acatalepsy
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Post by acatalepsy on Sept 29, 2016 22:58:26 GMT
That is mildly terrifying. How effective is it in practice? I am about to find out!
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acatalepsy
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Post by acatalepsy on Sept 29, 2016 22:41:54 GMT
How's this?
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acatalepsy
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Post by acatalepsy on Sept 29, 2016 19:23:30 GMT
Single player is really fun, but to answer the question this game is meant to solve (how do space combat?) I think multiplayer isn't sufficient, and it probably isn't necessary. I think that there are a lot of hard problems that this game can help solve, or at least raise some very interesting questions about - if nothing else it's an amazing place to refight the old purple-green laser-missile wars. But a full answer to "how do space combat" requires, I think, more than an ability to put ships up against each other in the style of a death-match; it requires a harder look at assumptions of economics and logistics which can't really be done in simulation (or, at least, this simulation isn't set up for it), and must be argued for or demonstrated through citation. Incidentally, there's an easy-enough way to simulate any fight you want for the purpose of answering questions, which is to simply give the player the ability to control both sides in a fight, along with an ability to pause (and, ideally, the ability to save a game so that specific scenarios can be worked through multiple times). No multiplayer required, though a community that challenges assumptions and suggests different approaches - taking each other's saves and showing how to get one side or another to win an engagement - is probably essential. Wow, I hadn't considered AI-vs-AI "autobattles". That sounds like a promising and less labor-intensive method of testing designs against each other, while we wait around for proper multiplayer. Cool idea! That might be an interesting game, but it's a very far cry from answering "how do space combat"; you end up building around the limitations of the AI to the point that the fleets themselves are just gross over-optimized parodies.
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acatalepsy
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Post by acatalepsy on Sept 29, 2016 18:32:36 GMT
I think that is true currently, but do we even know if proper multiplayer is in the works? Or will we be stuck with play-by-post against questionable AI forever? Probably? Multiplayer is a whole different problem; one filled with fundamental design and coding issues. It's not unsolvable, but it's a major, major undertaking that's out of line with what resources appear to be available. You'd probably want at least one other developer dedicated to that, as well as doing more intensive QA because multiplayer is bug city. I think the only way multiplayer will ever be a thing is if qswitched decides to go all in on this. That would probably mean launching a Kickstarter, or talking to a publisher like Matrix Games (who publish a lot of niche simulation and wargames, such as Command: Modern Air and Naval Operations, or Starshatter). If that happens, I'll certainly be there, but it doesn't seem terribly likely at this point. Yup, I experienced the missile problems last night myself. With a 250km engagement range for my lasers, the incoming missiles just burned straight at me until empty so they were on a ballistic trajectory. I evaded the missiles by boosting forward slightly, lol. So that needs work. Right, the arbitrary laser ranges, combined with the lack of intercept logic for missiles, make missiles basically nonfunctional. With the somewhat-ridiculous 10 kps+ NTR missiles and some careful hand-maneuvering, it may be possible to engage a target starting 250 km away, but it's not exactly fun, easy, or interesting. A more robust approach might be to use heavily laser-armored drones with missile magazines as a sort of multi-stage missile and use raw dV to overcome, but still - it's not terribly great.
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acatalepsy
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Post by acatalepsy on Sept 29, 2016 17:50:32 GMT
The problem with this kind of thing is that the AI just isn't bright enough to use ships designed for human control in an even vaguely correct manner. For example, I'm working on a carrier/drone centric design, and it will absolutely get shredded if placed under AI control. Design for this kind of fight is absolutely designing around what the AI knows how to use, not what is actually effective against an opponent who isn't dumb. It also pushes heavily for low-dV fleets, because the AI doesn't maneuver, and won't try to punish you for not having enough dV by dodging your intercept and then laughing as you go on a one way trip to nowhere.
My suspicion is that missiles in particular are overpowered when used against the AI (because they won't dodge or change orbits effectively, or use drones effectively to interdict incoming missiles), and underpowered when used by the AI (because the AI has no idea how to actually use missiles effectively, and good human players can just dodge them; not to mention use 'smart' decoys that the AI has no idea how to prevent). And missiles are cheap enough within this limit that they'll likely be a dominant strategy; every fleet will include a missile truck of some sort and every fleet will wipe every single other fleet (when controlled by a player against an AI). On top of that, I think we're waiting for at least some review of the questionable physicality of certain designs - most notably supereffective micro-NTR rockets and minifission reactors.
