Posted by: se5a
« on: September 10, 2016, 04:37:56 PM »best is to catch us on IRC. note that we don't always answer right away and you may have to idle for a while depending on time of day/time of week.
Is the project dead, or still in progress?
Could you by any chance upload current version?
>Lore-wise, the BFC is no longer like a normal tracking fire-control. It isn't "Point and Shoot" instead the BFC creates a quantum ion path between the firing ship and the enemy ship. Once this ion path is established, the ion path itself tracks the moving ship. When the Laser is fired, using hand-wavy TN mechanics, the beam travels along the quantum ion path to the target. Similar to lightning. Strong BFC's can create more larger and more powerful ion paths, and ECCM can stabilize the ion paths to be more coherent. ECM on the other hand, destabilizes the ion path and increases the likelihood of a miss.
Why was this mechanically necessary over lasers that just travel in a straight line and fire controls that try to predict the target's location?
Unrelatedly I'd love to hear about how development is going, is there a place I can do that?
I am not sure if its the best place to have a discussion on weapons (suggestion or new thread?). But for what it worth, eventually I'd like some thing along those lines. I think, that ideally its best to avoid rock paper scissors scheme (e.g. all lasers are short range). Instead offer some overlap, and encourage Races to specialize in a specific field, by offering advanced weaponry (e.g. Particle Lance) down the road.
Which would make scavenging and technology sharing that much more important. Although longer range "lasers" might be balance breaking, so some sort of reflective shield or armor coating (against specific frequency) could be used.
you could do two tiers of weapons:
unguided weapons (lasers, particle beams, dumb projectiles(gauss?).:<1ls range, high damage)
tracking weapons (smart projectiles(railgun?), tracking energy weapons (homing plasma?): longer range, tracking mechanics, vulnerable to ecm)
I wonder if cross section of a ship should affect the accuracy of weapons against them?
We're not ready to diverge from the Trans-Newtonian ship movement and introduce acceleration/ship agility quite yet. se5a has stated interested in creating a "Newtonian Pulsar" after Pulsar4x 1.0What about this bit of techno-babble that falls in line with pre-existing lore: Beam weapons fired upon ships of significant tracking distance away don't need to actually travel the whole distance physically? Specifically, it uses the same technology as jump engines to "jump" through the distance between the two vessels in much shorter time it takes to just span it directly. If we want to get less silly, we can say the space between the target and the shot is dilated to be much shorter, but only along the firing vector, whereas such distortion would be interrupted if anything of significant mass cuts through it (which is not a concern for shooting because of how fast projectiles are and how big space is).
In a real military situation, analysts would realize that undirected, constant random movements would effectively dodge any unguided aimed shot against a ship with the size, speed, and acceleration of a Trans-Newtonian ship. If your computer is constantly making minor adjustments to course, you can easily dodge anything when we're talking about the speeds and accelerations involved. This is not an unrealistic situation under the universe's rules, and the only solution I see to counter this is to have either guided beam weapons, or faster-than-light ones. As i said before, I like my scfi to have a little hardness to it. If I have extra time I may introduce light-speed sensors and communications as well.
As of right now, there are no plans to introduce non-lightspeed beam weapons.
+speculativeYou might be looking at this a bit roughly, for an effect like that, we have two interpretations for that:
huge cone of effect weapons (big sweeping laser: unguided, but effectively undodgeable, leading to longer effective range: tends to only do topical damage, can hit multi targets?)
mind you I'm kinda riffing on the concept of being able to turn out of the path of long range beam shots, though I'd think you'd need some kind of limit on how quickly a ship would respond to orders to change course, do it with crew quality, and perhaps ship agility causing a delay between order to turn and turn. that could be very interesting
Will there be a difference between lightspeed weapon and projectile weapon?
My problem is once you start with the superluminal beam weapons it's only a short hop to the $&*(@#(% intergalactic laser nonsense in Force Awakens.Actually, Aurora Beam weapons range is due to 5s pulse technical limitation, not because its not using some "$&*(@#(% nonsense" like superluminal sensors tracking from across the system, instant command relay and laser sniping a ship as if it froze in position for 5 light second.. But such things are usually glazed over with *technobuble* as long as the system is solid.
Which immediately takes you away from one of Auroras main advantages over pretty much all the rest of the 4x field.