Missile speed
- Thread starter npcole
- Start date
AFAIK dumbfires do that, but i am not 100% sure.
seeker may do it just as they are launched, but fall back to their max travel speed shortly after
Seekers, flak, flechettes, and I believe dumbfires, do not retain any momentum from the ship that fires them, and some ships can actually outpace what they launch.
Torpedoes are a partial exception, they start at 250m/s or the velocity of the ship that launches them, whichever is higher, after which they rapidly slow down to 250m/s.
Torpedoes are a partial exception, they start at 250m/s or the velocity of the ship that launches them, whichever is higher, after which they rapidly slow down to 250m/s.
Weird. One of the staples of hard sci-fi is that ships with higher velocities have the advantage when firing missiles. The Chanur series for example has one ship in supercruise decimating an entire enemy squadron since it caught them at low C speeds while firing it's own missiles at high C - with devastating impact.
Not that we have that in ED, still the same principle should apply in normal space.
You have a point... the main reason for giving ships a maximum speed, as opposed to a maximum acceleration, is to prevent most fights from devolving into jousting matches where you flash past your opponent in a couple of frames and combat becomes a bunch of quicktime events. That doesn't apply to missiles or ammo rounds.
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I agree with OP and I'll add my vote to the bug report / feature request (s)he enters on this!
Oh oh oh, wouldn't it be cool if someone made a video of shooting them their own ship with the dumb fire missle(s) it just launched!
Oh oh oh, wouldn't it be cool if someone made a video of shooting them their own ship with the dumb fire missle(s) it just launched!
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Not for me. When I'm in a fair fight, it's usually a set of tight turns. But I usually do combat in a Viper Mk.IV which has very strong lateral thrusters, and I use them a lot. To an outside observer, it probably looks like two spiders trying to wrap each other in silk.
I agree with OP and I'll add my vote to the bug report / feature request (s)he enters on this!
Oh oh oh, wouldn't it be cool if someone made a video of shooting them their own ship with the dumb fire missle(s) it just launched!
as long as it lasts - make a video of a mamba trying to fire dumbfires at 2000% heat. (dumbfires have special overheat failure mechanic)
especially now that we have large dumbfire launchers too
IRL, it's been known for fighter jets to shoot themselves down with their own cannon:
https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/aviation/a27967/the-fighter-plane-that-shot-itself-down/
https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/aviation/a27967/the-fighter-plane-that-shot-itself-down/
in real life, bullets are slowed down by air-friction and gravity (the thing that happened in that incident)
Leading to the projectiles traveling more slowly than the ship that fired them - which, IIRC, is the topic under discussion.
Course, we should bear in mind that there isn't any aerodynamic drag in space.
The only reason a multi-stage rocket works is 'cos the upper-stages can take advantage of the thrust provided by the lower-stages to continue to accelerate even though they're using a much smaller engine.
I'd rather we didn't have cumulative acceleration in ED though.
I like having ships that can outrun missiles.
Also, it's kind of fun launching a missile in my Viper and then trying to fly in formation with it.
And, yes. I've been hit my my own missiles several times.
Hasn't everybody? [where is it]
Course, we should bear in mind that there isn't any aerodynamic drag in space.
The only reason a multi-stage rocket works is 'cos the upper-stages can take advantage of the thrust provided by the lower-stages to continue to accelerate even though they're using a much smaller engine.
I'd rather we didn't have cumulative acceleration in ED though.
I like having ships that can outrun missiles.
Also, it's kind of fun launching a missile in my Viper and then trying to fly in formation with it.
And, yes. I've been hit my my own missiles several times.
Hasn't everybody? [where is it]
But it'd be fun launching mines off an iCourier that travel faster than a Mamba and even huge cannons.
Yeah, it's deliberately weird, probably for balance reasons. Frontier apparently doesn't want our reverb torpedoes doing 1100m/s for extended periods of time, or having to take actual velocities into account with impact damage outside of ship-to-ship collisions.
But it'd be fun launching mines off an iCourier that travel faster than a Mamba and even huge cannons.
Mines will accelerate to some pretty comical speeds if you drop them over high-g worlds.
Cannon and other projectiles, where the projectile isn't separately targetable do retain momentum of the ship firing them, oddly enough. A standard MC shot leaves a ship at 1600m/s relative to that ship. Even more strangely, this has no effect on damage, but seems to exist only as an aiming aid.
I knew that about MCs but not cannons. Haven't used them since 2.1. There's a video of someone dumping a ton of cargo over a high G world and destroying someone parked on the planet below, but I haven't been able to find it again. Pretty hilarious. SRVs get catapulted away at ludicrous speeds (or did) in the past too.
I shot myself with my own packhounds before...
I made a post about these mechanics before. It does irk me some but oh well it's a video game I guess. Kinetics should have additive velocity and proportional damage. The folks calling this a "simulation " need a reality check. This game is as gamey as it gets.
The Stellar Forge is a simulation. Even the basic flight mechanisms are a Newtonian simulation, but with a slew of arbitrary constraints bolted on top. The BGS is a rough and highly abstract simulation with a few key holes and a mountain of bugs.
The rest of the game is either a scaffold/placeholder for things that should be simulated better, or pure gamist elements.