Why do kinetic weapons have such low range in space?

[KayAitch]

Laser weapons rely on the focus and coherence of light - while we can make lasers that can be bounced off the Moon easily enough their effective damage would fall off with inverse square law, so it makes some sense for them to have an effective range in the kilometers.

Kinetic weapons should have effectively infinite range. A cannon shell fired in space will continue indefinitely at the same speed until it hits something or gravity captures it.

It's really weird that a cannon or rail strike would do significantly less damage after traveling 3KM than they would at 500m. What friction has slowed that shell down?

You could argue that this was a game balancing decision, but as almost everyone seems to prefer using lasers over kinetic for their primary weapons I'd argue that a buff for kinetic weapons would benefit them - if you can hit a target at 7km with a cannon shell that took several seconds to get there then it should still do full damage.

Plasma weapons are a special case, but they behave oddly too - falling off in damage but with no other change to the projectile. A ball of superheated plasma fired through space would expand, getting larger but also less dense and so doing less damage, something like a shotgun spread. This would actually be a great dynamic for plasma weapons, and they'll need a buff soon (is anyone going to use them once there are C4 multicannon and lasers?)

 

[EdzUp]

Well after the famous incident where the war around a planet caused bullets to rain down on a unsuspecting populous it was deemed necessary to build a small explosive charge into bullets so they expire after a certain distance, this is why they stop.

It's the same for missiles after the NN500 nuke incident when a colony was lost after a freak missile hit a colony.

This is speculation but I do remember reading about the missiles so it does make sense on the bullets too

 

[Thetele]

Hitting something 3 km away is already really hard without hit scan weapons. It would be pointless to have 7 km range, even small change in heading of target would make you miss. There would be no benefits to have longer range so there is no need to have it. I don´t know how far away missiles can lock but i have been hit by missiles while the closest ship was 6 km behind me.

 

[Troa Barton]

Hitting something 3 km away is already really hard without hit scan weapons. It would be pointless to have 7 km range, even small change in heading of target would make you miss. There would be no benefits to have longer range so there is no need to have it. I don´t know how far away missiles can lock but i have been hit by missiles while the closest ship was 6 km behind me.

By that logic it then also doesn't make sense to limit the range since you're going to miss anyway.

 

[kofeyh]

Laser weapons rely on the focus and coherence of light - while we can make lasers that can be bounced off the Moon easily enough their effective damage would fall off with inverse square law, so it makes some sense for them to have an effective range in the kilometers.

Kinetic weapons should have effectively infinite range. A cannon shell fired in space will continue indefinitely at the same speed until it hits something or gravity captures it.

It's really weird that a cannon or rail strike would do significantly less damage after traveling 3KM than they would at 500m. What friction has slowed that shell down?

You could argue that this was a game balancing decision, but as almost everyone seems to prefer using lasers over kinetic for their primary weapons I'd argue that a buff for kinetic weapons would benefit them - if you can hit a target at 7km with a cannon shell that took several seconds to get there then it should still do full damage.

Plasma weapons are a special case, but they behave oddly too - falling off in damage but with no other change to the projectile. A ball of superheated plasma fired through space would expand, getting larger but also less dense and so doing less damage, something like a shotgun spread. This would actually be a great dynamic for plasma weapons, and they'll need a buff soon (is anyone going to use them once there are C4 multicannon and lasers?)

Why?

Input causes are almost always one or more of the following:
- people complained about module damage
- people complained about weapon damage
- people complained about armour
- people complained about hull reinforcement modules
- people complained about "hit-scan" weapons
- people complained about kinetic weapons
- and (rarely) frontier getting some numbers wrong and realising about 6 months down the track

Result? Nerf the impact of weapons on a steep bell curve. Except for rails. Probably because this would just make PVP people complain about not being able to use the weapon correctly (or they simply forgot to change it too).

You may notice a pattern above, though. It's subtle, and you might miss it.

Generally this crap happens because people decide that frontier should "balance" the game, and are absolutely driven by their own reasons for doing so. Usually because it isn't "correct" (clearly!) and their expansive knowledge on the subject justifies their responses.

If you go back and look at feedback and forum posts, there is a correlation; a cause and effect. People of course deny this and blame frontier, for doing whatever it was in an attempt to help.

