|
Post by dragonkid11 on Oct 21, 2016 11:23:13 GMT
Okay...I have tested out an armored sub-capital drone and the result is very interesting.
Without a crew compartment, the giant armor drone are practically indestructible.
Even when the projectile went right through the drone, it didn't nothing but destroy a couple fuel tank as the remote control was simply too small to be hit.
Hell, after I reactivate the drone's weapon system on the poor test stock ship, I have it return to my carrier to refuel and it actually has MORE delta-V despite destroyed fuel tank due to just how much armor and guns were shaved off and destroyed.
The remote control seriously need to be rebalanced.
|
|
|
Post by redparadize on Oct 21, 2016 13:18:46 GMT
Yep, I was fighting against one my own pocket battleship yesterday, just could not manage to destroy it. It hand holes all across the hull and most weapon were destroyed, but still had fuel, engine and power. Until I hit guns ammo and boom! The rear still worked...
|
|
erin
Junior Member
Smash Mouth Plays From The Depths Of Hell As You Traverse A Deep, Rat-Infested Cave
Posts: 57
|
Post by erin on Oct 21, 2016 20:04:47 GMT
I mean, maybe that's just going to be the case with remote/autonomous capships? Especially if you have multiple banks of autonomous or semi autonomous combat control. Humans are around to make command decisions and shepherd repairbots, not steer the ship and guns. If the game is meant to be about realism, that has to be accounted for I think. It doesn't really make sense to me that crewed capships lose all control if the crew section is compromised, what with all this talk of ubiquitous smartphone sensors and so forth
|
|
|
Post by redmars on Oct 22, 2016 17:14:01 GMT
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think the example resolution figure given in the blog (70cm at 100km) is at all adequate for aiming guns unless you're going for the centre of mass of a capital ship. IRL, naval guns have their own fire-control radars because search radars don't have a sufficiently fine resolution. You can spread these across the ship (but not across the nose of a needle?), but these can't be infinite, and they come with their own costs. Sorry if isolated that part specifically. Being able to see a target does not translate into firing solution. With radar, you know how far the object because of the Doppler effect and delay, that combined with a 2d vector and you can calculate fire solution. I would have do some check for IR tracking and such. But with multiple sensor you can simply triangulate the target to get the distance. Wave of missile that communicate with each other could be very good at this. About low powered laser that harm sensor without doing any serious damage to the rest. I thing it would be the prime tactic in space. With local sensor damaged, electronic warfare, flare and maneuver would be a effective counter. Good point, and I really don't have answers to questions about vectoring. I'm sure there are a lot of kinks to consider, though. For example: 'range resolution' (distinguishing multiple targets in the same 'pixel') is apparently possible with a sufficiently broad-spectrum sensor; does this mean that you have to choose between sensor 'hardness' and accuracy? I'm not competent to do the numbers, but it seems like there could be a lot of play and counter-play. [EDIT] re: drones, I think it makes a lot of sense to split your fighting force into 'teeth' and 'tail' to the extent you can. Crewed ships are meant to survive for up to six months on their own, which implies a whole lot of stuff you just don't need on a gunboat with a mission that can be measured in hours or days. The catch is that the current implementation is very much all or nothing. There are good reasons for doing this from a design perspective, but it does mean that the 'all' is a little too costly and the 'nothing' a little too cheap. What happens if your drone suffers a malfunction, or if its sensors turn out to be inadequate, or there's a telemetry problem?
|
|
|
Post by fallingaggressively on Oct 22, 2016 21:15:30 GMT
I think that to really feel the difference between local and remote control light speed lag should be added to any orders given to missiles and drones. The further the remote is from the launcher the longer it takes to react to any orders.
|
|
|
Post by jonen on Oct 22, 2016 21:24:42 GMT
In regards to remote controlling warships: With a crew, a launch may have a crew of a couple of dozen, plus the crew on the launching vessel. With a remote control, you only have the crew on the launching vessel, but the same amount of work needs to be done in combat.
... Well, personally, I always slap a remote control onto my ships in addition to a crew module - as there's absolutely no drawback to doing so. Means the ship can still fight even if the crew get pasted (for whatever reason), just figure it's slaved to other ships in the fleet, or executing a combat program - makes a lot of sense for composite beam superlaser arrays. A remote controlled ship doesn't seem to fight as well as a manned one, though, but I'm not sure how much of that is due to battle damage.
Also, the fact that you get the option to "disarm" the ships remotely (which does nothing when the crew is alive, by the way) is kind of funny. I'm imagining I'm sitting on the remote detonation trigger as I'm ordering the fleet into battle.
|
|
|
Post by redparadize on Oct 22, 2016 21:48:51 GMT
I think it would be fair if more active drone/missile would require bigger crew. The it would require more personnel and bigger CIC to guide and direct them. It would still be possible to have a stockpile of thousands of them. But only like 5 basic missile per crew available. More complex drone would require more people too direct them.
