Ships should have the ability to out manouver attacks!

Nope.

You can make a mod that would increase hitpoints, though.

i remember watching on the discovery channel, or one of those, that in space there is no air acting on the ship. So, the size of the ship would not matter on maneuverability. To turn you would need an thruster or engine or some sort of blast to fire off to make the ship turn

I think mass does have an effect on acceleration (whether by main drive or thrusters) in space so the size of the ship does matter to some extent.

As to the OP, ships do miss in a way, I do get several 0 hits in combat.

It's a little thing called inertia.

Hi!

You can outmaneuver a missile, or dodge the bullet. But did you ever manage to dodge the light beam?


It has not. There's always the chance for rolling zero-damage shot. Check the wiki: Ship combat for more details.

BR, Iztok

Yes Inertia means that the mass of an object will affect its manoeuvrability. In a vacuum it’s shape that doesn’t matter because of lack of friction with the air.

Sorry, but i can't resist -- Coward!

- Zyxpsilon.

Zyxpsilon Play Nice Or All The Ship Will Run And Hide     

Air has comparatively little effect on acceleration in a properly built aircraft (the main impact is to dictate shape, so shape is not a significan issue in space craft).

Newton's Second Law dictates that Force = mass x acceleration. That means that in order to get the same acceleration, a more massive vessel is going to require a correspondingly greater amount of thrust. That generally has the effect of making more massive vessels less maneuverable.

All that said, the game abstracts things just fine IMO.

It's true that larger ships with more mass would be less maneuverable (assuming all other things being equal, like ratios of engine size and power generators to hull size), but why would it be difficult to target and hit a smaller, more maneuverable ship? We're talking about advanced, space-faring civilizations here. They're not going to be aiming and shooting by hand (or tentacle, claw, whatever).

Beam weapons work (presumably) at light speed, so they hit where you point them. Missiles will be self-guided, and home in on the target. Projectile weapons like mass drivers are technically slower and unguided, but still fast enough to act like a beam weapon at the very close distances modeled in the combat screen. They could be designed to counter evasive maneuvers by firing in a "spread" or cloud, instead of a single line of projectiles. Maneuverability in space won't keep you from being hit. If it did, we'd have only tiny and small ships in the game, and that would be boring.... all other realism issues aside.

Anyway, I like the way the current game mechanics favor larger ships. I think real space combat, if it ever happens, will revolve around capital ships as the main players, and not the WWII fighter theme seen in so many movies and space games. Also, as someone said in another thread, since larger hulls take longer to research and cost more to build and maintain, they should have some advantages.

well i was thinking more along the lines of say dog fighting. flying in a straight line would be easy, but doing sharp high speed turns with no aerodynamics acting on the ship would make them, well, not happen. you would need another method of turing the ship


I think it was about star wars and they were talking about the xwings but it was a little while ago. If what i heard was wrong then i'm sorry. I was just adding my input. you all have a good night tho


if what i remember is true, maybe someone could mod, or the devs, could add a ship component, a "thruster array" so make the ships evasion go up

An interesting question. Even todays aircraft are not anymore limited by air friction or inertia. The weakest part is a human. More that 5-10G acceleration and the whole crew becomes unconsciousness or dies.

This means ships in space will either move the same as now, or outmaneuver their pilots to porridge. Forget about evade. And probably means huge and smallest ships will have the same maneuverability, given enough engines. But not the same turn around speed. No need too, since big ships=turrets on all sides.

Rockets however are both fleshless and have more fuel and speed than current rockets, since they do not need to combat air friction. This means it should be more difficult to evade missiles in space.

Iztok Bitenc

The same way. all three are moving at finite speeds, just that light is pretty fast. But in that feature we ARE able to move faster than light. With a warp engine. So a little warp sensor giving warning of an incoming laser. and a little hyperspace jump taking us out of the line of fire hehe.

Wow, I'm amazed with the amount of responses so soon hehe.



Since were talking about Ships and Nano Robotics in this game, eventually more advanced ships shouldn't be "manned" at all concidering the limitations which humans would have vs a computer with the "memory" span and functionality of almost an entire ship body. The only ships that wouldnt be able to withstand 5-10G acceleration would be colony ships and transport ships.




