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Post by captainkoloth on Dec 29, 2021 16:36:25 GMT
I realize that I’m about 5 years past anyone caring about this discussion, but it’s been bothering me so I’m going to bring it up anyway: I am not at all convinced that the game’s representation of space combat is accurate. Ordinarily I play lots of games that aren’t even remotely close to having physics that exist in this universe (e.g. Sins of a Solar Empire), but they also aren’t claiming to be a 1:1 hyper-accurate portrayal of reality. The way many reviews and discussion describe this game would lead one to think that it is a simulation accurate down to the molecular level and that no one else could ever even come close to such verisimilitude. The more I play this, the farther from the truth I am finding this characterization to be. Here are some specific issues I have based on my short playtime with the game:
1) Radiator and systems modeling. So far as I can tell (and I may be wrong, maybe I haven’t played long enough to see), there’s no modeling of systems damage. If I shoot off someone’s radiator, it just… gets shot off. In theory, especially with these glowing red-hot radiators, destroying one should render a spacecraft completely inoperable within minutes. I see no evidence whatsoever that the game actually models system failure in this way. I have several times shot off an enemy’s radiator only to see them come back on another pass days later. Spacecraft damage modeling appears to me to be binary. The spacecraft either is dead or alive. Individual systems like specific weapons do have damage modeling, but it’s completely separate from the rest of the spacecraft so far as I can tell.
2) Further radiator issues. In real life, no radiator would be glowing red-hot like this unless it’s actually about to explode. Again, this is something I would ordinarily give a pass to, but there is discussion on the game website and blog about how lasers are accurate down to the spectral level, so this annoys me. It’s like you’re saying you have some MSFS 2020-level flight simulation but you have giant 150-foot cartoon propellors driving the aircraft. To be sure, space hardware can radiate glowing red (look at footage taken in orbit of radiatively cooled engine nozzles), but typically almost all of the radiation you want to be in the infrared, which would not be visible to the eye.
3) Command and control. Who is commanding these ships? From where? If it’s from some kind of base, there would be a light travel time delay, not modeled. That delay could even be seen if the ships are being commanded locally (there would be small ship-to-ship communications delays). Additionally, as the ships maneuver and as plasma is generated from e.g. nuclear weapon detonations, there would be interruptions to communications. As far as I can tell all ships everywhere immediately get perfect orders with no delay or error (different context but the game Flashpoint Campaigns models this kind of order interference and uncertainty very well).
4) Acceleration concerns. You have these long spindly radiators on many designs while simultaneously having gigantic high-acceleration nuclear thermal rockets firing at full force for prolonged period of time. In any realistic design that would cause serious structural and vibration issues with the radiators, which do not appear to be modeled in any way.
5) This is shifting now more toward questions regarding the assumptions than problems with the physics. First, I am not at all convinced that the tapered cylinders which represent most of the spacecraft in the game are a realistic shape for this kind of spacecraft. On the game’s blog, it basically just asserts that you’d have cylinders because it gives you sloped armor, and armor would be the most massive component on a combat spacecraft so this reduces mass. There are a bunch of problems with these assumptions. First, there is no armor in the universe that’s going to stand up to (for example) a hypervelocity 500 kg slug coming at you at 10 km/s. Armor would also be unhelpful (to a reasonable extent) with e.g. the neutron radiation coming from a nearby nuclear blast. The assumption that armor is going to drive your entire spacecraft design is unsubstantiated. Furthermore, even if we put that objection aside and assume it will drive the spacecraft design, the ships in COADE don’t actually utilize armor in this way. They never turn the armor such that it’s facing into the enemy weaponry; everyone always engages in broadsides, such that the whole rationale for shaping the spacecraft this way is unfulfilled anyway. If armor were to be utilized in the way the game describes, the weapons would have to be firing down the length of the spacecraft, but many of them are firing radially outward. Furthermore, this shape yields the maximum surface area for a given volume which, if armor really is your highest mass subsystem, means you’re maximizing mass for a unit volume or capability measure, which is exactly the opposite of how you’d want to design any spacecraft.
