239 replies to this topic

[Satan n stuff]

Alek Ituin, on 14 August 2015 - 09:39 AM, said:

It's only as complex as you make it. For instance, the circuitry controlling each coil can be a self contained "plug n play" module, as can each coil, each capacitor bank, and every other piece of the rifle. You could make a coil/railgun easier to field strip than an actual gun. (Don't try and pull that "den u dun no how 2 feld strip riful, hurr hurr" s**t with me either)

Plus, shielded timing circuit. Why bother fixing something when you've got redundancies? A few % less efficiency in your acceleration is a small price to pay to have your equipment still work after it gets dirty. More than you can say for quite a few modern firearms, that's for sure.

Field stripping a coilgun and actually assembling it clean isn't exactly going to be easy, the standards for "clean" in this case being quite a bit higher than for your typical gun. A bit of dirt on a contact point could quite easily cause it to fuse two parts together when fired, because that's what happens when you try to force electricity through the high resistance conductor you'll have created. There would probably be a fail save to prevent that, but then you're still stuck with a gun that doesn't fire. Using your suggestion of an optical timing mechanism each coil would have to be cleaned separately and much more thoroughly than a typical gun, which would make the operation too time consuming to do in combat, rendering the weapon completely useless if it gets slightly dirty.
A weapon that is entirely electrically powered shouldn't ever need to be field stripped, because that makes it wholly unsuitable for any real battlefield due to the simple fact that these weapons would be extremely vulnerable to dirt contamination once disassembled.

[Alek Ituin]

Dino Might, on 14 August 2015 - 09:50 AM, said:

Yeah, railguns have some of the same worries, and some others. As Bishop pointed out, we can get the same KE out of a much smaller package with a railgun, currently. I think, for military application, a railgun is superior because a significant portion of the firing mechanism (the rails) is easy to replace. With a coilgun it is much harder to fix/replace parts after being damaged.

Bishop, as for DU and the affect on armored vehicles, I'm not up to speed on the terminal ballistics. I'm assuming the fire isn't from the actual U-238 - all that is is a heavy metal. But when that impacts thick steel plate, the KE transfer creates a such high friction heat as it penetrates, that it ends up melting/lighting material on fire from the extreme temperature. I assume the same would happen with mechs, so there would be some balance of how much penetration you want. If we had an extreme case though, where we had such high penetration that not enough KE was transferred, you'd get the penetrator causing the heat and plastic deformation as the metals smashed together hard enough, but there would be enough momentum for the penetrator to cut a relatively clean hole straight through the mech/vehicle/building/ship. You want that post-impact superhot penetrator to slow down enough so it will bounce around and smash into things before it gets to the other wall of the compartment.

The other major contributor to vehicle crew kills from a penetrator round is spalling - much like in sailing ships of old, the actual projectile doesn't do most of the damage - it is the splintering of the internal wall material that gets shot out in many directions at high velocity that does most of the killing/destruction. Same thing in a mech, I presume. You want to basically splinter the ferro armor to spray it all over the internals, cutting ammo feeds, severing myomer, impaling critical systems.

I think at some point, more KE just doesn't help you much unless you alter the geometry such that more of the penetrator will have to be ablated as it burrows through the armor. The less of the penetrator that ablates away, the less energy delivered to the target. I think that's why you will use more of a blunted cylinder projectile (or sphere) rather than a dart, as is found on most of our chemical driven AP projectiles these days.

Depending on what they're made of, it could be a breeze to replace the rails, or a b*tch and a half. For military applications though, either one works. It's really down to exactly what your requirements are which then determines what style of magnetic accelerator you use.

As for the DU penetrators, it is the material itself. Uranium as a whole is a pyrophoric material, and the action of shearing apart on impact actually causes the metal to ignite. Which, of course, results in a firestorm of flaming metal shards filling the tank. Spalling is also severely minimized by the introduction of spall liners as standard equipment in tanks. Introducing your own high velocity metal shards by way of penetration is a much better method of killing everything inside.

On to design, blunt nosed munitions were phased out for a reason. They lose too much energy during travel through drag, which means they'll be reserved as vacuum munitions (the one time having no atmosphere is an advantage). Your best bet is probably oblong "cigar" shapes with near perfect aerodynamics, or current G7 boat tail munition shapes. Those strike a nice balance between surface area and aerodynamics, which means you retain lethal velocity over longer ranges, and maintain devastating impacts.

