Long range primary weaponry?

[SuperG]

Warfare in space would just be a result of what tactical and strategic choice the made and what worked well and what not. Sometime try things out and adopt to what is sucsesfull.

So it depends what the enemy does and what there tactics are.

Force or production of it could be we go for lot of light big missile frigates wich do most of the task force rolez. The counter part would react on this choice by anti frigate solutions. If the are sucsesfull with there frigate tactics the keep it.
The other adopt to the same tactic or specilised force of anti frigate solution in huge numbers. If sucsesfull the enme adopt to counter the tactic.

So I think space warfare is a dynamic fenomena it depends in what fase you are and if the war is symetric or asymitric in numbers but also tactical solutions.

Example naval carrier group has several layers off defence.
First interceptor wing.
Second longrange missiles
Third short range missiles
4th gatling guns also anty air and anti missile.

Fighter vs capital ship.
Well in airforce they got this the HARM missile so make them blind.
In Space if using passive sensors. The would do carpet bombing.

In space it would be a high incomming fighter with a shotshel cannon fire cloud of high velocity cloud of buck shot wich make a mess of a sensor arry.

Missiles with frag shell aimd like a claymore up front could trigger at specific distance so you got a schrapnel spry on the capital survice.

In this fase you loose a lot of fighter class vessel till the capship is blinded.
Then you can spam the anti capship with high yield solution to make a mess of the capship.

I wouldnt call it fighter vs capital ship.
But multirolefighter or strike fighter or light bomber vs capital.
It is huge number vs one big thing.

Capital ships how ever could counter this is several ways.
Being light armord but huge so lot of senor spread out and reduncdancy. Also not al sensors are exposed but only part where replacement or reservers are covers with armor shield that could get open.

Most war are settled with those who have the high numbers or and can replace them fast.

[Rabiator der II.]

If you want realistic, space battles would likely happen at ranges where you cannot see the enemy with the naked eye.

The X series is more about fun than realism, therefore the tendency towards close combat. But sometimes it appears a bit too cramped, even World War I sea battles happened at up to 20km range. See this for instance: http://www.worldwar1.co.uk/despatches/b ... tland.html

Of course this is a matter of taste, but personally I'd like to see the speed, weapon range and bullet speed of most X³ ship classes increased by maybe 50%. Still below Jutland range, but with a bit less risk of crashing into each other on a crowded battlefield

[Fallent]

Of course this is a matter of taste, but personally I'd like to see the speed, weapon range and bullet speed of most X³ ship classes increased by maybe 50%. Still below Jutland range, but with a bit less risk of crashing into each other on a crowded battlefield

Seconded, it would be pretty nice to extend the range of all ships, weapons and make the fights a little longer and more detailed. The new module system they are bringing in should hopefully help a whole lot with that!

[PookyMacMan]

Seconded, it would be pretty nice to extend the range of all ships, weapons and make the fights a little longer and more detailed. The new module system they are bringing in should hopefully help a whole lot with that!

I totally agree, as long as the bullets will be faster too...imagine current CIGs, HEPTs, or PPCs firing at 20km.

I'm in favor of long range weaponry as long as bullet speed is increased as well.

[Alan Phipps]

Isn't increasing the range and increasing the bullet speed/accuracy in proportion pretty much the same as leaving things as they are now but just making all the capital-size ships smaller? Also you begin to skew the gun v missile combat balance.

[shadowrunner85]

Isn't increasing the range and increasing the bullet speed/accuracy in proportion pretty much the same as leaving things as they are now but just making all the capital-size ships smaller?

Yes it is, this is way it has bothered me that everyone is talking about km, when game engine units and 3d modeling tools are with out denomination.
This is way in the post I stared on the same topic a while back I used the length of a capship as a reference measurement, I pointed out that I think that all ship classes should have somewhere between 10-20times the weapon range of the ships length.

[Rabiator der II.]

Isn't increasing the range and increasing the bullet speed/accuracy in proportion pretty much the same as leaving things as they are now but just making all the capital-size ships smaller? Also you begin to skew the gun v missile combat balance.

In terms of combat balancing, it is similar to making all ships smaller. Fighters also become more difficult to hit.

