My trigonometry's terrible but I calculated over 200m of beam spread at 3km for a clipper (width 103m) with convergance at 1km. That's a pretty big hole for a ship to hide in.
Anyone else think fixed weapons on large ships should point slightly inward?
- Thread starter Rexoplex
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My trigonometry's terrible but I calculated over 200m of beam spread at 3km for a clipper (width 103m) with convergance at 1km. That's a pretty big hole for a ship to hide in.
Thanks for the numbers, I was just thinking maybe I should bust out the old pen and paper, but you beat me to it
Fixed weapons on a huge ship should be an utterly choice of hardpoints. The fact that it's not is just a aspect of why ship balance is currently broken - mostly because the rest of the game hasn't been brought up to the level it needs to be for huge ships to behave like huge ships in the game (and small ships to behave like small ships).
Huge ships should be mostly turrets, because they should be slow to maneuver due to their mass. They should be shadowed constantly by fighter escorts to handle the faster moving hostiles. It's also why the idea of all of the hardpoints being able to face forward is stupid on ships the size of an anaconda. The ship needs to protect it's huge sides, not being concerned with always having to face it's nose to what is most likely to be a smaller faster ship in order to target. The anaconda should not be a dogfighting ship.
Any other desire/request is just wasting everyone's time with changes that are still wrong. Make it right and you wont have to spend dev time continually going back to work on it.
Huge ships should be mostly turrets, because they should be slow to maneuver due to their mass. They should be shadowed constantly by fighter escorts to handle the faster moving hostiles. It's also why the idea of all of the hardpoints being able to face forward is stupid on ships the size of an anaconda. The ship needs to protect it's huge sides, not being concerned with always having to face it's nose to what is most likely to be a smaller faster ship in order to target. The anaconda should not be a dogfighting ship.
Any other desire/request is just wasting everyone's time with changes that are still wrong. Make it right and you wont have to spend dev time continually going back to work on it.
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Even though this point is entirely contrary to what I've been arguing here, I can't say I wouldn't appreciate larger ships that feel more like large ships. I'm thinking of something like Dreadnought (by Grey Box) for comparison, and those ships *feel* like they have a lot of mass. Having a combat meta where turrets were more important, and with a greater range of difference between small ship/fighter dog-fighting tactics and large ship positioning tactics would be pretty cool. But I also think that FD have pretty clearly been going for a fairly uniform flight/fight model across all ship sizes, and I don't really expect that to change much going forward.
The ships have to be fun to fly, and what you just described are the capital ships. Which are 12 times larger than tiddlers like the corvette.
They are fun to command. If you want fun to fly, you fly smaller ships. If you want fun to command, you get yourself into a larger ship like a conda or cutter and find fun in managing and directing things. The T9, Cutter, and Conda are all large ships and should behave that way. Cap ships even more so, like violent portable stations.
If I stick a fighter bay in my corvette I can have fun flying a big ship, or a small ship and I also get to give the orders.
What you want sounds a bit like X3, which I play when I want to command an armada from the bridge of my carrier. The downside of X3 being that as it's not first and foremost a spaceship flying game the flight model is extremely basic.
No, i never said anything about commanding a fleet... which is what X3 is all about.
What i said was command a large ship. Where the ship is balanced in a way that makes sense for large ships (and it's how they're written about in the books). By turning slower and feeling that bulk, you'd be forced to equip turrets (though I'd also like to see hardpoints made more realistic for a large ship instead of all facing forward, that is very unlikely to ever happen). You'd then have better turret auto-controls. Like Target closest hostile ship, or target all hostile ships, or target my target, or target ship with most damage...etc. Then you'd have to give commands to your escort wing / fighters. In addition to being able to jump into your own fighter and protect your own ship while it continues with your last commands.
You dont need to refactor huge parts of the game or make the game different than what it is. But by making large ships behave like large ships and tweaking the setup a little bit... you have an entirely different gameplay that balances what it means to pilot a large ship that is categorically different from what it means to pilot a smaller ship. This adds value to the existence of ships of all sizes and adds an additional dimension of strategy when deciding which ship you are going to use for a given role/mission.
We don't fly huge ships. In the real world, corvettes and cutters are the smallest types of warships, made for speed and agility.
In my own biased opinion, the hardpoints on the Clipper do feel *that* far apart sometimes... lol
Oh I agree - I can't even fly the Courier due to the hardpoint spacing :-(
Personally I'd love it if they tightened things up, but can see why they've done it how they have.
You dont dogfight in a 747. You dont even have the air to push against to help maneuver like a 747 has, it's raw thruster power only that can help move the ship. The Conda is heavier than a 747. The current game is making it possible for a 747 to dogfight ships a fraction of it's size that maneuvers like a quadcopter toy. I'm not suggesting we make them BSG style carrier battle-types but i think there should be a much more clearer break in how the fighter ships behave and how the larger ships behave. To the point where fixed hardpoints becomes a non-issue on them.
Comparing spacecraft to 747s isn't really apples-to-oranges, especially when it comes to dogfighting. In any case, larger and heavier ships do maneuver more slowly in this game, and often use turrets as a result. Is your issue a matter of degree? It sounds to me like you are wanting corvettes to turn like heavy cruisers; they aren't that big. Personally, I do feel a big difference between fighting in smaller ships versus larger ones.
EDIT: Also, big ships with fixed-only weapons are already at a huge disadvantage in the way that you're talking about, running a big ship with all fixed weapons is just asking for it from an FDL.
