Hard Light Productions Forums
Modding, Mission Design, and Coding => FS2 Open Coding - The Source Code Project (SCP) => Topic started by: TopAce on September 16, 2003, 02:46:33 pm
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Well, listen, it is complicated :D
As you probably noticed, your Ursa bomber fully packed with Helioses is as fast[slow :)] as another Ursa without any bombs.
I think you should give all weapons(mostly secondaries) an $Weight value which defines how heavy the missile is in kilos, and how much speed does it gives your bomber when it is fired.
Like this:
Helios
$Weight: 2.0
Your bomber obtains +2 m/s when a Helios is fired.
The $Max velocity can stand for the velocity without any secondaries. The $Weight is decreased from the $Max velocity when the mission begins, and the $Weight of the fired missile is added to maximal velocity.
eeehhh .... understandable? :confused:
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sounds good, very good actually.
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Actually, at launch your machine should slow down abit due to the oposing forces.
(In zero gravity both would move into oposing directions)
Cheers
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so do you think that weight has no importance in space?
I don't know, I am not good at physics. :(
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Originally posted by TopAce
so do you think that weight has no importance in space?
I don't know, I am not good at physics. :(
'well, you would need more energy to change your speed and/or direction of movement, but since the FS2 physics aren;t really anywhere near the real stuff, i think this sounds better, with added turning imparity.
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instead of speed, it should be acceleration and decceleration, as that's what extra mass would really effect. that and turning smoothness.
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Originally posted by TopAce
so do you think that weight has no importance in space?
I don't know, I am not good at physics. :(
If i'm not wrong it's not the weight thats important, but the mass :)
But since misiles have engines that (probably) have a thrust that pushes them out of their launchtubes, this thrust would most likely affect yuor ship.
Cheers
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I really don't want to think about heavy speed decrease, bombers are basically slow. Only around a 5-10 maximum scale.
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Originally posted by TopAce
I really don't want to think about heavy speed decrease, bombers are basically slow. Only around a 5-10 maximum scale.
I was thinking of a slowdown of a very short amount of time (say 1/2 second), not a constant slowdown, but just the initial push of the missile.
Cheers
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khmmm... that's a good idea :yes:
but the bomber is continously carrying the same amount of weight. :mad2:
Bah! That's really complicated :)
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Well, less misiles should perhaps allow it accelerate faster, since there is less mass to pull.
Eg: full payload = Max speed in 10 seconds
No payload = Max speed in 5 seconds
It would be something like the kickback of a gun, a short slam on the break in a way, it might add to realism.
Cheers
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Well, for the first few seconds, yes, the Bomber would lose velocity because it is pushing something away in the direction it wants to go. But after that, there would be an increase in Top Speed, and a slight increase in acceleratiion to get there, since the mass of the bomber is slightly less, so the thrusters at full power would push it faster :)
Flipside
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I agree, but the increase in speed shouldn't be to high
Cheers
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In space, bombers carry mass, not weight. Mass becomes weight when affected by gravity.
So, full bombers have more mass. The only effects this should have, like Carl said, is on acceleration/decceleration and maneuverability.
And if you wanted to get picky, then you could have a launched bomb/missile give a bit of kick-back to your ship as an equal and opposite reaction issue. Wouldn't really affect the gameplay any, since the actually change would be negligable, but the effect would be cool to experience. ;)
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Every time a particle is launched off the ship in any direction, the ship would have to be accelerated to the opposite direction. Of course, firing a heavy bomb should push you back (like if you rammed), you can just go & accelerate back to normal speed. Primaries that fire particles would also push you back, but normally not enough to throw you back or even stop your ship (if youre flying at 50 m/s you'll prolly go down to 45 m/s or something like that :) ).
That'd be a really nice effect :D
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additional idea.
If this ever were implemeted we'd have new weapon ranges. You could have something like Nitro bursters that, when fired, create a strong blast so your ship will be thrown back at a high speed (especially useful to get out of some critical situations, or away from some missiles, out of a MS trap, etc.). The bad part about those bursters would be that they take up a missile bank so you'll have less missiles to shoot at your opponents ;)
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Yup ;)
Cheers
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it definately would be cool, and maybe we could give the maxim a slight kickback, maybe -1mps per shot or so, just because it's be cool.
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just don't give it a heavy pushback. Like the one which occurs at AAA hit. The game would be less playable.
