erik
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Posts: 34
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Post by erik on Nov 20, 2016 21:59:50 GMT
In Aurora though there is no dV, ships and everything moves without inertia. Hardly realistic, and weapons other than missiles have a hard-capped range of 5 light seconds. Both do favor missiles. I'm still waiting for Newtonian Aurora, and for the game to not think for minutes for every 1 d time advancement after mid game.
For a missile boat with light or no armor, your missiles will likely cost more than everything else put together. Sure the crew can fly home and be safe after a failed mission if the firing platform they are aboard is untouchable(assuming scenario where opponent has dissimilar, shorter range weaponry), but matter, manufacturing hours and energy and money were still lost in form of missiles and fuel.
In a real war however, high kill ratios are meaningless as everything remains second to achieving objectives and winning the war. Say, an invasion fleet that needs to move in and park on enemy home planet or moon's low orbit does not necessarily need dV to chase down ranged missile platforms, if they survived attacks and have seized the objective, and will then continue to enforce terms of enemy surrender right where they sit. AMMs works both in Aurora and CoaDE, and even with some missing are quite likely to break even in invested mass and/or credit costs against attacking missiles. At least for now.
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Post by amimai on Nov 21, 2016 1:25:13 GMT
true, but survivability and long engagement ranges have their merits... also that is probably not the best image since it had king tor fleet killer missiles on it (they made up 75% of the cost ) with fleet killer missiles removed it costs only 31MC(10MC of missiles) i.imgur.com/bcnEFKb.png?1you can fly your heavily armed and armoured warships into orbit eventually but to do that you would have to brave a gauntlet of thousands of missiles and drones that missiles fleets would launch at you, and since missile fleets have much longer patrol ranges due to higher dV they would detect you earlier, have more time to call reinforcements, bring in a couple colliers, sip some delicious space tea, unload all the missiles in those colliers, go back, reload a third time, and by the time you reach that planet have a few hundred drones and fighters in orbit to reduce whatever is left of your fleet after taking on tens of thousand missiles to space dust... as I said earlier, 1Mc in missiles is around about 1000 missiles, so for the price of a fraction of a armoured attack craft you can have that ships mass in missiles launched out of a missiles carriers the point im making here is that space warfare would not be glorious space battles, it would be the equivalent of being the fish in the barrel while someone is shooting at it with a revolver... and I don't particularly feel that I want to be those fish
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Post by argonbalt on Nov 21, 2016 6:05:22 GMT
I think this blatantly ignores a very simple principle though, as we have established in game, ultra light reactors and small scale lasers are roughly feasible. So unless a new miracle(and maybe broken) material is found, missiles, even in the 100+ range can be taken out by mega-metre range laser drones, i doubt the creation of even longer range electron and neutron particle beams and x ray lasers will make it any easier.
Like wise secondary counter measures i have thought up but are not directly modelled in game could include:
Electronic hacking, think about it, unless every missile is a hard box and pre wired the potential electronic vulnerabilities can be present. A hacking missile would not need to even be in constant range, simply upload to a single missile in a stack and let it work it's way through the rest. Alternatively if the missile receives back up guidance from a ship, that guidance could be falsified and intercepted.
Dummy Balloon+radiator combo+coolant heat suppression. How smart the missiles are is another matter of question, if a ship were say, to launch a dummy reactor with a balloon to inflate and radiate while the original target runs cool with only vital systems, would the missiles be able to differentiate? if a thing has the same shape heading and heat signature?
In general history has taught us that over reliance on a single form of warfare will inevitably turn out to be bad for you at some point.
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erik
New Member
Posts: 34
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Post by erik on Nov 21, 2016 6:12:18 GMT
(Edit: in reply to amimai)
Yes, at least for now missiles are more cost effective than armor, lasers, reactors and CIWS. People have already begun to experiment on non-physics breaking low budget guns, I'm thinking missiles are easy to make cheap at least partially because there are less design decisions to make compared to (effective) alternatives. We'll also see how possible future changes to how nukes, missile guidance/behaviour and fuses work will change things.