EDIT: You could use a shell resembling a "tipped" hollowpoint. It looks like a normal bullet until impact, where the tip shears off, collapses in to the interior hollow, and creates a much larger surface area for the shell to disperse its kinetic energy with.

Satan n stuff, on 14 August 2015 - 11:32 AM, said:

Field stripping a coilgun and actually assembling it clean isn't exactly going to be easy, the standards for "clean" in this case being quite a bit higher than for your typical gun. A bit of dirt on a contact point could quite easily cause it to fuse two parts together when fired, because that's what happens when you try to force electricity through the high resistance conductor you'll have created. There would probably be a fail save to prevent that, but then you're still stuck with a gun that doesn't fire. Using your suggestion of an optical timing mechanism each coil would have to be cleaned separately and much more thoroughly than a typical gun, which would make the operation too time consuming to do in combat, rendering the weapon completely useless if it gets slightly dirty.
A weapon that is entirely electrically powered shouldn't ever need to be field stripped, because that makes it wholly unsuitable for any real battlefield due to the simple fact that these weapons would be extremely vulnerable to dirt contamination once disassembled.

Alright, I'll give you that one.

Then use optical timers in lab conditions to figure out optimal timing sequences, then use a normal timing circuit to avoid the hassle. However, you could have a failsafe that still fires the gun, just avoiding the coil in question during the sequence. Less acceleration, but you still got a round out regardless.

Edited by Alek Ituin, 14 August 2015 - 12:05 PM.

[M4rtyr]

How about getting back on topic you two.

[Alek Ituin]

M4rtyr, on 14 August 2015 - 12:00 PM, said:

How about getting back on topic you two.

[IronLichRich]

Alek Ituin, on 14 August 2015 - 12:21 PM, said:

TANKRED ENDURES

What's the difference in drag coefficient between the boat tail munition and a spherical projectile for the less scientifically inclined (other than significant )

[M4rtyr]

Alek Ituin, on 14 August 2015 - 12:21 PM, said:

... well played
lol

[stjobe]

Telmasa, on 12 August 2015 - 09:06 PM, said:

Expecting the game to dice-roll factors that "ought" to be controllable & take them out of my hands completely is not fun, enjoyable, or enhancing the experience whatsoever.

Games use random number generation to simulate chance, luck, or something happening at a certain percentage interval. MWO has lots of RNG already, from which team you end up on, to which drop zone you drop into, on which map, to which hit location your SSRM tracks towards, whether or not you get a critical hit, or whether or not your ammo explodes. It's literally all over the game.

Now I'd like you to observe the fact that the only ones that talk about taking control completely out of player's hands are the people that vehemently oppose RNG on the basis it detracts from skill. These people are wrong and it is my personal belief that they do not understand the nature of randomness in video games.

Nobody that actually argues for a cone of fire or spread or targeting computer load or any of the other mechanics for alleviating the pin-point nature of our shots want to take control completely out of player's hands - they argue to do it just a little bit, just enough that not each and every shot land perfectly converged in the same location no matter what you do; and preferably with a mechanic that's predictable, if not necessarily avoidable.

We don't want random hit locations any more than you do, but we do want a less-than-perfectly-pin-point accuracy. At least on my part, that is both because it is such a large part of BattleTech lore, and because having the perfect pin-point accuracy and instant convergence we have simply breaks the armour system.

Personally, I'd be fine with pin-point accuracy if we didn't have instant convergence. But we do, and it's not going away, so the next thing to try to change is our accuracy. It needn't be pin-point accurate to both be enjoyable and skill-based, it just need to be accurate enough.

[Alek Ituin]

IronLichRich, on 14 August 2015 - 03:05 PM, said:

TANKRED ENDURES

What's the difference in drag coefficient between the boat tail munition and a spherical projectile for the less scientifically inclined (other than significant )

Oh lord... I swear I did this before.

For now, just imagine the difference in drag between a racing yacht (boat tail) and a freighter (spherical).

[ChronicRage]

For God's sake this is a freaking game. Nothing more, nothing less. It's a game. It's not real. The mechs, the weapons, the planets, the turrets, the generators, all of this does not exist and the physics the game uses for the most part does not exist. it's just a freaking game. Just play the game, don't analyze it to death!

