C# Aurora Changes Discussion

[Adseria]

Don't forget that you'd probably be able to have ships in orbit too. Their sensors are going to be much more powerful than anything you can fit on a fighter.

And Jorgen, you don't need to see where the attack starts; if you see where it is and where it's going, you can easily trace it back to the source. And as for missiles, even a ship with no sensors whatsoever (and therefore relying on the default thermal sensors) can detect a missile just before it hits the ship, right? Since the minimum range is 10k km, that presumable means it's detected somewhere between 10k and 0 km. Earth's atmosphere is only 100km thick (approximately). Presumably, most combats will be taking place on similar worlds. So, your ships will always be well within range to spot missiles being fired at aircraft. And atmosphere no longer affects beam weapons, so shipboard point defence can be used to protect fighters against SAMs. Therefore, it seems likely that SAMs in the Aurora universe would be a pretty inefficient way to fight. So, AA beam weapons would probably be the major way of fighting.

Or would they? Again, passive sensors could be used to spot the gunfire, and trace it back to the source. And energy weapons are no longer affected by atmosphere, so why not use targeted orbital bombardment to knock out enemy AA?

Incidentally, Steve, I hope manual targeting of orbital bombardment will be a thing? So you can set each FC to target a different ground formation, exactly like space combat (plus maybe an option for "general targeting, where they just shoot at a random formation)? And, presumably, from that point it works like ground based artillery bombardment?

Just a suggestion.

I still fail to see why ground based energy sources and ability to fool even ship sensors could not be far superior. Ships sensors would also be tailored for space not the condition to a specific planet which planet wide sensors, cloaking systems etc. would. If you don't want to believe that ground based fire can be cloaked or enemy sensors fooled that is up to you, but I don't see why it could not or that AA installations can be moved with anti-gravity devices rather quickly after use.

If ground base AA system were as impotent and useless no one would use them. Even the US use ground based AA even if they dominate the skies. Weaker countries rely more on it because it is cheaper and from a defence perspective very strong.

I didn't say they couldn't be moved. But can they be moved faster than the speed of light? Because I'm betting that's how fast a laser blast moves. And I don't imagine the difference between space and atmosphere would reduce the effectiveness of sensors much. After all, ships have no trouble detecting populations from millions of km away. Detecting a missile or laser blast from low orbit shouldn't be that different.

And sure, you could cloak the unit firing the AA weapon. But you can't cloak starship weapons, so why would you be able to cloak surface-based weapons?

And tell me, how many spaceships do the enemies of the US and these "weaker countries" have?

[Titanian]

I think there is something seriously off with the flak suppression task: Imagine two different ground forces: Force A has a few AA units in every formation. Force B has it's AA units a lot more concentrated, with many formations having no AA at all.
Let's assume a fighter force goes on flak suppression agains these forces.

Case A: Fighters pick any formation. Formation has a few AA unit, thus gets some hits. So until the fighters have deprived many formations of their AA units, they will hit some with every attempted attack.

CaseB: Fighters pick any formation. Case B1: This formation has no AA units. Fighters get shot at, but shoot nothing in return. Case B2: Fighters pick a formation with AA units. Fighters attack these units, but since this formation consists mostly of AA units, they only kill a small part of them. This means in general, that the fighters won't have any targets most of the combat rounds, which is clearly preferable.

Something similar happens with force C and D, where force C consists of one large formation (which thus contains all AA units the force has) and force D has lots of small formations, each having max one AA unit. Fighters attacking force D will probably often have no valid targets, or cause massive overkill. This could be made more crazy by including many one-soldier formations into your army, protecting your AA from fighters!

[Garfunkel]

But that isn't really a concern because NPRs will not do that and if a human player wants to exploit and game the system, they are free to do so in a single-player game. After all, if you're going to the trouble of creating thousand single-soldier formations just to protect your AA from NPR fighters, you might as well just use SM to manipulate the battle in the first place - it's much faster and far less work.

But you can't cloak starship weapons, so why would you be able to cloak surface-based weapons?

Starship weapons cannot be hidden because there is nothing to hide them in space. On planet surface, there is. The atmosphere can distort where the laser beam came from, terrain features might enable rapid shoot'n'scoot operations. Counter-fire isn't instant even with computer assistance, because there is always delay and lag: you have to observe the AA fire, then calculate the area where its coming from, then make a decision whether to fire, then get into a firing position, and only then is your counter-fire moving at the speed of light. Fighters operating on a planet are immune to fire from STO and space ships, meaning that they are operating at low enough altitudes that terrain and curvature come into play, so the same things work for the benefit (as well as hindrance) of AA.