The overall effect might be like playing BSG Diaspora for a change, which I liked. More challenging than X3TC, but still manageable even for an old fart like me .

Outside combat, it would make getting through those jumpgate-less Terran sectors less tedious. My Valkyrie in X3TC is actually quite nice for that, at 540 m/s. You also need to start paying a bit of attention to traffic, looking twice a minute if something might be on a collision course is no longer enough. Based on that, I think I'd like a bit more speed throughout the game. M3s at 300 m/s sounds about right.

@Shadowrunner: Based on my sense of size in the game, reading the speed as m/s seems to make sense to me. Also, whatever screenshot I can find on short notice has m/s as unit for speed in the ship info. So does my X3TC installation, but having the TOTT mod installed, this could be nonstandard . I'm just not sure ATM.

[Wraith_Magus]

In that respect, I don't particularly think we should have "main guns" unless we want to climb into the turret to aim manually.

The way that the game is now, M3-M5 ships are basically little more than Korean-War/Vietnam-War-era early jets shooting at each other with machine guns. The fact that I'm constantly almost ramming into things if I fly a ship faster than my target makes little sense. When I fly a fighter near a capital ship, I am fighting at a range where I can be weaving between the cap ship's turrets. That's like landing on an enemy aircraft carrier in order to shoot at its deck crews directly.

It undermines the notion that you're in space, and that we're dealing with futuristic technologies to have things play out like it's being fought in 1960's tech.

I'd rather have to rely upon targeting computers to aim at enemy ships I can't recognize but for the targeting blip on a gravidar screen. In Mass Effect, where they didn't have to model any of that, they basically out-and-out say that the range any ship engages in combat is the range at which the ability of evasive maneuvers and ship size is overcome by the speed of the weapon, itself. Hence, you sort the distance each ship fights at by size and maneuverability, and someone's going to die right fast when you get a capital ship into a fighter's effective range (which can move out of the way of a shot in a fraction of a second, compared to taking several seconds for a capital ship). It basically just becomes impossible to dodge or miss at that range.

By those rules, you'd measure distances in light seconds, not kilometers, since the time between when something moves, you can see it's moved, fire, and the laser or whatever reaches its target is all going to be based upon lightspeed, not the speed of sound (around 300 m/s as we play with now).

(Light seconds, for those who don't know, are laughably huge distances - around 300,000 kilometers. It's talking about shooting at things that aren't even pixels from distances far greater than the diameter of planets.) (Of course, if we're going for realism, ships themselves shouldn't have speed limits but for when they hit relativistic speeds of around 1/2 or more the speed of light, either, aside from their rate of acceleration or deceleration, but I'm sure everyone knows about that, already, too.)

A realistic space battle would basically be like standing on the moon (conveniently, around a light second away from Earth) and trying to shoot a specific car on Earth that is driving at top speed, dodging and weaving. It's a feat that no human hand or eye is equipped to handle, you'd have to hand it all over to the AI.

Capital ships would be like New York City in a gunfight with a city on Mars. (Or to bring it into a human-understandable scale, like two humans having a fight with two pieces of artillery spaced a hundred miles apart trying to aim at each other with their GPS.)

So, as much fun as it might be to try out, I doubt all that many people welcome a "you have to turn your ship around halfway to your destination, and hit a full burn to decelerate" type of game, and realistic distances are pretty much right out the window, but that doesn't mean that the game has to feel so downright claustrophobic. At the very least, if I park my Kestrel to open up my property window and manage freighters, I shouldn't have to worry about the fact that there's a decent chance another ship will RAM ME when I should be the only object for kilometers around.

Part of the thing is, we aren't going to be in those capital ships, so the sense of scale doesn't have to be matched to the player's viewpoint. You can have them bombarding each other from the other side of the planet, using the planet's gravity well to arc the shot towards the target, or engaging in slugging matches from 100 kms away, or firing off torpedoes from 1,000 kms away (gives smaller ships plenty of time to pick torpedoes off, too). You can make fighting a capital ship that Speck of Doom in the distance that takes a very brave pilot indeed (if not one with plenty of drone cannon fodder) to come within the sort of distance where you can be flying around that ship.