Simple: the smaller the ship the more acurate the weapon has to be to hit it and the gun/laser/missile has to take into concideration whether or not the ship (big or small) is going to change directions or not before its projectile hits it.
(were literally talking about aiming at a man on the moon with a jet pack that likes to fly around around Zig-Zagging and trying to shoot him with a laserbeam the width of maybe a basketball)



They have a lot of advantages, their masive HP, the amount of weapons you can put on them, the amount of Engines you can put on them and the amount of shielding you can put on them that makes them invincible to any inferior ship.

And smaller ships do have their numbers but the numbers still dont match up to 1 capital ship with the amound of HP and shields and damage it can deal, they usually cant get by its shields unless it has none, but even then the amount of HP it has withstands everything.

So the small ships should atleast be able to have a chance to dodge a few lasers or missiles or large projectiles but highly unlikely to dodge 10 of them.

Besides, adding manouverability would mainly make whichever ship has more speed capability get hit less (And you can put more speed on a capital ship)So their wouldnt necessairily be more smaller ships.

P.S: I only said "Smaller and faster ships should out-manouver larger, slower ships."
not "Out-do larger ships" lol
if anything it should make gameplay more interesting and the battles more difficult (since "size" wouldnt allways have 100% chance to kill "numbers")

I agree this is the current direction airborne military hardware is going (i.e. robotics), but I don't think it necessarily extends to far future scenarios in space, especially if the game is including sci-fi tech like "shields." Bigger ships mean more power and stronger shields. It means you can carry more anti-missile defenses, and thicker armor. If my hulking battleship has all that, then it doesn't need to maneuver at high G's to evade your fighter's puny weapons.

Besides, you're ignoring the obvious extension of the "robotic fighter" -- past a certain point, you're basically talking about a self-guided missile. Those are already in the game. I think it's one of the stronger arguments against more powerful small ships, or the carrier idea that people continually suggest.

BTW, for some reason the forum quote function picked up part of your post that didn't appear above. Anyway, here it is, and a reply:



We can already bounce a laser off a small, static mirror left on the moon by the Apollo missions. The U.S. and China can already target kinetic hit-to-kill missiles against satellites, with "smart" autonomous aiming in the last second before impact. Those aren't targets trying to do evasive maneuvering, but hey... we don't have starships either. By the time we do have starships, these technologies will be much more advanced.

So it doesn't make sense (to me anyway) that hitting a small target maneuvering at high G's is going to be such a big problem for advanced space-faring civilizations. In space there is nowhere to hide,. Engagements are going to be FAST. That laser beam fired from the Earth hits the mirror on the Moon in just 1.2 seconds, and that's much further away than ships are shown in the game's tactical combat screen. You're not going to evade something that moves that fast. Speed (or auto-homing missiles and projectiles) will be a necessary feature of any space-based weapon. I think the game does a fine job of abstracting this in the combat screen, even if some of the other aspects are a bit flaky (like the lack of turreted weapon fire).

Indorikan


Hmm point taken. They probably will be intelligent machines indeed. The absence of a human means that the missile and the smaller ship are essentially one and the same thing.

But ontopic since there is no air size/shape does not matter for maneuverability, only mass. Bigger engines fix that. Ok they do matter, but only if we want to turn around and why would a capital ship want this.

Besides i dont think speed is a very good thing to have actually. There is no gravity in space either. A capital ship can build a field of flying junk around him, by firing well, junk, in his surroundings. Now a fighter flying at 10km/s at a not moving bullet is the same as a bullet moving at 10km/s at a standing fighter. They all will just instakill themselves if they dare to attack at high speeds. Either that, or they will have to be armored = more mass = here goes your maneuverability.

Size does matter.

Engines are for straight-line thrust. They are not for maneuverability.
Thrusters are what would actually change the ship's direction.

Size = mass. So to turn the ship or to increase speed, the power of the thrusters and engines has a great deal to do with maneuverability.


Funny.
I have never seen main engines placed in a reversed position in any sci-fi.

Engines are always placed at the rear, to give forward thrust.
But what would check that speed other than engines facing in the opposite direction?
After all, there is no 'reverse gear'.
What would slow you down other than inverting your ship's forward attitude by 180 degrees?

Bab5 probably had the physics most correct with the little fighters. But even that left something to be desired with the larger ships.