Slitherine

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ORIGINAL: Bartje

I don't like this idea. I like the standard system. Hardpoints feel too artificial and take away from the players possibilities.

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ORIGINAL: Fishman

Rather than adding more weapons or humongous changes to the design system, the easy solution is just to increase the competitiveness of beams: Double the projectile speed, because honestly, they're ridiculously slow right now, double the rate of fire, and cut the energy consumption to about 75%. Voila: Now it's competitive again. The main thing is simply that the shorter ranged weapon needs to have better DPS than its counterpart, otherwise it's pointless.

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ORIGINAL: Gertjan

Please don't make the weapons system even more complicated. I already find it too much micro as it is and I'm afraid I still have to do it myself since the AI cant do it optimally.

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They should be long range double to tripple the range of Laser at same Tech level.

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Projectille:
Since the battle distance is over 300.000 KM, standard projecttiles are too slow to be effective agains a moving target.
Yes Mass Driver or Railguns theortical can be close to lightspeed, but then we can add them into the Laser class to keep the system easy.

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If we are going to try to be realistic, why would missiles have longer range then laser?

Missiles need to be chemically propelled, are very VERY slow, and are limited by their fuel.

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Lasers are limited by their cohesion, in space there is very little gas to scatter them, so its mostly base on how good your lasing array is... and it should be pretty simple to reach the other side of the solar system.

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ORIGINAL: taltamir

If we are going to try to be realistic, why would missiles have longer range then laser?

Missiles need to be chemically propelled, are very VERY slow, and are limited by their fuel.

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ORIGINAL: taltamir

Lasers are limited by their cohesion, in space there is very little gas to scatter them, so its mostly base on how good your lasing array is... and it should be pretty simple to reach the other side of the solar system.

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ORIGINAL: taltamir

Anyways, the current problem is that the lasers are irrelevant, not because of damage, but because torpedoes have longer range... longer rage = win.

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Cohesion isn't the big problem, ok when you want be effective at other side of the system i could be a problem :-)
But the real problem is to hit a moving target. Its like a police officier want to someone with a bowling ball instead his pistole.
A laser beam can't correct his flight, on long range you can hit static moving objects without problems. It the same problem current sharpshooter have, if the target is doing a step while he pull the trigger he will miss.

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The only true statement are "Limited by their fuel", if they dont need fuel they would got unlimited range.
But why the heck a missile need to be chemically propelled ?
Missiles or Torpedos are mini Spacecrafts without hyperdrive,lifesupport,defence. If you want a real tech counterpart, try a Tomahawk.

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In space, missiles have infinite range. If I want, I can lob a missile towards Alpha Centauri. It may take a hundred years to get there, but it'll get there. What I wanted to kill probably won't still be there, though. While missiles have finite delta-V, presumably, like any ship, in space, there is no such thing as "maximum range" for an object, Newton's Laws of Motion assure us that anything you throw into space will fly forever until it hits something.

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Cohesive laser range is actually fairly short, although in theory, it could be improved a lot. However, lasers are strictly line-of-sight, and cannot be guided. A missile can do a burn, fly towards its target, and then use its remaining delta-V for terminal attack maneuvers. A laser cannot make any such corrections. Additionally, space is very huge, and targets are very small: Even the smallest aiming error is amplified many, many times over the massive distances of space. Even without issues of cohesion, the maximum effective range for a laser against a target actively desiring not to be shot is maybe 150000 km. At that range, by the time you see the target, it has not been there for a good half a second, and by the time your shot REACHES the target, it will have not been there for a good second. Imagine trying to snipe an object smaller than a pixel with 1000ms ping. Ain't easy. The same limitations apply for any other relativistic projectile: While a mass driver round won't have cohesion issues, the odds of hitting anything become exceedingly bad very fast. Unlike lasers, that mass driver round is going to eventually ruin someone's day, because while a laser will lose cohesion and become harmless, a mass driver round will fly forever through the infinite void until it hits something. If some hapless planet is your backstop, it sucks to be them.