Say you have 8 empty seat in your crew module. that would mean 40 basic missile could fly at the same time, or 20 missiles plus 10 gun drones etc...
|
|
|
Post by ross128 on Oct 22, 2016 22:13:48 GMT
Why wouldn't a single missile herder be able to control an arbitrarily large number of missiles, as long as the missiles are all swarmed together?
As far as missiles go, I'd only expect crew to limit how many swarms I can have out at once (and even then, one guy should be able to juggle a few since maneuver burns are few and far between) but not the size of each swarm.
Drones would be a slightly different can of worms. How crew-intensive drones would be depends on how much you can automate the guns. In their current state they're treated as fully automated, so an arbitrarily large number of drones can be swarmed together under a single drone herder (though an argument could be made that the drone would need an on-board computer with enough brains to run all its systems). If they had to be manually targeted, or worse manually aimed, then crew requirements back on the mothership would start to skyrocket.
A hard 5/crew launch limit seems like it would be not only pointlessly arbitrary, but also unnecessarily harsh. Anybody with a decent laser array would be immune to missiles under that restriction, unless you start lobbing heavily armored IPBMs at them.
|
|
|
Post by beta on Oct 23, 2016 1:54:34 GMT
There also should be considerations for maintenance of payloads. If a chemical gun needs someone to maintain it over the 6 month tour of duty, the 900 nuke reactors and 900 NTRs from all those drones are probably going to need to be maintained as well. If you had to provide crew for maintenance of your payloads, using vast swarms of missiles/drones will be a lot less inviting and larger missiles/drones will start to become a lot more relevant.
|
|
|
Post by redparadize on Oct 23, 2016 2:37:01 GMT
Consider this: RIM-161 Standard are ship mounted vertically launched missile sealed into box and do not require regular maintenance. In fact, if one day we have space missile, they will not be launched from rails but directly out of their sealed containment, for sure.
NTR can't really be maintained, but that's another story.
|
|
|
Post by ross128 on Oct 23, 2016 2:50:31 GMT
Stuff that's shut down generally doesn't require much maintenance, especially if you store it in vacuum (no air = no corrosion, yay!). Over the course of just six months, it's not likely to be an issue at all. Even the nuclear fuel won't degrade appreciably, its half-life is quite long when the reactor's not running.
|
|
|
Post by redparadize on Oct 23, 2016 3:13:29 GMT
Radiation have corrosive effect. NTR, by design, exacerbate this problem. It is difficult to prevent the nuclear fuel to deteriorate the engine and everything around it. For the specification imposed in this game (5 years autonomy) it could be a issue, specially for extremely light engines.
|
|
|
Post by captinjoehenry on Oct 23, 2016 3:18:41 GMT
Radiation have corrosive effect. NTR, by design, exacerbate this problem. It is difficult to prevent the nuclear fuel to deteriorate the engine and everything around it. For the specification imposed in this game (5 years autonomy) it could be a issue, specially for extremely light engines. Well to counter that point the Voyager probe which runs off of a NTR has been running without any form of mainence what so ever in the depths of deep space since 1977. And is still fully functional and returning great scientific data. In fact it is expected to continue to do so until more or less all of the nuclear fuel has decayed by its half life.
|
|
|
Post by redparadize on Oct 23, 2016 3:22:46 GMT
Radiation have corrosive effect. NTR, by design, exacerbate this problem. It is difficult to prevent the nuclear fuel to deteriorate the engine and everything around it. For the specification imposed in this game (5 years autonomy) it could be a issue, specially for extremely light engines. Well to counter that point the Voyager probe which runs off of a NTR has been running without any form of mainence what so ever in the depths of deep space since 1977. And is still fully functional and returning great scientific data. In fact it is expected to continue to do so until more or less all of the nuclear fuel has decayed by its half life. NTR as in "Nuclear thermal rocket", not RTG "Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator".
|
|
|
Post by captinjoehenry on Oct 23, 2016 3:34:23 GMT
Well to counter that point the Voyager probe which runs off of a NTR has been running without any form of mainence what so ever in the depths of deep space since 1977. And is still fully functional and returning great scientific data. In fact it is expected to continue to do so until more or less all of the nuclear fuel has decayed by its half life. NTR as in "Nuclear thermal rocket", not RTG "Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator". Ah I am not sure how I got that mixxed up I thought we were talking about an RTG for some reason. On looking back I am not sure how I screwed that up
|
|