Deserves rep for trying to add a lore reason for the apparent technological regression.
Why Are Weapons And Sensors Badly Unrealistic?
- Thread starter Mrjupp
- Start date
Deserves rep for trying to add a lore reason for the apparent technological regression.
I thought the lore reason was the stealth tech as some have mentioned... Most current sensors revolve around light/visual/infra-red, radar (acoustic) or heat.
Acoustic is out from the start lacking a medium through which to travel in space.
For lights and radiation (microwave/radio/infra-red etc) as proven by the B2 spirit and other stealth aircraft it's possible to lower the signature of even huge objects to what could effectively be a flock of birds or something fouling up the sensor. Or just scatter all the rebounds so the object looks like it's about the size of a small city giving no indication of what it is, which way it's heading or where precisely it is. They know something is there but not what it is.
In any case these should be easy enough to make obsolete given some clever design choices in 1000 years.
That leaves heat sensors which Elite uses heavily, presumably they are cheap and obviously in the near absolute zero background of space they should be fairly reliable. It's kinda hard to hide heat when everything around you is -273 degrees Celsius
Even the stealth aircraft currently rely on the surrounding air to disguise a lot of the heat their engines generate, without that airflow it'd be rather difficult to permanently hide heat output, hence silent running.
Yes gameplay, and yes I'm sure you could argue that there is a type of sensor that would work long distance etc and that but to be honest this explanation is good enough for me personally. If you are still overly bothered about this point you may wish to avoid looking at the artificial speed limit
Acoustic is out from the start lacking a medium through which to travel in space.
For lights and radiation (microwave/radio/infra-red etc) as proven by the B2 spirit and other stealth aircraft it's possible to lower the signature of even huge objects to what could effectively be a flock of birds or something fouling up the sensor. Or just scatter all the rebounds so the object looks like it's about the size of a small city giving no indication of what it is, which way it's heading or where precisely it is. They know something is there but not what it is.
In any case these should be easy enough to make obsolete given some clever design choices in 1000 years.
That leaves heat sensors which Elite uses heavily, presumably they are cheap and obviously in the near absolute zero background of space they should be fairly reliable. It's kinda hard to hide heat when everything around you is -273 degrees Celsius
Even the stealth aircraft currently rely on the surrounding air to disguise a lot of the heat their engines generate, without that airflow it'd be rather difficult to permanently hide heat output, hence silent running.
Yes gameplay, and yes I'm sure you could argue that there is a type of sensor that would work long distance etc and that but to be honest this explanation is good enough for me personally. If you are still overly bothered about this point you may wish to avoid looking at the artificial speed limit
The REAL question is WHY DOES THIS THREAD ACTUALLY HAVE TWO PAGES ALREADY WHEN THE ANSWER WAS POSTED FOUR TIMES IN A ROW ON PAGE ONE?!
Because some people would like a proper reason rather than just one word. Yes gameplay answers it but some of us have nagging doubts that poke the backs of our heads constantly. Having a reason, even if a bit fudged offers at least some comfort to those that would prefer Elite to be a 100% realistic simulator.
Don't want to get off topic but I for example I'd like to know why the D grade sensors in an Anaconda weigh 60x the amount of a sidewinder but have less range. Sure there's more cables and stuff in the Conda but when it weighs as much as every other module in the ship combined (in an exploration loadout), I get suspicious
Sure gameplay works but a real reason would lessen the frustration everytime I go to the outfitting screen looking for mass savings
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Say one day you are tooling around Sol just generally feeling whizzed off. To vent some steam you fire off a bunch of plasma accelerator rounds in the direction of Alpha Centauri. Eight years later, they strike and kill some poor T9 there going about his business.
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What system do you become wanted in?
Forget being wanted. That should be an instant perma-ban for griefing!
Or immediate combat rank of Elite for an utterly amazing shot.
And the cries for a plasma accelerator buff will begin.
The REAL question is WHY DOES THIS THREAD ACTUALLY HAVE TWO PAGES ALREADY WHEN THE ANSWER WAS POSTED FOUR TIMES IN A ROW ON PAGE ONE?!
An answer, not THE answer and certainly not a SATISFACTORY answer.
Some of us are a little more cerebral than others, indulge us.
Cheers,
Drew.
To the OP, there ARE some simulators out there that do what you are asking for, and they tend to have incredibly tiny playerbases, don't sell well, and a number of people who buy them bring them back for a refund because realistic isn't fun generally, especially not in a video game where you are having to deal with the negatives that accompany realism without the advantages.
People don't LIKE to hear 'gameplay!' as the reason why games like Elite make combat so simplistic, but that IS the entire reason, there's no lore or convoluted scientific reasons behind it, it's simply because it makes the game fun to play for the majority, nothing more, nothing less.
You'd be wanted in Alpha Centauri, that's where the actual criminal act took place. Meanwhile, back in Sol, you'd have won multiple awards from the Federation, Empire, Alliance, and various alien races for the longest sniper shot in galactic history, both temporal and spatial!
People don't LIKE to hear 'gameplay!' as the reason why games like Elite make combat so simplistic, but that IS the entire reason, there's no lore or convoluted scientific reasons behind it, it's simply because it makes the game fun to play for the majority, nothing more, nothing less.
You'd be wanted in Alpha Centauri, that's where the actual criminal act took place. Meanwhile, back in Sol, you'd have won multiple awards from the Federation, Empire, Alliance, and various alien races for the longest sniper shot in galactic history, both temporal and spatial!
And on a similar note, why don't smaller ships have smaller heat signatures?
I beg to differ. Certainly gameplay comes first, but there is plenty of lore behind the way things work in Elite. I know from firsthand experience how much 'lore' work was done to ensure there was context around the gameplay. That's one of the things that differentiates Elite from <insert generic space game>.
For example.
- No anti-grav, thus centipetal force providing pseudo gravity in spinning space stations and some ships
- All ship instrumentation is holographic
- Many ships are named after snakes
- Those adverts you see have stories behind them, company histories etc.
- The Federation, Empire and Alliance all exist because of a complex intertwined history
Specifically to combat
- The FSD has a specific justification in lore
- Weapon heat, power and convergence are genuine 'real' issues in space
- The weapons themselves are based on established lore from the original game and manuals
In short, there is a rich tapestry behind the game and the way it works. You don't have to notice it, or even acknowledge it. But it's there.
Cheers,
Drew.
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And that's an easy one.
<science>
- The accuracy required would be utterly impossible to achieve and the chance of it hitting anything so immeasurably small that it's not even worth calculating.
- If it really is 'plasma' it would degrade into harmless gas and disperse into unmeasurable quantities before it had travelled even thousands of miles, let alone to another star.
- If it's actually a beam weapon of some kind, it would diverge beyond any ability to cause harm. For example, a laser fired at the moon today and reflected back has a diameter of almost a metre, and that's over a mere 550k miles. You'd be hard pushed to even detect it at 8 lightyears, let alone be worried by it.
Not an issue.
</science>
Cheers,
Drew.
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On the plus side the optional Bobbleheads are quite realistic.
Leaving aside the obvious reason of game play. Radar has two main problems. The first one that many posters have alluded to is that even today we have stealth and jamming technology that seriously reduces the effectiveness of radar. The second problem is that it's an active system so essentially you are lighting yourself up like a Christmas tree. We have already developed missiles that will home in on radar signals (Passive radar exists but relies on some other source for it's signal such as a tv transmitter). It might be that the use of anti radiation missiles or mines effectively killed off the use of radar, this would push people into using passive IR/heat sensors though it doesn't explain why they are limited to 6km. The short range of weapons could well be down to agreements to limit potential collateral damage and also research showing that the majority of engagements took place at distances under 2 km. There is a real world precedent in the development of assault rifles as research during World War 2 found that the majority of firefights took place at distances of less than 400 metres, hence modern assault rifles usually have a much shorter effective range than World War 2 era rifles.
Good question.
The reason being is that they wanted you to see the ship before engaging in combat, rather than playing it SC style where you shoot at a dot on your HUD for realism's sake and never see the explosion, damage, etc.
They wanted it to be more like this:
[video=youtube_share;LaVIIoRKBlk]https://youtu.be/LaVIIoRKBlk[/video]
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The actual reason is gameplay. David Braben et al wanted a certain style of combat gameplay, old school dogfighting, and that's the way they designed it.
My personal head canon explanation is that modern stealth technology and countermeasures are responsible for the current range of engagements. The advantages of active scanners like radar, long range detection and weapons lock, do not make up for its disadvantages, which is the huge glowing bullseye spreading out at the speed of light.
As a result, everyone uses passive scanners, primarily visible light and infra red detection. Again, stealth technology limits the effective range of the scanners to a few kilometers for weapons lock, and maybe twice that for a confirmed contact.