That can, in turn, be where the player's role has meaning - where defeating the fighter screen, and getting close enough that a capital ship can't dodge can mean victory for your side, while capital ships are at distances that make them irrelevant to the dogfight unless they are willing to risk bombarding their own side, still preserving the sense of scale of space combat, without the silly distances that make you wonder why you don't just strap a giant bayonet onto the bow of your M2 and ram your opponents.

When speaking of camera angles in Battlestar, as well, we already have those little monitors at the top left and right of the HUD. Why not just use holo HUD visual enhancement, where, instead of looking at a red box around a ship, the game auto-inflates that ship with a view finder. If we spread everything out further, there shouldn't be terribly much competition for things that are on your screen at once, barring missile or drone swarms, which you could just inflate the ones you're currently targeting or pointing at.

I'd also say that it might be cool to just make capital ships just be really, really crappy at maneuvering, and making capital ship weapons kind of slow, as well. Make a shot take 5-20 seconds to cross those 100 km distances (with mutual destruction possible), and have cap ships with such poor maneuvers that only the smaller or more nimble can dodge down to ranges of 80 km or so, and make engaging corvettes and fighter drones that can scramble erratically only really possible at ranges of 20 km or less, even with faster, more accurate (or flak) weapons. (Unless you're being an idiot, and forgetting to waggle.)

[SuperG]

Your forget one thing huge vessels do not dodge but intercept incoming ordinance with counter measures.

Incomping missiles are intecept on long range with missiles.
Medium range with massdriver. Due to the velocity difference the kenectic energy is so high for these small object they totaly disintergrate to fine debri or gasses or plasma. Even large railgun projectiles can be intercepted.
Depending on sensor fidelity even smaller.
It depens if the capital ship is overflooded with enemy ordinance.

They could find a way to counter plasma beams.
Laser is difficult to intercept as you wont see it coming. Armor with high melt point or dsperse heat efficent.

[Wraith_Magus]

At a great enough range, capital ships can dodge. If it takes a long enough period of time for a shot to travel the distance to the target, you can dodge.

Keep in mind, you don't have to see a shot to dodge it. When I played Team Fortress Classic, one of the things I learned playing against the top-level clan players was how to dodge soldier rockets being fired at point-blank range... by understanding the timing of the shots. I just memorized when the next shot would come, and would be running left, but dodge right the fraction of a second before the next shot was coming, before my opponent could recognize my change in direction, and was still shooting for where I would have been, not where I was suddenly going.

You can dodge a laser without seeing it by just being so far away (from a fraction of to several light seconds away, based upon how long it takes your omnidirectional thrusters to push you a hull's width away, barring slow targeting computer re-acquisition times) that your random motion cannot be accounted for. (And that's with actual speed-of-light weapons, if capital ships are dodging slower weapons, it's possible at much shorter ranges.)

The computer's targeting is based upon your current velocity, not your current acceleration. Against an M5 currently, the targeting will only be accurate whenever the M5 actually levels out (or you have a PBE or other very fast weapon), and will miss because the ship is turning, otherwise. If you just barrel roll and zig-zag, you can throw off most shots that aren't so close relative to shot speed that your dodging is meaningless.

The capital ships are just the same thing, but they're much bigger, slower targets that have to stand much further away to make themselves relatively small targets again.

It means that "maximum range" is a less meaningful term than "maximum effective range against this target", as range is a matter of how close you have to get to a target until it's relatively large, and has too little time to move a full hull's-width before your shot gets there. The maximum range of a weapon against a small, nimble fighter is much shorter than against a huge, slow capital ship.

To think about it differently, we might think of bullets as flying instantaneously to their target, but that's only because gunfights usually take place at very close ranges of around 50 meters or less. Meanwhile, those bullets, even high-powered ones, are "only" going around 400 m/s, which is around the same speed as slower shots in this game. It's just that in this game, HEPTs are useless against faster, smaller targets except at very close range.

When I watched my brother play a game like Battlefield 3, where you actually have bullet physics instead of hitscan and can fire a sniper round from over a kilometer away, it does take around 3 seconds for the bullet to actually reach its target, and against a target that far away, dodging is really easy - you hardly have to move at all and don't need to know the enemy has fired to (accidentally) dodge a sniper round. It's basically impossible to hit you unless you stand stock-still or move at a slow, predictable clip. That's because it's easy to move a full human-width to the side unexpectedly in that three second window between firing the shot and being hit.

