AI War Beta 5.090 "Fish Or Cut Bait" Released!

[Faulty Logic]

I would agree, but the ship class name "dreadnaught" is inherrently awesome (along with most current naval naming schemes), and we lost that possibility as soon as we called them spaceships.

Incidentally, could arcen make a realistic space combat game?

3D, incorporating velocity and acceleration, ships rarely take more than one hit, range is determined by whether or not a ship can detect and dodge your weapon, stl sensor limitations, the works.

[keith.lamothe]

Incidentally, could arcen make a realistic space combat game?

3D, incorporating velocity and acceleration, ships rarely take more than one hit, range is determined by whether or not a ship can detect and dodge your weapon, stl sensor limitations, the works.

Whenever I read Harrington, I think "I wish this could be made into a tactical space-naval game".

And then I remember "oh right, mostly-stl sensors and comm, total implementation/interface rabbit hole, nvm".

[keith.lamothe]

Anyone else encountering strange behavior on the controls screen?

9711: The "do you want to save your settings" screen appears spuriously when opening up control screen

I would have asked earlier but figured it would be easy to reproduce, but it turns out I can't get this to happen at all; does anyone have a save where it can be reproduced reliably?

[Draco18s]

Incidentally, could arcen make a realistic space combat game?

3D, incorporating velocity and acceleration, ships rarely take more than one hit, range is determined by whether or not a ship can detect and dodge your weapon, stl sensor limitations, the works.

Optimal fleet strategy is a cube formation, attempting to align one of your "corners" with the enemy's "face."

Or so I've been told.

[Toranth]

Anyone else encountering strange behavior on the controls screen?

9711: The "do you want to save your settings" screen appears spuriously when opening up control screen

I would have asked earlier but figured it would be easy to reproduce, but it turns out I can't get this to happen at all; does anyone have a save where it can be reproduced reliably?

Don't have a save at this moment but try these steps:
Go to world 1.  Open Controls.  Open the Planet Specific tab.  Set "Warn when enemy" to 1.  Click Save.
Go to world 2.  Click 'Ctrls' to open.  Get the warning.
    If you click 'Cancel', the previous world's planet specific settings will be copied to the current world.
    If you click 'OK', the correct settings for the current world will load.
Interesting note:  This only happens if World 1 and World 2 have DIFFERENT planet-specific settings.  If they are the same, no warning is given.
Interesting note 2:  If the first time the warning appears, you click 'Cancel', World 1's settings will be loaded for World 2.  If you click 'Cancel' again to exit the Controls window, you'll get the unsaved warning again.

[keith.lamothe]

Optimal fleet strategy is a cube formation, attempting to align one of your "corners" with the enemy's "face."

Or so I've been told.

That would depend heavily on the physics of the engine, weapons, active and passive defense, etc technologies actually in play.

[keith.lamothe]

Anyone else encountering strange behavior on the controls screen?

9711: The "do you want to save your settings" screen appears spuriously when opening up control screen

I would have asked earlier but figured it would be easy to reproduce, but it turns out I can't get this to happen at all; does anyone have a save where it can be reproduced reliably?

Don't have a save at this moment but try these steps:
Go to world 1.  Open Controls.  Open the Planet Specific tab.  Set "Warn when enemy" to 1.  Click Save.
Go to world 2.  Click 'Ctrls' to open.  Get the warning.
    If you click 'Cancel', the previous world's planet specific settings will be copied to the current world.
    If you click 'OK', the correct settings for the current world will load.
Interesting note:  This only happens if World 1 and World 2 have DIFFERENT planet-specific settings.  If they are the same, no warning is given.
Interesting note 2:  If the first time the warning appears, you click 'Cancel', World 1's settings will be loaded for World 2.  If you click 'Cancel' again to exit the Controls window, you'll get the unsaved warning again.

That does do it now, thanks.  Dunno why it wasn't happening before, must have misunderstood what I was doing.

[chemical_art]

Optimal fleet strategy is a cube formation, attempting to align one of your "corners" with the enemy's "face."

Or so I've been told.

That would depend heavily on the physics of the engine, weapons, active and passive defense, etc technologies actually in play.

Yep.

Dad did some minor research on Startrek, and he came up with this:

Optimal strategy using current physics would be isolated frigates lobbing nuclear (fusion) missiles at each other. Once FTL that can be charged rapidly can be used in combat, its better to jump to a small distance to avoid missiles then then to bunch up and trust anti missile defenses.

Battlegroups would not exist except in blockades, since missile boats can accomplish most of the goals necessary to defeat bigger vessels.

[keith.lamothe]

New one

[Faulty Logic]

New one 

How obnoxious. We were just getting properly off topic.

[Draco18s]

Optimal fleet strategy is a cube formation, attempting to align one of your "corners" with the enemy's "face."

Or so I've been told.

That would depend heavily on the physics of the engine, weapons, active and passive defense, etc technologies actually in play.