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Actually, damage DOES matter. Right now, the problem is that lazor appears, according to your calculations, to actually exhibit inferior DPS. If there are hidden factors that make torps worse than how they appear on paper, or if lazor damage were made superior to torp damage at lazor range, this would entirely change the picture. But there's no way to get around the fact that longer range + greater speed = autowin. That's just a basic law of the universe. It worked the same way for the Mongols: Anyone who couldn't shoot back and wasn't faster than them wound up performing their best porcupine impression.

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ORIGINAL: taltamir

I actually did the math once, even a fairly small sized vehicle will need to apple acceleration of thousands of G in random directions every few seconds to avoid lasers fired from the other side of the solar system.

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ORIGINAL: taltamir

You confuse missiles with bullets... missiles are, by the definition given above, bullets that use an engine to track a target. When a missile runs out of fuel in space it becomes a bullet.

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ORIGINAL: taltamir

Correct about mass drives... as for line of sigh issues, this is a big deal for planetary combat, where even today battleships curve projectiles to hit target beyond line of sight (due to the curvature of the earth, LOS is blocked BY the earth itself)

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ORIGINAL: taltamir

unless the target randomly fires its engines to produce enough thrust so that your calculations will be off, to the point where, as I mentioned above, they will need to apply thousands to millions of Gs of accelerations.

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ORIGINAL: taltamir

Also, at a distance of half a light second away, your torpedo will take A LOOOOOOONG long time to reach the target.

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ORIGINAL: taltamir

Well, true lasers do exhibit worse DPS.. but even with better DPS torpedoes have greater range... unless lasers have MUCH MUCH better DPS it is not going to be worth it...

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ORIGINAL: taltamir

if they do have a lot more DPS, then torpedoes are effectively "starbase destroyers" because starbases cannot close in to use their lasers (which is already the case, only more so), and ships with faster engines could keep out of laser range

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Now, SPACESHIPS are capable of moving MUCH faster than cars are. A spaceship capable of, say, 10G acceleration

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Yes, and this is why laser weapons remain dubious even on Earth: Line of sight range on Earth is fairly short compared to what can be done with ballistics.

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Well, unless you, like me, sensibly realize that putting only short-range weapons on an object with 0 speed is an act of utter idiocy, and it doesn't matter if you put a million of them on the base if they can't outrange their attackers.

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ORIGINAL: taltamir

Humans are not capable of surviving 10g of acceleration beyond a few moments.

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ORIGINAL: taltamir

Drop the EVEN... laser weapons are dubious ON earth... bullets and missiles are dubious in space.

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ORIGINAL: Fishman

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ORIGINAL: taltamir

Humans are not capable of surviving 10g of acceleration beyond a few moments.

That is basically why I used that figure as the upper limit, yes. Humans are a significant obstacle to getting anything done in space. We actually have all the technical requirements needed to DO useful space stuff...the problem is, humans suck. If we replaced all humans with robots, these problem would entirely evaporate. If anything, the replacement of humans by robots is inevitable and beginning even now: First, we will become cyborgs, meatbags with increasing amounts of robotronic parts. Eventually, we will have discarded the meatbags entirely.

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Light travels at 670,616,629 miles per hour.
The fastest missile ever built at 15,000 miles per hour.

This makes 44707.8x faster. if it takes half a second for your laser to reach, it will take 22353.9 seconds for the missile to reach. 6.21 hours for an ICBM to reach a target that light reaches in half a second.
And keep in mind that most missiles are vastly slower then those super ICBMs... the missiles an air plane shoots top out at 1/6th that.

Conversely, if the target is close enough that a torpedo takes 5 minutes (300 seconds) to reach it. A laser beam will take 0.0067 seconds to reach it. Since the laws of physics make it impossible to know a laser beam is approaching until it actually hits you, you must randomly provide enough thrust to displace half your diameter (aka, your radius) in that time period.
A 200 meter ship thus must displace 100 meters in a random direction in under 0.0067, at all times, randomly, and must HOPE that it displaces it in the CORRECT direction.
X_f = X_i + V_i*t +0.5a*t^2
100 meters = 0 + 0 + 0.5a*(0.0067s)^2
a = 4455335.3 m/s^2 = 454626 g

Good luck applying 454626 g of acceleration in a random direction every 0.0067 seconds to dodge lasers.