6) Further, I find the whole concept of manned carriers being required to utilize drones to be questionable. The reduced light-travel time delay makes sense, but in this conception, why require the intermediary of combat spacecraft at all? It would be far more cost effective simply to launch hypervelocity kinetic slugs (which, by the way, would be “cold” and therefore stealthy) directly at enemy installations in orbit or on a planet. I would also claim that, by the time the technology level portrayed in the game has been reached, it would be far more cost effective to incorporate simple AI with e.g. infrared imaging capabilities to track targets without human intervention than to build manned spacecraft simply for the purpose of joysticking a drone. The drones in the game are going at orbital velocities relative to their targets anyway and aren’t being controlled in real time from the carriers in any meaningful sense.
7) Why are nuclear weapons limited to fission and boosted fission? You’re arbitrarily handicapping the yield of your warheads by two to three orders of magnitude.
I don’t mean to dump on the game. I actually really respect what the developer was trying to do. It just bothers me when something is portrayed as a perfectly accurate, unquestionable, hyperrealistic representation of spaceflight or physics and there are gaping flaws in the logic (I had the same problem with the movie Gravity). If the game were representing itself as just a space combat sim with a physically realistic flavor or inspiration it wouldn’t bother me nearly so much. But the more I play the game the more cartoonish I find its universe to be in terms of the physics and assumptions in play.
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Post by sage on Dec 30, 2021 19:09:20 GMT
1) Radiator and systems modeling. So far as I can tell (and I may be wrong, maybe I haven’t played long enough to see), there’s no modeling of systems damage. If I shoot off someone’s radiator, it just… gets shot off. In theory, especially with these glowing red-hot radiators, destroying one should render a spacecraft completely inoperable within minutes. I see no evidence whatsoever that the game actually models system failure in this way. I have several times shot off an enemy’s radiator only to see them come back on another pass days later. Spacecraft damage modeling appears to me to be binary. The spacecraft either is dead or alive. Individual systems like specific weapons do have damage modeling, but it’s completely separate from the rest of the spacecraft so far as I can tell. I would agree that there are problems with the Radiator modeling, but not the same ones as you. From what I get from gameplay, if you should offer radiator, any system that is attached to it will shut down. Now people design their ships to have more radiators than they need to dissipate the heat produced by any system. So, if you destroy a radiator attached to a laser, and there are other radiators that can disperse the waste heat produced by that laser, the game was still allow the laser to fire. But if the waste heat exceeds what the radiators can radiate than the game shuts down the radiators. And if you have a nuclear reactor, which is normally attached to the glowing red-hot radiators, and you destroy enough radiators the reactor will shut down. By the way if this is your only power source the end result will be that the crew that ship will die. Which is why dragon claw designs his ships to have an independent crew power source. And this is my problem with the radiator models. Unless you're using thorium reactors with neutron bombardment. Your nuclear power source will not shut down when the radiators are gone. Instead, the ship should heat up, until the crew is cooked alive, or the ammunition or fuel source explodes. |
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Post by sage on Dec 30, 2021 19:11:21 GMT
2) Further radiator issues. In real life, no radiator would be glowing red-hot like this unless it’s actually about to explode. Again, this is something I would ordinarily give a pass to, but there is discussion on the game website and blog about how lasers are accurate down to the spectral level, so this annoys me. It’s like you’re saying you have some MSFS 2020-level flight simulation but you have giant 150-foot cartoon propellors driving the aircraft. To be sure, space hardware can radiate glowing red (look at footage taken in orbit of radiatively cooled engine nozzles), but typically almost all of the radiation you want to be in the infrared, which would not be visible to the eye. The IR signature is overlaid with the visual one. So, you see the infrared overlaid with the color and shape of the ship. Which is why you can see the radiators glowing red-hot on high temp ones. |
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Post by sage on Dec 30, 2021 19:32:21 GMT