Just as an example, Serbia managed to preserve the vast majority of its ground forces, as well as keep her air defence network working, throughout the 1999 Kosovo war. Despite the fact that they were facing the largest and most technologically advanced air power in the world. One reason was that NATO really wanted to avoid casualties, but the Serbs also did many things right. So while sensors get immensely better in Aurora-future, there is no reason to assume that the defensive measures and tricks would remain stagnant.

Basically, I want to avoid a situation where one player can send a bunch of fighters against a planet, divide them on generic ground attack and SEAD missions and them leave them for six months.

[Adseria]

Fair enough.

I mean, I still disagree. But I see that I'm not going to convince anyone.

[Person012345]

I think there is something seriously off with the flak suppression task: Imagine two different ground forces: Force A has a few AA units in every formation. Force B has it's AA units a lot more concentrated, with many formations having no AA at all.
Let's assume a fighter force goes on flak suppression agains these forces.

Case A: Fighters pick any formation. Formation has a few AA unit, thus gets some hits. So until the fighters have deprived many formations of their AA units, they will hit some with every attempted attack.

CaseB: Fighters pick any formation. Case B1: This formation has no AA units. Fighters get shot at, but shoot nothing in return. Case B2: Fighters pick a formation with AA units. Fighters attack these units, but since this formation consists mostly of AA units, they only kill a small part of them. This means in general, that the fighters won't have any targets most of the combat rounds, which is clearly preferable.

Something similar happens with force C and D, where force C consists of one large formation (which thus contains all AA units the force has) and force D has lots of small formations, each having max one AA unit. Fighters attacking force D will probably often have no valid targets, or cause massive overkill. This could be made more crazy by including many one-soldier formations into your army, protecting your AA from fighters!

Presumably they will average out the same, because the fighters will kill far more AA units when they attack the AA blob than when they attack dispersed AA. I'mnot necessarily saying it's how it works now (I'm not sure) but it's how it should end up working.

[Steve Walmsley]

Presumably they will average out the same, because the fighters will kill far more AA units when they attack the AA blob than when they attack dispersed AA. I'mnot necessarily saying it's how it works now (I'm not sure) but it's how it should end up working.

Yes, that is true. Also, you would want to protect your formations from ground support and search and destroy, not just anti-flak, so it doesn't necessarily make sense to concentrate the AA in one place (especially light AA). Plus, if you have heavy AA it doesn't matter where they are located as they can fire on any attacking aircraft. Having said all that, you do have the option of an 'AA blob' if you believe your opponent will use anti-flak instead of ground support.

[space dwarf]

Presumably they will average out the same, because the fighters will kill far more AA units when they attack the AA blob than when they attack dispersed AA.  I'mnot necessarily saying it's how it works now (I'm not sure) but it's how it should end up working.

Yes, that is true.  Also, you would want to protect your formations from ground support and search and destroy, not just anti-flak, so it doesn't necessarily make sense to concentrate the AA in one place (especially light AA).  Plus, if you have heavy AA it doesn't matter where they are located as they can fire on any attacking aircraft.  Having said all that, you do have the option of an 'AA blob' if you believe your opponent will use anti-flak instead of ground support.

You mentioned Combat Air Patrol in your changelist post.  Will this be an air-air intercept mission or a general "loiter in the area of the battle and engage anything you see"?

[Steve Walmsley]

Presumably they will average out the same, because the fighters will kill far more AA units when they attack the AA blob than when they attack dispersed AA.  I'mnot necessarily saying it's how it works now (I'm not sure) but it's how it should end up working.

Yes, that is true.  Also, you would want to protect your formations from ground support and search and destroy, not just anti-flak, so it doesn't necessarily make sense to concentrate the AA in one place (especially light AA).  Plus, if you have heavy AA it doesn't matter where they are located as they can fire on any attacking aircraft.  Having said all that, you do have the option of an 'AA blob' if you believe your opponent will use anti-flak instead of ground support.

You mentioned Combat Air Patrol in your changelist post.  Will this be an air-air intercept mission or a general "loiter in the area of the battle and engage anything you see"?

I haven't written the code yet but at the moment my intention is for CAP to function in the same way as heavy AA - it will engage random hostile fighters.