Also, uh, without streaming or some kind of verification you can't stop someone from winning every fight by just trying again and again until they get it right, then posting three victory screenshots.
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acatalepsy
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Post by acatalepsy on Sept 29, 2016 14:29:42 GMT
What about spider silk? I've been meaning to do some armor testing with that against kinetics and lasers, and the result of the fiber against lasers is encouraging.
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acatalepsy
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Post by acatalepsy on Sept 29, 2016 2:43:33 GMT
The Sky Guardian is a dedicated slugger/capital ship killer with a meter of depleted uranium in the nose. Has excellent survivability against stock craft and railguns, though is potentially vulnerable to missiles. It was an experiment in using graphite as a spaced outer layer, which it functions quite well against near-misses from Devastators. The conic shape works well when oriented towards incoming fire. It can clear out modest missile volleys, but is probably susceptible to large volleys, and untested against drones at the moment. It uses custom methane tanks & crew modules designed for redundancy over durability, and also sports some lighter methane NTRs that enable it to have a ton of delta-v, for purposes of bringing the fight to the enemy. With high dV and 400 flak missiles, it is an effective force projection design. I'd be less worried about large missile volleys and more worried about someone with long range lasers poking out all of your frontal weapons. If you've seen the reactor thread you'll know that we've been getting some fairly ridiculous power outputs, and laser range is basically arbitrary. Also, the problem of that frontal-mainly/only design is that an evading target can make you very, very unhappy, especially if those targets have friends, and even more if those friends have lasers. Drones are probably going to be a problem in that a flight stingers that makes it past your is going to absolutely shred your sides. I'd consider upgrading your reactor, and switching out (or adding) some long range lasers to the front, to take care of drones before they become a problem and to poke out enemy lasers. Since your frontal weaponry is in a small spot, you should probably go for custom weaponry with some heavy armor (and you can probably afford to drop at least some of the uranium). Also, consider how this thing will work in fleet against highly non-cooperative targets. What does its support look like, and what does the worst case scenario look like? On the plus side, it's good that you're not neglecting acceleration. With that much dV, you'll be able to control the engagement range pretty reliably. You just need to avoid getting your engine sniped while you're doing so.
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acatalepsy
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Post by acatalepsy on Sept 29, 2016 1:19:51 GMT
Hmmm... I had been trying to lob a bunch of flak missiles at it, but haven't had much success in actually scoring a hit yet. The damned ship evades every time. >.< Try a very low velocity intercept, with as much of your dV remaining in the missiles as you can. What may help, especially if you're trying to get the record, is building a ship with a very high acceleration and dV and a boatload of flak missiles just for this mission. EDIT: I tried again with just a stock missile boat. Very doable. You need to bring yourself to rest next to the planetoid it's orbiting (orbit behind it, maybe, or just use the trajectory - the gravity is extremely weak). Then I lobbed clusters of striker nukes and flak missiles at it until it was a total wreck, then moved in with the missile boat's cannons to finish off the last radiators and drives.
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acatalepsy
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Post by acatalepsy on Sept 29, 2016 0:36:44 GMT
Okay, so your target is a gunship. You need to disable it, which means blowing away all of its weapons and engines, without killing the crew underneath the hull...or just blowing up the reactors or their radiators. The latter is a lot easier, and more importantly, doesn't have any critical crew compartments right next to it Let's see how we can do that, by looking at the gunship in the ship builder view. Good stuff. The reactor and radiators are far enough away from the crew compartments that it shouldn't be a big deal. Unfortunately, you have to deal with the lasers, which means a high speed flyby with Stinger drones is going to be a no-go. Your options then are to go in fast and hard with capital ships, targeting the radiators with weak weapons, or trying to hit the reactor only with flak missiles. The latter is going to be very hit and miss, literally, but with some patience and low closing velocities, it can work. (The actually easy way is to use custom modified lasers to snipe the radiators, reactors, and engines from extreme range; but you don't have that option yet.)
