Author Topic: Beam question  (Read 6946 times)

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Offline CT27

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I understand that UEF AWACS ships can disable the targeting system of GTVA heavy beam weaponry.  However, if GTVA slash beams still work, why can't the GTVA 'dumbfire' regular anti-cap beam weaponry? 

 

Offline AdmiralRalwood

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ECM sometimes disrupts the targeting systems and sometimes it disrupts the magnetic containment field itself. It depends on the ECM environment of the mission; if only the targeting systems are affected, the GTVA does fire their beams anyway; they just miss. You can see this in, for instance, the Icarus cutscene when the GTCv Marcus Glaive fires its three frontal beams and misses with two of them.
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Offline General Battuta

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Slash beams by nature are more robust to bottle disruption attacks because their mechanisms don't expect the bottle to be a fixed line with a set target.

 
Or, from another perspective: they barely hit the target on a good day; what's there to jam?
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Or, from another perspective: they barely hit the target on a good day; what's there to jam?

Except when you are at like 30% integrity at a critical point 20 minutes into the mission and it happens to cut you in half.
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Offline -Norbert-

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Or, from another perspective: they barely hit the target on a good day; what's there to jam?
That's a good argument for the TerSlash (or whatever the name was again) that the Deimos use, but trust me the Blue Slash Beams that the Diomedes uses are an entirely different chapter. A chapter full of severe hurt.

 

Offline Fury

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Miss Factor in weapons.tbl is your friend. :p

 
ECM sometimes disrupts the targeting systems and sometimes it disrupts the magnetic containment field itself. It depends on the ECM environment of the mission; if only the targeting systems are affected, the GTVA does fire their beams anyway; they just miss. You can see this in, for instance, the Icarus cutscene when the GTCv Marcus Glaive fires its three frontal beams and misses with two of them.

Considering that this is the future, it's very likely that the GTVA uses a combination of both active radar and optical image processing systems to target the beams.

The AWACS uses EM jamming to block the active radar - maybe by focusing an EM beam directly onto their radar or some other mechanism. But the GTVA can still use their automated optical systems to precisely target their beams.

This is where bottle disruption occurs.

And here's the kicker about how exactly the UEF does it: Disrupting the entire bottle would take an incredibly strong magnetic field. So strong that it would in fact rip apart the crew of the AWACS on a molecular level. But there's a simpler and more elegant way of doing this: Rather than attacking the entire bottle using magnetic disruption, the AWACS uses an incredibly powerful and focused EM beam to create slight disturbances in the superconducting coils that are used to produce the magnetic field. These disturbances create slight imbalances in the magnetic field which are then amplified over the large distances involved.

Think of this another way: Lets say that you have a very tall flagpole. You come over and tilt the base slightly by maybe 2-3 degrees. It's maybe at most a centimeter level shift at the base, but because the pole is so tall, it ends up being by several meters at the top.

If you're screwing with the bottle of a direct beam by just a degree or less, the distance involved is going to make that beam miss by several hundred meters.

This is exactly how direct beams are disrupted.

Slash beams by nature are more robust to bottle disruption attacks because their mechanisms don't expect the bottle to be a fixed line with a set target.

On the other hand, extending on what General Battuta said, it's much harder to create disturbances in the superconducting coils of slash beams because the electronic systems of a slash beam already create huge disturbances to get the beam to pivot. In contrast to the latter disturbances, the disturbance from the AWACS ship's EM beams is insignificant and doesn't contribute much. At most, the AWACS might be able to make the slash beam less accurate, but that's about it.


 
Just realized that the superconducting coils are also why slash beams are dang inaccurate. I'll post my explanation in the morning after I get a few zzzz's.

 

Offline CT27

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After reading these good posts:

So the UEF doesn't so much "stop" the GTVA primary cap-beams from firing as it does "deflect" them?

 

Offline qwadtep

  • 28
Pretty much, yeah.

I think there was a post way back about how you should really see the beams curving away from their targets, but of course, the engine doesn't support that.

 

Offline -Norbert-

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If I remember the explanations correctly they do both.

They jam in any and all ways they can, while the Tevs try to counter that jamming. Sometimes that means the beams will go wide of their mark and sometimes that means the beams won't fire at all, depending on how this invisible ECM vs. ECCM battle is going.

 
They jam in any and all ways they can, while the Tevs try to counter that jamming. Sometimes that means the beams will go wide of their mark and sometimes that means the beams won't fire at all, depending on how this invisible ECM vs. ECCM battle is going.

General Bat has final authority on this, but I strongly think that if the Tevs know that their beams are going to miss everytime they fire, they stop firing to save energy and redirect it to other systems (Eg. Jump drive).

 

Offline -Norbert-

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I based that comment on an explanation he once gave, I'm just not entirely sure I remember it correctly.

But I think the final authority is Darius :P

 

Offline -Sara-

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Different question. What if a beam is set to a dispersive burst or wave instead of being focussed, sort of like the light coming from a flash light, cone shaped? If possible, as long as it has some amount of damage, and while it would not be intense enough to fry fighters, it would it make a good defense against waves of bombs, missiles or even asteroids (incinerating the latter completely because of wide spread area effect). However, is such a thing even possible at all?

« Last Edit: April 04, 2015, 10:12:21 am by -Sara- »
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That's basically how (one kind of) active armour works, so the exact method you described is probably not worth it when you've already got specialised systems doing the same thing.
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Offline z64555

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I think Sara was asking if it were possible to have the beam turrets to be able switch their focus, to assist the shields in missile (and asteroid) defense. Notably, the disadvantage to using them vs. shields would be that anything within the field of fire would be damaged, including friendlies.
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I'm sure they can, but here's my reasoning:

- Bombs in FS are pretty sturdy, on the whole. They can withstand flak explosions and other bombs detonating very nearby; only a direct hit can destroy them. I don't think a fanned-out beam would be able to do it.

- However, it could more plausibly interfere with the bomb's targeting and guidance systems. These are canonically very sophisticated, and a great deal of the bomb's nominal damage relies on them functioning properly; so bombarding them with high-energy plasma is likely to make them less effective...

- ...which is very similar to how your active armour works in TBI. The description even mentions plasma jets used to throw off the timing of incoming detonations.
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Offline Fury

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- Bombs in FS are pretty sturdy, on the whole. They can withstand flak explosions and other bombs detonating very nearby; only a direct hit can destroy them. I don't think a fanned-out beam would be able to do it.

That's because bombs do not take damage from any indirect sources, such as explosions or shockwaves. Which is why flaks are in fact completely useless against bombs unless they score lucky direct hit. And why blobs perform so much better against bombs. There is weapons.tbl flag that force weapon to deal explosion or shockwave damage to bombs and flag that force bomb to take explosion or shockwave damage.

 
But since that's a game engine explaination, that's kinda beside the point, which is that since bombs will shrug off all but direct hits, an in-universe justification could be that the bombs are somewhat sturdy.