In the game world why do lasers have such high penetration?

[KayAitch]

In the Elite world damage is split into thermic or kinetic, and thermic is what you need to take down shields, kinetic for hulls.

However if you sub target internal components it becomes about the penetration stats for the weapon, and lasers seem to have very high penetration - a pulse laser can kill a power plant while the ship still has over 50% hull armour.

This doesn't seem to make sense; surely a laser does all its thermic damage on impact, only penetrating to the next layer when it has melted through? Like a real world laser hitting a line of balloons, they pop in turn, not all at once (and note these are balloons, you can see through them, they're hardly any kind of reflective armour):

[video=youtube;HuceDT2R4f4]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuceDT2R4f4[/video]

A rail gun or cannon should be able to punch through with a single slug, but a laser shouldn't. If a laser did just cut through then it would carve ships up like a lightsabre.

This doesn't seem to make sense from a game design perspective either, as lasers break the rock/paper/scissors style balance - they shouldn't be the best weapon both for killing shields and killing internal components. Surely they should be useless (especially against reflective armour, which only appears to affect hull %) at hitting internal components, forcing players to carry a balance of weapons for different damage, rather than the always the best lasers that they can afford, fit and power?

 

[Firestarter]

Yeah. Luke didn't use pulse lasers to destroy the death star did he?

 

[YinYin]

No.

Depending on the highest energy wavelength of the lasers they may actually pass very far into dense materials. Since we can even see those lasers in elite, which really is just for pretty visuals and highly unrealistic, you can easily bend or dismiss anything else about them to match.

edit: also afaik current penetration mechanics actually aren't worth much - 1.4 is about to fix that

 

[Yank31]

edit: also afaik current penetration mechanics actually aren't worth much - 1.4 is about to fix that

I was about to say...


Mark Allen explanation on damage mechanics : https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=170205

5) If the shot has penetrated and not hit an external module we need to know how far it went into the guts of the ship. Each ship defines a standard penetration depth (usually 75% of its height), which is then modified up and down by weapons. Aside from the ever-powerful railgun which will go all the way through any ship currently in-game (but still can't hit a second ship!).
In the current live build (1.3.07) there's a bug where this penetration distance is much larger than intended, which has been fixed internally for 1.4.

1.4 beta patch note : https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=179075

Adjustments to how penetrating shots work:
- If no standard penetration depth is set for a ship, use 75% of its size in the smallest axis (rather than 100m). As no ships actually had this value set this will stop shots going all the way through ships to hit modules at the back

So... we'll have to look see how the penetration behaves in 1.4!

 

[KayAitch]

No.

Depending on the highest energy wavelength of the lasers they may actually pass very far into dense materials. Since we can even see those lasers in elite, which really is just for pretty visuals and highly unrealistic, you can easily bend or dismiss anything else about them to match.

edit: also afaik current penetration mechanics actually aren't worth much - 1.4 is about to fix that

A laser that passes through a material does so by not losing its energy to that material - for instance a laser can pass through a clear lense without damaging it and melt the wall behind it. The thermal damage is only done to a material that stops, and hence absorbs the energy from, the laser.

IRL you wouldn't see lasers in space, or hear them impact, those effects are added for gameplay reasons. However as I said, the way this works now is broken from a gameplay perspective.

Don't you PC guys aready have 1.4? I'm on Xbone and waiting for MS to do their testing.

 

[YinYin]

It's currently in beta testing.

 

[Yank31]

1.4 should / could go live next tuesday...

 

[Von Shadow]

Also consider the amount of energy used in Elite Dangerous ...
If you look at the National Ignition Facility (trying to create fusion reactions).... the highest they've managed to produce using bundled beams is 2.5MJ of energy for a fraction of a second...

A Class 3 Fixed Pulse Laser in ED produces 7MJ per shot... 22MJ per second
A Class 3 Fixed Beam Laser in ED produces 30MJ continuous.... thats enoumous amounts of energy

It is going to do serious damage

 

[tiger61378]

The lasers in Elite are massively powerful...far more powerful than even the anti-missile laser that's currently in testing by the US Air Force (its mounted on board a converted 747 airliner, and can blow up a missile from something like 400 miles or more, and that's through atmosphere). So, its very possible for a laser in Elite to be able to burn through a hull very fast indeed...think about using a magnifying glass on a sheet of paper. Get that little point of light small enough, and the paper burns nearly instantly. Now expand that out to millions of times the power, through extreme optics for focusing, and you've got something that could easily melt a hole through a house in under a second.

As for why we can see the light from the lasers...space may be empty, but there's still a lot of galactic dust and stuff around. What we're seeing is the beam vaporizing and reflecting off of that dust...its very sparse, but there's enough there to display the beam's path (you can see the same thing with a pocket laserpointer...shine it at a wall, then blow dust at it, and you'll see the line of the laser).

