113 replies to this topic

[Satan n stuff]

Paigan, on 07 May 2015 - 06:14 AM, said:

As PPCs compared to lasers currently are, they are only really good (better than ERLL) as a siege weapon.
Long range, but horribly inefficient against moving targets.

I'm gonna stop you right there and tell you to lead your targets, seriously it's not that hard. Three of my current CW mechs are some type of PPC+AC sniper and every single one of them is absolutely lethal at optimal range or beyond.

[Tombstoner]

Satan n stuff, on 08 May 2015 - 08:59 AM, said:

I'm gonna stop you right there and tell you to lead your targets, seriously it's not that hard. Three of my current CW mechs are some type of PPC+AC sniper and every single one of them is absolutely lethal at optimal range or beyond.

If a 4 ppc alpha can have all 4 shots hit the same pixel at max range why cant the weapon handle/ calculate the lead for me. The answer is cause PGI sucks at game development. its an arbitrary choice like the need for 3pv, ghost heat or heat neutral mechs are bad... 2x Gauss anyone....

lets say we treat ppc's as the energy based version of the ac-10. are they balanced. nope. that right there is a problem in TT it didn't matter in a FPS it does. because of min maxing behavior. PGI ham fisted the TT to FPS port.

if moneys not an issue are you going to eat at a restaurant thats a contender for kitchen nightmares or your going to eat at a 4 star top of the line restaurant. when ever i see a topic like this i am reminded that this game is designed by people who consider "minimally viable" the design target.

in other words did you puke up what you just ate....did you run to the bath room..... No..., you got your moneys worth.

[Y E O N N E]

Why the hell would I want a PPC that leads for me? That removes all of the fun.

[CocoaJin]

Yeonne Greene, on 08 May 2015 - 08:25 AM, said:

You are over-complicating it. It's just a particle beam (according to lore, the MW games all depict it incorrectly) and likely a neutralized one or else we'd all be equipped with simple electro-magnetic repulsor fields to deflect or scatter it. It's a projectile weapon. It's dumping a bunch of energy into a tiny point, and there's no material dense enough to realistically protect against it. It's the same operational concept behind any type of KE penetrator taken to an extreme and requiring similarly extreme measures to stop.

Here's an article, and here's the relevant bit:



You would get radiation and EMP as the beam hits the air, but that's an AOE along the length of the beam. On the impact site, you are going to bore straight through in a tiny spot and dump the energy straight past the armor and directly into the internals. Then things go boom with such a sudden surge in energy. If you drag the beam around and it is powerful enough, you cut the target to ribbons. Think of it like a water-jet cutting tool, scaled to relativistic speeds with a smaller-diameter working fluid.

Though I can see a Particle Beam with an actual duration being a penetrator, especial the neutrally charged hydrogen atom beam. What we always seem to have in MechWarrior is a charged(so dissipating, as we see in game) projection with no duration...essentially a pulse...a particle cannon.

Like the charged, short duration lightning strike, penetration wouldn't seem to be a major feature of our PPCs. The jump on/jump off points along the surface certainly burn away(an effective way to ablate armor), but the internal damage is much less than the contact damage would imply if you assume it was impacted by a penetrator...



There is no through and through to cause additional damage like an AP, AP/HE or even explosive impact damage from a HE round propagating from the surface of the object inward.

That's not to say there would be no internal damage, or that it couldn't set off ammo, fuel or some other crit on the target...but when it comes to mechs, it would have to ablate the armor on a mech before it could do so...one damaging pulse at a time. Once in the structure, the vulnerability of internal systems should be highly susceptible to the PPC...like ballistics.

[Soy]

They already have a proper niche, what's the ******* problem...

[CocoaJin]

Soy, on 08 May 2015 - 10:08 AM, said:

They already have a proper niche, what's the ******* problem...

That's what I'm saying.

[MysticLink]

If the velocity is buffed to the extent people can easily master hitting moving targets, then that removes the reason for the nerf I think.

