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Post by omnipotentvoid on Feb 18, 2017 10:33:13 GMT
Don't all systems in the game use assumptions and simplifications in order to simulate them in a way that doesn't fry our computers? As far as I can remember from researching rail guns, rail geometry is incredibly important to the calculation of the force applied to the projectile. The game doesn't simulate this, rather it assumes a rail geometry for which the equations are known/simple and uses them. I imagine implementation of sensor systems would be similar: assumptions are made so that the calculations that the game has to make based our input parameters are simple enough that our computers can handle it. The only in-combat difference that a different geometry simulation would cause is a change in the parameters applied to the barrel and projectile. This doesn't add new parameters, hence it has no effect on the processing load outside of the module editor. I'm quite sure the simplification for railguns is either due to unknowns or to reduce game development time, or both. It may be added sometime in the distant future, or when/if the dev team expands. The current railgun geometry as displayed is actually nonviable. It is one solid barrel of metal, which would short circuit at its base. Rail geometry dictates the shape and strength of the magnetic field generated. Certain shapes could be used to allow for different accelerations along different parts of the barrel, say, to counteract material weakening due to heating. Calculating the magnetic field of a barrel with such a complex shape as the projectile moves along it is not easy and the game probably doesn't allow it because a) it would probably take a long time to calculate the parameters needed for combat and b) implementing such a simulation would be incredibly difficult to implement, probably being beyond the scope of a project like CoaDE. My point is that sensors would need to be simplified to some extent in order to be implemented, as do all systems.
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Post by dragonkid11 on Feb 18, 2017 11:25:05 GMT
Is the math for magnetic field generated by different rail geometry available though?
If possible, it would be nice if we can change the shape of the rail for optimization to several sets of shape.
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Post by leerooooooy on Feb 18, 2017 11:25:28 GMT
I strongly disagree. This game is about uncovering what realistic space combat would actually be like. For that, we need as many options and detail as possible, as conventional wisdom gets overturned every update or so. Simplifying something for the sake of simplifying would do this injustice. How would you even determine how effective a sensor would be without going into detail? Just look at how varied coilguns and railguns are. Could you simulate these in the way you propose? Determining what is optimal for a given situation is one of the core principals of the game. Detection and tracking (and even communication) are too important to oversimplify or abstract away. The importance of these becomes clear when observing current military hardware and the emphasis on awareness and communication, from AWACS to Global Hawks to tiny quadcopters. Just look at current day thanks and how loaded they are with sensors and comm gear! No, this game ATTEMPTS to uncover what realistic space combat would actually be like. Having more options is not nice at all if just a handful of those new ones are broken, is pointless if there are preexisting issues (like 9001% efficient coilguns), and ridiculous if the tooltips are in direct contrast with their functionality. Having loosely simulated sensors is better than having to work around mysteriously limited sensors, and FAR better than having to deal with fully simulated but broken sensors.
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Post by omnipotentvoid on Feb 18, 2017 12:55:01 GMT
Is the math for magnetic field generated by different rail geometry available though? If possible, it would be nice if we can change the shape of the rail for optimization to several sets of shape. It's readily available : en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biot%E2%80%93Savart_lawlinkIt becomes extremely complex for none trivial geometry though, especially because a railgun is a dynamic system, where the geometry effectively changes as the projectile moves along the rails. The only way to implement more complex geometry is probably select a few simple geometries and derive the formula of the magnetic field based on a few simple factors like length and width at certain points using the Biot Savart law. These formulas could be integrated into the game fairly easily, deriving the formulas could be very difficult though and might require some rather tedious simulation. Does anyone know if the projectiles are assumed discs? Most rail armatures are actually pretty thick rectangles/squares with a parabolic cutout in the rear. It would seem to me that this would allow for more acceleration, since the magnetic field, and thus the force applied to the projectile, is strongest close to the rails. These shaped armatures would thus be able to accelerate much faster without shattering, cutting down on barrel length or increasing muzzle velocity. It may be more efficient as well as far as I remember. Reference image: Source: www.google.com/patents/US8132562
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Post by bigbombr on Feb 18, 2017 13:41:33 GMT
I strongly disagree. This game is about uncovering what realistic space combat would actually be like. For that, we need as many options and detail as possible, as conventional wisdom gets overturned every update or so. Simplifying something for the sake of simplifying would do this injustice. How would you even determine how effective a sensor would be without going into detail? Just look at how varied coilguns and railguns are. Could you simulate these in the way you propose? Determining what is optimal for a given situation is one of the core principals of the game. Detection and tracking (and even communication) are too important to oversimplify or abstract away. The importance of these becomes clear when observing current military hardware and the emphasis on awareness and communication, from AWACS to Global Hawks to tiny quadcopters. Just look at current day thanks and how loaded they are with sensors and comm gear! No, this game ATTEMPTS to uncover what realistic space combat would actually be like. Having more options is not nice at all if just a handful of those new ones are broken, is pointless if there are preexisting issues (like 9001% efficient coilguns), and ridiculous if the tooltips are in direct contrast with their functionality. Having loosely simulated sensors is better than having to work around mysteriously limited sensors, and FAR better than having to deal with fully simulated but broken sensors. The only way to get things simulated accurately is by going for as much detail as possible and fixing any bugs along the way.
