If the rockets weren't fire from a closed tube, then they would have to accelerate to max speed after being fired (currently, rockets are fired at top speed). However, if the rockets are fired out of a tube sealed at the back, the expanding gasses could cause enough pressure on the rocket to quickly accelerate it to its max speed by the time it fully leaves the craft, but would this would cause the firing ship to experience some recoil.

I think we can all agree that the forces involved would result in some kind of forcefull kickback of the ship. Great. Now back to reality. Is it really worth programming this in when we havent even set up a mission system or intermediate/advanced factions? After all, was this game built on exact physics. Of course not. Why do we need to get this in depth when we should be focussing on balancing out gameplay, or building the structure of the game further. If this was to be considered, it should be one of the last things we implement. After all, do we know the mass of the objects we are even talking about? What about the type of propellant? Or the type of tube? What im getting at is you cant even begin to calculate the physics before you calculate every force or act upon every critical component at any given time. If you want physics like this, good luck.

In addition, would this kickback result in something that would make it that much better to play Vendetta? In my mind, it would be annoying.

Rockets are unbalanced because they can easily take out turboing ships.
+ recoil
Rockets are hard to use while turboing because they have recoil.

Riddle me this, riddle me that: how do you drop something out of a tube when there's no gravity? :P

Drop in the sense that the rocket floats away from its holed container. Bottom line is that there'll always be some amount of recoil. There are methods to reduce that, but it would be impossible to get rid of it completely. Familiarize yourself with Newton's third law of motion.

But as Black_Death said, there are more important things that need to be dealt with at this time. It's still a good suggestion nevertheless.

Oh well... we're talking bout physics in open space and such?

Forst disable sound, then think about weapon recoil.

Vendetta without sound? Boring. Stop thinking.

Valk - Say 2 tons.

Sunflare - Say 100lbs x 3 = 300lbs.

Tri-flare launching is .07% of the mass of the Valk. They also don't go very fast. So very little force is needed to fire a tri-flare burst - way too little to make a dent in the forward momentum of the valk. Also, modern aircraft have no trouble with time-delayed firing missles, so I fail to see why it would be more difficult in space. In either case, the recoil would be neglible.

Look at rocket pods on modern aircraft. They hold something around 16 rockets as well - and you can empty the things with a neglible drop in airspeed. Sorry, recoil just makes no sense from a physics perspective.

It's not about mass mostly, it's about FORCE. Even it's only a 1 gram rocket, vs a 6000000 ton frigate. If the rocket gives a lot of force, the frigate is still going to be moved... anyway, with modern day fighter jets, if a rocket is dropped it takes some time before the rocket actually ignite... and now it's just... 'press fire' ZOOOOOOM!!!

Now, here follows some simple physics:
(sorry for it being in metric units)
Say, one rocket is 50 kg, and they accelerate from 0 to 55 m/s (relative to the space ship) in 1 second:
F = m*a
F = 50*55
F = 50*55
F = 2750 N (2,75 * 10^3)

Say, the valk is 2000 kg (2 ton)
F = m*a
2750 = 2000*a
a = 1,4 m/s^2

So, that should be about 1,4 m/s^2 backwards acceleration!
(now, multiply this by 3 and multiply that by say 4 fires)
Would be 4,125 m/s^2 recoil for 4 seconds!

m/s^2 = an acceleration in m/s per second, so this much m/s is added/removed from the speed per second

Ofcourse the problem is, the ship's weight are way off (the engine is just 200 N).. so if someone could just give the time it takes a valk to go from 0 - 65 it would make things a lot easier ;) And 2 ton for a valk, I think it should be more like 1 ton, or maybe even less.

I'm trying not to laugh when Starfisher says "they also don't go very fast." What's the speed of sunflares? 50m/s? That's FIFTY meters per SECOND! Hehe...

55 m/s = ~165 ft/s = Half as fast as the average paintball gun. Very slow, especially in the world of powered munitions, ESPECIALLY given that modern missles go faster than the speed of sound in an atmosphere. Here we are with no drag and our missles are going about half as fast as a paintball shot from a paintball gun. Yeah, that qualifies as slow. In case you don't know paintball, here's another comparison: about 198 km/h, which is a good speed for a race car. Missles are supposed to be much faster than cars.