PGI obviously tested this out and tried to find the ideal where you can hit targets even moving but it's significantly harder.

The PPC gauss days if people remember were such that ppc and gauss were the dominate weapon.

Right now people still use ppcs they just not as good for duals as they use to be. Which I think is a good thing.

[Y E O N N E]

CocoaJin, on 08 May 2015 - 10:05 AM, said:

Though I can see a Particle Beam with an actual duration being a penetrator, especial the neutrally charged hydrogen atom beam. What we always seem to have in MechWarrior is a charged(so dissipating, as we see in game) projection with no duration...essentially a pulse...a particle cannon.

Like the charged, short duration lightning strike, penetration wouldn't seem to be a major feature of our PPCs. The jump on/jump off points along the surface certainly burn away(an effective way to ablate armor), but the internal damage is much less than the contact damage would imply if you assume it was impacted by a penetrator...



There is no through and through to cause additional damage like an AP, AP/HE or even explosive impact damage from a HE round propagating from the surface of the object inward.

That's not to say there would be no internal damage, or that it couldn't set off ammo, fuel or some other crit on the target...but when it comes to mechs, it would have to ablate the armor on a mech before it could do so...one damaging pulse at a time. Once in the structure, the vulnerability of internal systems should be highly susceptible to the PPC...like ballistics.

Please quit comparing a particle projection to lightning. It's not lightning. Lightning is used as a descriptor for what it looks like, and it's a fantastical one at that. Realistically, it's going to either be invisible or a straight, incandescent line through the sky.

What we have in this game is something that shouldn't even do any sort of damage at all. If you assume it's a ball of plasma, the shot just dissipates as soon as it hits air through a combination internal pressures, lack of structural integrity, and friction. If it's a plasma, it's also going to get easily scattered by EM fields. If you assume it's a neutral fuzzball of particulates, they are moving way too slow to do kinetic or thermal damage, let alone trigger an EMP event, and would similarly be scattered by air resistance.

There are also no jumping arcs onto and off of the surface of targets in these games, I don't know where you are getting that from, with the exception of the C-ERPPC, and that was just a balancing feature. The round smacks the target and it takes physical damage and suffers effects from various types of radiation. That's it. Nothing super flashy.

As for internal damage, it should be massive. As the beam is passing through material, it is exciting it, causing it to heat up catastrophically. This is all happening in fractions of microseconds, mind you. You can just cut little pieces out of an Atlas as you please, or blow up the ammo reserves, or rupture the reactor. We can't do all of that in the game because it would be OP as hell, obviously. The best we can say is that the armor is thick and the PPC is flash-boiling the underlying layers to explosively ablate large amounts of it in a single shot.

To wrap up, just let the PPC be a fantastical device and leave it at that. Our lasers are also wrong and we don't even have conventional ballistics that work like they ought to, even by modern fantasy video-game standards, all because TT has some abstractions that the computer games seem to think should be taken literally in translation.

P.S. Even if it's just a pulse lasting the duration of an eye-blink, it's still a beam. Particles have to be travelling near light-speed for them to do any damage at all, which is why building a real one is such a major pain in the butt. You need both high current and high voltage, and that makes it a hugely power-hungry and energy-wasteful system. The USAF and USN have been looking into weaponizing particle projectors for decades and remain limited by power requirements.

[CocoaJin]

Yeonne Greene, on 08 May 2015 - 10:59 AM, said:

Please quit comparing a particle projection to lightning. It's not lightning. Lightning is used as a descriptor for what it looks like, and it's a fantastical one at that. Realistically, it's going to either be invisible or a straight, incandescent line through the sky.

What we have in this game is something that shouldn't even do any sort of damage at all. If you assume it's a ball of plasma, the shot just dissipates as soon as it hits air through a combination internal pressures, lack of structural integrity, and friction. If it's a plasma, it's also going to get easily scattered by EM fields. If you assume it's a neutral fuzzball of particulates, they are moving way too slow to do kinetic or thermal damage, let alone trigger an EMP event, and would similarly be scattered by air resistance.