Yes, constructive feedback happens. Mostly though, people come onto the forums to have a nice vent about their particular grievance, and it is of course entirely frontier's fault.

tl;dr - some of it is frontier figuring it out, sometimes it's genuine mistake; most of it is due to trying to action changes the community cries for

 

[tiger61378]

Think of it this way...its an anti-griefing tactic. Imagine if kinetics had no range dropoff in space...some joker could load up rails, sit 20km from the front of a station, and unload their whole ammo rack at the toaster rack. Then, a few minutes later, anyone unfortunate enough to come out of the station at that time would suddenly start getting pelted by railgun rounds coming from seemingly nowhere. And YES, there are people who would be doing this, because why not.

 

[Trafalgar Law]

Why?

Input causes are almost always one or more of the following:
- people complained about module damage
- people complained about weapon damage
- people complained about armour
- people complained about hull reinforcement modules
- people complained about "hit-scan" weapons
- people complained about kinetic weapons
- and (rarely) frontier getting some numbers wrong and realising about 6 months down the track

Result? Nerf the impact of weapons on a steep bell curve. Except for rails. Probably because this would just make PVP people complain about not being able to use the weapon correctly (or they simply forgot to change it too).

You may notice a pattern above, though. It's subtle, and you might miss it.

Generally this crap happens because people decide that frontier should "balance" the game, and are absolutely driven by their own reasons for doing so. Usually because it isn't "correct" (clearly!) and their expansive knowledge on the subject justifies their responses.

If you go back and look at feedback and forum posts, there is a correlation; a cause and effect. People of course deny this and blame frontier, for doing whatever it was in an attempt to help.

Yes, constructive feedback happens. Mostly though, people come onto the forums to have a nice vent about their particular grievance, and it is of course entirely frontier's fault.

tl;dr - some of it is frontier figuring it out, sometimes it's genuine mistake; most of it is due to trying to action changes the community cries for

Cannons and multicannons always had a maximum range right from the very start, so I'm not sure what the relevance of this rant even is to the op.

 

[Derath]

Why?

Input causes are almost always one or more of the following:
- people complained about module damage
- people complained about weapon damage
- people complained about armour
- people complained about hull reinforcement modules
- people complained about "hit-scan" weapons
- people complained about kinetic weapons
- and (rarely) frontier getting some numbers wrong and realising about 6 months down the track

Result? Nerf the impact of weapons on a steep bell curve. Except for rails. Probably because this would just make PVP people complain about not being able to use the weapon correctly (or they simply forgot to change it too).

You may notice a pattern above, though. It's subtle, and you might miss it.

Generally this crap happens because people decide that frontier should "balance" the game, and are absolutely driven by their own reasons for doing so. Usually because it isn't "correct" (clearly!) and their expansive knowledge on the subject justifies their responses.

If you go back and look at feedback and forum posts, there is a correlation; a cause and effect. People of course deny this and blame frontier, for doing whatever it was in an attempt to help.

Yes, constructive feedback happens. Mostly though, people come onto the forums to have a nice vent about their particular grievance, and it is of course entirely frontier's fault.

tl;dr - some of it is frontier figuring it out, sometimes it's genuine mistake; most of it is due to trying to action changes the community cries for

Im perfectly willing to give ED or the community frequent stick, but this is just so wrong lol, module damage needed changing, as far as i'm aware the only weapon fundamentally changed in terms of damage was dumbfires and they certainly needed it (or all you'd see is dumbfires still), armour was useless, hull reinforcements were worse than useless, module damage made both of the previous 2 irrelevant.

I mean basically you've made a list of things that FD did a bad job of, that got complained about and improved the game overall, I'm also not entirely convinced you know what a bell curve is though maybe I just don't understand the point

 

[Bran Tse Mallory]

This one is simple... Space is very, very, very cold... So cold that after a certain amount of time exposed to space even the metal bullets freeze to the point of becoming brittle and although they do not slow down or stop they will just shatter if they impact anything.

Same as dipping a banana in liquid oxygen.

 

[kofeyh]

Cannons and multicannons always had a maximum range right from the very start, so I'm not sure what the relevance of this rant even is to the op.

Which has since been reduced. All weapons had a maximum range, iirc (not sure about the initial beta/ alphas - that was wild west time).

The difference is the damage fall off values. Turrets were nerfed and over time weapons have had their ranges adjusted as well. Rails continue to hit like a sniper round, which is almost certainly the intention.