3) Command and control. Who is commanding these ships? From where? If it’s from some kind of base, there would be a light travel time delay, not modeled. That delay could even be seen if the ships are being commanded locally (there would be small ship-to-ship communications delays). Additionally, as the ships maneuver and as plasma is generated from e.g. nuclear weapon detonations, there would be interruptions to communications. As far as I can tell all ships everywhere immediately get perfect orders with no delay or error (different context but the game Flashpoint Campaigns models this kind of order interference and uncertainty very well). The crew of the ships is listed on the left had side when you view ships in the ship builder. What makes up the crew is based on submarine warfare. I would have used different names for some of the crew members. Like having the captain called the Commanding Officer and the lieutenant called Executive Officer. The rank of each would change with the class of ship they command. For example, an escort ship would have a Colonel as commanding officer and a Commander as executive officer, but a capital ship would have a Commodore as commanding officer and a Colonel as executive officer. Now on to your question about where they are commanding their ship from. As I have stated before, there is a lot of problems with the crew modules. Not just the size, but where are things done inside them. Did you know that if you divided the crew by the m^3 of each crew module you get that each crew member has a space of less then 5 m^3. By the way 2.1 m^3 is the crew quarter size on the ISS (page 7 "Minimum Acceptable Net Habitable Volume for Long-Duration Exploration Missions" by NASA). 25m^3 is what they say should be the minimum on page 9 of the same report. Note that the ISS has 85.17 m^3 per person and Mir had 45 m^3. So yes, there are a lot of problems. I had to take several small modules, and make copies of them, at which point I would have to rename them to each of the jobs they perform. As a workaround to this problem. Note that I would have to extremely increase the amount of space to make these into accurate realistic military spacecraft. |
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Post by sage on Dec 30, 2021 19:59:26 GMT
5) This is shifting now more toward questions regarding the assumptions than problems with the physics. First, I am not at all convinced that the tapered cylinders which represent most of the spacecraft in the game are a realistic shape for this kind of spacecraft. On the game’s blog, it basically just asserts that you’d have cylinders because it gives you sloped armor, and armor would be the most massive component on a combat spacecraft so this reduces mass. There are a bunch of problems with these assumptions. First, there is no armor in the universe that’s going to stand up to (for example) a hypervelocity 500 kg slug coming at you at 10 km/s. Armor would also be unhelpful (to a reasonable extent) with e.g. the neutron radiation coming from a nearby nuclear blast. The assumption that armor is going to drive your entire spacecraft design is unsubstantiated. Furthermore, even if we put that objection aside and assume it will drive the spacecraft design, the ships in COADE don’t actually utilize armor in this way. They never turn the armor such that it’s facing into the enemy weaponry; everyone always engages in broadsides, such that the whole rationale for shaping the spacecraft this way is unfulfilled anyway. If armor were to be utilized in the way the game describes, the weapons would have to be firing down the length of the spacecraft, but many of them are firing radially outward. Furthermore, this shape yields the maximum surface area for a given volume which, if armor really is your highest mass subsystem, means you’re maximizing mass for a unit volume or capability measure, which is exactly the opposite of how you’d want to design any spacecraft. The main answer to your question was answered in Why Does it Look Like That? (part 2) on the games blog. Radiation form the nuclear powerplants and nuclear thermal rockets, is very much taken into account. Which is why many are cylinders. But not all. See Raider Redesign III, on page 5 of Stock ships redesign - the practical approach. Now with that said, there is a problem that has yet to be addressed. That of Sieverts and the crew modules. Here is a question I asked and never got an answer to. |
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Post by linkxsc on Jan 3, 2022 19:56:31 GMT
2) Further radiator issues. In real life, no radiator would be glowing red-hot like this unless it’s actually about to explode. Again, this is something I would ordinarily give a pass to, but there is discussion on the game website and blog about how lasers are accurate down to the spectral level, so this annoys me. It’s like you’re saying you have some MSFS 2020-level flight simulation but you have giant 150-foot cartoon propellors driving the aircraft. To be sure, space hardware can radiate glowing red (look at footage taken in orbit of radiatively cooled engine nozzles), but typically almost all of the radiation you want to be in the infrared, which would not be visible to the eye. The IR signature is overlaid with the visual one. So, you see the infrared overlaid with the color and shape of the ship. Which is why you can see the radiators glowing red-hot on high temp ones. Minor point, on many high temp radiators. Any of them operating above 770K will glow in the visible spectrum, starting as dull red through orange and yellow to white hot around 1500k (and most reactors I build put out ~2500k) Naturally if you have a lot of excess radiator surface, and good pumps to circulate coolant, then your larger radiators should equalize at a lower temperature than this... but as far as ships designed along the lines of those in game, they'll definitely be glowing in the visible spectrum. Though my personal addendum to issues with radiators. 