Sheean, that assumes the missle is in direct contact for that entire second. It isn't. In a fraction of a second the missle is clear of the tube and no longer acting on the Valk at all. You also don't take into account the fact that most Valk pilots are firing while boosting, which would overwhelm the neglible deceleration imparted by the missle's departure from the tube.

It took 4 seconds for the Valk to move from 0 - 65 m/s. That means an acceleration of 16.25 m/s^2. Using F = MA (210N from the engine) we discover that the valk weighs 12.9kg. Clearly, we cannot trust the game for statistics on ships and therefore must rely on logic alone.

Logic demands that a 12m ship, especially one so solidly built as a Valk, weigh a significant amount. I said 2tons arbitrarily. However, a Ford contour, for instance, weighs 2,851 lbs and is about 5m long. The valk is twice as long, and armored much more heavily than a sports car. I think 2 tons is a conservative estimate.

http://www.bharat-rakshak.com/IAF/Images/Current/Helicopters/Mi-17l.jpg A nice shot of a helicopter rocket pod. They seem to be able to fire them without flying off backwards, and these things go MUCH faster than a sunflare.

In short, expecting a small slow rocket to make even a small dent in a Valkyrie's momentum is simply dreaming.

The game doesn't exactly follow the rules of physics anyway, so this discussion is pretty moot.

Because there is no atmosphere the full force of the rocket will be put on the ship ...because... there is no atmosphere to absorb the force!

Simple: say somebody hits a ball with a baseball bat...
Compare the power of impact of the baseball bat underwater and on land. The water absorbs a deal of the force given by the baseball bat, aka friction. In space you don't have it. So the rocket will just give exactly that amount of power on the valk.

Also, as I said earlier I think the rockets are more like torpedoes in a submarine than rockets in a jetfighter, or in this case a helicopter. There is no exit for all the force!

But I think to make it more realistic (or at least, make it feel more realistic, wich is probably more important - sounds, lighting, etc) a *slight* recoil could be a good thing. Something like 2 m/s recoil for every fired rocket for a ship with very high agility, 1.8 m/s with high, 1.5 with medium and 1.2 with low.

Also the armament don't necesarly needs to be very heavy, it could be made out of some super strong über-light stuff so that would be just an other pseudo-scientific discussion.

Bah. Enough physics. I just took a look at some flares ingame (the stationary flare trick) and they are hollow triangles with a ball in the back for a thruster. I'll go with the ultra-light explanation.

The way flares work now is fine... (except for their ability to float backwards... perhaps remove their thruster graphic so that they are truly burst fired? Anyway) what needs to be fixed gameplay-wise are the energy weapons. It takes a lot more effort to be a good energy pilot than it does to be a good flare pilot. My solution would be to make energy weapons faster, so that they would be more viable at ranges beyond 100m, and therefore more of a threat to boosting flare valks.

What if the rockets were propelled out of the tubes by a form of coil gun. Simple, effective. No recoil. The rockets are held in a magnetic field and a computer chip keeps everything pointing straight.

Then to lauch the rocket the field shifts and out the rocket goes. Hell, who even said the thing in back was a engine. I look at it as a flare to allow the guy who shot it to keep track of it.

It would still produce recoil, the same force that pushes the projectile out will push the gun(and the ship) backwards.

Since some people have trouble understanding it, allow me to paste Newton's third law of motion:

"For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction."

If you haven't taken physics yet you're probably better off not lecturing others about how rockets shouldn't have recoil. If you want to argue that it's just a game and things should be left alone, fine. But don't pretend to be smart by posting BS.

Woah, Urza; you do realize that your design would give by far the highest ammount of recoil of all rocketsystem (tubes, dropping them, etc)?

hehe yeah sheean's right. In physics mode... woooowheee! that's some kickass kickback...

I dont really see how.. Nothing pushes against the ship, nothing even touches hte ship. it's just magnets at work.

Magnets push and pull using magnetic force.