Hard Light Productions Forums
General FreeSpace => FreeSpace Discussion => Topic started by: JudgeMental on June 05, 2003, 07:41:54 pm
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I was always curious about something. What is the explaination for slash beams? I mean, there seems to be little purpose to them. I don't mean as in gameplay or anything, but why would the Terrans or Vasudans use slash beams, when they could just use standard, non-slash beams?
I don't know if this has been talked about before, but is there an official explaination for this? I have my own idea, but I want to hear your guy's first.
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Think like modern vessels, does an iceberg do more damage by hitting the flank of a ship at a 90 degree angle and punching a hole in the side, or does an iceberg do more damage by scraping along the flank and carving a nice long gash in the side? Tis my impression at least.
A more practical explanation would probably be that it looks cool.
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Punching a hole in the ship may not cause any problems if you don't go through any vital systems. Carving a gash down the side on the other hand means that that entire area has to be sealed cutting off a larger area of the ship.
Basically you're trading the chance of a lucky hit against something important against crippling the entire ship.
Secondly slashers have a better chance of wiping out turrets on the enemy ship so that it can't shoot back at you :)
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And its kinda impressive to watch them rake along the side of a target. Cool factor and all that (don't say a word Sandwich, I know. Its ironic, ain't it?)
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Onlooker answer: they look damn cool!:thepimp:
teh FS geek: it's a heating issue, if the beams move it helps dissapate the heat faster.
game designer: the beams eat a lot of frames on the really slow machines and thus if you have a beam that fires for less time you get a better light show for less system usage.
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OK, those sound like good explainations...
The last "geek" explaination is closest to what I had in mind. Technical problems might have made sweeping beams easier to control/stabilize for the smaller ships. Though, I was kinda thinking that slash beams are older tech, with the larger, immobile beams being newer with improved tech.
I also had a different idea, regarding Shivan beam/reactor tech... Perhaps they use subspace tech to stabilize their beams, giving them that smooth look. This would result in a subspace signature in the beam, that adds damage by directly destabilizing atomic bonds at the target. The added stability means that they can fire their beams longer. The added damage means they don't have to use as high power beams as we do to achieve the same effect, and so they can fire more often. Added together, it means that, though probably more advanced than ours, Shivan reactors need not be THAT much more advanced. It's not always how MUCH you put out the front end, it's how you put it out that counts...
Well, that's my idea for Shivan tech:p
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In a realistic sense slash beams should only be used against lightly armored targets, where much of a regular beam would be wasted. To have billions/trillions of watts pounding down on an ship may be cool, but once the beam vaporizes everything in its path it'll punch through the other side and and billions of joules of energy are wasted (or happen to hit a hapless ship on the other side).
A heavily armored ship would take a huge amount of power to tear through so you need regular beams there to provide that concentrated energy. On a lightly armored ship the armor would cumple like paper so best to spread that energy out and tear up as much hull as possible. Idealy slash beams should zig-zag to do the most damage.
Another abstract idea I have is that instead of bothering to physically rip open the hull, simply heat it up so that the people inside would deep fry. :drevil:
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Are you kidding? LTerSlash can't even destroy heavy fighters if they get nicked by it. Surely it can't do much more than scorch grafitti into most capital ship armour?
TerSlash isn't that much more powerful, and most of the time a good portion of the beam output is wasted. Compare that with a point to point beam straight through the front of the Orion - punch through that outer hull armour and you'd be able to bore a nice kilometer long tunnel straight through it. :)
What I consider the reason for slash beams is to suppress turrets and other weaker, smaller external subsystems.
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Originally posted by karajorma
Punching a hole in the ship may not cause any problems if you don't go through any vital systems. Carving a gash down the side on the other hand means that that entire area has to be sealed cutting off a larger area of the ship.
All right... take the BFGreen, or just the BGreen for that matter. It punches through one point in the hull, causing that much damage to that single point. Now, most caps have two or more of these kinds of beams on each side, so two large holes in an Orion is a nightmare for Engineering. Plus, it utterly vaporizes whatever was there, and most captains have the good sense to target subsystems on a ship than fire at some randomly-selected point.
Plus, take into account that slash beams aren't large enough to cause to much focused damage. Take the woman in high heel shoes vs the elephant. The woman does more pressure because her force is exerted on a tighter area. Same goes for big beams. They focus their energy at one point, causing more damage (and a sexy blow-through effect) on a ship.
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Meh, a better question is: Why do capships use laserturrets (like TerranHeavyTurret that fires once every 20 seconds :doubt: )?
I mean, in FS1 it was understandable. But in FS2 they do little to no damage to caps, lasers are easily avoided by fighters and bombers and even if they hit the damage on a fighter is neglectable unless you are it 20 times in a row (which is highly unlikely).
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Originally posted by Tiara
Meh, a better question is: Why do capships use laserturrets (like TerranHeavyTurret that fires once every 20 seconds :doubt: )?
They must look fancy, I guess. Plus, if a pilot has to evade a laser shot, they also have to look out for the blue-anti-fighter-beam-of-death powering up right beside it.
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Originally posted by nuclear1
They must look fancy, I guess. Plus, if a pilot has to evade a laser shot, they also have to look out for the blue-anti-fighter-beam-of-death powering up right beside it.
