How should weapon ranges and projectile speeds compare with real life?

[zrisher]

In real life battles happen over significantly greater ranges than in SE. In general, everything in SE is scaled down from real life to help make the simulation more playable - asteroid and world sizes, distances, etc.

I.e. per Ophichius:

Real-world vehicular weapons tend to have muzzle velocities that would be staggeringly huge in SE terms. The 120mm gun used by most western tanks is around 1.5km/sec, the railgun the US Navy is testing is 2.5km/sec, while HMGs and autocannons tend to be around 1km/sec. Naval artillery and field artillery tends towards lower muzzle velocities, 800-900m/s or so.

Our max speed for anything in SE is 1,065 m/s, and I believe (we need to test) that the actual speed we can reliably use in multiplayer without projectiles moving through objects before physics has a chance to catch up is much lower, somewhere around the 250-700 m/s range.

I think (and feel free to argue this point) that the ranges and speeds for our weapons can have the same relationships to eachother that exist in real life, but everything should probably be scaled down by a certain shared factor to fit it into the SE world.

[drNovikov]

I believe weapons should be compared not to real life, but rather to the rest of the game. Will this weapon break the game? Will it be overpowered? Will it make all other weapons unnecessary? Will it make certain class of ships unplayable or obsolete?

For example, a long range near-hitscan weapon mounted on a fast moving rapid turning platform would be totally OP, because it would allow a small fighter to incapacitate a capital ship from a safe distance, thus making such capital ships obsolete.

So, railguns, in my opinion, should require a huge slow platform to be mounted on, and some sort of a charge-up mechanic to compensate for its near hitscan nature. They should be huge, and they should require lots of energy, like a heavy and bulky capacitor bank. Such capacitor bank should require charging before shooting, just like a jump drive. Capacitors, probably, should be atached to railguns like production modules to refineries.

Another example is balancing range / speed vs turrets. At the moment it is possible for a small ship to stay out of enemy turret range and just snipe turrets one by one, then move in and grief the hell out of enemy base while the poor guy is offline. This eventually leads to people avoiding big structures, which are cool, but indefensible. This shifts the whole metagame.

Thus, instead of comparing small ship weapons to their real life counterparts, we should compare them to their target's capabilities. The balance between small ship weaponry and defenses should require small ships moving into the danger zone. This could be achieved by decreasing small ship autocannon accuracy and bullet speed.

[zrisher]

I believe weapons should be compared not to real life, but rather to the rest of the game.

So this thread (and mod) assumes we were "rebooting" weaponry - i.e. changing or removing every existing weapon in the game and replacing them with our own versions. So we don't need to compare them to other weapons because we are going to change other weapons.

Obviously that means we have a lot to discuss on the other weapons - accuracy, necessary ship size, tactical use, etc - all the things you mention above. Those should be discussed on issues related to the weapon or the dynamic itself. This thread is just specifically about ranges / speeds and what baseline we should establish for all of them. Think of it more as an introductory step to more fully understanding the weapons we will introduce - we just need to figure out what proportion of real life weapon ranges and speeds we will use by default. Then we can tweak as necessary.

[drNovikov]

I mean not to other weapons, but rather to hte other parts of the game. Like the ability to dodge or to negate incoming damage.

[zrisher]

Well we have control of both of those as well - we'll be re-doing armor and thrusters.