lance (not 100% sure if its like that now, never used too many railguns in ship-to-ship combat).
03.  Since Rail Cannon could acquire the same energy as particle lance, so damage would be at least the same if not bigger.  However devastating to the internals, damage should be dampened by 1/3 or 1/2 to armor both for physics and balance reasons.  (composite and ablative armors are made to absorb the shock of kinetic projectiles, and that would fit railgun slug nature)

- Railguns take chunks out of armor, Particle Beams grind through it by bombarding it with a constant stream of, well, particles. So the damage profiles make sense. No, they can't acquire the same amount of energy. Not at all, not now, not ever. Particle Beams are DEVASTATING in theory and would likely be far more devastating in practice. They just aren't comparable as the particle Beam can be seen as the penultimate evolution of ballistics weapons... in that it is technically a mass driver. Albeit a Mass Driver that drives extremely small, extremely hot matter at an extreme rate of fire with an even more extreme velocity.

Off-Topic: show

05.  Not sure if this is possible to code up, but unlike gauss cannons that uses maglev system, Railguns uses electric system to propel the slug, and thus should require very specific projectile (this has also potential to designate rounds, similar to rockets, in the future?), an thus also would requiring magazines (although without warheads it would not contribute to explosions) even if only 1ms per projectile, it would be counterbalance to the effectiveness.  Also please not that difference between cannon and missile is that railgun require specific dimension of the projectile, not like in case launchers that can launch everything up to launcher size.
06.  Range - This would mostly depend on difference between railgun size and projectiles size times speed.  Now, since gauss system uses EM field to transfer energy, speed achieved is much lower, than rail system.  I would propose initially speed of around 100 000 km/s, and since aurora uses 5s intervals it would calculate base accuracy based on that (100 000km/s * 5s = 500 000km for shot without accuracy penalty, 750kkm for 50% penalty, capped at 1mln km with no chances at all) Although i would love to imagine railguns as long-range kinetic weapons.
07.  further counterbalance would require at least sizes like spinal mounts (800-1000t for the smallest ones), no turret mounts, and no usage in point-defence scenarios.
08.  A lot of EM echo on each shot.
09.  speed may be adjusted based on rail cannon size, launch velocity speed, projectile (mass, maybe composition in future?).
10.  There is also potential to add new component - energy capacitor - as a separate entity from all the weapons - that would play nicely with all weapons for example having two capacitors would speed up energy weapon recovery, in exchange for additional mass.  Also it would determine performance of the rail system (shooting from multiple capacitors, or only one, using capacitors form other weapons if those are out of range).
11.  Reload penalty should be related to size of the cannon and mass of handled projectile.
12.  and the last thing - great from pounding ground units from orbit.

 - I personally think these are too complicated overall, but I would like a Spinal Mount for railguns, and a Single Shot Rail Cannon like SerBeardians mod for VB6. Railguns already cost MSP to fire, just like every other weapon. Separate Capacitor modules is a wonderfully delicious idea, allowing the player to trade in mass for power to compensate a tech deficit or to power truly massive weapons to fire at one increment intervals. They would explode if hit, obviously, doing damage proportional to the amount of energy that they store. Aurora does not model Gauss or Railgun ammo, and I for one would like that to stay... at least for now.

[TheTalkingMeowth]

I do agree that railguns are kind of in a weird spot, both from a usage standpoint and from a "lore" standpoint (though they aren't actually useless as primary weapons; they have higher DPS/ton than any other weapon and so are great vs shields).

But it's weird that railguns are short ranged, when in the absence of atmosphere the rounds shouldn't be slowing down. They really shouldn't have any range degradation at all. Particle beams have that role right now, but I would argue that this exactly backwards. A mass of charged particles repel each other and so should disperse really fast. I sometimes swap the names of railguns and particle beams in my games to reflect this. I guess the lore idea is that the railgun rounds are in the Aether and so suffer from the drag in that dimension?

TL,DR: please give us giant spinal railguns. I need my Ukonvosara-class mass drivers.

[esavier (OP)]

1. Okay, point taken, although i do not know how that would work on damages we are dealing with here. On recent games i was able to make particle lance that was grinding through 5-layer armor - however i do not know how shields would help me against something like that (i.e. math behind it, does strength 1 shield will soak all the damage or will remove some points from actual hit). Either way if its working on missiles it makes sense for the railgun slugs.