1. Should take an awful lot of power to pump all this coolant around, esp for different systems at different temperatures/coolant types. But we get this for "free" in terms of electrical power (much like NTR gimballs/pumps) 2. For modules that can't be made "high temperature", and thus need a lot of low temperature radiators... we should have the option to build heat pumps in for some extra mass. Might sound like a waste of mass, but in many cases, for these low temp modules, pumping the heat into a higher temp range and then sending it to the radiators, would result in radiators small enough to offset the mass of the heat pump. 3. Really wish we could mount radiators flat on the outside of the hull, esp for low temp modules. And that 2 different types of radiators for 2 different modules could be mounted... in the same circle I guess, as eachother, without the game erroring about "interreflection" when the effect would be negligible for the ship. |
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Post by sage on Jan 4, 2022 1:35:10 GMT
The IR signature is overlaid with the visual one. So, you see the infrared overlaid with the color and shape of the ship. Which is why you can see the radiators glowing red-hot on high temp ones. Minor point, on many high temp radiators. Any of them operating above 770K will glow in the visible spectrum, starting as dull red through orange and yellow to white hot around 1500k (and most reactors I build put out ~2500k) Naturally if you have a lot of excess radiator surface, and good pumps to circulate coolant, then your larger radiators should equalize at a lower temperature than this... but as far as ships designed along the lines of those in game, they'll definitely be glowing in the visible spectrum. Though my personal addendum to issues with radiators. 1. Should take an awful lot of power to pump all this coolant around, esp for different systems at different temperatures/coolant types. But we get this for "free" in terms of electrical power (much like NTR gimballs/pumps) 2. For modules that can't be made "high temperature", and thus need a lot of low temperature radiators... we should have the option to build heat pumps in for some extra mass. Might sound like a waste of mass, but in many cases, for these low temp modules, pumping the heat into a higher temp range and then sending it to the radiators, would result in radiators small enough to offset the mass of the heat pump. 3. Really wish we could mount radiators flat on the outside of the hull, esp for low temp modules. And that 2 different types of radiators for 2 different modules could be mounted... in the same circle I guess, as eachother, without the game erroring about "interreflection" when the effect would be negligible for the ship. good point, it is true that most of our ship reactors are around 1500. But at 2500 flares become almost useless. Also, would laser not be more effective against a radiator running at 2500 as they are already close to melting down. |
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Post by linkxsc on Jan 4, 2022 19:14:13 GMT
good point, it is true that most of our ship reactors are around 1500. But at 2500 flares become almost useless. Also, would laser not be more effective against a radiator running at 2500 as they are already close to melting down. Game flare model doesn't mind temperature, it worries about total thermal power being dissipated. So far as I recall (haven't played in a bit), a flare putting out 400MW at 1700k will mask a 200MW ship, even if it's radiators are tuned up to 2500k. Is this accurate to RL? Probably not, I've only worked with building a visual recognition program to guide a robot, not messed with thermal object recognition/guidance (outside of 1 experiment with a wiimote camera, but we aren't guiding missiles with those). But if I can guide a robot based on the optical shape of a target... doesn't seem a stretch to do so for a thermally guided unit. Especially given that many ships have a few easily idenfitiable "hotspots" of radiators, that it shouldn't be too hard to have your guidance "ignore" the new 1 floating off the the side at an odd angle. 1 thing the game severely lacks IMO is delayed action flares BTW. Our current flares start burning the second they are launched... there's no reason we shouldn't be able to put a remote detonator on them and detonate them 20-30 seconds after being launched. Consider the idea. Launch 1 large flare that burns for 10 seconds that travels away from the ship at a steady rate. VS 3 smaller flares (same thermal power, but 3.3 seconds burns), launched at different speeds at the same time. Missile approaches, trigger each as the last burns out, this could not only turn a missile, but make it oversteer away due to thinking it's tracking an accelerating target. Also for real ship designs, if they ARE relying on flares for defense like ingame. The though occurrs that the main fluid you use to pump heat into your radiators... is the same fluid you use for primary propellant. Thus in combat, with a missile incoming, the ship could route "cold" propellant through its radiators for a second to chill them, (waste heat instead is dumped into the propellant tanks) while setting off flares to increase effectiveness. As far as lasers. I don't think they'd offer much difference in combat whether your radiators are 1500K or 2500K, as the aim point is going to be an order of magnitude higher than that. |