Now the money and time we have "invested" into this game is real, and other than entertainment value, you should not expect anything else from this "investment".

It's a game. Pew, pew, pew. Bang, bang, bang. It's a game............

[CMDR Sunset Shimmer]

ChronicRage, on 15 August 2015 - 07:06 AM, said:

For God's sake this is a freaking game. Nothing more, nothing less. It's a game. It's not real. The mechs, the weapons, the planets, the turrets, the generators, all of this does not exist and the physics the game uses for the most part does not exist. it's just a freaking game. Just play the game, don't analyze it to death!

Now the money and time we have "invested" into this game is real, and other than entertainment value, you should not expect anything else from this "investment".

It's a game. Pew, pew, pew. Bang, bang, bang. It's a game............

See, here's the thing, for some people Analyzing a setting, or mechanics, or breaking down the psychology of the characters involved in said fictional setting, is part of the fun.

For example, it's far more fun to watch a show like say House M.D. and start to break down how screwed up all the characters are, and what's driving them forward, than to just watch and laugh at House being an idiot in the clinic just to spite Cuddy.

You might like to just sit around and surface watch, or play something and turn your brain off, but to those of us with an iota of intelligence... we don't like to do that. Doing that is what's allowed people like Michael Bay to make billions off of dumbing down media.

[Telmasa]

stjobe, on 14 August 2015 - 03:26 PM, said:

Games use random number generation to simulate chance, luck, or something happening at a certain percentage interval. MWO has lots of RNG already, from which team you end up on, to which drop zone you drop into, on which map, to which hit location your SSRM tracks towards, whether or not you get a critical hit, or whether or not your ammo explodes. It's literally all over the game.

1. Which team, map, or drop zone you end up on has almost no impact on dealing damage.
2. SSRM locations are justifiably random because they never miss. The only times SSRMs do not deal damage is if something gets in the way or they out of range, that's *it*.
3. To get a critical hit, you have to completely shave all the armor off a component first and THEN you have to get through the hitpoints of the internal modules. Same thing goes for ammo/gauss explosions.

It's not "literally all over the game", it's stuffed between heavy doses of sensible non-random gameplay factors, that keeps it tolerable for all concerned.

My answer to adding RNG is not changing from:
HELL to the everlasting, echoing NO.

[stjobe]

Telmasa, on 15 August 2015 - 08:54 AM, said:

3. To get a critical hit, you have to completely shave all the armor off a component first and THEN you have to get through the hitpoints of the internal modules. Same thing goes for ammo/gauss explosions.

This is just plain wrong.

To enlighten you a bit: After armour is gone, every hit has a chance to crit. 42% for regular weapons, a bit more for the 'tarded "crit weapons". You absolutely do not need to "get through the hit points of the internal modules". Gauss and ammo explosions do only occur on the hit that destroys the GR/ammo bin, but that is the exception, not the rule.

Edited by stjobe, 15 August 2015 - 11:45 AM.

[Eradicated]

Spr1ggan, on 09 August 2015 - 02:07 PM, said:

Why the hell would anyone use sphere shaped projectiles in a gauss rifle? That would be inefficient. Might as well rename the gauss rifle to hyper velocity musket.

Lynx7725, on 09 August 2015 - 02:11 PM, said:

Please don't give them ideas.

Im just imagining hundreds of Hollanders in revolutionary war era paintjobs slowly lining up and taking blind shots at each other.

Mechwarrior 1776. Because lostech.

[Burktross]

I Zeratul I, on 10 August 2015 - 08:44 PM, said:

The reason poptarts aren't as common in 2015 as they were in 2013 has absolutely nothing to do with... jump jet changes

Phew! I thought these hoverjets™ were holding me back!

[Dino Might]

Telmasa, on 15 August 2015 - 08:54 AM, said:

1. Which team, map, or drop zone you end up on has almost no impact on dealing damage.

Really? My 4 PPC Awesome can pump out just as much damage on Terra Therma as it does on Alpine? Good to know.

Telmasa, on 15 August 2015 - 08:54 AM, said:

2. SSRM locations are justifiably random because they never miss. The only times SSRMs do not deal damage is if something gets in the way or they out of range, that's *it*.

