[mosshadow]

I wonder, what is the in universe explanation for not sticking trebuchets on every ship the GTVA has? I understand that in game it would be so horribly OP that fighters would no longer be needed but out of gameplay it would be simple to get a fenris a few hundred missiles to wreck the turrets of any other ship.

[FrikgFeek]

Because fighters do that same thing better and cheaper. Why bother sticking trebs on a Fenris when you can just stick some on a wing of Hercs and have them pop up and saturate the area with Trebs. You'd also have to dedicate more space in the cruisers to ammo storage which would definitely hurt other things.
Not to mention that a cruiser that has to get rearmed after every engagement wouldn't be very useful unless on defence. You can rearm fighters with support ships that jump in from the nearest base/destroyer but you'd need dedicated logistics ships to rearm warships and those would also have to be supplied from somewhere.

It doesn't do anything you can't do with fighter-mounted trebs and it just presents logistical and engineering problems.

[AdmiralRalwood]

Except the Fenris already presumably needs to store ordnance for the fusion mortar.

[FrikgFeek]

Well, I guess you could replace the Fusion Mortar with a treb-turret but that would be a massive downgrade in terms of killing capability. The Fusion Mortar out-DPSes the SGreen so it's worth having it. I just can't imagine a situation where trebs on warships would be more useful than trebs on fighters.
On Warships you'd need multiple turrets for 360x360 coverage while with a fighter you can just turn around.

[NGTM-1R]

There isn't one. The GTVA simply seems to favor not doing so.

Out of universe, I suspect there were engine problems with it, as it's only relatively recently we've figured out how-to VLS and I'm pretty sure something like a Mark 13 single-arm launcher is still not in our grasp.

FS1 had a number of ships with Fighterkillers though, and they were effective, but not very visually impressive.

[IcemanFreespace]

You could try explaining it by saying they came quite late to the party and retrofitting would be expensive, time consuming and hard, also, it is possibly given only to elite fighters who will presumably use them better with much better flexibility. How you explain the inability to produce them en masse, I don't know.

[General Battuta]

If I did a pre-FS1 setting it'd all be missiles and EW and everything would have like 10 hit points but then they'd figure out crazy super armor and say 'welp we can't kill **** without parking 500m away and lobbing blobs and fusion mortars for half an hour.'

[mosshadow]

Because fighters do that same thing better and cheaper. Why bother sticking trebs on a Fenris when you can just stick some on a wing of Hercs and have them pop up and saturate the area with Trebs. You'd also have to dedicate more space in the cruisers to ammo storage which would definitely hurt other things.
Not to mention that a cruiser that has to get rearmed after every engagement wouldn't be very useful unless on defence. You can rearm fighters with support ships that jump in from the nearest base/destroyer but you'd need dedicated logistics ships to rearm warships and those would also have to be supplied from somewhere.

It doesn't do anything you can't do with fighter-mounted trebs and it just presents logistical and engineering problems.

But Trebuchets have a range of around 5000m, If you replaced three weapons on the Fenris with trebuchets you could pop out 4000m away from a another ship and wipe out all of their beam cannons with the missiles in a few minutes. DPS doesn't matter. Plus those support ships can easily dock with the fenris too and any fighter or bomber wings are going to get wiped out by the trebuchets unless they emerge very close. In missions you are usually seeing the bombers exit 4000-3000m away which is more than enough to be wiped out by Trebuchets.

[General Battuta]

Trebs aren't as effective as beams and flak against human players, so you could chalk this up to AI limitation.

Ships could always launch CMs to decoy the trebs :getin:

[Aesaar]

Because it would be OP.

Seriously, that's the only reason needed.  Same reason why ships don't just mount Maxims instead of any weapon that isn't a heavy beam and why they don't all have ULTRA AAA.

If you're looking for an in-universe reason, there isn't one.  Chalk it up to gameplay and story segregation.

