C# Aurora Changes Discussion

[Steve Walmsley]

Please allow energy weapons to use the general missile attack rules as well. On the receiving end the difference is minimal.

The principle is that missiles are area attack weapons while energy is precision. Against ships, missiles cause damage via near misses while energy is a direct hit. This isn't ideal as ships should really take variable damage from missiles in that situation and a direct hit with a nuke should kill the ship. However, missiles are powerful enough without adding one hit, one kill capability. I guess one option when I get to coding ship to ship combat is to double warhead strength and use a range of damage instead of fixed amount (so the new strength is the max) but it might be simpler to leave it alone.

Also, nukes in space are far less powerful than nukes in atmosphere (well, less powerful in heat/blast but more powerful in radiation terms), which means I should vary bombardment damage based on atmospheric density but that adds another complication. So the current missile rules are a balance between realism and game play.

I don't want to have a situation where a ship with a single laser can wipe out an entire civilisation from orbit without any cost, allowing your own colonists to move in the next day. The game play rationale is that while a single nuke could take a out a city, energy weapons are designed to hit specific, small targets.

It isn't perfect but it achieves the game play objective of requiring a ground invasion to take a planet relatively intact, while giving energy weapons a meaningful role in planetary combat (in fact, a much larger role in C# Aurora than VB6 Aurora)

[bean]

Also, nukes in space are far less powerful than nukes in atmosphere (well, less powerful in heat/blast but more powerful in radiation terms)

This isn't really true.  There are two major differences.  First, space is big, and thus you aren't likely to have multiple targets within the damage radius because things are spread out more.  Second, spacecraft are pretty durable.  There are durable things on Earth, too, but most people's perceptions of nuclear weapons are shaped by very flimsy Japanese houses getting knocked over and dramatic test footage that doesn't give a good sense of scale. 

[Steve Walmsley]

This isn't really true.  There are two major differences.  First, space is big, and thus you aren't likely to have multiple targets within the damage radius because things are spread out more.  Second, spacecraft are pretty durable.  There are durable things on Earth, too, but most people's perceptions of nuclear weapons are shaped by very flimsy Japanese houses getting knocked over and dramatic test footage that doesn't give a good sense of scale.

My comments were based on the results of testing nuclear weapons in space:

https://history.nasa.gov/conghand/nuclear.htm

[serger]

The principle is that missiles are area attack weapons while energy is precision. Against ships, missiles cause damage via near misses while energy is a direct hit.

Therefore, missile AP pattern must be more, more flat - it must sandpaper nearest half of ship's armor, not digging out a crater (and this rule is also even simpler, than VB6 WH AP pattern rule).

Also, nukes in space are far less powerful than nukes in atmosphere (well, less powerful in heat/blast but more powerful in radiation terms)

They are not, really!
Atmospheric blast wave is very weak and soft comparing to blast wave, stamped in the hull by an instantaneous absorption of x-ray wave and, correspondingly, instantaneous thermal expansion of these layers of hull. In truth, vacuum blast will be delivered to a hull sharper and less weakened by medium absorption, than atmospheric blast. Do you remember Honorverse laserhead blasts? It is the same, as a blast of nuclear near miss - it's not a slow warming up and degradation of an armor. No, it is instantaneous warming up, when outer layer (1cm or 1m layer, depends on the power of warhead and distance) of hull is just transforming instantaneously into an overheated mass - plasma, gas or simply heated armor - and then hummer inner layers with a deadly sharp shock wave.
Look at it from the other side: in vacuum, energy of nuclear blast spreads as a near-spherical wave, and therefore weakened with 2nd power of the distance, while in atmosphere this energy is quickly (comparing with air blast front expansion velocity) redistributing by air reradiation, so it spreads near-uniformly by sphere volume (of the blast sphere), and therefore weakened with 3rd power of the distance, and wasting mostly (99+%) to the mushroom cloud heating and lifting (that is spectacular, but not dangerous for most of this warhead's targets).
Vacuum is an ideal medium for nuclear blast damage! It just spreads there more sharp, less stretched in the time, less distracted at the medium (not target) heating, shaking and degrading, and so on.

