Capital Ship Missiles

[supernova]

A player wipe would be good..only if we got all of our money back...then it would be fine.

EDIT:Sorry Nightfall...didnt see your post.:P

[Nadir]

So... back on topic (and picking pieces of fish of myself)... have we come to any conclusions about cap ship missiles?

1. They're too deadly in numbers against most kinds of ships. I faced a heavily missile based cruiser in a VHF and it was very one sided. Better pilots, light fighters and people with good ping times may have more of a chance than my humble self ...but I think we all agree these missile turrets are too powerful.

2. No ammo - can't be done. Unless I've missed something.

3. I hate and despise and object and will sticky-tape myself to the front of my ship to protest against artificially imposed restrictions on the numbers of turrets of whatever kind one is allowed - it's neither realistic or furthering any RP and would be yet another rule to police and no fun for anyone. Silly. Rebalance the faulty equipment: much easier.

I like the idea of cap ship specialisation so one could build a missile destroyer if one wanted to but it would be crap at roles that missile's don't suit. You could build a Flack cruiser to take down battleships, but have no effect on fighters (unless they're asleep). You could build a multi-roll ship to take on all sorts but not be brilliant at any one kind of target. That way several players could form a wing of ships and use tactics often seen in RTS games and real life military conflicts. In other words I don't want to be forced into building generic ships - the more freedom the better.

To balance missiles Igiss could simply reducing damage, splash radius and turn rate and so on... but better still, focus the weapon to be useful against one type of ship, while less useful against others. You could make it an anti-fighter weapon by increasing the turn rate slightly and dividing the damage by 5 or more (and reduce the range to something sane). I think the flack turret is already an 'anti-slow-moving-thing' weapon and we don't need another variant on the theme.

All in all I think the concept of the function of cap ship missiles needs to be firmed out - what they were invented for, what they're good at and what they're bad at.

(re What is RP or not, that, again, is another topic... Also I apologise for bringing up server wipes in an inappropriate fashion - post edited)

---

ex

[Igiss]

Capship missiles should be good against fighters, for the most part, and capable of dealing some damage to larger ships.

For now, I'm slightly increasing damage (for all), halfing refire rate (for all), increasing energy requirements alot (for all), and increasing range (for battleship turrets).

[Panzer]

Good changes imo.

Btw, speaking of range, could all capital ship turrets get increased range?

Like...Batleship main turrets up to 6-8k, cruisers 5 at most, gunboats no less than 2

---

[Qunitinius~Verginix]

Remember though Templar, a Missile in many Sci fi stories should be able to go father then most projectiles since well, they are missiles and they naturally have longer range...

I do agree, that battleships should be able to engage each other from around 8 k away. It would make for some sweet battles. But the main issue is the draw distance. What I notice with my battleship is that, the camera is so far away from everything so you can see the ship, that your shots will disappear from being too far away. This would be annoying in a combat situation. Anyway it could be fixed? Or is it a client side thing that can be fixed with a better computer.

Verginix Out

---

[Nadir]

Well physics are not FL's strong point... energy weapons will eventually disperse to the point of being harmless (damage would decrease with distance) but anything physical like a missile will go forever until something gets in their way. Missiles would have the unusual property of accelerating until they run out of propellant but after that they would just keep going unguided. Presumably they would be hazardous until their chemical warhead or detonation system degraded with age, which could be millions of years. Now THAT's space junk! Anyway, not really relevant.

---

ex

[Qunitinius~Verginix]

Aye there is a point, but the emery weapons would actually not disperse for a very long time. They only break up once they enter gravity wells and atmosphere, the air makes the particles separate. Hence, why a person would use a bullet firing gun in a human habitable environment and lasers in space.

Verginix Out

---

[Igiss]

Offtopic {

Question that always bothered me is why firearms are never/almost never used for space combat in sci-fi. If someone got ideas (or knowledge) on that, I'd be eager to listen.

}

Missiles will not go 8K or even 3K. For most ships, view distance is 2K (fighters), on a longer distance, you'll barely see a visual of one. Since in FL combat is visual, I won't make missile range too long.

[McNeo]

Aye there is a point, but the emery weapons would actually not disperse for a very long time. They only break up once they enter gravity wells and atmosphere, the air makes the particles separate. Hence, why a person would use a bullet firing gun in a human habitable environment and lasers in space.

Verginix Out

In case you havent noticed, the whole universe interacts with Gravity. Our modest sun has a magnetic field engulfing the entire system including the kuiper belt and the Ort cloud, which are very very far away, though still in our system. What about a star 10 times bigger or a black hole at the centre of a galaxy? They hold our sun in place, and there are many galaxies. So you see, gravity is everywhere and hence energy weapons get affected very easily. Lasers can be used in a ground battle, but they drain huge amounts of power so could only be fitted on somthing quite large, like a cruiser. A laser beam is a concentrated beam of light, and light has a very negligable mass value (though it does have mass otherwise you couldn't bend it).

Energy weapons are possibly the future, as they can be much more concentrated than a nuclear bomb.

Also, Energy weapons, barring the laser, would thiorestically disapate in space because what is holding it all there. Surely the pressure inside a packet of energy would be more than the pressure (0 atmospheres) in space? So hence you get disappation, unless you can arrange the particles in a pressure tight structure. As it stands, we dont even have the weapon yet so it wont happen.

@Igiss: The simple reason for no firearms in a space combat sci-fi is because a red laser cutting things up is much cooler and "futuristic" than a bullet flying at high speed towards the desired target's head. At least thats my understanding of it.

Also, slightly on topic now:lol:, can the view distance be increased in a client side menu. I hate the 5k limit because a person can be on you in an instant and you have no idea what your doing.

eg. Me as a pirate catch a fair amount of traders because i see them on scanners and CD them straight away. They still have no idea whats happening when i start shooting them either. Im more attentive when i trade and i regularly keep the chat menu up to see what my "long range scanners" are picking up.

[Panzer]

Well, this "almost never" is battlestar galactica...

Colonial warships all use firearms. Both the light 30mm autocannons and Battlestars' main batteries require ammo. In the series, the main guns sound off a few times. In my op it looks damn impressive. Huge blasts and bright orbs of matter flying towards a big, fat basestar, poetry:nyam:

Here's a bit of evidence

(Galactica's main batteries, they used either explosive FLAK ammo to set a "firewall around the ship or armor-piercing)


Apart from that, battlestars had several lighter turrets of this type for point defence. They also had missles. Conventional ship-to-ship and with nuclear payload


A nice battle is shown in the "resurrection ship" episode. All these weapons are shown in action there.

---