..or whatever it's called. Seems silly that rockets have mechanisms in place to discourage certain tactics, yet a swarmer can just ram them down someones throat.

My 2c's.

And yes, I'm writing because I got swarm rammed just seconds ago.

swarms explode at 20 meter proximity and rockets explode at 30, whats your point?

I think he's talking about the fact that rockets/flares don't have a prox fuse within X meters of the firing ship--they have a safety catch, if you will. Gav seems to be saying that swarms lack this device, meaning that they have a 20m prox fuse from the moment they leave the tube, no matter how close the firing ship is to the target.

Fuse, that's the word I was looking for.

So what Lecter said. Rockets were given an arming period where they wouldn't trigger if your target was right in your face. If I'm not mistaken (and I may be, I'm anything but a rocketeer), they also have a kick back in damage (double is it?) for the person who fired said rocket if they get hit by the same blast as the person they are targeting.

I believe these measures were put in place to discourage rocket ramming, yet no measure has been put in place to discourage missile ramming, which is essentially the same thing, except the rockets in this case are guided.

Honestly, while I have to agree with Gav that swarms should have the same safety device as flares/rockets, the whole "must discourage ramming" goal always struck me as silly.

If you want to discourage ramming, keep the safety device: your munitions have prox fuses that won't arm themselves until they're 100m away from your ship. That's fine; it means you have to actually hit your target to boom them with a ram. Balances fearsome rocket power with a nerf that requires twitch skill to overcome; cool, that's the VO way.

However, the artificial 2X DAMAGE TO TEH EVUL EVUL RAMMERZ crap needs to go. There's already a nerf to flares/rockets if you want to use them to ram--bogus damage inflation gimmicks seem a bridge too far. Especially now that sunflares are 12, rather than 16, per tube.

Ah, good old operation market garden. Anyway, yes, safeties on missiles seems reasonable to me.

However, I'm keeping the kickback damage inflation at this time. It was added during a contentious period of game balancing, and it may have outlived its usefulness. But I'm changing enough scary crap right now, without impacting fundamental combat stuff that has been working for some time. It's a little lame, but not clearly broken. Maybe later.

[EDIT]: Added as a ticket.

Ah.

Thanks for the feedback, spidey.

i like the kickback damadge, when my ship explodes it just might be the extra umph needed to finish somebody off

No problem Inc! :P

I have a completely different angle on this issue...

Ramming ought to kill- or nearly so- both ships that collide, regardless of any weapons either employs. Describe for me, if you can, *any* vehicle that would survive a 55m/s collision without a hull breach (that is 198km/h or 123mph btw). And since we're talking space, a pin-hole can kill you. I'm not even going to address the case where we hit our friends at 220m/s just for the fun of it.

While our guns and rockets melt or spray shrapnel at one another, two armored vessels colliding only do negligible damage? I think not.

Even better, if all your unused ammo exploded with your ship...

If the devs raise the collision damage then people would die instantly from even the slightest tap on a 'roid.

Ramming ought to kill- or nearly so- both ships that collide, regardless of any weapons either employs. Describe for me, if you can, *any* vehicle that would survive a 55m/s collision without a hull breach (that is 198km/h or 123mph btw). And since we're talking space, a pin-hole can kill you. I'm not even going to address the case where we hit our friends at 220m/s just for the fun of it.


The current collision model will kill a capship if you accidentally stick a free bus in the wrong spot . . . and you want that? Get a MRI, you've got brain trauma.

Describe for me, if you can, *any* vehicle that would survive a 55m/s collision without a hull breach (that is 198km/h or 123mph btw).

Building hulls that can withstand high speed crashes isn't the problem. Old race cars used to be a steel shell that was just fine after a crash. I'm sure you can imagine the technological advances that would lead to contemporary (VO) ships being just fine after a bump. The bigger issue, and this is WHY vehicles crumple so easily and those old race car DRIVERS tended to be a pile of goo no matter how well their car made out, is that any energy not absorbed by the hull is transferred straight into the cockpit and absorbed by the next softest thing: your body. I would think the technology to prevent that transfer of energy would be a touch more difficult to master.

Inertial dampening. Not sure how it works, but it seems to solve the issue of pilots not being liquefied by sudden changes in speed such as hitting a docking port, or your buddy.

Given that we're talking about ships using alloys that are (supposedly) vastly better than anything we currently have, objects colliding at a scant 123mph without a hull breach doesn't seem that far-fetched. Strictly speaking, one could make such a design with current technology.. similar to current submarines: in this case an "armor hull" and an internal "pressure hull" separated by a gap.

Also, if one assumes the pilot steers from a point of suspension within the hull (wearing a light headset, and sensory input cowlings on the hands and feet), held in place by a 3D spiderweb of straps whose tension can be dynamically changed to dampen impacts detected by the ship's computer.. survival of a 123mph impact is no longer a big deal either.

Anyway, let's not go too far with the "how this this possible?" thing, especially for this kind of topic. It's kind of irrelevant, being science fiction and all. We made ships not explode on the lightest contact because we felt it was better for the game.. players get a chance to learn how to fly without instantly exploding the first time they bump something.

The idea of Armor is to protect the inside, so when all your armor is gone... boom!, anything that touches you after that, then you go Kablooie!!

Incidentally, I think I fixed the swarm prox trigger thing last week.

Assuming that our ships are driven by gravity well projectors, those projectors could produce a gravitational field in cases of impacts that counteracts said impact. The energy will be dissipated within the ship, and from thence to the exterior... somehow. Perhaps gel packs that heat up. There we go, perfectly reasonable technobabble explanation. Want more? I got more! Slightly off-topic, though.

Incidentally, I think I fixed the swarm prox trigger thing last week.

Nope. Just happened to me. Sucked too because I thought it couldn't!!!