I don't want to have a situation where a ship with a single laser can wipe out an entire civilisation from orbit without any cost, allowing your own colonists to move in the next day. The game play rationale is that while a single nuke could take a out a city, energy weapons are designed to hit specific, small targets.

Well, would you like to introduce weapon overheating? It can be represented by very simple rules. For example, overheating time = const * capacitor tech.

[serger]

My comments were based on the results of testing nuclear weapons in space:

https://history.nasa.gov/conghand/nuclear.htm

Is it comparing blasts? No. They just said, that there are no blast in the space. But it's not true, when you deliver powerfull warhead at the durable thick armor vicinity.
(And if you are not defended by that durable thick armor - than you just killed with radiation, yes.)
This test is just not for TN spacecrafts.

[Steve Walmsley]

The loss of an entire side of armour to a depth determined by range of blast was the model I used for Newtonian Aurora:

http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=4329.msg43459#msg43459

This project was based on very detailed mechanics but ultimately it died due to over-complexity. I might convert some of it into a tactical combat game at some point but it won't work strategically. There has to be some trade-off between realism and playability. The current missile damage mechanics work well.

[bean]

My comments were based on the results of testing nuclear weapons in space:

https://history.nasa.gov/conghand/nuclear.htm

I'm reasonably familiar with those results.  All of the energy from the weapon has to go somewhere.  To a first approximation, how badly you are hurt depends on how much energy you get hit with and how durable you are.  There's nothing magic about blast which makes it so much more damaging than the flood of X-rays you get in space.  Spaceships are durable, but so are lots of other things (just not houses, which may, admittedly, be specifically vulnerable to blast).  And space is big, so you're less likely to get multiple targets close enough together to be killed with one hit. 
See http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacegunconvent.php#id--Nukes_In_Space for more details.

Re the behavior of missiles and damage pattern, we can probably reconcile it with only a bit of handwaving.  Maybe there's some sort of focusing being used (see Casaba-Howitzer in the link above) or maybe TN materials are so tough it has to get close enough to start to show near-field effects. 

[serger]

Another sugestion that can limit the overusage of energy/kinetic weapon:
Every shot triggers a roll to maintenance incident, so firing vessels will consume supply much faster and have good chances of disabling weapon, if there is no sufficient supply value.
I think it will be very nice in any case, regardless of orbital bombardment problem.

[Hazard]

I always figured Aurora nukes were contact/extreme proximity detonated; with TN armour technology and protection schemes an armour system that allows that sort of nonsense may actually possible, instead of instantly killing the spaceship from the detonation shockwave propagating through the ship's armour layer and into the ship structure anyway.

I've previously opposed the idea of increasing maintenance requirements as weapons are used, even missile launchers, but it would be a valid manner of removing the threat of free planetary bombardment glassing a planet and readying it for later colonisation. However, if the breakdown is per shot, per gun, and separately calculated, and elegantly handles multiple weapons mounted in a turret it sounds good.

Of course, this leaves a different question; right now maintenance happens effectively instantly when the maintenance roll is made unless there's not enough MSP. Perhaps maintenance speed should depend in part on DC ratings? Given it's maintenance damage control should probably be considerably more effective and thus faster fixing stuff threatened by maintenance rolls, but it's a thing.

[TheDeadlyShoe]

i just don't think energy weapon maintenance failres are a meaningful way of restricting anything. At most, it stops a single light ship from devastating an entire civilization, temporarily, if there's not empty missile ships to feed it MSP. It's such an edge case i think it doesn't really matter. Another aspect is that your ship with a single light laser and 1000 msp is just as deadly in the long term as a ship with 10 lasers and 900 msp.