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No, missiles are the only sensible things in space, really. If you want to kill something in space, right now, you need a missile. Lasers generate more damage to you than they will to the target, given that the best available have maybe 30% efficiency, tops, so for every 3 units of energy lobbed at the target, hit or miss, you cook in 7 units of waste heat, which is very hard to get rid of in space. Missiles have none of these problems! In fact, who even needs ships? Just lob a rubberbanded package of missiles in the general direction of your enemy, and have them released to go KILL once they get close enough.

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ORIGINAL: taltamir

Light travels at 670,616,629 miles per hour.

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ORIGINAL: taltamir

The fastest missile ever built at 15,000 miles per hour.

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ORIGINAL: taltamir

2. The heat produced by lasers is handled by cooling systems built into the device. You can simply use some sort of substance to absorb the heat and then eject it from the ship altogether. use water, then spray it in a fine mist out of a protrusion from the ship and catch when its nice and cool on the other side. etc..
The heat the enemy takes is in a specific concentrated spot... this means damage, lots of it.
3. You can shoot down missiles... in fact, you can shoot them down with lasers :)

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Of course, none of this matters, since DW is magic. However, if you want to see scary with magic, I can stick HYPERDRIVES on missiles and LOB THEM FROM THE OTHER SIDE OF THE GALAXY. If anything, the existence of magic just makes them MORE scary.

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ORIGINAL: Fishman

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ORIGINAL: taltamir

Light travels at 670,616,629 miles per hour.

Ugh. Barbarian. Use metric already!

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ORIGINAL: taltamir

what you describe is not a missile, it is a mass driver that shoots out slugs with built in trajectory corrections. (aka, missiles)
Those are indeed highly practical. If you can shoot a slug at 0.3c and give it vectoring thrusters it can be very effective.
Having a missile propel itself to any speed that is worthwhile in space is ridiculous.

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ORIGINAL: taltamir

it still produces a lot of heat for that initial acceleration to take place.

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ORIGINAL: taltamir

Ofcourse, if you really DO have battles where you shoot the missiles now and they reach the target 6 hours later that is a different thing altogether.

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ORIGINAL: taltamir

that is indeed the most practical of weapons in space (should hyperdrive exist).

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ORIGINAL: taltamir

Ha, agreed. I use metric but in this case I got my figures originally in mph and I didn't think to make the conversion. I am also used to whomever I am talking to to be using the "american british standard system"

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Not really. The reaction thrusters used by the missiles jettison their heated thrust-products into space, where nobody cares what happens to it.

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Why not? Is the target going to go somewhere in 3 hours?

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The Imperial system is utterly unsuited for anything that is even remotely technical or scientific, relegated only to measurements of things involving people and their meaningless lives. To express anything in the Imperial system indicates that it should not be regarded as important.

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ORIGINAL: taltamir

6 hours away by missile time is half a second away for a laser or a particle beam. in those 6 hours a laser equipped ship will blow you up, then blow your missiles up.

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ORIGINAL: Fishman

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ORIGINAL: taltamir

6 hours away by missile time is half a second away for a laser or a particle beam. in those 6 hours a laser equipped ship will blow you up, then blow your missiles up.

That brings us to laser-wielding MISSILES. A missile that functions by simply getting CLOSE to its target, whereupon it unleashes a bomb-pumped X-ray laser on it. Unlike firing a ship-based lazor, I can lob these things, often well in advance of any actual combat, and when you are sighted, they will move in and kill you. As a side benefit, having this thing deployed gives me fantastic resolution for finding you. It's like a very large array telescope. Only it's a very dangerous array.