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Originally posted by Lightspeed
additional idea...
that's pretty much what the afterburners are for, though.
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but to esape, you must turn away from your attackers, and use your afterburners. It pushes you backwards by default, If I understand LightSpeed well.
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Ok, now lets get one of the SCP gods inhere, where are my banana's...? ;)
Cheers
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You all seem to have the wrong conception of the mass ratio between a bomber - heck, even a fighter - and even the heaviest GTVA bombs (Meson doesn't count). Fighters would be around the 50-ton range, whereas a bomb would be around 1 ton, max. With that kind of ratio, you wouldn't even come close to stopping, let alone slowing down anything near significantly.
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I've been checking and Sandwich speaks the truth....
A Boanerges can carry about 17 Cyclops bombs. That doesn't really make them much more powerful than Mk82 bombs loaded on a Strike Eagle. The Eagle would barely notice the loss of a single bomb, though the whole lot 'would' have a cumulative effect.
One effect that could be good though is a table entry of something like 'Launch_Thrust_Delay', which makes the weapon 'Freefall' for a few seconds before igniting it's thrusters?
Flipside :D
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Originally posted by Flipside
I've been checking and Sandwich speaks the truth....
A Boanerges can carry about 17 Cyclops bombs. That doesn't really make them much more powerful than Mk82 bombs loaded on a Strike Eagle. The Eagle would barely notice the loss of a single bomb, though the whole lot 'would' have a cumulative effect.
One effect that could be good though is a table entry of something like 'Launch_Thrust_Delay', which makes the weapon 'Freefall' for a few seconds before igniting it's thrusters?
Flipside :D
I'd love that for my Starforce Mod.
Now all we need is an ordinance bay code for ships that drop their missiles out of their undersides.
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In the code there is a bit commented out which made bombs/missiles drop down when they were fired, apparently it looked at bit funny so Volition took it out.
As for having your ship 'speed' up when you fire off your secondaries, (or ballistic primaries now), in real life the only thing that would improve much is your acceleration and rotation, but Sandwich is right about the size comparison, the Boanerges for instance is just under 35 metres long and has a weight (well as used by the model in game anyway) of 686, I'd guess thats supposed to be in tonnes, your cyclops bomb is about 6 metres long, as for its weight dunno. Though having said that, the cyclops shouldn't be able to fit through the 'holes' the secondaries are supposed to come out of.
Anyway, what needs to be asked is, do you really want this feature, personally, I'd say yes, a bit of an increase in the acceleration and rotation speed ( and thinking about it the rotation damp as well ) would be quit cool, I't would be no problem to make it proportional to the amout of current total amount of cargo space divided by the total amout of cargo space. So how much does everybody think the amount should be? I'd probably say less than 25% maybe even only 10% ( in fact it might be cool to have it related to the mass of the ship divided by it total cargo space ).
If I remeber rightly , If you 'fired' off a missile/or bomb it won't actually push you back because of the action 'releasing' it, but rather because whatever the propellant is coming out of the back of it hits you and slows you down ( this would only apply to things that are in for purposes a very low G enviroment). But ballistic primaries would, in fact normal primaries would too, though both only by a tiny amout, unless it's some freaking huge bazokoid-blaster-from-hell type cannon. We've already got the shudder flag, would you really want to be pushed back by your firing weapons, I know I wouldn't. ( Though with that bazokoid-blaster-from-hell, mmmmmn. )
Robin.
EDIT: On weapons dropping: when fired, all the default FS2 ships fire them out the front, so the weapons are going to drop through the firing ship, I suppose you could create models which have bomb bays like the B52 et al, or have the missiles on Pylons under 'wings', then you'd have to have the missiles appear on the pylons until they were fired, hmmmmn be pretty sweet lookin' though.
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I was thinking that the drop-down missile attribute will be controlled by a flag, since some ships in the Starforce Mod have missiles that descend a bit before zooming forward (the Talon, Perren, and Fang fighters), and some ships' missiles fly straight. I think that there should be flags so that the ships with missile points on their undersides get drop versions of the missile, like a version of the Trident anti-fighter missile (yes, it comes from Inferno, but it's more maneuverable than the original) called Trident#drop.
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I always wondered why an Ursa full of Helioses had the same explosion damage as an empty one... I wonder if payload could be taken into account.