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Post by sage on Jan 6, 2022 22:33:48 GMT
good point, it is true that most of our ship reactors are around 1500. But at 2500 flares become almost useless. Also, would laser not be more effective against a radiator running at 2500 as they are already close to melting down. Game flare model doesn't mind temperature, it worries about total thermal power being dissipated. So far as I recall (haven't played in a bit), a flare putting out 400MW at 1700k will mask a 200MW ship, even if it's radiators are tuned up to 2500k. Is this accurate to RL? Probably not, I've only worked with building a visual recognition program to guide a robot, not messed with thermal object recognition/guidance (outside of 1 experiment with a wiimote camera, but we aren't guiding missiles with those). But if I can guide a robot based on the optical shape of a target... doesn't seem a stretch to do so for a thermally guided unit. Especially given that many ships have a few easily idenfitiable "hotspots" of radiators, that it shouldn't be too hard to have your guidance "ignore" the new 1 floating off the the side at an odd angle. 1 thing the game severely lacks IMO is delayed action flares BTW. Our current flares start burning the second they are launched... there's no reason we shouldn't be able to put a remote detonator on them and detonate them 20-30 seconds after being launched. Consider the idea. Launch 1 large flare that burns for 10 seconds that travels away from the ship at a steady rate. VS 3 smaller flares (same thermal power, but 3.3 seconds burns), launched at different speeds at the same time. Missile approaches, trigger each as the last burns out, this could not only turn a missile, but make it oversteer away due to thinking it's tracking an accelerating target. Also for real ship designs, if they ARE relying on flares for defense like ingame. The though occurrs that the main fluid you use to pump heat into your radiators... is the same fluid you use for primary propellant. Thus in combat, with a missile incoming, the ship could route "cold" propellant through its radiators for a second to chill them, (waste heat instead is dumped into the propellant tanks) while setting off flares to increase effectiveness. As far as lasers. I don't think they'd offer much difference in combat whether your radiators are 1500K or 2500K, as the aim point is going to be an order of magnitude higher than that. I double checked and you are right. It the total thermal power of the ship that they go after. And thanks for noting that you can use the propellant as a heat sink. I thought I was the only one that noticed. On laser they get exponentially more powerful as you get closer. One way to disable a ship is to destroy it radiators. Are you using amorphous carbon for your Radiator? If so, then they max out at 3719k. Meaning if the laser can get the temp to 3719k, they would be destroyed. Your thermoelectric fission reactors, how efficiency are they? At higher output temp, radiators are more efficiency, but the thermoelectric fission reactors become less so, leading to more waste heat. |
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Post by sage on Jan 6, 2022 22:55:35 GMT
6) Further, I find the whole concept of manned carriers being required to utilize drones to be questionable. The reduced light-travel time delay makes sense, but in this conception, why require the intermediary of combat spacecraft at all? It would be far more cost effective simply to launch hypervelocity kinetic slugs (which, by the way, would be “cold” and therefore stealthy) directly at enemy installations in orbit or on a planet. I would also claim that, by the time the technology level portrayed in the game has been reached, it would be far more cost effective to incorporate simple AI with e.g. infrared imaging capabilities to track targets without human intervention than to build manned spacecraft simply for the purpose of joysticking a drone. The drones in the game are going at orbital velocities relative to their targets anyway and aren’t being controlled in real time from the carriers in any meaningful sense. The answer is that this game base its spaceship off of submarine combat. Cold war and current submarines currently use wire-guided torpedo, as the submarine sonar is better than that of the torpedo. That why the game has a missile fly-by-wire pilot for both drones and missiles. As it is based on submarine warfare. Now if it was me, I would use laser communications as it would not be able to be hackable and you could not jam the communications, but that just me. And fly-by-laser sound a lot better in space then fly-by-wire. Now onto what does the pilot do. I think that it is their job to maintain control and contact with the missile or drone on way to the mission. Like a missile (or drone) only Comm officer with an electronic warfare specialty. |
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