[FrikgFeek]

You can't just remove 3 blobs, put in Treb launchers or maxims or whatever and say it's basically the same thing(Well, FRED lets you do that, but you get the point). Blobs are massively worse than almost any other weapon, it can be concluded that for reasons like reactor energy or ammo supply most weapons can't be power-heavy beams, Fusion mortars, or hypothetical Treb-Launchers. Blobs exist for bomb-intercept and to make use of hull space, they're not equal to more advanced weapons.

So in your case, you could downgrade the reactor, remove all the AAAs and the single LTerSlash on the Fenris to make more space for ammo and put in 3-5 Treb launchers. This would be a lot worse against players and only works against the AI because for some reason they can't dodge trebs.

So which one of those would you remove to add a treb-launcher? Blobs are presumably very energy efficient and require no ammo so removing them only frees up space on the hull and does little to help you carry another munition based weapon. I personally don't think a treb-launcher would outperform an AAA beam in the anti-fighter role or a LTerSlash/Fusion Mortar in the anti-warship role. Hell, if you gave the AI stronger CMs or taught them how to barrel roll it would be outright useless against fighters.

And if we ignore this line of thought then the question should be why don't cruisers toss out all the blobs and replace them with more beams or Fusion Mortars? Why doesn't the Orion replace the crappy TerSlashes with more BGreens?

And Hygeias might carry a lot of ordinance but with everything else they have on-board they probably can't fully rearm even a cruiser so you're left with the same problems. Support ships exist to rearm fighters mid-mission, fighters still operate from a destroyer in the long run. Cruisers are supposed to be more self-sufficient and operate for longer periods of time.


And you come back to the same question. If you want to deal with fighters, why would you sortie a Fenris? If you want to deal with cruisers without using corvettes or more expensive assets, why would you want trebs over something that kills cruisers?

[Lorric]

You really don't see many Trebs in the game even though you can go through scores of them. The best excuse would probably be to say they're an exorbitantly expensive weapon. A very powerful weapon, but exorbitantly expensive. Most missiles have a far shorter range than the Treb. That could be part of the expense. Maybe they could also be difficult to manufacture. So they only go to the top units and only get used when the mission is a critical one.

[Spoon]

Didn't retail ai have some kind of bug that prevented them from even using Trebs in the first place?

[FrikgFeek]

Yeah, it was the combination of the bomber+ flag(fire on bombers) and the 'huge' flag(prevents firing on small craft). Thing is, even furyAI is kinda bad at dodging trebs, they just don't break away early enough for whatever reason.

[Aesaar]

Yeah, it was the combination of the bomber+ flag(fire on bombers) and the 'huge' flag(prevents firing on small craft). Thing is, even furyAI is kinda bad at dodging trebs, they just don't break away early enough for whatever reason.

IIRC, the reason is that the AI breaks and deploys CMs when a missile is a certain distance away, and the Treb moves so fast that the distance is way too short for that to work.

[niffiwan]

I've done a bit of testing with this and in my experiments the AI hardly ever pops CMs at all vs incoming Trebs.  I think I had 1 CM launched in response to about 20-30 dual-fired Trebs (based on me switching to viewing from the target and only once hearing the CM launch sound). Still needs a lot more testing, including messing with the AI profiles to ensure the AI has the highest possible chance of firing CMs, etc.

(note, you can still "remotely" fire your trebs when viewing from the target, just make sure you're far enough away so the target will easily be in your missile-lock-cone )

[AdmiralRalwood]

Not to mention countermeasures have been more-or-less completely broken for 16 years and nobody really noticed.

[T-Man]

I would say rule of cool, but the idea of cruisers with treb launchers is rather cool .

Always imagined canonically it was due to logistics; the laser/plasma blobs aren't quite as good as some missiles but they're potentially less expensive and they don't need ammo, so less space needed on the ship (space which would be filled with stuff that goes boom; always lovely on a warship) and less need to resupply the ship in the field. A all-treb Fenris would eventually need to retreat and restock it's ammo (requiring more supply depots and convoys for all those ships) while a laser-armed one could fight on with only food and reactor fuel to be topped up with. That also means incidentally you can support a lot more ships in the field for the same price.