 

[CMDR Argent Steel]

I think the most sensible excuse for why kinetic weapons (most especially bullets from cannons) drop off over distance is because of their speed. Since they travel so much slower than laser light or relativistic rail gun slugs the targeting systems can only account for their range over short distances. Since space battles happen over great distances it makes sense that over range the angle and accuracy of the bullets is only sufficiently accurate to cause appreciable damage up to a certain distance. If you consider that rifled projectiles cause significantly more damage to a target they hit head-on as opposed to at an oblique angle, and a ship being fired upon can easily turn and present an angled surface for that bullet to skip off of instead of penetrate, it makes sense to me.

Speaking in Newtonian terms the projectile shouldn't be losing any momentum because space is a near total vacuum, but the distance it has to travel before reaching the target is obvious to anyone who's been in a dogfight using these things.

 

[kofeyh]

This one is simple... Space is very, very, very cold... So cold that after a certain amount of time exposed to space even the metal bullets freeze to the point of becoming brittle and although they do not slow down or stop they will just shatter if they impact anything.

Same as dipping a banana in liquid oxygen.

Which explains micro meteorite damage as? And why NORAD tracks millions of bits of space debris. All of which is travelling at high velocity and imparts considerable kinetic energy. There is still a conversion between mass and energy, even for slower objects. Doesn't matter if it's cold hard steel or a chunk of ice.

This is to say, that a round 'fired' in space (lol) is going to impart quite some kinetic energy over considerable distance, before gravitational forces manage to tug it off course. Laser light actually diverges over distance so in space this is viable, although a couple kilometres I cannot expect the divergence would even be a fraction of what it is inside an atmosphere.

As to what energy a particle beam imparts to a struck surface over a few kilometers, I'd imagine it would require the reading of at least one or more peer-reviewed papers.

tl;dr: projectiles in space will eventually be affected by gravity but imperceptibly over short range; laser would begin to diverge but again only imperceptibly. who knows how thermic lasers even work as far as space is concerned so gameplay is likely winning over reality.

I am a lay person though, so YYMV.

edit: honestly? rails are probably the only reasonably accurate simulation; very high speed round will hit like a truck and as there's no real immediate loss of velocity almost all energy used to expend the round will be imparted to the target vessel (it does beg the question as to why such a force doesn't slow ships down, it probably should). If HRM is mostly ceramics and metal alloys (eg think tanks) it won't actually stop the round as well as ballistic materials might (kevlar, reinforced carbon fibre, etc).

 

[Wedgetail]

Gunnery Chief: "This, recruits, is a 20-kilo ferrous slug. Feel the weight. Every five seconds, the main gun of an Everest-class dreadnought accelerates one to 1.3 percent of light speed. It impacts with the force of a 38-kilotomb bomb. That is three times the yield of the city buster dropped on Hiroshima back on Earth. That means Sir Isaac Newton is the deadliest son-of-a-      in space"

 

[KayAitch]

Well after the famous incident where the war around a planet caused bullets to rain down on a unsuspecting populous it was deemed necessary to build a small explosive charge into bullets so they expire after a certain distance, this is why they stop.

It's the same for missiles after the NN500 nuke incident when a colony was lost after a freak missile hit a colony.

This is speculation but I do remember reading about the missiles so it does make sense on the bullets too

That still wouldn't cause the damage to fall off over range, and it could be easily set to long enough for a few KM range.

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Hitting something 3 km away is already really hard without hit scan weapons. It would be pointless to have 7 km range, even small change in heading of target would make you miss. There would be no benefits to have longer range so there is no need to have it. I don´t know how far away missiles can lock but i have been hit by missiles while the closest ship was 6 km behind me.

Yes, which is why also having a damage fall off over distance is unnecessary for gameplay reasons. Their range is limited by effective targeting, so Frontier shouldn't need to break physics for playability.

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Cannons and multicannons always had a maximum range right from the very start, so I'm not sure what the relevance of this rant even is to the op.

No, they don't. Cannon shells sharply reduce damage with range, Rails even more so, and multicannon have the longest range of any kinetic weapon, but still do about half damage from 2km and nothing past 3km.

 

[KayAitch]

This one is simple... Space is very, very, very cold... So cold that after a certain amount of time exposed to space even the metal bullets freeze to the point of becoming brittle and although they do not slow down or stop they will just shatter if they impact anything.

Same as dipping a banana in liquid oxygen.

Er, better tell the guys on the ISS not to tap the hull of their station.

These bullets can penetrate ship armour capable of skimming the corona of a star, they're clearly not made of banana. Even if they were made of something mundane like lead or iron they wouldn't shatter - they're already in their solid state, supercooling them doesn't have the brittle side effects that it does with organic materials.