2. on the pattern - i imagine that taking under consideration modern apfsds or solid shell projectiles (non-chemical, non-explosive tank munition) i find railgun pattern kinda to wide, and despite all the all, kinda unbalanced for  this specific weapon pattern. large damage radius is fine for lasers, gauses and for current gaus guns, but thats only because it is playing really well with its fire rate, and slowly ablating each layer of the armor.
This weapons is more like all or nothing kind of weapon and your fleet. Rail cannon would be heavy and slow ship that does not have a lot of means of defending itself (so called glass cannon). You need to deploy those with sufficient escort, and even then you either have rail canon big enough to pierce to pierce specific ship at once (or at least wound it), or you have a problem since you will have to wait minute or more to change the gun components before shooting another time.
This calls for different tactics:
- either you pierced and wounded the ship (but not destroyed) - in that case you are in semi-bad, semi-good position, you have most likely damages so much stuff inside that your fleet can help you with easy pickings, or at least disabled some good components (always there is a chance for ammo rack explosions so this is a game worth playing in some cases. This damage is still not critical and armor damage is not really tactically viable since 1block wide armor hole is incredibly hard to fit missile precisely into the second time.
- or you did not penetrated nor perforated the armor - in that case you have a bad day and you should run, since as above you have a for example 3block deep, one block wide hole, that is not tacticaly viable, and ship is technically, mostly unharmed.

I am considering the smallest ship to carry only one of those (early small ones) would be around 18KT at least, and main difference between this and particle lance would be increaseed damage, especialy after penetration, and extended range in exchange to huge penalty to reload time, and high costs of running/specialization of the ship (tonnage,ammo,maintenance and all the stuff around it), early max range would be around 1MKm

please mind that all the stuff around providing ordinance and maitenance would be a nice to have stuff, that would make this even more fun to play with, but its optional. Main idea is big-boy slug driver

guys, sorry i am writting so much about this, but listen,
sluuuuuugs tru spaceeee :3

[liveware]

I am very much in favor of a late-tech rail gun upgrade that would remove their multishot capabilities and replace that with a single larger, higher damage munition. Maybe call the upgraded rail gun a rail cannon to differentiate it from it's multishot siblings? That would keep rail guns relevant and interesting compared to spinal mount lasers or particle lance's, and since gauss eventually overtakes rail guns in the missile defense role, it would make railguns more unique from gauss in their current state of existence.

[xenoscepter]

Oh yes, I'm all for them big honkin' slugs. It's just so... >w<

The dispersion... yeah, in space that'll happen. If anything, Aurora is far to generous in dispersion to both Railguns AND Particle Beams. particle Beams would have worse dispersion than Railguns IRL, while Railguns would have such a horrible shot dispersion that you'd need to throw a frankly stupid amount of dakka at a target to hit anything... at close range.

I say keep the shotgun like spread of the standard Railguns, and create a separate technology for Rail Cannons. Make it work just like Particle Lances in that you must have invested enough RP into Railgun Caliber and Railgun Launch Velocity to "unlock" that tech. Then you research it and can retroactively apply it to the standard Railguns. There is a spoiler tech related to Railguns that makes me advocate for this solution, as it wouldn't interfere with them as much, and would allow a Railgun heavy empire to really crank up the crazy if/when they got a hold of it.

[Jorgen_CAB]

At least I think Railguns should have a spinal version that might have some different capabilities such as a single shot that do allot more damage.

I also wondered why lasers can be spinal mounted in the first place since it is just a large mirror focusing a beam in the first place. Where the generator or batteries are placed really does not matter much.

But this us a very different question.

In general I don't think weapons need much change in Aurora until Steve make any considerable changes to the mechanics if he ever do that. He did have some interesting ideas for Aurora II (or if it was Newtonian Aurora) in terms of weapons, armour and shield. Where each armour block would absorb a certain amount of energy and would either break and absorb that energy or don't break at all. Potentially a really weak weapon would do no damage to certain armour types at all. The shields would not always deflect all damage but some energy might get through the shield also depending on the weapon type I guess. Together with the new armour rules this would be an interesting thing as the shields could blunt the incoming damage that then do practically no damage to armour.

Now you could potentially have weapons with very high DPS but can be negated by strong shields and/or armour or weapons that do lots of damage in one shot with low DPS but you are guarantied to do damage with each shot, more or less.

Missiles would not be like kinetic projectiles and lasers would be weaker by range by spreading their damage over a larger area thus making armour more effective, the kinetic bullet from the railgun would potentially be able to go straight through a ship.... in one side and out the other. You could potentially have explosive rail gun shots with reactive armour protecting from it perhaps.

Until something similar is implemented by Steve I think weapons work quite fine as is, more or less...

[Rich.h]

While many Sci Fi tropes and modern real world tech makes rail guns work more like Auroras particle lances, there is a very simple work around to this I employ. Since Aurora doesn't care about the asthetics of most things in the game, you use this to your own ends. For my own campaigns particle lances are my rail guns, I achieve this by simply naming them so in the tech component design screen. My rail guns I rename to some other weapon thype that suits their function.