[Profugo Barbatus]

Steve, the ground combat bombardment rules state each weapon fires once per combat round. Do weapons that fire multiple times in a single shot get multiple shots in ground combat?

It also specifies that accuracy is modified by crew grade and the officers, but does the weapon innate accuracy factor in at all? Otherwise, reduced size, massive rate of fire gauss cannons are going to act as orbital machine guns, slaughtering everything.

either way, the 3 hour window adds a lot of potential for massive reduced size weapon loadouts. In a 3 hour window, you can reload pretty much anything. I could see combat supply ships packing 80cm reduced rate lasers to obliterate enemy forces while dropping supplies.

[Jorgen_CAB]

Or... if balanced properly the reduced sized weapons are suppose to be the most efficient bombardment weapons so there now is a choice with using them versus normal sized weapons for space combat.

[Whitecold]

One thing that seems a bit odd is assigning Fire control directors by ships. I would assume the ships all share their data, and any particular ship can cover almost half a hemisphere. If targets are spread out, a single director cannot provide targeting information for all of them, even if a 100kt battleship is standing ready. On the flipside, if a concentration of units is detected, a bunch of beam FACs should have no trouble firing at the same coordinates.

[Jorgen_CAB]

One thing that seems a bit odd is assigning Fire control directors by ships. I would assume the ships all share their data, and any particular ship can cover almost half a hemisphere. If targets are spread out, a single director cannot provide targeting information for all of them, even if a 100kt battleship is standing ready. On the flipside, if a concentration of units is detected, a bunch of beam FACs should have no trouble firing at the same coordinates.

For the same reason you assign fire-directors for artillery batteries etc... ships are likely assigned to support certain formation during missions and stuff. It has to do with fire-priorities and how you govern the hierarchy of fire-direction. The more channels you need to go through the longer it will take. It usually is easier to assign batteries to certain prioritized missions and sometimes they will be diverted for opportunity fire elsewhere but such fire usually take much longer to coordinate.

At some level someone will decide what is important and not important to support.

We should also not assume that beam weapons are effective at all angles of attack either, especially if there is an atmosphere... but these are abstracted things.

Perfect coordination from one place is probably an utopia very hard to achieve in reality where there are many strong willed people contending for priority and differing opinions.

[Jorgen_CAB]

Presumably they will average out the same, because the fighters will kill far more AA units when they attack the AA blob than when they attack dispersed AA.  I'mnot necessarily saying it's how it works now (I'm not sure) but it's how it should end up working.

Yes, that is true.  Also, you would want to protect your formations from ground support and search and destroy, not just anti-flak, so it doesn't necessarily make sense to concentrate the AA in one place (especially light AA).  Plus, if you have heavy AA it doesn't matter where they are located as they can fire on any attacking aircraft.  Having said all that, you do have the option of an 'AA blob' if you believe your opponent will use anti-flak instead of ground support.

You mentioned Combat Air Patrol in your changelist post.  Will this be an air-air intercept mission or a general "loiter in the area of the battle and engage anything you see"?

I haven't written the code yet but at the moment my intention is for CAP to function in the same way as heavy AA - it will engage random hostile fighters.

Would it be possible to have both CAP and Intercept missions for fighters?

Intercept missions would try to target fighters on ground support missions while CAP would randomly target any fighter or even slightly favor fighters on intercept missions.

It would create some interesting dynamics as in real life.

[davidb86]

Each Forward Fire Direction (FFD) component in a formation allows support from a single ship in orbit or up to six ground support fighters. If more ships and fighters are assigned to a formation than can be supported, the chance to hit is modified by:
Number of FFD / ((Fighters x 6) + Ships).

This may have been mentioned before, but in the formula above for excess ships/fighters shouldn't it be Number of FFD / ((Fighters / 6) + Ships). Since 6 fighters is equal to one ship

[Steve Walmsley]

Each Forward Fire Direction (FFD) component in a formation allows support from a single ship in orbit or up to six ground support fighters. If more ships and fighters are assigned to a formation than can be supported, the chance to hit is modified by:
Number of FFD / ((Fighters x 6) + Ships).

This may have been mentioned before, but in the formula above for excess ships/fighters shouldn't it be Number of FFD / ((Fighters / 6) + Ships). Since 6 fighters is equal to one ship

Yes - text mistake on my part. Above is how the code is actually written.