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Errr, I wouldnt wan't to be anywhere near a ship that could be carrying 9 helios when it goes off, KABOOOOOM.
Back to your actual point, It would be feasable, though, by raising this point, would you include the blast radii for the weapons on board, what about shield, armour etc factors. From a fluff point of view, a lot of the non bomb weapons use just normal or nuclear-based explosives and wouldn't go off unless armed, but the cyclops and helios are anti-matter based so, when the bombs, for a better word, crackopen as the ship explodes they would add to the explosion.
Once agian it's a question of how far do you take things like this, as they say you've gotta draw the line somewhere.
Robin
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*imagines destroying one nephilim, and annihilating half the galaxy*
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*imagines the Shivan Pilots Union saying; the only way you'll get us to fly is by remote control*
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Originally posted by Raa Tor'h
*imagines destroying one nephilim, and annihilating half the galaxy*
:lol: :lol: :lol: :lol:
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I like the bombs going off in the ship idea, there should be a flag for it,
add the inner/outter radia and damage of the weapons in each bank to the values of the ship when it explodes
a fully loaded bomber could have the same damage as a small capship
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Possibly a 'Volatile' tag in Weapons.tbl?
Flipside :D
EDIT : Otherwise a Mymidon carrying 400 dumbfire missiles would make a REAL mess :)
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Mmm, firecrackers ;7
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Hehe, I'd like to see this implemented.
And why shouldn't a myrm filled with tempests have a big blast? Does a box of 20 sticks of TNT exploding simultaneously not have a bigger boom than a single one?
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LOL Perhaps, but a large number of dogfights would end up with both ships destroyed :(
And not all missiles are explosive before they are armed. Can you imagine the outcome of taking out something carrying an area denial weapon? You not only get the effect of the initial explosion, but the power of any spawn weapons on top of that, multiplied by the number of missiles. Ouch!
Flipside :D
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That'd actually be cool to implement on crappy old fighters... Imagine an Infyrno style explosion from the old, out dated reactors in Lokis, and Hercs. :devil:
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missiles don't go boom along with their ships or, in real life, planes. that's what all that deal with "armed" is. for exemple, a sidewinder is armed only 2 seconds after the engine has been ignited, iirc. If by some (bad) luck it were to hit something before, it would just, well, not explode :p
submarine torpedoes are even worse, they can be armed seconds before it HITS its target, so intercepting it at half its course wouldn't make it explode either. all that is about safety.
a b2 that would crash wouldn't ignit 24 nuke explosions :p
during WW2, bombs were armed by hand, so they could explode if the bomber was destroyed just before it drops its load ( nothing sexual here ), but the weapon dude was supposed to wait for the last minutes before arming the bombs.
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Jesus, imagine some of the fighter supression missiles cooking off... the cluster based ones. Scary stuff indeed.
By the way, if we're doing this - why not take the whole nine yards and see what happens when you add the payload of the craft as well as the power output of the craft together. Think about it, an Ursa has a larger power output than a Valkarye, it should make a bigger bang when the fuel core goes. Right?
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Originally posted by TopAce
Well, listen, it is complicated :D
As you probably noticed, your Ursa bomber fully packed with Helioses is as fast[slow :)] as another Ursa without any bombs.
I think you should give all weapons(mostly secondaries) an $Weight value which defines how heavy the missile is in kilos, and how much speed does it gives your bomber when it is fired.
Like this:
Helios
$Weight: 2.0
Your bomber obtains +2 m/s when a Helios is fired.
The $Max velocity can stand for the velocity without any secondaries. The $Weight is decreased from the $Max velocity when the mission begins, and the $Weight of the fired missile is added to maximal velocity.
eeehhh .... understandable? :confused:
:yes: According to true physics, what would be affected (as has been said) is maneuvrability and acceleration rather than velocity, but FS has never been about full physical reality - more about gameplay. I say go for it. :nod:
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Freespace 2 physics cuts corners everywhere.
Ive always been 'annoyingly aware' that although the thrusthers are always ON there is a 'Top-speed' ( with a constant force accel. it, it should go faster and faster). Not to mention the missiles and bombs.
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I was just talking to Goober about weapon weights the other day. Now of course the mass of your weapons won't affect your top speed in space BUT they should affect your accel, decel and agility. This would be most useful for FS:AAB, especially if a weight limit could be set for fighters as well :nod: It would really affect your loadout choices since a fighter packed with huge bombs would be at a disadvantage in a furball...
