Fire Control question and Acceleration gates

[Poojawa (OP)]

Frustrated by the lack of good weapon range, I SM'd full fire control range and tracking speed.

with x4 size and range/speed, the fire control tower is limited to only 1,400,000 km and 100,000 KM/s tracking speed.

Yet 80cm Far Gamma Ray Laser turrets reach out to 20160k km

Sure, I like missile ranges up to a billion KM it seems like >.>, but there's something satisfying about cooking your foes in weaponized gamma radiation lasers. Is there any chance of a much longer ranged FC with higher accuracy at longer ranges as well? Perhaps resolution improvements like the active sensors?

Also, would it be possible to perhaps have acceleration/mass driver gates that are able to put ship in 'hyperspace' within the hyper limit?

Right now I have the only jump point in the Sol system that somehow moved out to about 1.40b km away from the homeworld, which takes quite a while to get to and from (a week on the average 6000 km/s or so ) easily

[sloanjh]

Frustrated by the lack of good weapon range, I SM'd full fire control range and tracking speed.

with x4 size and range/speed, the fire control tower is limited to only 1,400,000 km and 100,000 KM/s tracking speed.

Yet 80cm Far Gamma Ray Laser turrets reach out to 20160k km

Sure, I like missile ranges up to a billion KM it seems like >.>, but there's something satisfying about cooking your foes in weaponized gamma radiation lasers. Is there any chance of a much longer ranged FC with higher accuracy at longer ranges as well? Perhaps resolution improvements like the active sensors?

This (that the actual beam range is significantly longer than the fire control range) is intentional, and was arrived at after much evolution of the interplay between fire-control and weapons.  The idea is that the hard part is hitting the target (especially if the target is jinking), not getting energy out to the range that the target is at.  In addition, you'll notice that 1.4M km is slightly less than the 1.5M km that light travels in 5 seconds.  Steve wanted to avoid relativistic delay issues/paradoxes, so he set things up so that he didn't have to model delays between firing a weapon and having it hit.  So my suspicion is that Steve's not going to be very enthusiastic about changing this

Also, would it be possible to perhaps have acceleration/mass driver gates that are able to put ship in 'hyperspace' within the hyper limit?

Right now I have the only jump point in the Sol system that somehow moved out to about 1.40b km away from the homeworld, which takes quite a while to get to and from (a week on the average 6000 km/s or so ) easily

I don't see this one changing any time soon either - a week's travel time to get to a jump point is actually fairly typical.  

John

[Poojawa (OP)]

Ah, alright.

It's just boring having to fight with missiles all the time - I'm a sucker for the old WWII surface battles between capital ships.


And drat on the acceleration gates, would have been useful for slow freighters or such, ah well.

[Journier]

Ah, alright.

It's just boring having to fight with missiles all the time - I'm a sucker for the old WWII surface battles between capital ships.


And drat on the acceleration gates, would have been useful for slow freighters or such, ah well.

I think we are all suckers for old Battleship combat and how it occurred.

Something about it is so amazing.

You can still have those types of combats, but you just need a big heavy battleship with enough point defense fire and speed to catch your opponents.

Huge part of WW2 ideal was to have a ship that was faster than the other guys ship so you could retreat at will and force the combat.

[Journier]

Ah, alright.

It's just boring having to fight with missiles all the time - I'm a sucker for the old WWII surface battles between capital ships.


And drat on the acceleration gates, would have been useful for slow freighters or such, ah well.

I think we are all suckers for old Battleship combat and how it occurred.

Something about it is so amazing.

You can still have those types of combats, but you just need a big heavy battleship with enough point defense fire and speed to catch your opponents.

Huge part of all naval warfare was to have a ship that was faster than the other guys ship so you could retreat at will and force the combat.while also having possibly same weapons and less armor. etc etc etc.