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Post by newageofpower on Feb 18, 2017 14:55:08 GMT
omnipotentvoidFrom railgun cutout diagrams in CoADE, they appear to be monolithic slugs, with solid cylindrical geometries.
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Post by leerooooooy on Feb 18, 2017 16:42:09 GMT
The only way to get things simulated accurately is by going for as much detail as possible and fixing any bugs along the way. I disagree, having a solid black box model to start with is a good idea for several reasons: - It gives you something to check against as you try and build more in detail simulations, making bug testing easier and unit testing (basically automated bug testing) rather simple.
- It gives the players half of the full deal to play with: the whole tactical relevance of the new addition is there even without the inner workings being simulated.
- It allows for far more variety: can't simulate properly a Teller-Ullam nuke because there are no public papers on it? Who cares lol, black box to the rescue!
I agree that the end goal is having as much as possible being simulated with as much depth and accuracy as possible, but I would very much prefer to see plausible or at least not wildly impossible behaviour a lot sooner than that.
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Post by bigbombr on Feb 18, 2017 17:07:42 GMT
The only way to get things simulated accurately is by going for as much detail as possible and fixing any bugs along the way. I disagree, having a solid black box model to start with is a good idea for several reasons: - It gives you something to check against as you try and build more in detail simulations, making bug testing easier and unit testing (basically automated bug testing) rather simple.
- It gives the players half of the full deal to play with: the whole tactical relevance of the new addition is there even without the inner workings being simulated.
- It allows for far more variety: can't simulate properly a Teller-Ullam nuke because there are no public papers on it? Who cares lol, black box to the rescue!
I agree that the end goal is having as much as possible being simulated with as much depth and accuracy as possible, but I would very much prefer to see plausible or at least not wildly impossible behaviour a lot sooner than that. For some things, determining this behaviour without digging into the details is nontrivial.
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Post by leerooooooy on Feb 18, 2017 17:40:14 GMT
I know, but things like railguns can be simulated far better than they currently are by replacing the velocity calculation with a far simpler one that assumes 100% efficiency. Total black box, would prevent most of the issues currently existing while introducing minor ones.
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Post by underwhelmed on Feb 18, 2017 18:05:32 GMT
I strongly disagree. This game is about uncovering what realistic space combat would actually be like. For that, we need as many options and detail as possible, as conventional wisdom gets overturned every update or so. Simplifying something for the sake of simplifying would do this injustice. How would you even determine how effective a sensor would be without going into detail? Just look at how varied coilguns and railguns are. Could you simulate these in the way you propose? Determining what is optimal for a given situation is one of the core principals of the game. Detection and tracking (and even communication) are too important to oversimplify or abstract away. The importance of these becomes clear when observing current military hardware and the emphasis on awareness and communication, from AWACS to Global Hawks to tiny quadcopters. Just look at current day thanks and how loaded they are with sensors and comm gear! Assumptions are already being made. It's assumed that designs with no safety factor don't suddenly fail from fatigue, it's assumed that radiator efficiency doesn't depend on how close they are to the heat source, it's assumed drone and missile guidance can't be jammed, etc. All models are wrong but some are useful. There's a lot of variety, but for any given bore size, payload, power, barrel material combination there's an optimal railgun for barrel velocity, range to hit a 1m^2 target, lowest cost, etc. Things have to be and are already being simplified in order to run real-time on a PC.