It's just that 2 km is a common range to engage targets in the X universe, not an uncommon, extreme range. You still can't really hit an M5 without getting to within 500 meters or using a much faster-flying round, however.

When the game is being reformatted, there is a choice that can be made, here.

If capital ship weapons can be fired from over 100 km away, but they only travel at 2 km/s, then that's 50 seconds from the time of firing to potential impact, and 50 seconds for that ship to change its course significantly enough to put a shot off target. (Even the current PPC's 6 km range has only a 333 m/s shot speed, adding up to around 20 seconds to reach its target at maximum range. Even the "slow" bullet of 2 km/s is an order of magnitude faster than current weapons.) It's just a matter of capital ship maneuverability relative to size when you have 50 seconds to push your giant metal mass out of the way.

That gives you options for the trade-off of faster bullets (like a 10 km/s capital ship weapon, which would be accurate out to around 5 times the distance of the 2 km/s weapon) for lower power, which is basically what you tend to see in the current FAA, used for targeting smaller ships at closer ranges, but also, potentially, for just plain being a longer-range weapon against warships while slower, heavier weapons are still just plain too slow to be within effective range but for a closer 10-20 km or so.

Again, when you make range based upon accuracy rather than arbitrary cutoff point (although for certain weapons like lasers or the PBG, becoming unfocused to the point where they are ineffective past a certain range while being very fast at close ranges makes sense), the more maneuverable the ship, the closer an enemy must get to make their shots accurate.

=====

Torpedoes, meanwhile, still need to be shot down from much greater ranges because they have a major advantage over ironsight energy weapons - they can readjust their aim mid-flight, and as such, stay accurate even over great distances (provided their target is not faster than they are).

It would actually be a great addition to have torpedoes, meanwhile, that have maneuvering thrusters of their own, and can erratically "jiggle" on their way to the target to increase their odds of evading incoming fire as they close on their targets.

The same thing goes for drones, especially when fired like a torpedo at an enemy ship - constant evasion to take advantage of their compact nature, allowing them to get in closer to an enemy target.

=====

The notion that you can intercept things like a railgun round, meanwhile, starts getting kind of silly. You're literally talking about shooting a bullet with another bullet. (Bullets, I might add, that could be potentially moving at relativistic speeds.) It would only really be possible to track and aim a shot at a bullet at the sort of incredible ranges that you could probably already just have dodged the bullet if you were firing your maneuvering thrusters. It only makes sense against torpedoes because they're already just plain slow but capable of chasing a target. There's no reason to shoot a HEPT you can just dodge.

Keep in mind that in real physics, things don't just disintegrate when destroyed, either - that mass, that energy, whether it is a plasma bolt or a metal slug, still has energy and mass, and will continue to fly until it hits something, even if broken apart. You want to deflect a bullet to help you dodge it more easily, but just shooting something through it only turns it into a shotgun spread. (Which is the problem scientists had with the movie Armageddon.)

[Bobucles]

One big thing you're assuming is perfect accuracy in space. It is unbelievably difficult to hit small targets at range because anything can throw the aim off. One of the best shots in public history was hitting a target at 2400 meters. That's 3-5 arcseconds of accuracy, quite possibly the best known to man.

With sniping, a simple heartbeat can send the shot careening off target. The tiniest thing can cut your effective range by an order of magnitude.

On a ship you have stomping crew members, revving engines, docking ships and a dozen other things shaking the ship up. At 400000km, a deviation of one arcsecond will send the shot a km off target, on top of the target doing its own evasive maneuvers. Add in the rumble of flak cannons, microimpacts from dusted ordinance, the steady rat-tat of fighter craft, and it's a wonder if you can get target lock at all. Simply listening to dubstep is going to cripple a ship's effective range!

A perfectly silent drone cannon might be able to hit those excessive ranges. But a ship in the heat of combat is going to have its range reduced by orders of magnitude.

[Wraith_Magus]

Well, to be honest, there's no reason to have human pilots in a fighter craft if we're going hard science.