I too have 50 MC ships with 10 km/s loaded dV, over 20 km/s empty, that carry 1500 highly laser-resistant nukes and KKVs, and that are still armored and have railguns and lasers for mopping up disabled enemies. Those are getting kinda boring already though and it doesnt help that the AI is clueless when it comes to missiles. I hope we will soon get a mission editor and something to tweak and/or script AI behaviour.
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Post by subunit on Nov 21, 2016 18:06:16 GMT
Like wise secondary counter measures i have thought up but are not directly modelled in game could include: Electronic hacking, think about it, unless every missile is a hard box and pre wired the potential electronic vulnerabilities can be present. A hacking missile would not need to even be in constant range, simply upload to a single missile in a stack and let it work it's way through the rest. Alternatively if the missile receives back up guidance from a ship, that guidance could be falsified and intercepted. MMMMmmm. Imagine if there was an EW model in game. Hacking missiles would be so good. Even just "sparklers" with telescope-blinding lasers, little EPFCG submunitions, and a bunch of chaff and flares, fly a couple of them in with a missile swarm?
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Post by subunit on Nov 21, 2016 18:51:00 GMT
ah aurora, best source of more or less realistic simulations of space logistics and combat, in other words the fine art of lobbing hundreds of ever more complicated missile systems at each other across Gm ranges Lol "more or less" eh? Last time I checked Aurora's sensor model consists of drawing a circle around a point "maneuvering" on a 2d plane, there are aliens and fantasy tech, and there's no real attempt to do any kind of physical simulation at all. It's the CMANO of space sims, except where CMANO is a glorified Harpoon database made by people with security clearances, Aurora appears to be an inventory management database that has been hacked to "simulate" some bored software engineer's science-fantasy headcanon universe . Neither one contains a genuine systems-level simulation of the platforms being represented. CoaDE does. Both CMANO and Aurora resolve events with hard-threshold die rolls, where the thresholds are chosen by the designer's intuition. CoaDE resolves events with models from IEEE papers, cited in game. I really find no value in looking to Aurora for lessons on what CoaDE should be doing. If we're going to compare CoaDE to "playing" database-sims, we should really be comparing it to Rule the Waves (RtW), which is a FAR more playable sim than either CMANO or Aurora and FAR more accurately represents the actual challenges involved in implementing the kinds of strategies you're talking about. For those of you who haven't played RtW, the player is basically the Fleet Admiral of one of the major powers of the turn-of-the-20th-century world, who starts with an (optionally) historically-informed budget, research base, and legacy fleet, and proceeds through a career from ~1900-1930, if you don't get fired before then. The period is therefore the golden age of battleships and the craft you'll be dealing with range from early submarines and torpedo motorboats to super-dreadnoughts- here's the ship design dialog to give an idea of how it works: So, the "all missile fleet" idea is conceptually equivalent in RtW to going after a torpedo-heavy fleet that performs hit-and-run torpedo barrages, and is probably trained to do so at night (otherwise your fleet is going to get gunned to death by someone who's trained in night gunnery and has a BC or two to blockade you with). The player might choose Japan as an appropriate starting power, as they have slight advantages in night attack training and torpedo research. If you go ahead and pursue such a strategy, what you very quickly find is the following: 1) A fleet admiral pursuing a coherent strategy by building ships around a particular engagement profile (torpedo attack) immediately faces multiple limits:-shipbuilding resources (can I build that 25kt torpedo cruiser at the local yard? Or do I have to get it built in England? Am I likely to go to war with them any time soon?) -shipbuilding budget (I have x$/yr to use with my y kt/yr build capacity at whatever yard I've chosen to build the ship) -crew training/experience (I have to actually teach my crews to do things like attack with torpedos at night, and they're not going to be effective right after the shakedown cruise- I need to plan for survivable engagements in both my ship designs and my strategic thinking so my crews get good at torpedo attacks) -research/industrial base (The designs I can build aren't completely arbitrary- complicated/expensive designs are likely to get screwed up if I'm not building them somewhere with a long history of building those vessels, I need to have particular doctrines and technologies assimilated organizationally before I can deploy them- there are some historical limits here which aren't relevant to CoaDE, but you get the idea) -intelligence (I may be able to estimate how long my proposed shipbuilding program will take at some budget and building out shipyard capacity at some rate, but I probably can't estimate how rival powers will react or how quickly they can