There are also no jumping arcs onto and off of the surface of targets in these games, I don't know where you are getting that from, with the exception of the C-ERPPC, and that was just a balancing feature. The round smacks the target and it takes physical damage and suffers effects from various types of radiation. That's it. Nothing super flashy.

As for internal damage, it should be massive. As the beam is passing through material, it is exciting it, causing it to heat up catastrophically. This is all happening in fractions of microseconds, mind you. You can just cut little pieces out of an Atlas as you please, or blow up the ammo reserves, or rupture the reactor. We can't do all of that in the game because it would be OP as hell, obviously. The best we can say is that the armor is thick and the PPC is flash-boiling the underlying layers to explosively ablate large amounts of it in a single shot.

To wrap up, just let the PPC be a fantastical device and leave it at that. Our lasers are also wrong and we don't even have conventional ballistics that work like they ought to, even by modern fantasy video-game standards, all because TT has some abstractions that the computer games seem to think should be taken literally in translation.

P.S. Even if it's just a pulse lasting the duration of an eye-blink, it's still a beam. Particles have to be travelling near light-speed for them to do any damage at all, which is why building a real one is such a major pain in the butt. You need both high current and high voltage, and that makes it a hugely power-hungry and energy-wasteful system. The USAF and USN have been looking into weaponizing particle projectors for decades and remain limited by power requirements.

The massive energy used and waste heat issue is why it makes sense it's a pulse and not a beam of duration in MechWarrior. Presumably, no mech could sustain the heat generation of a sustained beam. The PPC in game would be firing charged particles, but not necessarily plasma from what I'm understanding. Like a lightning bolt, PPC could be firing electrons(the thin, forked/arcing, negatively charged strike from a cloud), or positively charged ions(like the thicker, much straighter, non-arcing, earth to cloud return strike).

Now perhaps return strikes are more damaging and penetrating, they'd have significantly more mass behind them than the negatively charged strike most people associate with lightning impacts. Since most instances of strikes are grounded or at altitude, perhaps the results of a positive strike isn't seen too much. Maybe negative strikes run along the surface as typically described...but maybe the less common positive return strikes do massive damage with fewer opportunities for someone left to describe it

But it would seem the analogy of PPCs to lightning isn't a stretch...provided we are talking about positive return strikes.

[Satan n stuff]

Tombstoner, on 08 May 2015 - 09:24 AM, said:

If a 4 ppc alpha can have all 4 shots hit the same pixel at max range why cant the weapon handle/ calculate the lead for me. The answer is cause PGI sucks at game development. its an arbitrary choice like the need for 3pv, ghost heat or heat neutral mechs are bad... 2x Gauss anyone....

So it takes some skill to lead a target, I don't see what your problem with that is besides the fact that you apparently can't do it.
Do you seriously want the game to lead your shots for you? I've actually played games that did that and the result is that you can only fire at very specific times, those being when the target isn't actively dodging or accelerating/decelerating because you are pretty much guaranteed to miss if you try to shoot them right then.
Ask some people about the auto-aim system we used to have in Arena Commander ( Star Citizen's dogfighting module ) which did exactly that and ask them how it compares to the current manual aim system. The responses you'll get will be a great indicator of how "good" that system really is.

Edited by Satan n stuff, 08 May 2015 - 11:21 AM.

[Weeny Machine]

The question boils down to:
How can PPCs made as viable as lasers or lasers as "bad" as PPCs?

[Satan n stuff]

Bush Hopper, on 08 May 2015 - 11:32 AM, said:

The question boils down to:
How can PPCs made as viable as lasers or lasers as "bad" as PPCs?

Keep them exactly as they are and add a "leading your targets for dummies" tutorial.

[CocoaJin]

Not even a tutorial...honestly, why is that even needed after seeing your first dozen(I'm being forgiving for the slow and projectile weapon uninitiated) shots on moving targets sail behind them?

PPC are so fine the way they are.