A "real" space fighter would probably look like a dodecahedron with thrusters sticking out of every direction, and would constantly be making jarring shifts in thrust at G-forces that would kill a human, and shooting at targets that would be too far away for a human hand to accurately fire upon, and in space, at such insanely large distances, there's no reason an AI autopilot can't handle flying. Why waste valuable mass on life support and cockpits? Just fly it by machine.

Random vibrations reducing the range by an order of magnitude seems fair, however. (I was assuming perfect accuracy based upon a notion that a machine's weapons' gyroscopes would just naturally cancel the motion, but it wouldn't be so perfect as to eliminate ALL motion.) It would still be relative to the size of the ship, however, meaning that effective range is still a factor of evasion and size, but that evasion would matter slightly less in a more random spray, since you could accidentally dodge into an off-target spray of "bullets" by chance.

That's ironically a good thing for this game, in fact, compared to earlier games like X Wing, where, due to all shots traveling at the same speed, and with dead-eye accuracy upon your velocity-not-acceleration path, you could simply pull slightly back and left on the joystick, go into a long, slow, continuous barrel roll, and no shot would ever hit you, as they would all unerringly fly towards where you would have been if you ever leveled out.

However, we're still talking about ranges that are absurd for a game like this (especially for a human-hand-operated turret) if we are using lasers or other relativistic kill vehicle weapon. If we talk about maximum ranges for capital ships at 100 km, and fighter craft that can effectively engage with other highly evasive fighter craft at 5 km (although the weapons themselves may have a maximum range of 15 km or so that would still be effective against capital ships), and using projectiles that are, at most, 20 km/s, with some as slow as 1 km/s, (all of which is still asking for a massive increase in range and weapon speed over the current game,) then the minor vibrations are less of an issue, although human hand twitching and sheer inability to control a mouse so finely will still be an issue for drone-swatting at long range, if not bombarding a capital ship.

By simply balancing the speed of the projectiles to the damage they can inflict, you can still have "maximum effective ranges" against different targets - an anti-capital-ship cannon that has a maximum range of 100 km but only flies at 2 km/s is going to be useless against tiny, nimble fighter drones outside of 3 km. (Any fighter not going on a suicidal straight-line charge will easily change direction by a full hull-width within a second and a half.)

Sure, it would be strange/amusing (and possibly lead to mutual knock-outs in capital ship combat) to see cap ship weapons take 50 seconds to reach their targets... but current PPCs have a range slightly over 6 km and 333 m/s speed, giving it a bit less than 20 seconds to reach its target at maximum range. (And PPCs are already useless against a fighter that isn't dumb enough to fly directly at a turret shooting at them.)

Capital ship anti-fighter weapons, then, would be the 20 km/s weapons that could increase their swatting-range to possibly as far away as 30 km/s, but at the same time, if we rely upon a maximum effective range, rather than an arbitrary maximum range, fighter weapons would be able to strike capital ships from a far greater distance than they could dogfight with other fighters.

Again, there are reasons for lasers to diffuse at a maximum range, or for other weapons, like ion weapons or PBGs to have maximum ranges shorter than a maximum effective range would otherwise be, based upon the projectile speed, but generally, making weapon ranges based upon the relative speed of the projectile and the relative size and maneuverability of the ships in question makes for a better sense of progression and range. It would mean you engage M1 ships at greater range than M7s, which are engaged at greater range than M6s, which are engaged at greater range than fighters/drones, even when using the same weapons.

It would also still preserve the notion of flak weapons (which could also be weak "sniper weapons" that work at longer ranges, but without the damage capacity of a slower, more powerful weapon).

(Of course, this all throws the notion of a RKV completely under the bus if slower = more powerful, but that's beside the point.)

I would also point out that, if only from a computer resources perspective, the longer-range and slower-flying the weapon, the more sense it makes to have that weapon system have a slower rate of fire, just because the game can't track a million individual bullets at a time. Hence, those ultra-long-range bombardment guns that take 50 seconds to reach their target should probably only fire every 10 seconds or so.

Also on the topic of drones and range...

If we have targetable sub-systems of a capital ship, as well, there becomes a more viable strategy for using fighter drones than simply trying to deal hull damage.