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Originally posted by TopAce
but to esape, you must turn away from your attackers, and use your afterburners. It pushes you backwards by default, If I understand LightSpeed well.
Yes, it pushes you back (unless your missile banks are mounted backwards). Also, afterburners don't quite provide enough thrust to get out of some situations :)
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Actually, while I'm at it, I'd also like the option to no have bombs arm until they reach their target. Not using shields, I'm having trouble with interceptors killing themselves constantly by getting too close to the bombs they're trying to shoot down. If I could have a bomb which would only explode a bit when shot down but would go off with its full-scale bang when it impats the target, I'd be sorted :nod:
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Actually, I.m pretty certain that lower mass WOULD increase top speed. Weight is nothing to do with it, but if you have a Bomber with a Mass of 20000 Kg, and 8 Bombs with a mass of 1500 Kg each, the total mass would be 32000Kg This is the Mass of the bomber. There IS a function (I don't remember at present) which can tell you Velocity from a certain amount of Energy applied from a certain direction. This actually ASSUMES a friction/gravityless environment, and further variables need to be added to account for these in 'real' physics.
Therefore, after releasing 12000Kg worth of bombs, a Bomber has a Mass of 20000Kg total. Applying the same amount of Energy (from the engines) to a smaller mass WOULD result in a higher velocity :) I know Freespace doesn't obey the laws of physics even slightly, I suppose strictly speaking only acceleration would be affected, but I'm not sure :D
Flipside :D
EDIT : Ok, just checked my maths, acceleration would be affected, but in a truly frictionless environment, top speed would not, however, in a frictionless environment, there would be NO top speed from a constant thrust (obviously). So theres no reason why we can't pick and choose as we like :D
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Originally posted by Venom
missiles don't go boom along with their ships or, in real life, planes. that's what all that deal with "armed" is. for exemple, a sidewinder is armed only 2 seconds after the engine has been ignited, iirc. If by some (bad) luck it were to hit something before, it would just, well, not explode :p
submarine torpedoes are even worse, they can be armed seconds before it HITS its target, so intercepting it at half its course wouldn't make it explode either. all that is about safety.
a b2 that would crash wouldn't ignit 24 nuke explosions :p
during WW2, bombs were armed by hand, so they could explode if the bomber was destroyed just before it drops its load ( nothing sexual here ), but the weapon dude was supposed to wait for the last minutes before arming the bombs.
Actually, a bit of clarification is due here on this topic - and trust me, I deal with explosives in the army. ;) I'll make clear what parts I'm unsure about though.
Nukes cannot explode as a nuclear blast unless they are detonated using the detonator. This is due to the precise coordination required of the primer charges going of to ram the whatever-they-are into the core of the bomb. These whatever-they-ares compress the core, causing fission. Fusion, AFAIK, is more or less the same thing, but using mini-nukes as primer charges to implode the core.
Disclaimer to this is that I may have gotten the specifics wrong, but the general idea is right - nukes and H-bombs will not go off without a precise series of events, one which most definitely would not occur in a catastrophic ship explosion. At the very most you would get the conventional explosives' primer charges exploding, but their effect would be extremely marginal.
Moving down the line: conventional explosives. Take a military-grade block of C4 and drop it, throw it, toss it into a bonfire - it won't explode. What will set it off is sparks (specifically the kind that come off a struck match as it lights) and other explosions. In our case, this means that, armed or not, if a bomb/missile's shell is breached all the way to the explosives inside (due to ship explosion), it's gonna go boom. Armed / unarmed is referring to the detonator, not the primary charge.
On to antimatter... antimatter is/can only be contained by magnetic fields (at least that's the case in hard-core sci-fi; I haven't encountered anything to contradict this in real life). As it is an inherently unstable material (to say the least!), when the containment field ruptures, the full force of the bomb's antimatter reaction would take place.
As for all those other technologies (most of which are theoretical at best), go make up your own explanations. I'll theorize on some here though.
ZPE (Zero-Point Energy). This is essentially (AFAIK) a whole seperate dimension or level of energy "available" to be tapped. Therefore, I'd think that nothing would happen when a ZPE bomb in breached, since the energy is attained via coordinated and precise tapping into the ZPE realm of energies.