Meh,
1). They look like blobs of slime to me.
2). I don't avoid them as they do too little damage to be concerned about.
3). AAA turrets are my first target with nice long range trebs so they are no real threat ;)
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AAA beam turrets must use a lot of power. Think about it - you have to produce a coherent stream of photons over dozens of kilometers which is still powerful enough to punch through a fighter's shields and cause severe damage to the hull. Laser and missile turrets are far more economical in power usage, and laser turrets don't need ammo, either.
What puzzles me about beam turrets is why the main guns aren't used against fighters. You might be able to wipe out an entire wing with one brief blast of an Orion's main gun, for example. Of course, that would make attacking capital ships impossible. :)
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I think Subach HL-7's would be a bit more effective than the slimeballs the caps put out now.
Of course Kaysers would be really nice.
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DaveB says:
Slash beams pick two points from two different octants of a given ship and move between them. This allows them to occasionally miss their target, or overshoot, or shoot too early. There's a list of something like 10 or so good octant pairs to move between when blasting a ship. Not that this really matters to mission designers...".
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Originally posted by nuclear1
All right... take the BFGreen, or just the BGreen for that matter. It punches through one point in the hull, causing that much damage to that single point. Now, most caps have two or more of these kinds of beams on each side, so two large holes in an Orion is a nightmare for Engineering. Plus, it utterly vaporizes whatever was there, and most captains have the good sense to target subsystems on a ship than fire at some randomly-selected point.
Plus, take into account that slash beams aren't large enough to cause to much focused damage.
Didn't you see the second part of my arguement? Slashers take out more opposing turrets as well as raking damage across the surface of the ship. Put the two effects together and you have a weapon that is quite effective.
Considering the different uses of the two beams it seems sensible that the GTVA would use both. A beam that does damage to a large area of the ship (i.e the slasher) and one that does much greater localised damage.
As for punching holes in enemy ships you can't really claim that a slasher doesn't cut into the hull far enough to cause problems as the FS2 engine never had geo-mod so we will never know :D Most likely neither beam actually causes a huge amount of internal damage because an Orion at 5% hull is just as dangerous as an Orion at 100% (just for a shorter period of time :D ) Nothing on the inside appears to have been remotely damaged by the hull strength being reduced by 95%
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although it should. :doubt: But I'll take what I can get with a 5 year old engine.
Either way, they look cool. The only reason why they don't seem to do a lot of damage though is because they usually don't hit the ship more than a little while the rest flies off into space (i.e. Vertically slashing an Orion)
What would be cool is a slasher that does extradamage to subsystems or a slasher that does uber-damage, so it seems like a BGreen but it still has all the downfalls of a TerSlash.
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Originally posted by Tiara
Meh, a better question is: Why do capships use laserturrets (like TerranHeavyTurret that fires once every 20 seconds :doubt: )?
they rock at shooting down bombs
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Originally posted by PhReAk
they rock at shooting down bombs
:wtf:
They never shot down a bomb that I fired. Sure, AAA and flak turrets did, but not those slow moving blobs of slime....
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Originally posted by Tiara
:wtf:
They never shot down a bomb that I fired. Sure, AAA and flak turrets did, but not those slow moving blobs of slime....
Mine got shot down by laser blobs also. Not as much as AAA or flak but they did.
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What the laser turrets in the game need is the same effect as the ones in the opening movie of FS2: the rapid fire laser bolts. OR they need to do a whole lot more damage!!! (One big green blob blows away an Ursa or a quarter of a cruiser. Mod, anybody?) :shaking:
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Heh, I made a laser once... it fired blobs twice the size of your fighter lol :p Also I agree, the fire rate should be upped.
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Try out Sandwich's turret upgrade mod. Apparently he made turret lasers a force to be reckoned with. Link is in his siggy.
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Interestingly enough, I could only convince the fire rate of laser turrets to increase by upping the acuracy of the AI entry used by the turret. All logic would suggest that decreasing the weapon's fire wait should speed up the rate of fire, but my lasers refused point-blank to shoot any faster until I'd fiddled with the accuracy.
Now I've got warships defended by mini-guns and .50cal automatics... got S:AAB? (www.swooh.com/peon/diamondgeezer/frames) ;7
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I made all the turrets' firing rates really high and slightly increased their speeds, which makes them far more dangerous.
Also, that accuracy thing is indeed really a rate of fire setting and does not seem to affect the actual accuracy at all, which is more or less always perfect.
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Originally posted by Liberator
game designer: the beams eat a lot of frames on the really slow machines and thus if you have a beam that fires for less time you get a better light show for less system usage.
Like twice the sex for half the 4play;7
you could say slashers are tactical wepions for disabaling your opponets ability to shoot back (there turrents) while your main beems rip them apart. Mind you it looks stupid when a slasher is fired at a cruiser 1 km away and only hits the targed for 10% of the firering cycle.
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Maybe the SCP'ers could do some thing about that.....
Slash beams would be much deadler if they were tighter to the target, or even stayed on the target.....
Of course, I can't really comment, since I COMPLETELY redid my capital ship weapons....;7