One of the strategies I remember using to great effect in Nexus was to have my cap ships target an enemy cap ship's flak turrets (the only thing that would even fire upon my bombers), while running away so as to give my cap ship's shields time to recharge when need be. When I took out the flak turrets, I could send in the bombers to dive-bomb individual weapons and the engines (which were exterior features of a ship that bombers could target without needing the capacity to damage hulls that they did not possess) until the enemy ship was toothless and adrift. Then, they could be picked off at my leisure.

This means that you could have drones whose purpose is just to suicide-dive-bomb the heavy weapons of a cap ship in swarms that would not be enough to overcome the hull, but may be enough to overwhelm flak turrets long enough to get a weapon system or two offline. (Especially if it's the flak turrets, themselves.)

As for torpedoes, I'm not sure we really do need them having a range an order of magnitude greater than that of other types of weapons. Bombers-as-corvettes that just sit outside of weapons ranges, and just spam torpedoes all day makes sense from a strategic perspective, but there's reason to keep them in the same zip code as the fight. (I also think such weapons are actually better suited towards having top/bottom anti-fighter turrets, rather than rear only, and firing missiles rearward, so it can retreat from pursuers as it fires its artillery-like barrage, but that's just me...) A range of 300 km, or maybe 500 km for capital-to-capital nukes, and 50 km or so for drone-swatters seems reasonable.

(Extreme-range torpedoes that take one or two minutes to reach their target while a fighters-only "no man's land" in the middle of a major battle for space superiority dogfighting does raise the use of drones to include long-range torpedo interception, however.)

When talking about torpedoes, however, I'd like to see two things: One, dive-bomber munitions that dive-bomber drones can use that gain power from going on their diving attacks (that make them incredibly vulnerable while they are on their diving run) to be used against either corvette hulls, or capital ship weapons turrets. Two, I would like to see more MIRV-like weapons that can break apart into multiple warheads after traveling a certain distance to the target - either for tracking multiple small drones, or to frustrate anti-torp point defense turrets. In the latter case, the single warhead splitting apart only at a certain range would put greater value upon intercepting the torpedo before it hits that splitting distance, giving an advantage to those that win the small fighter superiority contest.

(Wow, my idle ramblings are getting more and more text-heavy, aren't they?)

[Bobucles]

By simply balancing the speed of the projectiles to the damage they can inflict, you can still have "maximum effective ranges" against different targets - an anti-capital-ship cannon that has a maximum range of 100 km but only flies at 2 km/s is going to be useless against tiny, nimble fighter drones outside of 3 km. (Any fighter not going on a suicidal straight-line charge will easily change direction by a full hull-width within a second and a half.)

Weapon spread, turret speed, and fire rate will get the point across FAR more effectively.

A weapon that fires every 5 seconds has very few dice rolls, period. A weapon that deviates .5km at full range has no chance at hitting a fighter long range (and is useless for targeting subsystems). A weapon with narrow scope, slow tracking turrets (or even a spinal mount) becomes ineffective for hitting fighters at short-medium range. Being able to OHKO a fighter is pointless if the shot is impossible!

The problem with obscenely slow bullets is that even capital ships start dodging them. 50 seconds to connect is a VERY long time. That's time to lag, time to run into the bullets, and time that combat isn't happening. I don't think anyone wants to wait a whole minute between the first volley and the first damage report.

[Wraith_Magus]

Weapon spread, turret speed, and fire rate will get the point across FAR more effectively.

A weapon that fires every 5 seconds has very few dice rolls, period. A weapon that deviates .5km at full range has no chance at hitting a fighter long range (and is useless for targeting subsystems). A weapon with narrow scope, slow tracking turrets (or even a spinal mount) becomes ineffective for hitting fighters at short-medium range. Being able to OHKO a fighter is pointless if the shot is impossible!

The problem with obscenely slow bullets is that even capital ships start dodging them. 50 seconds to connect is a VERY long time. That's time to lag, time to run into the bullets, and time that combat isn't happening. I don't think anyone wants to wait a whole minute between the first volley and the first damage report.

And that's part of the point - I don't think an arbitrary maximum range is necessarily a good idea (aside from some weapons that might have a reasonable range limitation based upon its weapon type, like the flamethrower-like PBG) I'd rather see weapon range determined by the effective range a shot is possible.

