Why Are Weapons And Sensors Badly Unrealistic?
- Thread starter Mrjupp
- Start date
Hmmm. What is the Falcon 4 playerbase size?
I don't know. I do know that people are still playing it and it's been remade by BMS which have updated the graphics a lot. It's still the only aircraft flight sim that has a dynamic campaign and a war you are part of as just a pilot (a lot like in ED you just fly around the galaxy as just a pilot - in other words, you don't play the hero.)
The best times for Falcon are playing with your friends against the AI (or join a VFW) and if you like flying combat planes you had better be prepared for the closest thing to an experience that you're probably ever going to get when it comes to fighting in a jet in a war.
From the planning stage, the whole thing is just immense. I really cannot give enough credit to the makers of the game as it is so good it's still being played today. Nobody wants to make another one which is a shame and even though it has a steep learning curve, that can be easily broken down into handy modules so you can be up and shooting things in 20 minutes.
If you have the original .exe for Falcon 4.0 then that's all you need to install the BMS mod which is free and I would seriously urge anyone who likes flight sims to check it out unless you don't like the idea of exactly planning your route and attack, starting your aircraft from cold or on the taxi, however you want, dodging SAM's and AAA, engaging enemy fighters, relying on your wingmen to take out defences as you come in to bomb the main target and in variable weather too and when the weather comes in in Falcon, it really comes in. Then there's the egress back to base and the landing to finish off an excellent mission and job well done.
See, it's logic like this that means we require a external source of handwavium to reasonably explain these things
I think a residual SC-field based approach could be used to explain a lot of game mechanics, not just limited radar and weapon range the way M-particles do, but drag in space, speed caps as well, and more.
The brilliance of the M-particle in the Gundam series was that it was a dual edged sword, allowing for many of its advances, but simultaneously its limitations as well. Supercruise could have a similar dual-edge that, if more fully fleshed out, could explain most of the game mechanics to an acceptable level.
ECM is simply an acronym for electronic counter measures, ECM can be any number of things, often is, such as our own real world jets using both chaff AND flares today, those are both a form of ECM. You aren't invisible due to ECM, it simply makes it much harder to find your exact position/get a target lock, you are STILL visible to sensors, but your exact position is an unknown. It also includes radar and radio jamming, so that your opponents not only have a hard time telling where you are, but they can't communicate with each other, making further attempts to locate you that much more difficult.
In BattleTech for example, ECM covers IR, UV, EM, Magnetic and seismic countering technologies as well as radar, as those are the standard sensor systems in the game.
In Elite, ECM would cover radar, IR and who knows what else, as we're not sure what the sensors in Elite track with. We know they are active systems, we know that heat is ONE of the things the sensors detect, but we don't know what else they detect. We do know it's more than JUST heat or we couldn't see ships from billions of kilometers away while in SC, the heat of a single ship won't be a blip at that distance, especially if it's near something much hotter, like a star. We CAN detect ships even in normal space while they are between us and a star, while in direct proximity TO that star, and heat detection in that case would be totally pointless, so obviously radar(you can see the pulses on your sensor display and hear them) as well as IR, possibly UV, and who knows what else, quantum state, neutrinos which could be spilling from our FSDs, hell they could be detecting the free oxygen in our ships for all we know, the possible range of sensor options is pretty much limitless in a scifi setting after all.
Drew made a point on this earlier. Just because it uses the same name, doesn't mean it is the same technology. What does ECM stand for - Electronic Countermeasure? You list one kind of ECM why does it have to be exactly the same thing in 3300? As long as it is electronic and it is a countermeasure, it is ECM. For all we know it could be a poorly wired electric blanket that just so happens to emit a quantum disruption field perfectly attuned to vibration levels of most major missile manufacturer models.
We grew up with lasers that go pew pew for cripes sake! I have yet to come across any lasers whether commercial or scientific that even 'pew' once let alone do it twice when you turn them on. I admit, if they did, powerpoint presentations would get more interesting.
Lets try some realism:
Lasers - a little light on our console flashes when we pull the trigger to tell us they are firing and a readout tells us if they are getting too hot. The canopy HUD shows an icon to indicate where the laser it contacting the target. Even more realism is that we target the craft by choosing from a menu and the computer does the rest and lets us know when it has finished.
Projectile weapons - banned by most civilisations due the concern over the dangers of future collisions with high velocity objects
Canopy - We don't actually have one. We have a cockpit hidden in the bowels of the ship with heavy radiation and blast shielding around us otherwise we would fry or die of radiation poisoning. Everything we see is a projection or screen from external sensors/cameras.
Piloting - other than under extreme circumstance we are not allowed to take manual control of our craft due to safety protocols. No government type is willing to allow manual flying of huge vessels anywhere near civilian populations without strict adherence to flight paths/plans
Trading - When we buy or sell something we wait for many hours while it is loaded/unloaded
Battle - we die due to the complete superiority of automated battle systems when compared to our pathetic Mk1 eyeball and human reflexes
Sensors - we have an entire room dedicated to the sensor suite which is powerful enough to picture our surrounding for hundreds or even thousands of kilometres in every direction. Pilots do not navigate they simply follow the instructions of their commanding officers.
