Yeonne Greene, on 23 October 2015 - 12:58 AM, said:
Diffuse source IS required. It's not negotiable. If it can damage the target, it will damage the weapon unless the source has a lower power density than what you want on the target. Since you can't change the power without nullifying the weapon's effectiveness, you have to start with a larger aperture size.
As you alluded to earlier, even an industrial laser cutter takes a larger diameter beam and focuses it down to a smaller spot to do its job. What is not clear to me is whether or not you are fully understanding the mechanics at work there. Only at low power and short range? Completely irrelevant. Absolute magnitude of power in the beam doesn't mean anything on the lens or the target, only the magnitude of power per unit area does. You can pass a gigawatt beam through any lens as long as the aperture and the lens diameter are large enough and the focal length isn't so long that the beam intensity reaches damaging levels while still inside the lens. Short range is only necessary on the cutter because the focusing optics are tailored for short range and possibly because the absolute power magnitude is low enough that atmospheric attenuation would render it harmless across larger distances anyway.
We can side-step this whole problem of focusing a high-power beam through an optical medium by firing number of low-intensity lasers in a phased array at a single point with constructively interfering wave-forms. But...that takes some processing power to do and I doubt the Inner Sphere have the necessary computing know-how to make it work. It's also fragile.
And I didn't miss the point. Rather, I implicitly (and poorly communicatedly) rejected it out of hand. Not counting the new mechanic PGI displayed in PTS or even how they operate now, which we can both agree is bogus ****** endo-cranial bullsh*t, the problem is that there is nothing easily discover-able in this game that informs players how the weapons behave except experience. There's no weapon lab where players can compare weapon performance on paper, there's no indicator in the HUD to show a new player he can actually do damage past the listed range, and there's nothing on the HUD tells him how much damage it will do past optimum. Hell, there's nothing that actually identifies that number next to the weapon name as the weapon's range, either, we just sort of figure it out over time. And to salt the wound, this game is basically counter-strike, so players can't quickly iterate on their experience and learn since they die and have to sit through a whole match to try again. So it doesn't matter what sort of performance curve you assign to the laser, the player is still up a creek without a paddle and also armless.
As for being for the effect and not the method, I can speak for myself when I say I want both. I don't mind higher skill floors owing to different mechanics; all that matter is that the risk potential match the reward potential. I wouldn't mind having an alpha strike get weakened by destructive interference from multiple, mismatched phase lasers. I wouldn't mind having to keep my distance with a larger laser or getting slammed by a lighter 'Mech that was skilled enough to get close enough to duck under my own guns' power zones. It's all a two-way street.
Finally, there's nothing inherently more intuitive about a linear drop-off in damage over an exponential one for a laser beam, especially because that's not even how it works in real physics to begin with. Not even ballistics are linear with that whole E = 0.5m(v^2) thing. W/(m^2) for lasers is rather similar. And that's what really made me longpost. You claim "start with physics" implying some of us aren't, and then you follow that up with something that is no more based on physics than anybody else's suggestion. Physics-based would be my suggestion from Page 1 plus effects of atmospheric attenuation (which I left off for simplicity). If it makes you happy, we can even give it a triangle function instead of a parabolic one so the drop-offs are linear to either side.
Not negotiable? Oh, well, that settles it then. Not. In engineering almost everything is "negotiable" through trade-offs. Lasers are not a special class. And since weapons grade, single source devices exist, are tested, and projected into multi-megawatt ranges, I think we'll negotiate afterall. And, no, they don't self-destruct.
Power is irrelevant? Not quite. A "larger lens" would only alleviate absorbtion. It wouldn't change reflectance and would actually increase reflectivity. Sure. It might protect the lens, but not the device much. Yep, you can increase the sources and lenses, but that still doesn't reduce scatter. Spreads it out perhaps to safe levels but the resulting geometry would look silly on a mech.
Sidestep the problem with an array? You could. But it assumes there's a problem to be avoided in the first place. And there isn't. Since you like the irradiance equation let's use it.
Let's see. A gigawatt laser (no lens) exiting at what diameter? I've read people saying a millimeter or a centimeter. But I like big, impressive lasers. So a ten centimeter laser at point blank will deliver 12.7 megawatts per cm sq. How much is that? Well, it's a measly 93 million times the Solar Constant. If you were suntanning on the beach, it would be like having about 200 million suns in the sky. Gonna need some major SPF sunblock.
This is more than sufficient to cause damage. So why would we need to "focus" it to a smaller spot? The answer is we wouldn't. A single, raw large beam is superior in every category to a single small beam or to multiple focused small beams.
Let's talk beam divergence. Beam divergence and beam diameter have an inverse relation. So a 5+ cm beam can have divergence angles in the micro-rads. What this means in a vacuum is that damage would be scarcely affected at any postulated game range (something to fix/nerf for game purposes).
Different story for smallimeter beams. If you have a beam diameter of one centimeter, I can think of no sane reason to further focus by unlikely optics when it is already at a flux density of 790 megawatts per cm sq. What's more if you have massed smaller lasers aim-converged at some range, you've only introduced a second form of divergence. So you have poorer beam divergence and the possibility of aim divergence. At the considered power levels, it would still be destructive - but inefficient and overly complex.
Some of these thoughts require knowing the unknowable. For example, what is the threshhold for causing damage/not causing damage. No number is given.
Linear shminear. So how do we get a damage profile that fits comfortably on the infamous MWO chart using near real life and what will the damage curve look like?
We know that a cone base expands with h. For each discreet increment of h the amount of area added increases but the rate at which it increases diminishes. This yields an asymmetric slope the steepness of which depends on how and how much we graph.
Since we already know we need to nerf "real" lasers, we can increase the resistance of future armor, or reduce the power of the laser or increase its divergence. The combination of these three will allow us create the damage we want on the curve we want. We adjust our numbers so that our laser is doing full damage at point blank but not by a huge margin. The way that a laser spreads out is going to flatten the curve for us. It doesn't spread power uniformly in the cone base, rather it gets fuzzy with a central hot spot.
We end up with a gentle asymmetric curve which readily accepts a linear representation.
Most will not find an arbitray parabola fabricated by fictional lenses intuitive. By comparison, distance/strength relationships are part of basic human experience. The fireplace gets warmer as you get closer, a person's voice gets weaker as you walk away, a distant light gets brighter as you approach... The curves may or may not be strictly linear, but they are perceived as such. They are intuitive if not, to some degree, even instinctual.
One half damage at half range. 1/4 damage at 3/4 range. 3/4 damage at 1/4 range. The only arrangement more intuitive than this is straight full damage across range. Not desirable. How do I estimate damage in a split second on a sawtooth or truncated parabola?
In the end, a linear curve meets design goals in reasonable way. Mind you, I also said this table should not have been touched in the first place. It is a "law" in the MWO universe which is now suddenly open for discussion. But if it's going to be changed, linear fits the bill.
1) It creates a damage curve which is demonstrably linked to real world science.
2) It is intuitive through human experience
3) It nerfs lasers (in a big way).
5