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Post by omnipotentvoid on Feb 18, 2017 19:42:50 GMT
I strongly disagree. This game is about uncovering what realistic space combat would actually be like. For that, we need as many options and detail as possible, as conventional wisdom gets overturned every update or so. Simplifying something for the sake of simplifying would do this injustice. How would you even determine how effective a sensor would be without going into detail? Just look at how varied coilguns and railguns are. Could you simulate these in the way you propose? Determining what is optimal for a given situation is one of the core principals of the game. Detection and tracking (and even communication) are too important to oversimplify or abstract away. The importance of these becomes clear when observing current military hardware and the emphasis on awareness and communication, from AWACS to Global Hawks to tiny quadcopters. Just look at current day thanks and how loaded they are with sensors and comm gear! Assumptions are already being made. It's assumed that designs with no safety factor don't suddenly fail from fatigue, it's assumed that radiator efficiency doesn't depend on how close they are to the heat source, it's assumed drone and missile guidance can't be jammed, etc. All models are wrong but some are useful. There's a lot of variety, but for any given bore size, payload, power, barrel material combination there's an optimal railgun for barrel velocity, range to hit a 1m^2 target, lowest cost, etc. Things have to be and are already being simplified in order to run real-time on a PC. In the game there may be optimal solutions, but in reality these are all suboptimal. Additionally, optimal is a relative term. I've pointed out multiple times, for instance, that the weight that is optimal for kinetic energy weapons depends on the specific tactical situation. In fact I've done tests that confirm it. This kind of non trivial situational optimum is a step of "impossible to calculate" above the standard "physics is impossible to accurately simulate". Any assumptions we make on a physical level may have extreme impact on effectiveness of systems and ships in combat that we can not predict. Of all the assumptions currently being made in the game, the one on sensory systems is the most extreme. Information is the most important thing in combat. And of all the systems implemented into the game, informational systems are the most rudimentary. This means that the ships and weapons we use may be viable, but they would likely never exist in reality. The limitations on tactics and strategy imposed by the lack of sensory equipment means that the situations currently portrayed in the game would never happen. Much of the game is focused on the science behind space combat and the majority of the expertise behind the community and (I'm making an assumption here) the developers qswitched is technical not tactical. This is important because, while technology dictates what tactics are available and to some extent the effectiveness of said tactics, tactics dictate what technology is used and how effective that technology is in combat.
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Post by underwhelmed on Feb 19, 2017 1:11:09 GMT
You're confusing something with an optimized parameter given set of constraints with tactically optional. Nowhere have I argued that players shouldn't be allowed to make their own tradeoffs. What I have advocated for is reducing design to meaningful choices. The RP-1 to Methane spectrum is a meaningful tradeoff. Many, if not most, of the remaining propellants are not, because they deliver less dV and thrust for more volume and cost. So why make them an option at all? It's a noob trap. In a quest for realism, we could force people to design their own radar signals processing circuits and algorithms. But the end result wouldn't be any more realistic than if you just let people pick a radar band, aperture size, power, etc.
You want to do "realistic" data links? Fine, you can go figure out a fair time and spectrum sharing scheme for multiple simultaneous distributed users, crypto algorithms to prevent eavesdropping, handshake protocols, network routing, digital massage encoding formats, etc. I'm just going to assume the narrowbeam laser data link works so I don't get stuck staring at a tree instead of seeing the whole forest.
