Well, ship speed is measured in pc/week. A parsec is about 3.2 light years across! The listed ship speed reflects only how fast it's hyperspace or warp engines are, not how manouverable or fast it is on a small scale (thats why a huge ship can have the same speed as a tiny ship). The battle view doesn't really show ship-to-ship combat taking place at millions of miles per hour, they must drop out of warp to engage the enemy.

Smaller ships would be harder to hit in combat, but adding manouverability or combat thrusters would just add complexity to combat without really changing the combat dynamic much.

Size modifiers would be interesting, but then you'd start getting into Homeworld-style combat where weapon effectiveness is based on ship size and class. Thats a whole other can of worms to open up in a game with a fairly complete combat system as is.

I wouldn't mind seeing defensive systems be more viable in the late game. I find I do better without them later on!

I once suggested that there be additional modules that can be put on ships. One was something like manevering thrusters that would increase your chances of receiving less damage from enemy attacks, anothr was something like tageting computers that would increase your hit percntage or increase the likelyhood for getting a good roll for damage. There were others. I get the feelig that some of the fleet nhancements for TA are lossely based on some of what i suggested back then. One can Dream... lol

That's a bit of a presumption on the dangers of hyperspace technology. Especially since other games/movies/tv have shown ships getting hit while trying to "jump away" to live and fight another day.

another retarded idea.


furthermore beam weapons are perfectly accurate... wtf is wrong with you?


If i had a beam weapon tied into the aim of a laser pointer i would simply aim the laser pointer at the target and every time i fired the weapon (which moves at the fecking speed of light) it would land exactly where the laser pointer is pointing...


or in your universe people too stupid to operate laser pointers?

Well at least you're response was well thought out and helpful. There's no need to have a WTF in a post... unless you say it with a smiley . Your name calling is not appreciated and is not likely to be well recieved on these forums.

I don't think it needs to be taken so seriously / realistically. I'm sure if the OP knew you were an expert in lasers he would have conulted you first. I mean do laser pointers work in space? And whats their range?. And can we put mirrors on our ships then? And will the ship shoot itself during presentations in the confernce room?

I don't think it was a bad idea at all, i think having something to add to your ships that adds another variable to the rock-scissor-paper equation can add to the strategy of the game. That is, deciding if you want to lose space for weapons and defenses to add a componet that can reduce your chances of getting hit (for one example).

No ideas are (or most aren't ) realy bad, just some don't fit the game well and others can't be easily implemented.

Not a laser expert either but I'd have to agree that they wouldn't miss going the speed of light but I imagine they would have a range dependent upon there power.

However a mass driver could possibly be avoided yet would have unlimited range due to vacuum of space and its velocity once fired would not stop until it hit something. So you miss and 100 years later some wandering mynock(empire strike back) out of no where gets smacked by the projectile you fired.

The wtf was a bit harsh.

Just an exercise to elaborate:

Let's say a grid cell in GC2 is even far less than an AU. Let's take the distance between the sun and Mercury as an example. Given the vastness of space, that distance can be called 'meelee' range.

Mercury is (at perihelion) approximately 45 000 000 km away from the sun.

Light travels at approximately 300 000 000 m per second.

If you are in a ship and rely on targeting information acquired through any non-FTL technology, your information about the targets location (orientation, speed...) is already 150 seconds old by the time you point the weapon. Your 'lasert pointer' target marker than travels ANOTHER 150 seconds to the location you pointed it at. To get feedback from that targeting takes YET ANOTHER 150 seconds.

Then you fire your laser.

Which takes (surprisingly enough) 150 seconds to travel the distance.

That makes 600 seconds or a whopping 10 minutes to shoot at a target. Assuming it is non-moving (or at least has changed neither velocity nor direction and you were able to correctly compute this and got the affirmating feedback from your laser pointer).



If you say 'than just close the distance' - your right. Close in to the distance of Earth to Moon, and you're down to 1,5 seconds instead of 150 seconds per step of this procedure.


So, to sum it up: In space combat, lasers can miss. A lot.

Which only shows two things:

1) TV series aren't about realism. Admittedly, neither is PC gaming.

2) The fights aren't using Newtonian physics and are at extremely close ranges.

For 1) I can say that at least Firefly was refreshing in that it adhered to 'there is no sound in space'.

Technically, your blasters aren't lasers at all. They are superheated plasma bolts propelled at sub-FTL speeds, in most handheld weapons apparently even sub-sonic. And yes, even laser 'beams' miss, if you just take the above example. At that distance, for a constant beam to appear, you'd have to fire a whole 10 minutes. Anything less and it would appear as a kind of bolt of variable length.

Speed of light is NOT instant. Just very, very fast.

yes but if you could travel of the speed of light without the need of a starship and then farted, would you then be propelled faster then the speed of light?

Then it shall forever remain a mystery.

where does it ever say battles in GC2 are occuring at distances greater than the span of the solar system?

How do you even begin to assume that?

It seems to be and is not contradicted in the literature that combat is occuring at roughly the distances they appear on the battle simulator...


they are not weaving around at a speed greater than the speed of light...

and as for relativity i think its pretty bizarre to assume some strange dogfight at greater than the speed of light is occuring... let alone that the weapons at the distances shown are directly impacted by the speed of light being a hinderance for weapons...


I stand by my correct assumption that energy weapons are essentially foolproof with accuracy and using a simple guiding laser (laser pointer) will allow for near perfect accuracy.


And yes a targeting laser in space works just fine thank you very much... we have been doing calculations on the moon using mirrons planted on the lunar surface and high powered laser pointers for over a quarter century...


please dont pull this "combat at parsecs range" and "relativity messing with our hoobyjoobs" without backing canon literature. it sounds bizarre and a bit dumb.


Furthermore im going to state that if somehow combat is taking place at obscene ranges (and it would be nice is somebody can prove this with some literature) energy weapons are the only logical choice of weapons... while I suppose we can say missiles have a built in hyperspace drive (kinda lame but ok) mass drivers are completely out of the question... the ship itself if your distant combat is correct should be visiting another star by the time the driver round gets near its target.


Until i see somebody back up this bullcrap about combat taking place at obscene ranges with some official literature im going to assume that combat is taking place at a few tens of miles to a few hundred and up to a thousand miles at the very tops... just as the ingame graphics seem to represent.

You're basing your arguments on the visuals in the combat simulator, where ship sizes don't match the information in game and ships can move in any direction without regard to where their engines are pointed? Interesting choice.

If engagement ranges were in the ~ 10 mile range, boarding and ramming would have been tactical options.

A more reasonable assumption would be somewhere on the light second range. That might be the equivalent of trying to hit a man-size target at the length of a football field with a rifle - easy enough if both you and the target are standing still, but not so easy if one or both are moving evasively. Evasive maneuvers that move a ship even the length of it's own hull would cause a miss, and with a minimum two second delay, such maneuvers would not be difficult. Under those circumstances, targetting accuracy would be based not on simply using your siting laser, but how accurately you predict which direction the next maneuver will go.

another thing i want to bring up is that no combat ships benefit by increasing distance... if it is hard to land hits your fleet is going to close with thier fleet...


Thus if both sides in a battle only improve by closing distance wouldnt most fleet battles naturally occur at shorter ranges implying less than a light second?

If neither one of us can hit each other we get closer... the closer we get the better our weapons fare...


It would seem to me that close range combat is likely and inevitable in a given engagement...