Dimento Graven, on 08 April 2015 - 08:47 AM, said:
No Dino, I am responding from an annoyance of having had this same damn argument ~150 times prior over the past 4 years, each with, at its core, the person on pro-COF just not wanting to be hit in his cockpit while standing still, or moving in a straight line, out in the open.
If you're picking up any 'ire' in my tone, it's from a, "Oh goddamn, not THIS **** again!" frame of mind.
Goddamn how f'ing pretentious do you have to be? Any moron can buy a deer rifle, practice for a few months, climb a clock tower and start one shotting the unsuspecting public at a few hundred meters WITHOUT bring tables of trigonometry, and a slide rule up with him.
Pretty goddamned sure that in the army they don't give you a math test before handing you a rifle, call me crazy, but I'm somewhat certain that for most recruiters the requirement of "must be breathing" is the most important one they factor in...
First, your invective to associate my examples with acts of murder is shameful rhetoric.
I'm pretty darn sure that the Army Marksmanship Manual, which I have read and trained on numerous times RELIES ON mathematics. The engineers of the weapons employed by infantry, vehicles, aircraft, and vessels ALL RELY ON THE MATH. They don't just slap something together without consideration on the impact to accuracy, muzzle velocity (relates to what we call "firepower"), weight, and other factors. Why is the AK-47 inherently less accurate than an M-16? Why is it inherently more robust? Why, when I mount both on an unmoving machine do they not put a round in the exact same spot at the same range every single time? Hint - lots of math. So keep trying to convince everyone that all the "stuff" I'm talking about doesn't matter in real life.
By the way, did you know that snipers use slide rules quite frequently in the field? To range a target and then calculate windage and elevation on the scope? Yeah, I know, this is mechs - the targetting computer does that. But do you know how computers actually do math? Computers can only add numbers. They use Taylor Series, which give you an approximation. Usually to 20 or 30 decimal places so it's close enough that it doesn't matter, but the point I'm making here is that all the things you think are perfectly exact are not.
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You're applying crap that does not matter. A laser travels in a straight line unless deviated via reflection or refraction (we'll ignore the video game's lack of application of the law of inverse squares, because, it's a video game), and with ballistics as far as I can tell, PGI doesn't factor gravity as a pull on the round, also considering the weight and velocity of most of these ballistic rounds, there isn't enough gravity, or atmosphere to deviate the round much at all, so having these items travel in straight lines isn't that much out of whack with expectations either. After all, the 30kph breeze pushing on a .25metric ton ballistic round traveling upwards 1000+ meters per second on a distance of ~2100 meters, AIN'T MUCH.
The laser, if perfectly collimated, will travel in a straight line - I don't know of a single laser source that can be perfectly collimated, BUT, you're right, the "error" here should be repeatable within accuracy that we couldn't even measure unless we have physical hardware failure or deviation. But, the targeting computer that is moving that arm or torso gimbal to align the weapon will have an expected point of impact different from actual based on all the tolerances of every part responsible for aligning that weapon. Any rotational element that is off by some small angle will have an increasingly magnified error in point of impact with increasing range. Again, if you've ever done any target shooting, you can know that all other things being perfect, an angular error of 1milliradian (that's the angular measure of a circle divided by 6283.185... or 1/1000 of a radian) will result in missing the target by 1 meter at a range of 1000 meters.
When you make a machine to align a weapon, you have motors, servos, joints, actuators, etc. that will respond to input commands, and you test this machine on its repeatability and reproducability. You want accuracy AND precision. And the random element comes from the fact that when you dial in bearing 150, azimuth 002, your mechs systems aligning that weapon may get to bearing 149.9999, azimuth 002.0001. Then you align things elsewhere, and then go back to that alignement and instead get bearing 150.0003, azimuth 002.0000001. There's a difference in the actual point of impact when you fire after both adjustments. Your perfect machine is not perfect. Depending on the constituent components and the design, aligning weapons at different speeds with inertial effects, thermal expansion/contraction of the metal, etc. will definitely change the actual point of aim from the calculated point of aim.
This stuff quite certainly DOES matter. For people, for machines, for particles traveling through space, for the entire physical universe. Please don't try to explain this away as a bunch of "math stuff that doesn't matter in the real world." I quite literally did engineering work with extremely precise machines for 5 years and had to deal with this stuff in manufacturing.
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Of course, now when you're talking in game MG's, CoF already implemented, not even moot to this discussion, but we can assume the unrealistic short range given the MG is an attempt to factor in the light weight ammo being flung...
Except that with lasers where you fire the beam in that arm swing is where the beam goes. If you pull the trigger when your reticule is on the target, and if your arms have tracked to your reticule, which the assumption is they always do, then the beam goes where aimed, same for the ballistic round, unless of course, you're saying we should 'curve' our bullets?
Except that we've taken the human component out of physically moving the weapon, that's all driven by computer driven precision machined components so that all the pilot has to do is decide WHAT to fire at and WHEN.
So a law of averages never factors into it.
I have my own philisophical view that these physical interactions we see are deterministic in nature and, IF we could know every single variable with perfect precision, we could calculate exactly where and when every particle would interact and how. BUT that would take computing power beyond what we could probably build on Earth, and it turns out that incorporating random elements in the model end up representing the reality very very well. WE USE STOCHASTIC MODELS FOR EXTREMELY PRECISE THINGS. Law of averages is why we can use stochastic models and have them be accurate. As I said before, the atomic clock is the most precise time keeping device in existence, and our model of the radioactive decay process which it uses to count time is RANDOM IN NATURE.
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The better MechWarrior is already doing that, so I'm not sure what you're buying by tossing in an RNG.
Again, what you're really angry at is the morons building laser/PPC/ballistic vomit builds alpha'ing upwards of 4 times, and not suffering ANY consequences.
Should PGI implement something like:
You'd get what you want, people playing their builds appropriate to circumstances, implementation of consequences for alpha'ing too often that directly results in a decreased ability to pin point aim.
I'm not even going to touch that red herring... It's stupid, spurious, and c'mon man at least try and make it relevant.
I'm not mad at boating. I do it myself. I like the game. I just think it could be better, and I have an idea to make it better. I like my ideas to have some reason behind them other than "because gameplay reasons," and I have provided that justification. If you think it's stupid because you just don't like the mechanic, fine, that's personal taste. But you have absolutely no basis for saying that the proposed solution is not "realistic."
Edited by Dino Might, 08 April 2015 - 01:10 PM.
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