I’m not sure if Newtonian Aurora suggestions should be going in this thread or in the Suggestions section, but my gut says to keep the Newtonian stuff here.
I’ve been thinking for quite some time (actually done itsy bitsy pieces of my own game about it) about attacking things in space far away from you. This is how I believe that the automatic form of weapon targeting should be accomplished:
When a Fire Control targets an enemy and is about to fire it should calculate (using its projectile speed, whether light speed for a laser, or some smaller value for a plasma bolt, slug, or inert missile) where the enemy would be at the point the projectiles would hit it if the enemy drifted. We will call this the target point. It should then estimate the target bracket in a simplified way, calculate the distance travelled under the targets estimated maximum acceleration (probably whatever the highest acceleration you’ve seen the class accomplish thus far) in the time between the firing time and the impact time. It would add this distance to each direction to get the total width of the target bracket.
Let’s say that the leftmost part of the bracket is called 0, the center (“target point”) is 50, and the rightmost edge of the bracket is 100.
The Fire Control would then look at all the beams under its control (a quad turret would count as four) and divvy up the shots as follows:
Beams: Target Spots
1: 50
2: 25, 75
3: 0, 50, 100
4: 20, 40, 60, 80
5: 0, 25, 50, 75, 100
6: 14, 28, 43, 57, 71, 86
7: 0, 16, 33, 50, 67, 83, 100
Etc, etc.
Now if this bracket represented the offset in the angle the firing ship had to aim its beams than you have the firing solution for that one ship. If you had multiple fire controls on the same ship with the same weapon (maybe just same projectile speed) they could also sum their beams together to best divvy up their shot spread. It’s all coming from the same ship so the same angle offsets would work.
However this wouldn’t be the easiest way to optimize target spread amongst a whole fleet. The easiest way I can see to do that is for the target bracket to not refer to the angular offset, but to instead find that maximum evasion distance from earlier, and then draw a line from your fleet’s current position to your target’s estimated position (assuming drift). Your target bracket now becomes a shorter line perpendicular to this line from your fleet, with a length of twice the evasion distance and centered on this fleet line.
Now count up your beams and divvy up the targets along this new line, and you can use that to get a firing solution for your whole fleet.
For example, a fleet of five ships with two quad turrets each could now cooperate to evenly distribute there 40 shots among the (reasonable approximation of the) entire region their target ship could be when their projectiles reach him.
I think that the same system would be useful for targeting launched missiles (either launched slowly or fired from a railgun). This would naturally make your missile salvo spread out, helpful to conserve losses from your enemies’ defensive nuclear explosions, and ensure that at least some of your missiles will be on a very close vector to your enemy when they light up for final course correction.