So yes, capital ships should, at some range, actually be capable of dodging. An M7 should be a big, easy target for darn near anything at ranges less than 15 km, but capable of dodging the really big, capital ship busters at their maximum range.

It also gives meaning to the differences between races at the capital ship level - Split ships have lower shields, but their speed advantage is basically meaningless in a M2. If their capital ships can dodge at a somewhat closer range (say, 50 km instead of 60 km) then their racial specialty can have some meaning again.

Beyond that, if we are talking about protecting the poor, abused fighters from being worthless against a capital ship, what about the M6 class (which seems to be what we'll be stuck in the whole game), as well as the M7 class? Shouldn't a M7, as large as it is, be capable of dodging at least better than a M1? By sorting ranges by maximum effective range rather than arbitrary maximum range, you give the M6 and M7 class ships the chance to survive the trip to where they can start firing upon their opponents.

What's more, you make smaller ships generally more important, since you make packs of M6-type ships capable of "dogfighting" at long range against larger targets. After all, if you increase range, weapon speed, and ship speed, as has already been mentioned, what you are effectively doing is making everything smaller.

That means that your M6 would be a "capital ship" compared to a drone, where you have to swat away the tiny, maneuverable things from a large, slow ship, but at the same time, your M6 could be a "fighter" against a much larger capital ship that could dogfight or make bombing runs. The sense of speed and nimbleness is entirely one of scale, and that is always relative.

I, for one, will miss the option to buzz around at max speed in a Kestrel, and have always enjoyed speed over power in these types of games. By underlining how size and nimbleness are entirely relative to the ships you are fighting, you can give the player both the notion that they are giants beset by rodents, and mice slaying giants within the same battle. But it takes the effectiveness of weapons having that same sliding relative effectiveness, as well.

I'm not saying that we shouldn't use those things you mention, (I even was talking about fire rate, I'd point out,) except possibly turret rotation speed. (There may be problems when dealing with the same turret possibly having anti-fighter flak weapons or else anti-capital weapons... why would the turret suddenly turn slower when switching to fire different sets of weapons?)

[Scraphound]

I would love to see capships with powerful long range MAIN weapons. Beam cannons that fire solid beams 30+kms or so, but with capships moving so slowly that those weapons aren't really going to hit fighters unless the fighters fly into the beams. Hence you don't want to find yourself caught between two brawling juggernauts.

Then a mix of heavy and light turrets, the ratio of which depends on the ship. Heavy turrets carry weapons meant for trade ships, corvettes, and also capships. Not as much range as the main guns. Easier to aim, but still a bit difficult to hit a fleet fighter. Then you've got light turrets with quick tracking and rapid firing, but very short ranged weaponry. Your anti-missile/fighter point defense systems, basically.

So if you're a fighter and you're a good pilot you probably don't have to worry too much about capships unless you get really close. You can focus on battling their screening fighters while they're duking it out in epic battles around you. If you decide to come in close and target their shield generators, however, you're going to have to contend with those turrets.

More than anything, I'd like capships to get major buffs in the hull department. I'm really sick of seeing capital ships explode almost the instant they lose their shields. All ships, for that matter. I'd much rather capital ships battle for minutes at a time rather than seconds. They should be absolutely epic.

[Shrewd135]

We have x editor... has anyone actually tried just modifying all the bullet values and having a couple fleets go at each other to see how it works out????

We can discuss it all day long, or we can actually simulate it in game and see if it works.

[Shrewd135]

ok So I did exactly that... My first test


I tried to give all fighter craft around 8km range to their weapons, and for heavy weapons was to set the values at around 10-12km range.

The results were better... and worse.

What was done... to get the 10km range, mostly I did not change the speed of the weaponry but instead modified its lifetime. So say a PPC has a range of 6km now.. because the shot fires at 400 meters/seconds * 15 seconds = 6000m (or 6km) range. So instead of modifying the speed... I modified the lifetime of the round.

The good.
So, are space battles better? Yes they appear more "realistic" since there has never actually been a space battle, it's all fiction, but to the naked eye, it appears better. at 20km, a capital ship is easily distinguishable without enhancement, meaning that you can expect is has some level of authority. So by the time you get to 12km, it is pretty looming on the screen... and you soon will be taking fire. In a fighter, this is super easy to dodge and manuver around... allowing you to return fire easily.

If you have turrents like on a corvette, the turrents track and blast from 8km away so you are able to use your manuverability to your advantage, even though you have weak firepower. The fights start to look like something from Star trek, and capital ship battles appear to be dook outs at a range that is at least forgiveable... unlike now where they are basically ontop of one another.

The very cool part is seeing the hundreds of rounds travelling between a couple capital ships, nuking each other down.

The Bad.
my computer (2 processor duel core, with 16gb of ram, and an older video card, nvidea 9800 gt)

I am putting my specs here cecause it makes a huge difference. Perhaps most of you have better than me, but maybe not as well. By adding to the time that the bullet flies so that it can have a greater effective range, you have just put a huge new load on your computer.

This is because it has to track every single bullet from creation to deletion at its end of life. So when a PPC has a lifetime of 15 seconds, now you up that to 30 seconds, and since it does 43 rounds a minute, that means originally, the game engine would only have to track and update the position of 1/4 of those rounds (11) since its lifetime was ~ 15 seconds (1/4 of a minute) , but now it has to track 22 rounds Now remember that is Per cannon... so on a ship with 8 ppcs per side broadsiding against frigates and a capital that is (8 cannons, 11 rounds to track, and 2 cannon banks) 176 rounds initially, just went up to 352 rounds to track for a full 30 seconds. Each ship is firing constantly so on a battle with 40 or 50 ships we are talking about 20,000 to 50,000 objects easily (remember each round has to be tracked for fighters as well, and their rate of fire is much greater) and that's just in this battle, much less having to cope with the entire game universe from moment to moment, collision checks, updates, and changes.

So in total, it really bogs your system. Framerates dropped to the point where there was extremely noticable lag while the battle was commencing. Furthermore, as mathematically makes sense, as the battle progressed, (aka ships die, so fewer rounds) then the performance of the game became much better since the engine had to track less objects.

As the game engine (aka Rebirth) is rewritten and the 300+ cores to the video card are used more efficiently to track those objects for you, the performance should increase, but as for the game right now.. there is alot of lag with this, but even with the lag, it is brilliant. Much better than the game right now.

Another bad spot, as has been mentioned here already, the fighter AI is stupid beyond belief and with larger ships having much higher range, fighters become even more trivial, probably because their AI does not key off for when to take evasive manuvers from the opponents weapon specs, but from some internal things saying if you take damage... turn.. Well if a ppc round hits a fighter... it dies.

I will test these changes some more to see more details of this gameplay. Later, I will try another test and instead of changing the lifetime of the round, just up the speed of rounds to get the same longer ranges and see if it is unplayable.

[Shrewd135]

Another unintended consequence of much longer ranges, is Protect ship X, missions are now much more difficult.

[Scraphound]

We have x editor... has anyone actually tried just modifying all the bullet values and having a couple fleets go at each other to see how it works out????

We can discuss it all day long, or we can actually simulate it in game and see if it works.

Play Freespace 2. Watch those capships duking it out while you buzz around in your fighters. They're close enough that you can watch the big battles in awe, but far enough away that they don't look like two T-Rexes in a boxing match. Long ranged weapons clearly worked there.

Whether or not it works for X3 is irrelevant. I'm looking at Rebirth and hoping they've done something about range.

[Shrewd135]

We have x editor... has anyone actually tried just modifying all the bullet values and having a couple fleets go at each other to see how it works out????

We can discuss it all day long, or we can actually simulate it in game and see if it works.

Play Freespace 2. Watch those capships duking it out while you buzz around in your fighters. They're close enough that you can watch the big battles in awe, but far enough away that they don't look like two T-Rexes in a boxing match. Long ranged weapons clearly worked there.

Whether or not it works for X3 is irrelevant. I'm looking at Rebirth and hoping they've done something about range.

I have adjusted all the ranges and am playing X now.. This game has some interesting consequences with extra range.

Asteroids are just terrifying now.. In any firefight within a heavily asteroided sector, asteroids are exploding everywhere. I have not seen a capital ship get taken out yet, but I have almost been taken out a few times.

BTW, I am pretty sure freespace 2 had a limit of only 23 ships in the sector at one time... X has no such limit. So it can have 200+ ships, with massive battles.