deploy counters) 2) Limits are malleable, but only to a certain extent-you can push hard for increased naval budgets, at the expense of social stability and international tension. Sure, the warhawk party is in power now, but when the bread lines start getting longer and the proles are still seeing shiny new torpedo boats being churned out at Sasebo, you better start thinking about your job, if not your life. And if you really think the Russians are going to let you complete your shipbuilding program before they take a poke at you to see just how effective Japanese torpedo designs actually are, you're in for a surprise. In other words, you are as likely to be fired as you are to see the apotheosis of your strategic masterplan; if you go to war at all it will be with a hodgepodge of old and new designs. -you can specialise in some particular technology, doctrine, etc., but it's expensive to do so and there are significant opportunity costs (if you later decide you need to specialise in all-centerline-big-gun designs, you have a lot of catching up to do) -you can always gather more intelligence, but spies are eventually caught, and usually right when you're riding that balance between high naval budgets and international tension. -you can have smart designs, but if you really need to switch to oil burners to shave that 10% off powerplant weight, and you haven't got any oil..? Well, for some things, there is no substitute. 3) When the rubber hits the road, specialisation is brittle and expensive
-all-torpedo-boats sounds great right up until you have dig a fleet out of a mined harbour with a torpedo net and a similarly-equipped MTB screen- defensive countermeasures are often trivially cheap compared to the massive organisational effort of pursuing an effective highly specialised capship fleet. -building counters into ship designs often results in a more well-rounded, robust ship at a lower overall cost than building the specialised attacker design does. Eg. torpedo bulges are a bit more mass (think spaced armor in CoaDE) but they make the ship beefier against all manner of waterline attacks, harder to sink, etc. When the AI begins to build counters, they may be able to deploy the designs both quicker & cheaper ("torpedo bulge" does not require a massive engineering effort- "long lance torpedo" does) and end up with a better, more flexible, more well-rounded fleet when the war begins than your (inevitably incomplete) shipbuilding program has produced at that point. Really I think if CoaDE took these things seriously we would be able to stop having a lot of these debates about whether this or that fleet composition is better- what matters is what kind of fleet you can build under the constraints of an unstable political situation domestically and abroad, that will deal with all manner of unforseen contingencies, and a fleet that makes sense as the USTA isn't necessarily going to be a good choice for the IR or RFP any more than a good 1910s Japanese fleet looks like a good 1910s American fleet. Different constraints, different challenges, different requirements.
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Post by argonbalt on Nov 21, 2016 19:08:00 GMT
An excellent examination, obviously there are some easy counter arguments like missile Dv being equal to ships at times and the relative bonus of absolute stand off with a missile focused design. Generally though i think you expanded nicely on the same point i made earlier:
Overspecialisation, even a supposedly superior one is very temperamental in regards to the irregularity of actual warfare were conditions are never going to be 100% guaranteed according to plan.
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Post by subunit on Nov 21, 2016 19:38:59 GMT
An excellent examination, obviously there are some easy counter arguments like missile Dv being equal to ships at times and the relative bonus of absolute stand off with a missile focused design. Generally though i think you expanded nicely on the same point i made earlier: Overspecialisation, even a supposedly superior one is very temperamental in regards to the irregularity of actual warfare were conditions are never going to be 100% guaranteed according to plan. Missile boats are definitely going to be the right choice some of the time. In RtW, you should pursue torpedoes as the Japanese- you just shouldn't expect that building your fleet around the engagement envelope of one weapon to be a panacea, and you shouldn't expect your torpedoes or the crews using them to be any good until you've been pursuing that strategy, institutionally, for 10 years or so. You also will have to deal with the reality that fleets are called on to do a lot more than blow up enemy ships- coastal patrol, colonial policing, etc., they need regular maintenance, parts break and overheat (DDs are fast as hell but don't expect to sprint for more than a couple of hours- bearings overheat). If you have to plan for even some of these considerations, the "best fleet" thing goes out the window I think. It depends on political requirements as much as anything else. If you only have one body to defend, and you can turtle, lasersats or kinetic kill sats could be a trivial cheap counter to missile swarms. If you've got to attack miisile-happy belters across 10 tiny bodies, maybe not.