Why not have a pre-determined spread? First missile always goes here, next goes here, and rotation continues until all missiles have hit? You seem to be fine with RNG, even when it's not the only way to do things. It turns out that it's a great model in a lot of cases, but you're only okay with that fact when it fits in your incorrect view of simulation and modeling.

Telmasa, on 15 August 2015 - 08:54 AM, said:

3. To get a critical hit, you have to completely shave all the armor off a component first and THEN you have to get through the hitpoints of the internal modules. Same thing goes for ammo/gauss explosions.

So...RNG okay here because it doesn't come up that often? Or because you have no idea when it does, because the game doesn't tell you. You've been affected by it more than you know, but because it's not broadcast to you in an obvious manner, you are fine with it, lacking the knowledge that it's going on all the time.

Telmasa, on 15 August 2015 - 08:54 AM, said:

It's not "literally all over the game", it's stuffed between heavy doses of sensible non-random gameplay factors, that keeps it tolerable for all concerned.

It is in fact literally all over the game, but you don't understand how it works, so you never think about it. You have demonstrated your lack of knowledge of statistics in arguing that a CEP or cone of fire mechanic removes skill from the equation. It does the exact opposite. As I have said time and time again, if you had experienced (or just considered my past examples) any kind of real life shooting competition, you'd understand the points being made about cone of fire being an excellent and realistic model that puts even more emphasis on good aim and "skill." If you took a single semester of statistics, and learned about the normal distribution and sampling, you'd understand what's going on. It's all because this game IS NOT all about one shot kills. If one shot killed anything and everything, then yes, CoF would be a problem. But to consider the need for repeated hits to take something down, CoF actually widens the skill gap and makes it more likely for the better skilled player to win an engagement. Again, if you don't understand why, you need to do some learning.

Telmasa, on 15 August 2015 - 08:54 AM, said:

My answer to adding RNG is not changing from:
HELL to the everlasting, echoing NO.

Ignorance is bliss. How about we put it in and tell you it's deterministic, and you won't know the difference? It seems to have worked so far.

Edited by Dino Might, 15 August 2015 - 01:34 PM.

[Burktross]

IronLichRich, on 14 August 2015 - 03:05 PM, said:

TANKRED ENDURES

http://i.imgur.com/gt2mMMK.jpg
Fresh off the press--- paint.net

modified from http://1d4chan.org/wiki/Tankred

[Koniving]

Hit the Deck, on 09 August 2015 - 04:21 AM, said:

Quote: The Executioner's right-arm Gauss rifle spat out a hunk of metal about thirty centimeters in diameter.

That's naval gun's territory. Stackpole can't into physics?

Current naval gun projectiles "must fit" within these parameters in order to ensure accurate fire within current limitations.
<40 mm outer diameter
<2kg
<200 cm^3
and surface temperatures of >800 degrees celsius.

o.O; (40 mm = 4 cm)
So yeah. Stackpole's measurements are pretty bad.
Then again is it any wonder that mechs became vastly super-sized during the Wiz Kidz era?

[El Bandito]

ChronicRage, on 15 August 2015 - 07:06 AM, said:

For God's sake this is a freaking game. Nothing more, nothing less. It's a game. It's not real. The mechs, the weapons, the planets, the turrets, the generators, all of this does not exist and the physics the game uses for the most part does not exist. it's just a freaking game. Just play the game, don't analyze it to death!

Now the money and time we have "invested" into this game is real, and other than entertainment value, you should not expect anything else from this "investment".

It's a game. Pew, pew, pew. Bang, bang, bang. It's a game............

But that's exactly what we are debating about--the entertainment value. Which has been diluted by large pin point alphas.

[Telmasa]

stjobe, on 15 August 2015 - 10:35 AM, said:

This is just plain wrong.
To enlighten you a bit: After armour is gone, every hit has a chance to crit. 42% for regular weapons, a bit more for the 'tarded "crit weapons". You absolutely do not need to "get through the hit points of the internal modules". Gauss and ammo explosions do only occur on the hit that destroys the GR/ammo bin, but that is the exception, not the rule.

I was 3/4ths right, not "plain wrong". I neglected to describe what happens for non-explosive modules, sue me.
Gauss/ammo explosions are by far the more significant aspect to the "crit RNG".