Sensors in battle - except for extreme circumstances, close quarters combat doesn't exist
Speed - there is no upper limit. Except in extreme cases, battle is long-distance and is over very quickly or revolves around jousting over extremely large distances due to the time taking to accelerate/decelerate. Collisions are invariable fatal for both parties.
Some examples, you could make these even less interesting to play if you add even more realism to them. Preety certain that if we get truly 'real' we sit in a metal box playing spaceman via spreadheets waiting for the computer to tell us if we have arrived or if we died yet.
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I did say in an earlier post you can easily just make up anything you want to explain the way things are but it still doesn't stop the fact that it's a poor mechanic to begin with. WE can have fun explaining it away and pointing out flaws in explanations but really, is is ever going to change to something with more substance.
Duane Dibbley
Banned
I ID'd a Clipper by from 8.5-9km a few days ago..who needs sensors?
See, it's logic like this that means we require a external source of handwavium to reasonably explain these things
I think a residual SC-field based approach could be used to explain a lot of game mechanics, not just limited radar and weapon range the way M-particles do, but drag in space, speed caps as well, and more.
The brilliance of the M-particle in the Gundam series was that it was a dual edged sword, allowing for many of its advances, but simultaneously its limitations as well. Supercruise could have a similar dual-edge that, if more fully fleshed out, could explain most of the game mechanics to an acceptable level.
My own head canon is that ships in the Elite universe have long shifted partially into Witchspace to augment their real space drives, and it is only recently that this shifting has become deep enough that Witchspace's resistance has become so strong that even in "normal" space its effect is felt. The mass lock effect of large ships isn't just an effect of mass, but of their Witchspace augmented drives that interferes with the drives of ships around them, creating the so-called "drag" for everyone around them, including themselves.
Without this augmentation, our drives can only provide a fraction of the thrust they do. 20 years ago, before the invention of the current generation if FSD's, our ships were capable of much greater thrust than they do today, but also took weeks to get anywhere interesting. Today our ships are much faster, but their top speeds are limited to how well they can push against Witchspace's resistance.
When my former master bought a FSD equipped ship for a personal, I was sent to the Pilot Federation's academy at Emerald to learn how to fly in Supercruise. We used custom built spaceplanes to simulate flight in Witchspace using a FSD, and most of our training was in atmosphere.
I suspect that this Witchspace field explains why ships are so easy to spot in Supercruise, but not in "real" space.
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One person's "poor mechanic" is another person's masterpiece. The Dev Team have deliberately designed the flight mechanics of the game, complete with nerfing yaw to prevent "turrets in space," to create short range dogfights. You are free to not enjoy enjoy that particular combat aesthetic, but that does not make it a "poor mechanic."
The thing is, they didn't just randomly pull up the ranges in Elite from thin air, there was testing done to see at what ranges combat was fun and engaging for the majority. Star Citizen, the ranges for combat are even shorter than we have in Elite, and again, that wasn't something that CIG came up with from thin air, they came up with the ranges after testing combat at different ranges and finding out what was the most fun to the majority of the testers. It's the exact same reason we have WWII dogfighting flight model(as does Star Citizen), it's more fun for the majority than a more realistic flight model is. Previous Elite games used more realistic flight models, those don't go over well with the masses. This is exactly why flight sims are NOT the games you find massive amounts of players playing, they are not fun to the majority. All the things you love about Falcon 4.0, John Q Public finds stupid, boring and a total turn off.
Me, personally, I find the combat mechanics in Elite to be horrid, terrible flight model, terrible weapons physics, it's all total garbage. And I was aware of this before I bought the game, I didn't get it for the combat, already knew it was rubbish, I got Elite for the sandbox and exploration. Combat isn't hard or complicated, it's pretty basic, no deep thought is required, no real skills needed beyond basic eye-hand coordination, and that's it. And that's all by design, it's meant to be fun to the majority, and you do NOT get that with complexity and thinking required to be functional, you get that with making things very 'point and click!'.
They tested combat, what we've got it what was the most enjoyable, some of us would prefer a LOT more than we get, but we're the edge cases, not the majority, so we're stuck with what we got.
Very good. I finished with that thirty years ago, and have no desire to return to active duty.
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Bingo. Thread over.
One big misunderstanding with this is that radar works so much better when protected within a magnetosphere
Here on Earth, we are pleasantly shielded from all the solar wind a resultant radio "noise" it would produce on a radar scope. Lets not even get started on Cosmic rays and Gamma ray bursts. Out There, Radar as we use it today really isn't that feasible of a detection method. Lidar and passive infrared systems would be more resistant to interference, but would still have a lot to sift through, what with there being a star in very close proximity most of the time.
Another thing to consider is that the elite universe had something bad happen in its past... AI problems. Like Skynet, we suddenly rocketed back to the 1970s technology in that aftermath. Thus we have 8bit computers on our left armrest, Use CB radio tech to communicate, and use morse code for nav beacons. So while we could build more high tech computers, detectors, targeting arrays and data processors, we simply do not want to. Quite possibly because the AI is still everywhere in our technology, and the only way to keep us safe is to have it lurch around in archaic systems that cannot support it (my pet theory).
So yes, Dumbed down technology. Welcome to the Elite Universe- all strings attached.
According to the time at the top of your post it was 5:03 AM so 11 sounds unrealistic even considering time zone difference since your profile says you are in California. That would make it more like 9 PM.