Free Allegiance Forums

There could be two flavors of this:
Absolute minimum range (no damage to targets inside that range).
Minimum range for AOE effects (essentially a minimum delay between when the projectile is fired and it explodes).

For the latter, direct hits would still do normal (+AOE) damage, but near misses would be complete misses.

I think the latter would be best, allowing weapons like skycaps to remain useful at close range. While allowing the creation of 'flak battery' weapons which would have a high spread and large AoE, making it almost impossible to score a direct hit, but creating a 'field of death' around the ship.

I think that GS's are actually one of the "Counters" to fighters, so to say. Its not like ints or sf's have a lot of problems with them as long as they go in groups. Sf's dont even needs groups if you have a good pilot.

Barrager wrote:QUOTE (Barrager @ Jul 18 2007, 03:03 PM) A flak Cannon is essentially what the long tom is.. slow rate of fire large explosion radius, the only differences would be the accuracy and the amount of damage.

I was thinking a max range of 1600m for the first level honestly. and a blasphemous explosion radius of about 800m or there abouts. Basically a sawwed-off shotgun effect. The max range on a level 3 version would be something like 1800m. Primary weapons on the GS could be nans / dis / gat just to nerf that AC cheeze too, but still give it an effective role.

deceit wrote:QUOTE (deceit @ Jul 18 2007, 07:59 PM) I was thinking a max range of 1600m for the first level honestly. and a blasphemous explosion radius of about 800m or there abouts. Basically a sawwed-off shotgun effect. The max range on a level 3 version would be something like 1800m. Primary weapons on the GS could be nans / dis / gat just to nerf that AC cheeze too, but still give it an effective role.

I think a radius of 800m is a bit extreme. Maybe 100, so its like your shooting out short lived prox.

What about creating a miniSC gun for GS and leaving SC for caps only?

How about this?:
Make 2 set's of guns for the gun ship that only the gs can use . One gun should have 0 spread (something like a beam that fires 1-4 shot/sec and dose heavy damage to med-hvy armor and lite-v lite damage to v LT- lt armor ) like a anti bbr/ cap ship turret ; And 1 turret that has great Aoe effect and dose moderate damage to lt- med class (but lighter damage than sky cap) for taking out those pesky fast ships like scouts or fighter's.

wizard58 wrote:QUOTE (wizard58 @ Jul 21 2007, 08:00 AM) How about this?:
Make 2 set's of guns for the gun ship that only the gs can use . One gun should have 0 spread (something like a beam that fires 1-4 shot/sec and dose heavy damage to med-hvy armor and lite-v lite damage to v LT- lt armor ) like a anti bbr/ cap ship turret ; And 1 turret that has great Aoe effect and dose moderate damage to lt- med class (but lighter damage than sky cap) for taking out those pesky fast ships like scouts or fighter's.

The first violates two of the unwritten rules of weapon design:All weapons must have some non-trivial dispersion.
All weapons must have a ROF >= 4 shots/second.The problem is that not all clients see all ships facing the exact same way (& the server may not think your ship is facing exactly the way you think it is). Nor will all clients/server see that a weapon is fired at exactly the same time.

Net result is that, if you have a slow/zero dispersion weapon, some people will see it hit & others will not. If it only did a trivial amount of damage, this wouldn't be a big problem, but slow weapons are typically made slow becase each shot does a lot of damage.

With a higher ROF/non-trivial dispersion, everyone sees the weapon shoot (though they may not see the same number of shots) and the dispersion tends to swamp the pointing errors between clients & server.

This discussion reminded of one thing that I think could be a cool new property for projectiles: turn rate.

Basically, this would allow projectiles to use a much simplified version of the missile guidance to track their targets (much simplified becase, since the projectiles would have a constant speed, there is a closed form solution).

The would allow two new types of weapons:A short-range weapon weapon with a high ROF, high turn rate and very high dispersion (1 radian?).
A long-range weapon with a moderate dispersion and low turn rate.The first would make for an interesting visual (a wide cone of projectiles converge back on their target). The second would make for a sniper rifle (at long ranges, the low turn rate will guarantee lots of hits but at short ranges, the moderate dispersion will make for lots of misses).

Tkela wrote:QUOTE (Tkela @ Jul 22 2007, 08:02 PM) The first violates two of the unwritten rules of weapon design:All weapons much have some non-trivial dispersion.
All weapons must have a ROF >= 4 shots/second.

TF weapons and Gauss?