Dino Might, on 15 August 2015 - 01:32 PM, said:

Really? My 4 PPC Awesome can pump out just as much damage on Terra Therma as it does on Alpine? Good to know.

Environmental effects are not determined by RNG. It's constant and stable throughout the entire match. Equating the map selection system to an RNG shot dispersion is inane.

Quote

Why not have a pre-determined spread? First missile always goes here, next goes here, and rotation continues until all missiles have hit? You seem to be fine with RNG, even when it's not the only way to do things. It turns out that it's a great model in a lot of cases, but you're only okay with that fact when it fits in your incorrect view of simulation and modeling.

You aren't describing "pre-determined spread" (which they already have), you are describing "pre-determined shot patterns", somewhat akin to unique guns from Borderlands, or perhaps some guns from Dead Space.

I would have no problem with missiles having a pre-determined shot pattern - hell, it might even be better, easier, and faster to have them coded that way. You could even define it from a lore standpoint as the missiles being "programmed to have a grid-like shot pattern in order to maximize coverage of the target."

But, I am also fine with the "pre-determined spread" with SRMs now, because in the specific case of Short Range Missiles, the concept of the "pre-determined spread" fits - the weapon works by spamming a big number of multiple 2-damage hits. I do not think SRM-2s should be as inaccurate as they are now, though.

If SRMs were, instead, a single missile, then there's no way I'd be OK with the "spread" system.

Quote

So...RNG okay here because it doesn't come up that often?

Because as I already described, it's sandwiched between non-RNG parts of the game mechanics. The RNG here isn't:

• deciding whether or not you hit
  
• deciding whether or not you did damage
  
• deciding how much damage you did

ALL it's doing here is deciding whether that damage destroyers an internal component. That's it.


And that's how use of RNG ought to be - sparingly and in limited fashion *only*.

You can sod off with the antagonizing, condescending attitude too.

Quote

It is in fact...blah blah atagonizing condescending attitude, rah rah

• My point that RNG determining what happens once a player hits "fire weapon" removes skill from the equation still stands. Nothing you or anybody else has said has refuted that point in the slightest. At no point does the RNG system in WoT "enhance" the effect of my skill on the game, ever. It only reduces it. And it's the major reason I gave up on that game, despite having reached the endgame and completed large portions of the grind. That RNG makes all progress and effort feel meaningless.
  
• There is no real life shooting competition where they hand the competitors guns that intentionally try to miss the target. Everything revolves around the skill of the participants in those competitions - including their ability to properly sight their weapon of choice and observe all the details of their weapon & of the environment the competition is in. Nothing about it is a "randomly generated number". There is absolutely nothing realistic about an RNG cone of dispersion - it's not even a mildly accurate approximation at best.
  
• I did take statistics and learned about distribution and sampling. It was the most god-awful course I remember from any point of my education. It was not fun, engaging, or exciting - and ultimately all I learned is that statistics can be used for many things, the majority of which is approximation and guesswork. Weapons in real life do not work according to mere "approximation and guesswork", they use the best possible precision and knowledge possible.

If the military today followed your line of logic when it comes to weapons, we'd still be using masses of civil war cannons, ball muskets, Napoleonic tactics, and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of artillery & carpet bombing.


Thank goodness reality disagrees with you.

4. The fact this game has no "OHKO" & requires multiple hits to take something down is what widens the skill gap. You have to hit the enemy that many more times - with precision, thanks to the multiple 'Mech sections - in order to take something down; you don't get away with merely 1 lucky/good shot, you have to REPEAT that several times in order to succeed. Adding a CoF into the mix completely takes away the point of repeated, precise "skill shots" & devolves the game into a competition of sustained DPS and hitpoints. World of Tanks, again, is proof perfect - "autoloaders", the kings of burst DPS, have been woefully unbalanced for years now, and there's still been no solution.

If you don't understand any of this, YOU need to do some learning.

Quote

Ignorance is bliss. How about we put it in and tell you it's deterministic, and you won't know the difference? It seems to have worked so far.

"Deterministic" RNG is still RNG. Nothing changed from the fact it's RNG. Why the hell would I accept that?
My tolerance for your asinine attitude is at an all-time low.

Edited by Telmasa, 18 August 2015 - 04:22 PM.