Thinking about it, there's also a matter of reliability; games like Freespace rarely go into it, but a missile system needs all manner of tech (a missile, a warhead with tracking system, targeting system, launcher, etc) any of which may have a 1% chance (especially on a ship with battle damage or lots of wear and tear) of not doing what it's meant to. Nothing quite like your Treb upon launch not releasing and just firing it's engine inside the launcher alongside all those other warheads, or even better launching and then deciding that Hermes your escorting isaShivananditmustDIE.

Would imagine many a GTVA captain would agree a Treb would be an epic capital weapon on the right turret, but it could never totally replace their 'good-ol' plasma'. Make one hell of a secondary weapon system though.

(...oh yeah and lest we forget, pew-pew lasers are shiny )

[headdie]

Not to mention countermeasures have been more-or-less completely broken for 16 years and nobody really noticed.

how do you mean?

[AdmiralRalwood]

Not to mention countermeasures have been more-or-less completely broken for 16 years and nobody really noticed.

how do you mean?

Oh snap; I didn't realize until now that the thread was in HPC instead of public. Here's the vital post:

So... I've come across an infuriating "bug" in the countermeasure code that dates back to retail. I found this as I was implementing "detonate aspect seekers when they lose lock".  I was watching this massive stream of westwards heading missiles, meeting a thin blue line of eastwards heading countermeasures, and wondering why on earth only the lead missiles in the stream were detonating. The rest of the missiles sailed on, thumbing their noses at the ineffectual efforts of the countermeasures (and my table tweaks) to achieve a semi orderly detonation pattern occurring along the length of the entire line of missiles. I tried different numerous countermeasure velocities & lifetimes, different launching intervals, I ever so carefully hand-tuned the launching pitch, bank & angle so the countermeasures would travel parallel to the missiles, ensuring that even at the end of their life the missiles would be within their supposed effective radius. And nothing changed.

Then my wife, bless her, who ever so patiently listens so my coding related rants, observed that the countermeasures only seemed to work just as each new set of countermeasures was fired.

Armed with that idea, I resumed looking through the code and traced the path of a global variable that was tagged with this innocuous comment:

Code: [Select]

//2-frame homing check, to fend off sync errors

I'd previously dismissed this as it had looked purely multiplayer related. On closer inspection though, I found that this little global was being set to 2 whenever any countermeasure was created. It was then decremented by 1 each time the code ran that was responsible for testing whether countermeasures could spoof missiles.  When the global reached zero, no more countermeasure checks are run, at least until another countermeasure is launched, which sets the global back to 2.

Or in other words, every single countermeasure active in the mission space gets two (2!) frames in which to spoof missiles, but ONLY when new countermeasures are launched.

You want to improve the chances of friendly capships spoofing incoming missiles? Alpha 1 launches countermeasures and all other countermeasure wake up & starting spoofing again! For 2 frames only of course so keep mashing x!  Want friendly missiles to penetrate the enemy countermeasure screen? Alpha 1 switches to ironman mode and dodges all homers without countermeasures!

 

So to confirm I ran my test mission again, waited until the missile stream had capship countermeasures passing by, and observed the pretty glow of missiles exploding perfectly in sync with each fighter mounted CM I launched.

When I was coding the "one CM chance only" change I was wondering why the difference in CM/missile interaction wasn't more obvious. Also makes me wonder if the problem with the AI dodging Trebs is that they don't know about this trick, and they launch their countermeasure(s) too early, before the Treb is within the default 300m CM effective radius.

Anyway, I'll have a look at changing this behaviour to be more... expected (maybe by removing that global-variable-based check entirely). It'll have to be wrapped in some flag because I'm almost sure it'll massively mess with balance. Please comment if you have any other ideas about how this could/should be changed.

edit: have a video, as I'm still shaking my head about this one