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edit: honestly? rails are probably the only reasonably accurate simulation; very high speed round will hit like a truck and as there's no real immediate loss of velocity almost all energy used to expend the round will be imparted to the target vessel (it does beg the question as to why such a force doesn't slow ships down, it probably should). If HRM is mostly ceramics and metal alloys (eg think tanks) it won't actually stop the round as well as ballistic materials might (kevlar, reinforced carbon fibre, etc).

Rails aren't - they sharply drop the amount of damage they do at 1km and 2km in steps, past 2km the only remotely effective kinetic weapon are multicannon.

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tl;dr - some of it is frontier figuring it out, sometimes it's genuine mistake; most of it is due to trying to action changes the community cries for

Frontier have a stated goal of realistic physics, except where gameplay needs to break it for playability. So they allow FTL travel and dim down stars and have maximum ship speeds for gameplay reasons, despite those all being wrong by the physics.

I'm not sure what the gameplay advantage is for this.

 

[KayAitch]

Think of it this way...its an anti-griefing tactic. Imagine if kinetics had no range dropoff in space...some joker could load up rails, sit 20km from the front of a station, and unload their whole ammo rack at the toaster rack. Then, a few minutes later, anyone unfortunate enough to come out of the station at that time would suddenly start getting pelted by railgun rounds coming from seemingly nowhere. And YES, there are people who would be doing this, because why not.

Rails should be a sniper weapon - that's the justification for their ridiculous ammo count.

Currently Elite doesn't calculate anything for an instance past 7km, so that would be the maximum range. You could fix the problem of camping griefers by including a couple of AI rails (you know the ones that never miss or run out of ammo) on the station that fire back.

 

[Becks]

I think it's a limitation of the target computer to save ammunition.
Tbh I wouldn't hit sh*t with my kinetic weapons over more than 3 kms and 2000 rounds isn't much ammunition for a ship.

Gunnery Chief: "This, recruits, is a 20-kilo ferrous slug. Feel the weight. Every five seconds, the main gun of an Everest-class dreadnought accelerates one to 1.3 percent of light speed. It impacts with the force of a 38-kilotomb bomb. That is three times the yield of the city buster dropped on Hiroshima back on Earth. That means Sir Isaac Newton is the deadliest son-of-a-      in space"

+rep for Mass Effect

 

[Iskariot]

Why do kinetic weapons have such low range in space?

It might have something to do with the fact that ED is a game.

 

[Agony_Aunt]

It might have something to do with the fact that ED is a game.

I'll go with that for an answer as well.

Gameplay reasons.

Also technical reasons as well. Imagine a big battle going on like in a CZ. All those bullets need keeping track of. What is the point of keeping track of them when they have long passed the distance where its useful to track them?

 

[Bran Tse Mallory]

Which explains micro meteorite damage as? And why NORAD tracks millions of bits of space debris. All of which is travelling at high velocity and imparts considerable kinetic energy. There is still a conversion between mass and energy, even for slower objects. Doesn't matter if it's cold hard steel or a chunk of ice.

This is to say, that a round 'fired' in space (lol) is going to impart quite some kinetic energy over considerable distance, before gravitational forces manage to tug it off course. Laser light actually diverges over distance so in space this is viable, although a couple kilometres I cannot expect the divergence would even be a fraction of what it is inside an atmosphere.

As to what energy a particle beam imparts to a struck surface over a few kilometers, I'd imagine it would require the reading of at least one or more peer-reviewed papers.

tl;dr: projectiles in space will eventually be affected by gravity but imperceptibly over short range; laser would begin to diverge but again only imperceptibly. who knows how thermic lasers even work as far as space is concerned so gameplay is likely winning over reality.

I am a lay person though, so YYMV.

edit: honestly? rails are probably the only reasonably accurate simulation; very high speed round will hit like a truck and as there's no real immediate loss of velocity almost all energy used to expend the round will be imparted to the target vessel (it does beg the question as to why such a force doesn't slow ships down, it probably should). If HRM is mostly ceramics and metal alloys (eg think tanks) it won't actually stop the round as well as ballistic materials might (kevlar, reinforced carbon fibre, etc).

Er, better tell the guys on the ISS not to tap the hull of their station.

These bullets can penetrate ship armour capable of skimming the corona of a star, they're clearly not made of banana. Even if they were made of something mundane like lead or iron they wouldn't shatter - they're already in their solid state, supercooling them doesn't have the brittle side effects that it does with organic materials.

Thanks for the analysis but I only said it as a bit of fun, hence ---> .

My actual thoughts on the matter can be summed up in just one word: Game