Uhm... I can't think of anything else. :p
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[color=66ff00]This idea has a lot of interesting applications. :nod:
BTW I quickly scanned through the thread and didn't notice if anyone pointed out that missiles would not drop in space unless boosted away from the launching vehicle. Of course we get to bend the rules a little to add to the fun/cool factor though. ;)
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Originally posted by Raa Tor'h
That'd actually be cool to implement on crappy old fighters... Imagine an Infyrno style explosion from the old, out dated reactors in Lokis, and Hercs. :devil:
Actually that could be a handy little bit of code for Bobboau to look at when looking at ways to make the explosions look even better :D
Flipside :D
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Originally posted by Venom
missiles don't go boom along with their ships or, in real life, planes. that's what all that deal with "armed" is. for exemple, a sidewinder is armed only 2 seconds after the engine has been ignited, iirc. If by some (bad) luck it were to hit something before, it would just, well, not explode :p
submarine torpedoes are even worse, they can be armed seconds before it HITS its target, so intercepting it at half its course wouldn't make it explode either. all that is about safety.
a b2 that would crash wouldn't ignit 24 nuke explosions :p
during WW2, bombs were armed by hand, so they could explode if the bomber was destroyed just before it drops its load ( nothing sexual here ), but the weapon dude was supposed to wait for the last minutes before arming the bombs.
"Hunt for the Red October" anyone?
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Originally posted by Flipside
EDIT : Ok, just checked my maths, acceleration would be affected, but in a truly frictionless environment, top speed would not, however, in a frictionless environment, there would be NO top speed from a constant thrust (obviously). So theres no reason why we can't pick and choose as we like :D
There is. In space (frictionless) you can accelerate permanently if your engines keep going. But the faster you will be getting, the higher your mass will get (infinite mass at lightspeed). So your acceleration would slowly be decreasing (since you'd need to accelerate more mass) until it comes to a stop where your engines cannot create enough thrust to accelerate you anymore.
On to antimatter... antimatter is/can only be contained by magnetic fields (at least that's the case in hard-core sci-fi; I haven't encountered anything to contradict this in real life). As it is an inherently unstable material (to say the least!), when the containment field ruptures, the full force of the bomb's antimatter reaction would take place.
Antimatter is just as stable as our normal matter is. In antimatter the cores of the atoms are charged negatively, and you have positrons swirling around them. The only point where the thing tends to go boom boom is when it meets 'normal' matter, which will result in 1 g Antimatter + 1 g Matter => 0 g Matter + Tons of energy :D
Antimatter can only be stored in fields / space where it doesnt have any connection to normal matter.
Any antimatter would have an immediate blast once the ship is destroyed, which will probably cause all the hull to melt and be washed away to all directions :D
That again, would influence normal warheads to explode (as the compounds will be split most explosives provide their own oxygen :) ), including nukes (since youre getting immense temperatures).
However, if there's no antimatter involved on the ship, most missiles probably would not explode at all.
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Nukes would explode more violently then normal if detonated with antimatter because the entire mass of the matter that comes in contact with the antimatter would turn to energy, causing a HUMONGOUS explosion. This applies for all antimatter/matter collisions.
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Originally posted by Lightspeed
There is. In space (frictionless) you can accelerate permanently if your engines keep going. But the faster you will be getting, the higher your mass will get (infinite mass at lightspeed). So your acceleration would slowly be decreasing (since you'd need to accelerate more mass) until it comes to a stop where your engines cannot create enough thrust to accelerate you anymore.
This is true, but even a Perseus at 120 Kph is going to have to accelerate for a looong time before it hits that barrier ;)
Flipside :D
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Yeah that's true, but who said FS2 was using real physics? ;)
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A nuke detonated by antimatter? Eh? If you put a nuke in contact with antimatter, you get an antimatter reaction and only that. You'd also lose more than enough radioactive material to even achieve critical mass (if that's anything left). The explosive charges in nukes are shaped precisely to crumple the plutonium, not atomize it.
As for antimatter-matter explosions. We really don't know how that will work out. Frankly I'm inclined to believe that it's unlikely to achieve a large blast even if we _could_ ever generate that much antimatter. Think about it. Matter is REALLY not dense at all. Kinda like the space between stars and galaxies. Normal matter interaction is just electrostatic forces.
