Missile impacts should not reveal enemy location.

[DemiserofD]

It makes sense that unguided projectiles reveal the location of the enemy, because your ship's computer can simply project back to the point of origin and figure SOMETHING is there.

But that isn't the case for missiles. Missiles are self-guided, so there really should be no way to know what exactly is firing at you. It'd be cool if missile impacts did NOT reveal your location on scanners, and players would need to use something else, like emissive munitions, to locate attackers and target them.

 

[SteveWW57]

It makes sense that unguided projectiles reveal the location of the enemy, because your ship's computer can simply project back to the point of origin and figure SOMETHING is there.

But that isn't the case for missiles. Missiles are self-guided, so there really should be no way to know what exactly is firing at you. It'd be cool if missile impacts did NOT reveal your location on scanners, and players would need to use something else, like emissive munitions, to locate attackers and target them.

Missiles still have to live with physics (real or the Elite 'verse), so tracking systems (radar?) can feed data into a computer and the likely origin location will be revealed for return fire. Just needs a bit more memory and better programming.

 

[DemiserofD]

Missiles still have to live with physics (real or the Elite 'verse), so tracking systems (radar?) can feed data into a computer and the likely origin location will be revealed for return fire. Just needs a bit more memory and better programming.

True, but that doesn't necessarily reveal anything about their origins. After all, they could curve anywhere, unless you're talking about tracking their trail to their location of origin? But even then, that itself wouldn't tell you anything about where the firing ship is NOW.

 

[SteveWW57]

Line of sight is required to fire, and distance between the firer and target in the Elite 'verse is rather short. Most of the time, ships are effectively in sight. I could envisage a stealthed ship dropping inactive missiles, moving on and then the missiles activating. That would only increase the time to target, which may be a major disadvantage.

 

[DemiserofD]

Line of sight is required to fire, and distance between the firer and target in the Elite 'verse is rather short. Most of the time, ships are effectively in sight. I could envisage a stealthed ship dropping inactive missiles, moving on and then the missiles activating. That would only increase the time to target, which may be a major disadvantage.

Technically, line of sight is only needed to get target lock, not to actually fire; you could conceivably get target lock and them move out of sight and fire curving shots from behind cover to hit them!

Exactly how would it be cool?

Presumably a ganker would be able to spam you with missiles without showing hostile, therefore reducing your chances of fighting back.

Most times, a ganker doesn't expect you to fight back regardless. That said, to do this, you'd have to be able to run cold consistently, which would encourage entirely different types of builds, which would be neat in itself. For example, hull tank builds could be much more viable if they could reliably avoid being targeted.

 

[SteveWW57]

"Technically, line of sight is only needed to get target lock, not to actually fire; you could conceivably get target lock and them move out of sight and fire curving shots from behind cover to hit them!"

Does not going behind cover break the target lock? I suspect that as soon as the victim realises they are a target, they will do something to break the lock.

Given the short range of missiles, lock hid and shoot might only be possible in asteroid fields, as otherwise the distances are just too great.