Dino Might, on 15 October 2015 - 08:04 AM, said:
I hear ya, but there is some space magic that gives us a collimated beam that is probably about a foot in diameter, at least. I'm just going on graphics here. If lasers only did their damage in 1mm radius areas, you'd be hard pressed to ever hurt anything in a mech, because there's a ton of empty space, and not everything you touch would be the critical juncture of an actuator or ammo feed. I assume that the lasers have to have a fairly large point of impact area and still do appreciable damage. Given this, the beam, while somewhat focused, is mostly reliant on the collimation in the tube to keep from dispersing too much. To the point, if you didn't add a focus lens on the end of it, and just had a collimated beam, you would have a slightly larger point of impact area than your collimator tube (assuming imperfect alignment of all rays). Add focusing lens that focuses out at extreme distance (infinity for all intents and purposes), and now you've got a beam with the same diameter as your tube and it's not going to disperse to any significant degree.
If you need such drastic focusing elements on the ends of the laser barrel, such that adjustment would take whole seconds to go from 600m to 300m, then why the hell do you have a collimator tube at all? It's obviously not working. Why not just pump all the light through fiber optic and you can ditch the big tube so your laser emitters can be tiny. One critical slot for a medium laser? Hah, more like one critical slot for 100 medium lasers.
Given the space magic that is already lore, I supposed the logicial conclusions of that space magic, and they convince me that this focusing stuff for ghost damage is stretching magic space reality way too hard.
I do give them points for trying, though. I appreciate that there is at least some reason, however far-fetched and inconsistent with the other elements of the lore it may be.
My biggest gripe about this change is going to be the unintended consequences for mechs that were not a big problem to begin with. That Panther with its 4 mpulse...gotta get that thing nerfed, too. That's all I see in the highest tier comp teams...
I know you know lasers are focused internally and have nothing to do with the targeting computers ability to maximize time on target. thats what does the damage. Many people do not and think the magnifying analogy works.
This proposed rule change demonstrates a lack of understanding. But hey this is the team that gave us ghost heat and magical level of trueness. accuracy + precision = trueness. all i can hope for at this point are scifi energy shields.
hey it could be lost tech.....and that wouldn't violate the rules in any way....