 

[igor37]

As for why we can see the light from the lasers...space may be empty, but there's still a lot of galactic dust and stuff around. What we're seeing is the beam vaporizing and reflecting off of that dust...its very sparse, but there's enough there to display the beam's path (you can see the same thing with a pocket laserpointer...shine it at a wall, then blow dust at it, and you'll see the line of the laser).

Nope. With the right wavelength a laser won't be visible to the human eye.

 

[tiger61378]

Nope. With the right wavelength a laser won't be visible to the human eye.

We're not seeing the light itself, we're seeing the superheated dust as it passes by and vaporizes it.

 

[igor37]

We're not seeing the light itself, we're seeing the superheated dust as it passes by and vaporizes it.

In space there's not remotely enough matter to make lasers visible that way, that doesn't even work in earth's atmosphere.

 

[Scudmungus]

In de world of maaaake belieeeeve

 

[Ceekay]

In de world of maaaake belieeeeve

AKA technobabble!

 

[CmdrJacks]

Lasers strip material one atomic layer at a time. Not sure about the numbers involved in the game, but I do know it would be no fun shooting invisible x-ray lasers. There'd be no reason to have a single beam either, you could split that energy in to several beams for more coverage making for a near-perfect point defense system. Perhaps we just call them lasers but they are in fact some kind of futuristic directional energy weapon. "Phaser" is probably copyrighted.

 

[Peuwi]

A laser cannot damage the whole line, it needs to pass through first layer, then second, etc. It's just done very very fast.

But, the rail gun projectile is doing exactly the same : first layer, second layer, etc.

In fact, pulse lasers should be, at the opposite, be extreme penetrative weapons, and almost unable to damage seriously hulls. Laser beam should be more spread damage weapon, damaging more the hull, and less the internal modules, due to lower but continuous damages.

 

[AdriánGuth]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9BS0KYbnyw

 

[KayAitch]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9BS0KYbnyw

That's what I mean when I compared it to a lightsaber - a constant fire beam laser that penetrated the hull would slice through it, cutting a ship in half. As beam lasers don't do that then their damage is being ablated by the hull.

Meanwhile a railgun slug would punch a hole all the way through the ship, but only a relatively small one.

- - - Updated - - -

Also consider the amount of energy used in Elite Dangerous ...
If you look at the National Ignition Facility (trying to create fusion reactions).... the highest they've managed to produce using bundled beams is 2.5MJ of energy for a fraction of a second...

A Class 3 Fixed Pulse Laser in ED produces 7MJ per shot... 22MJ per second
A Class 3 Fixed Beam Laser in ED produces 30MJ continuous.... thats enoumous amounts of energy

It is going to do serious damage

It is. Shields hold 100's of MJ of charge, so these ships are tough too.

 

[KayAitch]

A laser cannot damage the whole line, it needs to pass through first layer, then second, etc. It's just done very very fast.

But, the rail gun projectile is doing exactly the same : first layer, second layer, etc.

In fact, pulse lasers should be, at the opposite, be extreme penetrative weapons, and almost unable to damage seriously hulls. Laser beam should be more spread damage weapon, damaging more the hull, and less the internal modules, due to lower but continuous damages.

Not quite - you could think of the laser as throwing lots of photons, each on it's own does little damage, but there are a lot of them. They carry a lot of energy (i.e. heat) but very little inertia. You would need a very large surface area to be pushed by a laser.

A rail slug is a single lump of matter with a lot of inertia - even if it goes straight through it will transfer a lot of that to the vessel that it hits.

 

[Dark Skies]

Oh what fun, this is a game you know, if you are gonna pick on anything pick on faster than light travel. I had to chuckle when the lasers damage mechanic is not believed but light sabres are quoted as having realistic effects. Lasers exist lightsabres don't. Physics is complicated, we do not yet fully understand the mechanisms behind how damage is caused. However we do know that Lasers transfer energy and this energy causes the damage. it's a game but hey think of it like this if you like: lasers are organised electromagnetic radiation. Photons in synch if you like . Most lasers are designed to produce EM radiation of one wavelength only. But it is often the case that there are a range of unwanted wavelengths produced. Usually in the infra red spectrum. Now I imagine if I wanted to have a laser to do damage I would have designed it to consist of a range of wavelengths that cause damage by being absorbed or attenuated by the ships material. One of the wavelengths would visible so I could see it. And yep I imagine they developed a laser that can be seen in space. Why not.
I can see that it's easy to think hey laser are light and light stops at a surface. But the light is the energy and it's the energy that does the damage. Consider the production of ionising radiation that would cause damage in a very complicated way. High energy electrons neutrons x rays as well as thermal and mechanical shocks would all owner transfer energy further into the the ship. So I think lasers are fun. I think the balloons burst be mechanical shock and not by being burnt as is the easy assumption to make, but to be honest I don't know for sure.