So what? Won't the antimatter just attract it's counterparts? Well, Because matter isn't very dense (even stuff like lead) as soon as the leading particles come into contact with its counterpart and annihilate, the energy release will more than easily force the matter and antimatter apart again. What results is something like a fizzle as the two sort of skids around each other. It's similar to the effect of pouring liquid gas on a normal warm surface or pouring water on a really hot surface: it skittles around.
If you poured a cup of liquid nitrogen on a warm surface and can simultaneously have it all vaporize, you'd have a big explosion as well. But reality generally makes that really hard to do (if possible at all).
I'm sure a way could be worked to simultaneously contact the matter and antimatter, but it's not as simple as just say "pouring" them into the same jar.
In any case, kickback of launching a bomb and changing acceleration (which includes manueverability, it's the same thing) sounds like a good addition to FS2. It really doesn't matter if it's realistic or not, but that it would make the game more interesting. Additionally, instead of a REVERSE nitro charge, I'd prefer a shaped ROTATIONAL charge that would flip me over approximately 90 degrees.
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well, if you take thematter, and keep the antimatter contained, and then throw the matter into the containment field, and have both matter and a/m as a gas, i think you should get some larger explosion.
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Antimatter does exist, it was scientifically proved, since they even created it. How? In a cyclotron. They made high energy particles crash and matter and antimatter particles were created.
Actually matter and antimatter won't either push or atract each other as their inherent charge is zero.
When antimatter and matter come into contact they annihilate each other and create a 100% energy equivalent of their mass.
So this time you indeed get E=mc2, whereas in a nuke or H-bomb, only a small friction of the matter gets converted into pure energy.
Imagine the massive force an antimatter warhead could yield...terryfying. Both in effect and in budget to build a damn thing.
No wonder, that in FS1 they had to revert to an H-bomb when building their biggest bomb.
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Antimatter _atoms and molecules_ are generally neutral in charge just like such normal matter is normally neutral. But anti-protons and protons (and the other complement component particles) are attracted to each other and spiral in together. The only problem is, we haven't made anything past antihydrogen.
Hmm, a gas is even less dense. Even if you mix them really nice and evenly, the "collision" rate higher in the beginning, gas being what gas is will still go POOM and explode in showers of energy. But at much lower yield than what you'd expect =(
So unless you're driving a blimp towards that Shivan cruiser....
Also, even in the case of our "smallish" nukes, even tho the percentage of mass converted to energy is miniscule. It's still more than "just a few" atoms, or even "several" atoms =\ From a googled page, about 0.1% of a fission bomb gets converted to energy while a fusion bomb has a whopping 1%. In any case, unless we find a way to mass produce antimatter (which requires a large energy input, we'll need to harness the sun's energy for this) and find a way to "detonate" all the antimatter that's both reliable and doesn't take up too much space (just an engineering problem really) nukes are just so much easier.
But in the end, what does real life matter? All we need to do is put a lot of technical jargon into the tech database decriptor and then we can do whatever we want =D
Oh yeah, a lot of our nukes have more than a kilogram of fissible and fusionable material in them. So assuming we're comparing with a thermonuclear bomb, then we'd need at least 10 grams of antimatter for the _same_ potential blast. I wonder if we've even made 10 grams of antimatter yet. I used to believe so, until something showed me some numbers.
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Manufacturing in space would render a couple of things a lot easier. With a high power fuison reactor even the energy could be not that much of an issue, bit it would still be pretty expensive and would be hard to use.
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Is the Helios an antimatter warhead? I thought it was just a massive thermonuke.
It doesn't matter how low the density of matter is. A kilogram is still a kilogram. Half a kilo each of matter and antimatter (and once we can produce 10 grams of antimatter, we'll have no trouble producing 500 grams, or even several tonnes) would produce a larger blast than any weapon previously constructed. We're talking the complete obliteration of a country the size of France.
If you were to make a TC bomb of total mass 500kg, it is estimated that the Earth would be thrown slightly out of orbit by the explosion and almost 20% of the planet's mass would be rendered down into plasma instantly.
TC (Total Conversion) weapons are extremely powerful, and it's unlikely that anyone would be crazy enough to build one. Actually, given the overall stupidity of the human race, someone's almost certain to build one, assuming we all last that long.
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Yeah, Antimatter's just a bit expensive the going rate in 1999 was:
62.5 trillion dollars a gram
But hey, were talking about over 300 years in future, so it doesn't really matter.