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Post by newageofpower on Feb 19, 2017 3:34:10 GMT
Eh. We should be allowed to pick Hydrogen over HD if we're trying to maximize eV for a starship, or pick CO2/Sulfur NTR propulsion to simulate, say, a Venusian Rebellion equipped with crude industrial tech vs a hyperoptimized Decane MPD/Resistojet Earther Battlefleet. Likewise, without access to orbital deposits the cost of Boron (or the Noble Metals, oh god the noble metals) would skyrocket, so an hypothetical Earther battlefleet might be forced to make do with other things. Meanwhile the Roider clans have a hard time scraping up enough fissiles without trade... *shrug*
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Post by omnipotentvoid on Feb 19, 2017 9:06:24 GMT
You're confusing something with an optimized parameter given set of constraints with tactically optional. Nowhere have I argued that players shouldn't be allowed to make their own tradeoffs. What I have advocated for is reducing design to meaningful choices. The RP-1 to Methane spectrum is a meaningful tradeoff. Many, if not most, of the remaining propellants are not, because they deliver less dV and thrust for more volume and cost. So why make them an option at all? It's a noob trap. In a quest for realism, we could force people to design their own radar signals processing circuits and algorithms. But the end result wouldn't be any more realistic than if you just let people pick a radar band, aperture size, power, etc. You want to do "realistic" data links? Fine, you can go figure out a fair time and spectrum sharing scheme for multiple simultaneous distributed users, crypto algorithms to prevent eavesdropping, handshake protocols, network routing, digital massage encoding formats, etc. I'm just going to assume the narrowbeam laser data link works so I don't get stuck staring at a tree instead of seeing the whole forest. This is my point, we don't know what is "tactically optional" and what choices are meaningful in any given situation. It is tempting to say that all choices that don't lead to the optimization of what we consider are the most important characteristics are irrelevant. However we don't know what characteristics are relevant in any particular situation. As newageofpower pointed out, we may want or need to optimize for material use. Lack of manpower may also be taken into account. Depending on the situation, some weapon types may not be an option. Etc. This isn't well represented in the game, because all user designs are rather unlimited in this regard. They are all set up in such a way that technically optimizing weapons is enough to win them easily. So all most people do is technically optimize their designs. The Liberty assault cutter design challenge by Easy is a pretty good indication of how ships would be designed in reality. In any case, challenges where tactical expertise is required to win, rather than technical expertise would be extremely difficult for people used to the current meta and would probably take weeks for someone to beat on their own unless they know a lot about tactics.
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Post by sage on Jan 11, 2022 2:37:25 GMT
Easy I realize I know little about the functionality of detection equipment. I was actually hoping to learn about a bit more in depth in this discussion (without getting sidetracked constantly, which tends to happen when I simply look something up). That is why I stated it was a question in thread tittle. However, sensory data is one of, if not the most, important things in tactics. In fact, on tanks, the targeting system is the most advanced technology on the whole tank. The reason missiles are used on ships is that they can acquire targets beyond possible effective gun range. Even in infantry, technological advances has mostly been made in sensory and informational equipment. Take drones for example: the technology was effectively retrofitted to be armed. Their primary use is still reconnaissance in a strategic and situational awareness in a tactical setting. With such a major factor missing from the simulation, I can't really think of the tactics displayed in the game as realistic. It's like saying: lets make a tank simulator, but make all the guns handle the same way.
Based on my knowledge, I'd expect fleets to engage in the following way: - Fleets launch recon drones in order to enable long range targeting for capital ships and increases situational awareness. (well before engagement)
- Hunter-killer drones and missiles are launched to find and destroy the recon drones. (well before engagement)
- Interceptors are launched to intercept hunter killers (well before engagement)
- Missiles and drones are deployed to engage the enemy capital fleet and drones/missiles the enemy have deployed, this continues throughout the engagement. (shortly before engagement)
- Capital ships open up with main batteries at long range with rate of fire reduced to maintain maximum accuracy. (upon engagement)
- Maneuvers are executed if incoming shots are detected on time.
- Drone/missile fleets clash.
- Surviving drones engage capital fleets, secondaries and PD weapons engage drones and missiles, primary battery focus on enemy capital fleet
- Secondaries engage when the enemy capital fleet enters range, continues dodging begins
- Closest encounter: PD weapons intercept missiles and drones, secondaries use saturation fire to guaranty damage, primaries target important modules.
- Capitals stop launching drones in order to preserve ammo for possible follow up encounter, secondaries continue saturation fire, primaries switch back to targeting entire ships.
- Capitals leave effective secondary range, dodging is back to when incoming rounds are detected.
- Primary guns are out of range, engagement ends
- More recon drones are launched in order to improve targeting, search and destroy against enemy recon drones
there are three different ranges: Detection Range: You become aware there is something out there, at that position in the celestial sphere. You may or may not know how far away it is (e.g., there is a bogey, a blip on the radar screen). Identification Range: You know there is an object of a certain type at range x (e.g., there is a Blortch CL-23 "FenderBender" light cruiser at x 135.2, y 17.3, z 325.1 ). Targeting Range: Your sensors have enough data for a firing solution (Your casaba howitzers have a target lock on the enemy FenderBender, designated Target Tango 13. You may fire at will. ). Now all we have to do is find out what all three for a give sensor
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