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When it comes to laser point defense vs incoming missiles, there is some controversy. This is the subject of a long-running "Purple/Green" debate on SFConSim-L

(The term "Purple/Green" comes from an episode of Babylon-5 called "The Geometry of Shadows". The episode involving the ritual Drazi civil war, where the sides are chosen by randomly choosing colored sashes from a barrel. It is a science-fictional version of Miller Lite partisans shouting "Tastes Great!" and "Less Filling!".

More specifcally, as Christopher Weuve explains: "It's the SFConsim-L brevity phrase meaning 'an argument in which no actual agreement can be reached, usually (but not always) because it is dependent on going-in assumptions.'").


Green Drazi leader. Note green sash.
Anyway the argument is about what happens in the last hundred kilometers to the target ship.

For an in-depth look go to the Rocketpunk Manifesto and read Battle of Spherical War Cows: Purple vs Green and Further Battles of Spherical War Cows. For a brief summary, see below:

The laser gang asserts that they can zap a missile before it ever gets to kill range, even for a nuclear warhead. And do it every time, at least so much of the time that missiles aren't worth firing. Even if the missile fragments into 10,000 pieces of shrapnel (each with substantial killing power), tracking gear can determine the fragments that will hit, and zap them before they reach target.

The laser gang's theory is that lasers never miss. If you can paint the target with photons to see it, you can hit it with a laser. In addition: missiles, by definition, need to close on the target, which means there are some trigonometry tricks that will allow you to lock them up hard with lasers - they can't laterally juke in space without missiing the target, for example.

The missile gang contends that laser point defense can always be saturated. Fire a big enough missile, or a salvo of missiles, coming in fast enough, and there will just be more mosquitoes than the bug zappers can zap in the short time till impact.

The missile gang's theory is that you can derive the number of missiles needed to overwhelm a given number of lasers by inputting some variables, like amount of energy per square cm needed to guarentee a kill on a missile, the wattage of output of the lasers, and the cycle/recharge time of the lasers. Lasers do require some time to recharge, and need some time to cool off.

The laser gang reply that lasers have the advantage in that they are reusable, unlike missiles. If lasers are dominant, it's also an offensive weapon to zap enemy ships, not a purely defensive one.

The missile gang retorts that the missile can be fired outside of laser range, and if it does penetrate point defense and smoke your ship, your laser is no longer reusable, now is it?

There is the cost effectiveness argument. Can you afford to carry point-defense lasers that can stop my missiles? Can I afford to carry missiles that can penetrate your point defense? Which is cheaper?

Can there be any tactics in a long-range duel between two missile armed ships? It comes down to whether you can afford to fire a missile on anything but a certain intercept, this is also ultimately a matter of cost.

Can there be any tactics in a long-range duel between two laser armed ships? It can be argued that it is the equivalent of two crack marksmen at opposite ends of a football field, shooting at each other with scope-equipped, tripod-mounted sniper rifles.

Given equal quality lasers, if I can zap you, you can zap me. Given laser ranges of at least a few hundred km, maybe a few thousand how can ships maneuver? If they are slow, it will take minutes to change position, meanwhile zapping away with multimegajoule lasers. If they are fast, they'll hurtle past each other in a drive-by, then take hours to swing around for another pass, unless they have science-fictional levels of acceleration. Possible solutions include long recharge and/or cooling-off times between laser volleys, and restricted firing arcs on the laser turrets.

The argument rages on, which probably means you can just pick which side appeals to you and be able to justify it. By carefully selecting, say, the proper minimum laser recycle time one can decide whether missiles are a viable weapon or not.

The Attack Vector: Tactical wargame adds an additional wrinkle. The laser recycle time is set such that missiles are viable. However, laser cannons have a limited number of "flash cooler" loads which can drastically cut the recycle time. But once you've used up your flash cooler loads, the laser is stuck at the standard recycle time.

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6 hours away by missile time is half a second away for a laser or a particle beam. in those 6 hours a laser equipped ship will blow you up, then blow your missiles up.
That very page you linked shows that an XASER (Xray laser) to be an effective deathray light minutes away.