Back to what this thread was really about, err, I'll try putting a Volatile flag for weapons in, and have a ships explosion add in any Volatile weapons on board including blast radius. The only thing that I see as being a little tricky is taking into account the armour/shield/subsystem modifiers of the weapons in question, doing the improved manoeuvrability shouldn't be hard. I'll bung it in with some other stuff I've done that I want to get tested, before I ask about having any of it submiited to the main source code.
One question, for the manoeuvrability, should the current turn rate, acceleration etc of a bomber like the Ursa or any ship in fact be the base value, where any weapon with say a 'heavy' flag reduces this; based on the amount of cargo space all the weapons with 'heavy' take up. 'Cos you could end up with a very sluggish ship, and how much should 'heavy' weapons affect the ship?
Thats if you do it with flags at all.
If you want to find out about the use of antimatter as a power source for propulsion you can look here:
http://science.nasa.gov/newhome/headlines/prop12apr99_1.htm
for some incredibly dry stuff on nuclear weapons, go here:
http://www.infomanage.com/nonproliferation/primer/
There's alot of stuff about things like nukes and antimatter on the internet, unfortunatly a lot of it is written by idiots - in fact worryingly it applies to any subject in any area ( we were once looking up some stuff on cocktails, and having made them, realised the person who wrote the recipies could never have tried them themselves, the gits.
EDIT: back to physics, the 500kg TC device mentioned above would release energy to yeild equiavlent to ~ 11 giga tons of TNT, however, and this is a big however, it wouldn't have the exactly the same effect because a proportion of the energy released is released as radiation ( see that nuke link I mentioned earlier for some thing similar that happens with them ) in comparison:
Hiroshima device was ~20 kilotons
St Helens was ~10 megatons
I think most modern big nukes are 200 to 700 kilotons
the big city busters of the early cold war were bigger than 1 megaton
The biggest bomb humanity detonated was about ~60 megatons( dont quote me on that, it was a USSR device and I think Tsar was in it's name somewhere)
Krakatoa was ~200 megatons
If an asteroid hit us and the explosion was of around the 11 gigatons mentioned before, it'd destroy, and I quote:
'Land impact destroys a large state (eg- California, France, Japan) and produces enough atmospheric dust loading to affect global climate, freezing crops. Ocean impact creates hemisphere-spanning tsunamis but no global climate change. Global ozone layer is heavily damaged.' -( actually thats the low end it would also get the effects of the next in the list, see the link below)
This is taken off this site though I know it's originally off a differnet site, as mentioned in the refrences for that page):
http://www.stardestroyer.net/Empire/index.html
Go to the essay section and then look at planet killers
Althougth the site is about Star Wars, it is a very good and (accurate on the science) site, if your gonna start talking about things like this I suggest a look - the forums are also worth a good look to, hey thats enough pimping for the moment.
If I apear a bit preachy about this sort of thing, I suppose its because I am, I did 2 years of a physics degree before deciding to switch to just computers, and when you see wrong information being handed out, not that any has really happened here yet, it gets annoying, just like you get annoyed when some damn fool lists the wrong recipie for a Jack the Ripper cocktail. And I imagine If you hear somebody talking crap about something you knew a fair amount about you get annoyed, or a least think there a fool. Well I think I've humilated myself enough for the mo.
Anyway the big question: how much should manoeuvrability change?
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Originally posted by Robin Varley
Anyway the big question: how much should manoeuvrability change?
Noticably but not significantly - say ~%10.
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Originally posted by Sandwich
Noticably but not significantly - say ~%10.
Sounds good to me.
So if we take 10% manoeuvrability off say the Ursa when it's fully loaded with 'heavy' flagged weapons, are people gonna mind, or are they expecting their Ursa to perfrom better than it does at the moment.
Ok that's muddled, say hypothetically we dont have a flag system to determine 'heavy' weapons, ie any weapon you carry will affect manoeuvrability, in that case would you expect the Ursa to move as it does at the moment in FS2 when it has a full load and then gain up to 10% extra manoeuvrability as you fire off the weapons, or when your empty it'll move as it normallly does and with a full load of weapons its manoeuvrability is reduced by 10%
Then you could just control the use of 'heavy' weapons with a command line option, so you'd have an all or nothing system as it were.