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Post by Easy on Nov 21, 2016 20:10:08 GMT
Like wise secondary counter measures i have thought up but are not directly modelled in game could include: Electronic hacking, think about it, unless every missile is a hard box and pre wired the potential electronic vulnerabilities can be present. A hacking missile would not need to even be in constant range, simply upload to a single missile in a stack and let it work it's way through the rest. Alternatively if the missile receives back up guidance from a ship, that guidance could be falsified and intercepted. MMMMmmm. Imagine if there was an EW model in game. Hacking missiles would be so good. Even just "sparklers" with telescope-blinding lasers, little EPFCG submunitions, and a bunch of chaff and flares, fly a couple of them in with a missile swarm? I wouldn't expect true hacking to work, due to the ease of authentication. But: - Jamming to prevent issue of new orders, loss of telemetry
- Dazzling of optics, reducing sensors to azimuth of the dazzler only
- Spoof of Radar/Lidar with false reflections (difficult and requires a transmitter capable of frequency to be spoofed)
Manned ships would retain initiative and there is no good way to model a smart crew that is simply out of communication. A laser communications/control signal would be more resistant to jamming.
Navigationally, I think it would be interesting if there was a delay between observing a burn by enemy ships and the new orbital solution. When your target is smaller than a pixel it will take a moment to determine the burn's azimuth and derive the delta V from observation. Sure you might have an order of magnitude for the burn and a rough heading, but that's far from a true fix.
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Post by subunit on Nov 21, 2016 20:43:32 GMT
Manned ships would retain initiative and there is no good way to model a smart crew that is simply out of communication.
I agree with what you say except on this point- just don't allow an OOC ship to get new orders from the admiral until they reestablish comms. RtW does the same thing- ships will carry on with their last order, defending and attacking as appropriate, until they're back in touch with a flag officer.
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Post by argonbalt on Nov 21, 2016 21:25:59 GMT
I wouldn't expect true hacking to work, due to the ease of authentication. But: - Jamming to prevent issue of new orders, loss of telemetry
- Dazzling of optics, reducing sensors to azimuth of the dazzler only
- Spoof of Radar/Lidar with false reflections (difficult and requires a transmitter capable of frequency to be spoofed)
Manned ships would retain initiative and there is no good way to model a smart crew that is simply out of communication. A laser communications/control signal would be more resistant to jamming.
Navigationally, I think it would be interesting if there was a delay between observing a burn by enemy ships and the new orbital solution. When your target is smaller than a pixel it will take a moment to determine the burn's azimuth and derive the delta V from observation. Sure you might have an order of magnitude for the burn and a rough heading, but that's far from a true fix.
Ah but even laser transmissions can be duplicated, after all if the missiles are moving at you, and the ship that launched them is broadcasting a laser guidance transmission, then it would be an interesting solution to simply see how/when the enemy transmits and mount a laser transmitter of your own on your ships and counter missiles, then simply broadcast false/confusing data to the missiles en-route. Alternatively if the enemy is using a more conventional laser guidance option then diffusing the beam off of your ship/damaging the enemies guidance beam or blocking it, you could potentially hijack entire formations of enemy warheads.
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Post by wafflestoo on Nov 21, 2016 21:48:57 GMT
I wouldn't expect true hacking to work, due to the ease of authentication. But: - Jamming to prevent issue of new orders, loss of telemetry
- Dazzling of optics, reducing sensors to azimuth of the dazzler only
- Spoof of Radar/Lidar with false reflections (difficult and requires a transmitter capable of frequency to be spoofed)
Manned ships would retain initiative and there is no good way to model a smart crew that is simply out of communication. A laser communications/control signal would be more resistant to jamming.
Navigationally, I think it would be interesting if there was a delay between observing a burn by enemy ships and the new orbital solution. When your target is smaller than a pixel it will take a moment to determine the burn's azimuth and derive the delta V from observation. Sure you might have an order of magnitude for the burn and a rough heading, but that's far from a true fix.
Ah but even laser transmissions can be duplicated, after all if the missiles are moving at you, and the ship that launched them is broadcasting a laser guidance transmission, then it would be an interesting solution to simply see how/when the enemy transmits and mount a laser transmitter of your own on your ships and counter missiles, then simply broadcast false/confusing data to the missiles en-route. Alternatively if the enemy is using a more conventional laser guidance option then diffusing the beam off of your ship/damaging the enemies guidance beam or blocking it, you could potentially hijack entire formations of enemy warheads. Assuming your engineering teams aren't smart enough to construct one-way receivers that track the mothership's location. Pipeline communications arrays are a b*tch for guys wanting it to be easy to hack stuff
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Post by Easy on Nov 21, 2016 21:54:32 GMT
if the enemy is using a more conventional laser guidance option then diffusing the beam off of your ship/damaging the enemies guidance beam or blocking it, you could potentially hijack entire formations of enemy warheads. You won't hack them. The missiles/drones will use cryptography. Jamming is possible but there are antijamming techniques such as nulling the antenna in the direction of the jammer.
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Post by amimai on Nov 21, 2016 22:59:44 GMT
Lol "more or less" eh? Last time I checked Aurora's sensor model consists of drawing a circle around a point "maneuvering" on a 2d plane, there are aliens and fantasy tech, and there's no real attempt to do any kind of physical simulation at all. It's the CMANO of space sims, except where CMANO is a glorified Harpoon database made by people with security clearances, Aurora appears to be an inventory management database that has been hacked to "simulate" some bored software engineer's science-fantasy headcanon universe . Neither one contains a genuine systems-level simulation of the platforms being represented. CoaDE does. Both CMANO and Aurora resolve events with hard-threshold die rolls, where the thresholds are chosen by the designer's intuition. CoaDE resolves events with models from IEEE papers, cited in game. I really find no value in looking to Aurora for lessons on what CoaDE should be doing. If we're going to compare CoaDE to "playing" database-sims, we should really be comparing it to Rule the Waves (RtW), which is a FAR more playable sim than either CMANO or Aurora and FAR more accurately represents the actual challenges involved in implementing the kinds of strategies you're talking about. For those of you who haven't played RtW, the player is basically the Fleet Admiral of one of the major powers of the turn-of-the-20th-century world, who starts with an (optionally) historically-informed budget, research base, and legacy fleet, and proceeds through a career from ~1900-1930, if you don't get fired before then. The period is therefore the golden age of battleships and the craft you'll be dealing with range from early submarines and torpedo motorboats to super-dreadnoughts- here's the ship design dialog to give an idea of how it works: -snip- So, the "all missile fleet" idea is conceptually equivalent in RtW to going after a torpedo-heavy fleet that performs hit-and-run torpedo barrages, and is probably trained to do so at night (otherwise your fleet is going to get gunned to death by someone who's trained in night gunnery and has a BC or two to blockade you with). The player might choose Japan as an appropriate starting power, as they have slight advantages in night attack training and torpedo research. If you go ahead and pursue such a strategy, what you very quickly find is the following: ahh historyteaches us that 90% of all naval losses during WW2 were caused by torpedoes, aircraft and mines... also Behold! The ignominious deaths of the battleships! I think you can literally count the number of ships destroyed by enemy cannon fire during WW2 on one hand if your simulation does not match reality, its obviously not a good simulation
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Post by beta on Nov 21, 2016 23:25:20 GMT
In the Royal Navy alone, I've already counted 6 sunk by naval gunfire ...
ECM and ECCM is something that would require a lot more in depth simulation of the sensors and command and control of remote objects than what we currently have. Would be awesome if we could get better fidelity in those areas in the future though ...
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