[Weeny Machine]

Satan n stuff, on 08 May 2015 - 11:42 AM, said:

Keep them exactly as they are and add a "leading your targets for dummies" tutorial.

Then they will hardly be used. Why? Just look at the laser spam meta. Even a dumby can hit something at the range of 1000m+ and do decent damage. He doesn't need to come into effective range of missiles (if they are used at all) and can soften up brawlers decently before they can come close - and that at less heat than PPCs.

[Y E O N N E]

CocoaJin, on 08 May 2015 - 11:17 AM, said:

The massive energy used and waste heat issue is why it makes sense it's a pulse and not a beam of duration in MechWarrior. Presumably, no mech could sustain the heat generation of a sustained beam. The PPC in game would be firing charged particles, but not necessarily plasma from what I'm understanding. Like a lightning bolt, PPC could be firing electrons(the thin, forked/arcing, negatively charged strike from a cloud), or positively charged ions(like the thicker, much straighter, non-arcing, earth to cloud return strike).

Now perhaps return strikes are more damaging and penetrating, they'd have significantly more mass behind them than the negatively charged strike most people associate with lightning impacts. Since most instances of strikes are grounded or at altitude, perhaps the results of a positive strike isn't seen too much. Maybe negative strikes run along the surface as typically described...but maybe the less common positive return strikes do massive damage with fewer opportunities for someone left to describe it

But it would seem the analogy of PPCs to lightning isn't a stretch...provided we are talking about positive return strikes.

While Sarna says it's an ion beam, meaning its particles carry a charge, in practice you can't use that unless you are certain your targets won't be projecting significant magnetic fields. Unfortunately, that type of shielding is so cheap and easy to set up, that we have to assume PPCs are firing neutralized particle beams instead. That is, it's a proton stream with either an electron added back in or an electron subtracted out, depending on how you charged it for acceleration.

You also wouldn't want to fire electrons because to do damage with those is harder (lower rest mass), it can't be neutralized and you are contaminating the entire area with gamma radiation.

As for heat, that's exactly right. It would be a beam with microsecond durations. Even the lasers produce so much waste heat at weaponized energy levels that they can't stay active for long. That's one of the reasons they are always pulsed, so fast that you can't even see it. It also allows time for the blow-off over the impact site to clear for the next smattering of photons to get a clean hit.

One thing I find hilarious is that the description on Sarna for the PPC is a lot more realistic than what we have in the games. I don't even know why we shoot fuzzballs in the games, when we could have a weapon that takes a split second to charge and fire a very short duration beam, exploding on target for 10 points at the expense of a lot of heat and slow cycle time.

[Satan n stuff]

Bush Hopper, on 08 May 2015 - 12:11 PM, said:

Then they will hardly be used. Why? Just look at the laser spam meta. Even a dumby can hit something at the range of 1000m+ and do decent damage. He doesn't need to come into effective range of missiles (if they are used at all) and can soften up brawlers decently before they can come close - and that at less heat than PPCs.

They might deal damage more reliably, but they're not going to kill anything like that unless those dummies actually can maintain steady aim on one component, and if they did they wouldn't need the PPC tutorial. It's no harder to use PPCs effectively at range than it is to use lasers, but because you technically land more hits with lasers they feel more effective.

Edited by Satan n stuff, 08 May 2015 - 12:24 PM.

[LordKnightFandragon]

Soy, on 08 May 2015 - 10:08 AM, said:

They already have a proper niche, what's the ******* problem...

Yes, their niche is being the most useless and unreliable weapons in the game.

[Y E O N N E]

LordKnightFandragon, on 08 May 2015 - 12:38 PM, said:

Yes, their niche is being the most useless and unreliable weapons in the game.

False.

Flamer.

[LordKnightFandragon]

Yeonne Greene, on 08 May 2015 - 12:42 PM, said:

False.

Flamer.

OK lol, you win.

THe PPC is just in the same boat as the Flamer...

[FupDup]

Yeonne Greene, on 08 May 2015 - 12:42 PM, said:

False.

Flamer.