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1. There is no "apples to apples" comparison when relating size to something that exists today because we dont have those kinds of space ships. The next closest thing (since we're a game that simulates dogfighting as it's primary gameplay) is planes. The 747 weighs anywhere from half a conda (which is 400tons base) to roughly 300 tons ..which is close enough and relatable with people since they've seen one. You would never expect a 747 to be able to hang and win a dog fighting battle between it and WW2/cold war era fighter jets (the last of the dogfighting jets really). I think it's a very apt comparison.
2. Big ships with fixed-only weapons are only at a disadvantage really with human players. With npcs, it's all a cakewalk.
What i'm suggesting is that it should be slowed down more ...to the point where fixed weapons are all but useless unless your opponent is not moving or as-big or bigger than you on these larger ships.
I fly my conda all the time and bounty hunt. While yes, I can be out-turned by smaller ships, it's never a facter that I need to care about enough to equip turrets. Most of my weapons are fixed with only a couple being gimballed. I dont think that should be possible. I shouldn't be able to take out vultures and cobras while relying on fixed weapons to do the damage. But i do. All the time. I break the turn battle they try to do and can easily point my nose in their direction and wipe them out. It should be borderline impossible for me to do this.
Well, when it comes to maneuvering I think that boats and ships are a better comparison. For instance, a speedboat versus a coast guard cutter. But if we get truly realistic about it there would be no dogfighting in space at all, it would be done at ranges so far that you'd need a good telescope to see your opponent. But as you say, this game does use the dogfighting-in-space trope, a la Star Wars. Gameplay has to trump realism, to some extent.
We're not talking about being realistic to a fault. Just that the portrayal of larger ships behaving like they're slightly heavier fighters is an injustice to the gameplay that would revolve around larger ships not being able to dogfight directly at all.
You instantly remove large ships as being some kind of "end game" content and give back purpose to all the smaller ships that most players pass over. Because I can sit in my conda and just roll over CZ's all day long with no risk to myself. Go in, kill everything i want, go back to re-load. Repeat.
By pushing the conda and other large ships more into a role of a support/war ship ... you have strategy and loadouts and decisions to make that you otherwise wouldn't need to make. You have fundamentally different ways you have to play depending on the ship you choose. That's the value that's being lost by making these larger ships play basically exactly the same way you'd play in a small fighter. The tipping point I believe for that value to be realized is by making these ships too slow to maneuver to use fixed weapons at all to any effectiveness against anything smaller than a python.
In order for that to work, though, we'd need much better turrets and big ships would have to have escorts with them at all times. That doesn't really fit in with the current gameplay where any ship can be flown by one person. I wouldn't mind something like this being introduced for larger ships of destroyer or cruiser class, especially if we also had actual fleet battles against capital ships.
you seam to be failing to grasp the concept, that in a game verse where man is traveling the stars, and leaving a planet is a trivial matter, that some fundamental problems must have been solved, the main one being having huge amounts of finely controlled thrust that can hold your station without orbit while countering gravity, allowing you to keep a relative position to the planet at 0m/s.
this would mean even large ships have massive reserves of highly efficient thrust.
can you imagine the reaction if you could take an Airbus A380, or an Antonov 225 back in time just 110 years to the early part of the 20th century, and asked the early pioneers of aviation who were pushing the bounds do you think they could fly, yet ED is set in 1286 years time.
There's no failing to grasp anything going on. The game isn't a realistic simulation. There are thrusts in the game even that aren't even self-consistent simply for the sake of gameplay.
There is still the suspense of disbelief that has to justified by gameplay. I posit that ships the size of an anaconda able to go toe to toe dogfighting against ships a tenth of it's size or smaller, that this suspense of belief is impossible and it hurts gameplay.
It's the hurting gameplay that is the real issue. Arguing to fix hardpoints so that fixed weapons work better on these larger ships is the wrong way to approach the problem. The problem is that you're thinking about putting fixed weapons on these ships at all. My argument is that the Gameplay is better served by making the ships slower and focussing large ship combat around turrets (and improving how turrets are balanced and introducing the escort mechanic to the game).
That means as a player with access to all these ships, i now have better, more intuitive choices to make on which ships i choose for certain activities and which loadouts i choose on them. Diversity improves gameplay. The current setup is homogeneous, all ships are just fighters with slightly varying degrees of maneuverability (with the exception of a couple that have such horrible hardpoint options that they're not used in combat unless you're trying to joke around).
The bonus to all the gameplay improvements that would bring is that it makes better sense for it to behave that way. Less suspension of disbelief is always better for the game. But the suggestion is by no means anchored on this idea of making the game more realistic.
We were never intended to have access to even smaller capital ships, and none of the vessels we can fly are dramatically larger than the bigger fighter-class vessels.
There is a bigger difference in size between an F-15 and P-51 than an Anaconda and a Vulture, or a Corvette and an FDL.
Not true, cap ships are on the list.
From the ED wiki :
In The Commanders Livestream, a viewer asked "any chance of playing capital ships in the future?", David Braben answered: "it's on the list, but a long way down it, because there's a lot of gameplay to make it work. The issue is what we call the difference between direct control and executive control. Where rather than flying by the seat of your pants you're giving orders to a giant ship. Because you can't expect it to change course very rapidly and that sort of thing. So it's certainly a long-term possibility, but it's long-term."
http://elite-dangerous.wikia.com/wiki/Capital_Ships