I think it was laser combat without FTL engines.

I don't recall the name of the novel it was in, and I didn't read it.

But it was set up to be fairly realistic.

(Speaking of which, at relativistic distances, missiles are the superior weapon, as they can self-correct in flight, whereas lasers will miss simply due to lag time: already visible in AI War* )

*Photon Lance vs. any projectile.

[keith.lamothe]

On Light-speed weapons vs missiles there's a number of factors. 

If the two actually have comparable ranges, sure, the missile's self-correction is important.

It seems far more likely, though, that most mobile-base energy weapons would have substantially smaller engagement envelopes.  Projecting enough power to penetrate military-grade passive defenses at even one light-second would be much harder than lobbing a missile across that distance.

But once you're close enough, those light-speed weapons are the next best thing to un-evadeable, especially if you have no FTL sensors to tell you they're coming.  A random evasion pattern can only protect you so far in.

And the missiles are much easier to stop with active defenses, to the point that scoring an actual contact-hit with one could be very difficult.  Necessitating more complex modes of attack for the missiles, etc.

It's a fun thought experiment, though I imagine we're missing at least 90%+ of the important factors due to lack of information on how all this would actually happen.

[chemical_art]

On Light-speed weapons vs missiles there's a number of factors. 

If the two actually have comparable ranges, sure, the missile's self-correction is important.

It seems far more likely, though, that most mobile-base energy weapons would have substantially smaller engagement envelopes.  Projecting enough power to penetrate military-grade passive defenses at even one light-second would be much harder than lobbing a missile across that distance.

But once you're close enough, those light-speed weapons are the next best thing to un-evadeable, especially if you have no FTL sensors to tell you they're coming.  A random evasion pattern can only protect you so far in.

And the missiles are much easier to stop with active defenses, to the point that scoring an actual contact-hit with one could be very difficult.  Necessitating more complex modes of attack for the missiles, etc.

It's a fun thought experiment, though I imagine we're missing at least 90%+ of the important factors due to lack of information on how all this would actually happen.

It does, for example in Dad's thought experiments...

Laser weapons wouldn't be able to be made in turrets because they would require so much power to be able to puncture targets at range, they would need to be made straight guns bolted on ships...so he described it like this...

Imagine your car is trying to drive toward the sun and trying to lead the target so it hits its target after leading it.

Compare that to a missile barrage, where you would launch 100 missiles. 90 would be duds, 10 would be real, and if more then 1 hit the target is ded dead.

[Lancefighter]

Yeah similar points were brought up in Revelation Space books - You basically spam missiles at incredible ranges with the theory that one hit is plenty to effectively remove the enemy from combat.

In something like the Antares trilogy (really good set of books, look it up), both sides typically end up flying at each other, with less than a minute of actual combat range until they pass each other. Some lasers were used, but basically only at melee distance were they actually relevant.

Honestly though, I cant really agree that laser systems would require so much energy they would be fixed. If we are imaging that we are flying through space(something we cant do yet) can we not also propose that we can create powerplants or more efficient lasers, in such a way that will allow us to create turreted energy weapons?

If I am not mistaken, the USAF attempted to create a strategic warhead interception aircraft, the YAL-1, which would intercept and destroy (through puncturing fuel/hull of missile). it seemed to perform well enough in trials, and most importantly - It had a rotating turret on the front. Theory would state, I believe, that even if we could not create powerplants able to move with the laser, we might be able to funnel he laser's energy into a mirrored contraption, allowing us to shoot in any direction anyway.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YAL-1

And a final point - I believe projectile weapons are incredibly underrepresented in this discussion. Sir Issac Newton is pretty scary, after all. I mean they suffer from similar problems as your average laser, but at knife fight ranges where you couldnt dodge a laser, its pretty likely you also couldnt dodge a railgun or coilgun. Or hell, just a conventional gun.
Sure, missiles will be overall safer, but we could probably leave lasers to point defense and throw projectiles at each other if we got in close enough.

[chemical_art]

True, but it goes with whatever group of assumptions you are following.

For example for many theories, the things any sort of shield would be best suited to stopping would be lasers since you can base their defense on a specific wavelength, while projectiles or missiles are much more easily able to pierce them.

I do remember that turreted laser system, but again its differing nature of assumptions:
1) the hull of a ship is probably at least a few meters to cope with stress, a missile's hull is a few centimeters
2) To intercept a missile, you can puncture its hull almost anywhere once to disable it, for a ship you need to pierce the hull in certain key locations to disable it, andafter the outer hull probably hit through several decks to cause more then general havoc.
3)You are dealing with magnitudes, magnitudes different ranges, so interception requires hundreds of times better prediction and laser power.

So you need the laser to produce thousands of times more energy hundreds of times more accurate for ship combat. Its fine for knife fights for sure, but why not then just lob slugs at each other which are more inaccurate even at a knife fight but spewed for  much greater damage at a much greater rate of fire.