While I fully agree that if you remain inflexible on Auroras weapon system, rail guns are somewhat odd compared to their real world counterparts. Trying to change up the entire weapon tree in code is vastly more complex than just renaming them in your own campaigns.

[xenoscepter]

I've always understood Spinal Lasers as piggybacking off of the ship's own structure in order to get a bigger gun then you could otherwise design. If I can build a 15cm Laser as a standalone system, then Spinal Laser let's me up that to 19cm by utilizing the structure of the ship to make up for what I lack in diameter tech. Basically the calibre of laser tech was just an abstraction for, "Yeah we can build it this big and not have it blow up horribly", versus Spinal Laser Tech being more akin to, "But what if we grafted it to the ship? Then could we build bigger?" or maybe, leech off the cooling of the ship or a more direct power conduit that uses the non-combat reactors too, or something else to fluff it.

Many modern sci-fi and real world Railguns also ignore shot dispersion over the frankly preposterous distances that space battles tend to involve.  Just one micrometer of offset is a big deal when your 10,000,000 meters from a target. That's 10,000 km btw, which is practically the shortest range in Aurora for beam weapons. Just one micrometer of offset will result in a shot dispersion of 10 meters. That's 32 feet or ten yards of dispersion... at Aurora's "point blank" range. That's 96 feet or 30 yards of dispersion at 30,000 km, for just one mircometer of dispersion at the point where the Railgun slug leaves the barrel. and that's before we talk about the fact that at Ion Tech a ship could be moving as much as 8,000 or more kilometers per second? Yeah... maybe having four shots with a wide dispersion is a more accurate model...

[Jorgen_CAB]

While many Sci Fi tropes and modern real world tech makes rail guns work more like Auroras particle lances, there is a very simple work around to this I employ. Since Aurora doesn't care about the asthetics of most things in the game, you use this to your own ends. For my own campaigns particle lances are my rail guns, I achieve this by simply naming them so in the tech component design screen. My rail guns I rename to some other weapon thype that suits their function.

While I fully agree that if you remain inflexible on Auroras weapon system, rail guns are somewhat odd compared to their real world counterparts. Trying to change up the entire weapon tree in code is vastly more complex than just renaming them in your own campaigns.

Yes... I do similar things as well... I usually like to think that lances are railguns too, railguns are batteries of plasma cannons firing superheated plasma. Carronades are powerful plasma torpedoes etc... you can make it into whatever you want.

In a Star Wars setting then Railguns could be Turbulaser batteries and lasers could be more like some sort of energy lance, Microwaves are Ion Cannons and Measons are Tractor Beams.

[TheTalkingMeowth]

There seems to be a bit of confusion in the thread.

Degradation!=Dispersion.

A kinetic weapon should not suffer range DEGRADATION. That is, no matter how far away you are, the round has the same mass and velocity...so it should do the same damage.

Range dispersion is reflected in the reduction in accuracy at larger ranges that already exists. Maybe the current effective ranges are too high, but that has nothing to do with railguns vs. lasers vs. particle beams, all of which can be assumed to be firing projectiles at basically the same speed (c).

That said, accuracy really should be affected by target size and target acceleration, not target speed.

[liveware]

Acceleration is abstracted out of Aurora... I am sure this is because it causes a headache for game stability. If you ever mess around with something like OpenGL, you will discover quickly that is very easy to make a simulation with realistic acceleration blow up rather quickly.

[Jorgen_CAB]

Acceleration is abstracted out of Aurora... I am sure this is because it causes a headache for game stability. If you ever mess around with something like OpenGL, you will discover quickly that is very easy to make a simulation with realistic acceleration blow up rather quickly.

It is not directly abstracted as much as not used for simplicity so there is an in game explanation that means there IS no acceleration of ships, missiles for example. Ships don't use Newtonian movement at all to move larger distances. This is also why volume is the metric of movement restriction and not mass.

We all know that the mechanic around railguns does not make that much sense. But Steve have explained before that it is the mechanic that is most important not reality. You can imagine these weapons to be whatever you want that better suits the mechanics.

The most important thing is that the different weapons are different and interesting from a game play perspective.

[esavier (OP)]

Just to throw something back from me,
i am glad this thread got so much traction!

thank you

[Vasious]

There seems to be a bit of confusion in the thread.

Degradation!=Dispersion.

A kinetic weapon should not suffer range DEGRADATION. That is, no matter how far away you are, the round has the same mass and velocity...so it should do the same damage.

Unless the rounds suffer from Trans-Netwonain Drag and so will come to rest like Ships with no engines