[serger]

Well, it can be fixed by increasing maintenance consumption and/or adding a feature of increasing maintenance clock with every shot also, but it will require serious rewriting of maintenance rules and I don't like as it sounds, to be honest.

So, maybe some form of weapon overheating mechanics will be more simple and handy. Or even just add a maintenance clock to every component as a class, with a clock increase at the time of battle usage (shot, radar on, shield on, battle power of engines*, squad jump, training exercises as "all included" for these points).

(*) it will require also introducing a nonlinear dependence of speed from power / fuel consumption

[QuakeIV]

If we are talking about space ships with power systems that let them fire lasers comparable in performance to nuclear weapons every few seconds, I think the civilization-destroying potential is pretty obvious, even for small ships.  Nullifying that without any input from the defending player would be kindof counterproductive to the sci-fi nature of the game.  "oh yeah, we can nuke a planet all to hell, but our lasers that have the same energy output cant do smeg" 

Maybe give planets the ability to defend themselves better?  For instance, being able to build 'shield emitter' installations you can drop onto planets to let them mitigate a certain amount of energy/kinetic weapons fire directed at the surface?

Alternatively, require the player to manufacture 'high grade reactor fuel' to run energy weapons?  That way a energy weapon ship can run out of ammo in the same way missile ships can.  Make it marginally cheaper to make energy weapon fuel to compensate for the relatively short range, and I think that might be the better option potentially.  Given that each laser shot is discharging energy on par with nukes, I think it would be reasonable to say that you would need special fuel in order to facilitate that (to shove into your reactors).

Maybe it could be antimatter or something, then when a energy weapon ship gets hit it can have chain reactions of anti matter storage pods, which would be a bit neat.  That also makes it increasingly similar to missile ships though, so maybe not.

[serger]

It's more funny now, that a small kinetic fighter can now kill a civilization, having no supply line.
But I agree, that it's a question of micomanagement requirements, not only disbeleave.

[QuakeIV]

Right, but I'm saying given what that fighter is supposed to be able to do, thats completely credible.

[serger]

Hmmm. Well, if this fighter will consume 1kg of bullets per shot and will spit it out with, say, 60 000 km/s (0.2c), then every hit is an equivalent of 0.04kg mass excess, that is quite near to 1Mt nuclear warhead. So, really, every small fighter can bring enough bullets to kill planetary civilization with simple orbital bombardment.
But therefore it cannot be stopped by earth-like atmosphere! When this bullet with this velocity hits an atmosphere dense enough to stop it, that will be just an equivalent of an air nuclear explosion. Then this fighter cannot dig out bunkers in this planet's surface, but it can burn cities and rural areas to the ashes. So that is area damage, not a TN missile warhead, that is durable enough to pierce any atmosphere and knock out a bunker with near hit.

Aaaaand... if you have no such atmosphere, than your surface is open for natural bombardment with high energy space particles, so there is no surface cities and rural ares here. So there is no need in some complicated rules, just 3 cases:
1. Atmo is not dense enough for surface pop and commercial infrastructure. Thus, kinetic weapon have a point hit effect only (weakened by atmo density proportionally).
2. Atmo is dense enough for surface pop and infrastructure. Kinetic bombardment is able to kill those surface pop and infrastructure very effectively, but cannot affect TN-armored objects and underground infrastructure*. And it have no residual radiation effect, because there is just not enough mass in those bullets to deliver noticeable quantities of heavy unstable isotopes or pierce an atmo with enough energy to make those isotopes from the surface materials.
3. Atmo is dense enough to prevent pop and surface (not an underground) infrastructure. Thus, kinetic bombardment is unable to kill this pop nor dig out any bunker or underground infrastructure. You have to use mesons or missiles in this case.

(*) I mean - C# underground infrastructure, not VB6 one. IIRC, there will be atmo-ralated infrastructure, not a queer gravity-related, as in VB6.