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acatalepsy
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Post by acatalepsy on Sept 28, 2016 21:53:25 GMT
If I understand what you mean, it can be perfomed perfectly by making the target your frame of reference. It becomes fixed within that frame and it become merely a game of moving the green and red sliders to get an intercept, no matter how wonky the trajectory looks it will make all sense again when getting back to the central moon/planet/sun as your frame of reference. You don't understand what I mean. Doing that will guarantee an intercept, but not a minimum dV intercept/capture. That can only be done when the target body and starting location are aligned (which will happen on a periodic basis). This game, unlike KSP, does not make it easy to find when this alignment occurs, so it requires some guesswork.
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acatalepsy
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Post by acatalepsy on Sept 28, 2016 20:34:01 GMT
The problem with using missiles defensively is that they're not really "targeted" the way ships are; they are basically ships that happen to explode into things. Which means that you can't focus on them firing at an incoming missile swarm; instead the "seek heat source" behavior will go for the biggest heat source (modified by distance maybe?) and missiles are cold compared to their big radiating mothership.
It's an idea I'm still okay with playing with, however, especially for dealing with high speed hyperbolic intercepts by big missile swarms. You can't trade on a missile for missile basis with cheap flak missiles - they're less expensive and less massive - but these types of things might make good final defensive options to defeat swarms as they converge. I'd be interested to play around with the detonation range and yield as well. I suspect you'll need to be less than 50 meters to ensure a kill, but that's not too hard if you're directly between the enemy and their target. I'd recommend at least some armor, though, both to counter escorting drones with lasers, and to prevent fratricide if you launch several of these things.
Part of the problem here is that what's viable against a dumb AI isn't against an event remotely intelligent human opponent. Things like suckering a missile swarm by sending a single missile of your own against it wouldn't fly against a real person, who would just cancel the missile's orders, spread out a little, and/or try to actively evade your missile's interception. Past a certain point, testing a lot of missile and counter-missile tactics requires the ability to play both sides in an engagement.
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acatalepsy
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Post by acatalepsy on Sept 28, 2016 18:54:45 GMT
The main thing this game is missing is the ability to "slide" a specific maneuver around on the track. Often you know how you want to thrust (3 km/s retrograde) but not where (or when; the same thing in orbital mechanics). This makes doing transfer orbits frustrating; ideally it will be in a future version, but for now doing that kind of transfer requires a bit of guesswork and iteration.
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acatalepsy
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Post by acatalepsy on Sept 28, 2016 18:05:45 GMT
Nukes are a different scale of "thermal damage", I think - it depends both on intercept logic (since the countermissile could interpose itself between the missile and target, which would be pretty hard to counter) and the yield/proximity of the nuke. You might be able to make use of these in the terminal phase, as a sort of final backstop. Just an idea at this point, of course.
(Of course, maybe one could put flares/decoys on the missiles as well? Unlike a ship, where I think some pretty basic logic could keep a missile swarm on track, decoys really would massively complicate missile defenses.)
I'm also looking into flak behavior in general. It seems like most don't miss by much more than 100 meters, and most ships aren't more than 200 meters long. Similarly, it seems that most of the flak kills I've gotten have bored a ten meter or more hole through the target ship, which seems....excessive, to say the least. A superior solution may be to set the detonation so that at the intercept velocity (2+ km/s) the cone of fragments is 300 meters wide at its "base" where it intersects the target ship. Sure, most of the fragments will be wasted that way, but it may do a better job at hitting in the first place and doing damage to radiators. It would also make it easier to do a "scatter" order, so that there's fragments coming in from multiple angles (better odds of an up the kilt shot on the engines).
Also maybe taking advantage of the (impossibly?) good mini nuclear rockets Tuna has cooked up, though that may just be taking things a bit too far.
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acatalepsy
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Post by acatalepsy on Sept 28, 2016 14:33:23 GMT
Yes, please! Thanks for doing this (before I went crazy and had to do it myself).
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acatalepsy
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Post by acatalepsy on Sept 28, 2016 13:58:31 GMT
That's more of a ship design concern, than talking about the design of the radiators themselves - and I'm not sure I agree with it (though I don't want to get into that here). The main concern I have is less incoming gunfire - I think we're agreed that trying to armor radiators against any serious gunfire is basically impossible? - and more long range laser duels, where sniping radiators is more of a possibility. It's not at all clear to me how lasers actually do damage to radiators, and thus how radiator thickness and radiator armor are related to the survival of those radiators in a laser duel.
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