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Originally posted by Descenterace
It doesn't matter how low the density of matter is. A kilogram is still a kilogram. Half a kilo each of matter and antimatter (and once we can produce 10 grams of antimatter, we'll have no trouble producing 500 grams, or even several tonnes) would produce a larger blast than any weapon previously constructed. We're talking the complete obliteration of a country the size of France.
Actually Robin Varley has it correct. I worked out the numbers for this on another thread a while back (it's pretty easy. You just plug the numbers into e=mc^2. The hard part is converting from Joules to megatons :D )
I think there was a bomb built around 100Megatons but it was later dismantled again since it was pretty pointless.
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The Tsar Bomba, made by Russia, was a 100 megaton atomic weapon. Even the RUssians were scared of it, so they dismantled it fairly quickly.
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Lovely... They probably sold the bits too
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Originally posted by Robin Varley
Sounds good to me.
So if we take 10% manoeuvrability off say the Ursa when it's fully loaded with 'heavy' flagged weapons, are people gonna mind, or are they expecting their Ursa to perfrom better than it does at the moment.
Ok that's muddled, say hypothetically we dont have a flag system to determine 'heavy' weapons, ie any weapon you carry will affect manoeuvrability, in that case would you expect the Ursa to move as it does at the moment in FS2 when it has a full load and then gain up to 10% extra manoeuvrability as you fire off the weapons, or when your empty it'll move as it normallly does and with a full load of weapons its manoeuvrability is reduced by 10%
Then you could just control the use of 'heavy' weapons with a command line option, so you'd have an all or nothing system as it were.
For mission balance sake, I'd say it would be best to have it affect the Ursa by +/- 5% of its current speed, but I don't know how you'd pull that off.
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If you call the total mass converted to energy in an H-bomb 'm', and the bomb's yield in tonnes of TNT 'y', then the yield per kilo of converted mass 't' is given by:
t = y / m
If you know the approximate efficiency of the reaction, then:
m = total bomb mass x efficiency
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Originally posted by Robin Varley
for some incredibly dry stuff on nuclear weapons...
That site seems... well, crappy. If you actually want to know something, read the Nuclear Weapons Frequently Asked Questions (http://http://nuketesting.enviroweb.org/hew/Nwfaq/Nfaq0.html). It's best to have the .zip file handy:
http://nuketesting.enviroweb.org/hew/Nwfaq/Nwfaq.zip
Recommended reading and an absolutely mandatory resource for anyone wanting to have a clue about the subject. Very accurate details about the designs, effects, materials, you name it.Originally posted by Corsair114
The Tsar Bomba, made by Russia, was a 100 megaton atomic weapon. Even the RUssians were scared of it, so they dismantled it fairly quickly.
Uhh... Not even close, sorry. :)
The Tsar Bomba (http://nuketesting.enviroweb.org/hew/Russia/TsarBomba.html) design was for a 100 Mt device, but the tested bomb was a 50 megaton bomb.
Check the FAQ (http://nuketesting.enviroweb.org/hew/Nwfaq/Nfaq1.html): "The largest nuclear explosion ever set off (50 Mt) was the Tsar Bomba (King of Bombs), a Soviet three stage fission-fusion-fission design."
Without babbling too much about the matter (those who want can read the faq for the longwinded details), they replaced it's fissionable stage(s) with non-fissionable material. That halved the yield and made it the cleanest nuclear wepon ever (the term "clean" means how large a portion of the yield comes from fusion - with a uranium tamper the bomb would have produced huge amounts of fission fallout) - 97% fusion.
And by the way, the Tsar Bomba wasn't anything practical, it was a huge device and impractical for actual military use. Information, pictures and interesting descriptions about the test in here (http://nuketesting.enviroweb.org/hew/Russia/TsarBomba.html): "The nickname Tsar Bomba is a reference to the Russian proclivity for making gigantic but useless artifacts for show. The world's largest bell (the Tsar Kolokol) and cannon (the Tsar Pushka), neither of which are actually useful for anything, are on display at the Kremlin." For comparison, according to the faq, the largest deployed US three stage weapon is the 25 megaton Mk-41...
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Normal fighter/bombers shouldn't make a big bang when destroyed, but kamikazy ones should, since they'll cetanly arm everything they have. Taken that into account, no flag or code is needed, just set a special explosion and enjoy the show.:nod: