Hard Light Productions Forums
Hosted Projects - FS2 Required => Blue Planet => Topic started by: CT27 on March 23, 2015, 01:10:48 pm
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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?
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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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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.
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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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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.
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Miss Factor in weapons.tbl is your friend. :p
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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.
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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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).
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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
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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?
(http://i.imgur.com/JKwJPDa.jpg)
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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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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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- 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.
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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.
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Considering how the beams are only kept in their tight pass by a magnetic bottle, maybe you'd just have to make the bottle cone-shaped or complete disable it and let (FS2's pseudo-)physics take care of spreading out the beam.
But considering how the beams only reach their range due to being so tightly focussed, any such "shotgun-beam" would have a very short range, probably even shorter than most fighter-based primaries.
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I would assume the focus of the magnetic bottle is largely achieved through the setup of the hardware itself, and is therefore nearly impossible to adjust...
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A lot of the beam mechanics in BP, such as the need to construct a magnetic bottle from emitter to target, are designed to make it hard to achieve a few outcomes that feel degenerate, uninteresting, or corrosive to the internal logic of the setting.
One outcome we want to avoid is the ability to blind-fire beams like big lightsabers. If you could do that, jamming would be uninteresting (since you are at short visual range and relative motion is trivial to adjust for) and everyone would shoot their anti-warship beams at bombers. TAG beacons would become less interesting: why do we need a special transmitter attached to the target just to perform a trivial aimpoint calculation?
So we say that beams aren't lasers, they're huge confined blowtorches, and you can't just trivially fire them at an arbitrary point in space, you generally need to have a valid target to draw the bottle to (unless you're a slasher). Jamming can mess with your bottle, so even if you have a clear visual solution, you can't just shoot and get a hit.
Of course, it's obviously possible to have a beam that discharges into empty space, since we see AAAs do that all the time, and even direct-fire anti-warship beams sometimes slip off target. What's important is that it takes time and data to build the magnetic bottle, and it costs a lot of power and heat to fire. This prevents yonder Orion from firing its BGreens at incoming bomber waves, because it's impossible to build a bottle straight to such a small target and hard to build a bottle to an arbitrary point with much confidence of a hit. Slashers are more robust to jamming because they're already wheeling around crazily, but they can be jammed too.
The design goal in both gameplay and fiction is to promote shooting beams at other big things, reward clever use of ECM/ECCM/ESM, and discourage **** like a Diomedes waving its Bull Frosts around at fighters like huge death scissors.
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A lot of the beam mechanics in BP, such as the need to construct a magnetic bottle from emitter to target, are designed to make it hard to achieve a few outcomes that feel degenerate, uninteresting, or corrosive to the internal logic of the setting.
One outcome we want to avoid is the ability to blind-fire beams like big lightsabers. If you could do that, jamming would be uninteresting (since you are at short visual range and relative motion is trivial to adjust for) and everyone would shoot their anti-warship beams at bombers. TAG beacons would become less interesting: why do we need a special transmitter attached to the target just to perform a trivial aimpoint calculation?
So we say that beams aren't lasers, they're huge confined blowtorches, and you can't just trivially fire them at an arbitrary point in space, you generally need to have a valid target to draw the bottle to (unless you're a slasher). Jamming can mess with your bottle, so even if you have a clear visual solution, you can't just shoot and get a hit.
Of course, it's obviously possible to have a beam that discharges into empty space, since we see AAAs do that all the time, and even direct-fire anti-warship beams sometimes slip off target. What's important is that it takes time and data to build the magnetic bottle, and it costs a lot of power and heat to fire. This prevents yonder Orion from firing its BGreens at incoming bomber waves, because it's impossible to build a bottle straight to such a small target and hard to build a bottle to an arbitrary point with much confidence of a hit. Slashers are more robust to jamming because they're already wheeling around crazily, but they can be jammed too.
The design goal in both gameplay and fiction is to promote shooting beams at other big things, reward clever use of ECM/ECCM/ESM, and discourage **** like a Diomedes waving its Bull Frosts around at fighters like huge death scissors.
You really had 'bottled' that up for a while, didn't you? You're practically 'beaming'. :cool:
Okay sorry..
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A Diomedes scything beams at fighters like huge death scissors is satisfying as **** to imagine.
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You have to remember also that beams work on a thermal principle. Each individual particle in the plasma depositing it's individual energy onto the enemy hull. if the beam is to wide, the heat will be dispersed on the target in to wide an area to be effective at melting through the hull. So if a shotgun or otherwise beam was made, it might just warm up the Shields XD
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A Diomedes scything beams at fighters like huge death scissors is satisfying as **** to imagine.
Distance traveled by slasher beams are directly proportional to target's dimensions. A slasher beam travels far, far smaller distance when it targets a fighter as opposed to a cruiser. As a matter of fact, I believe BP should have at least one slasher type anti-fighter beam. It'd be nice if there was a way to override slasher starting and ending point distance to a fixed value regardless of target's dimensions.
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They have an anti-fighter slasher, though I'm not sure if it's actually used in any mission so far. But it certainly exists in FRED.
And the thing about the distance a slasher travels is just how the game calculates matters, not necessarily how it's supposed to work in-universe.
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They have an anti-fighter slasher, though I'm not sure if it's actually used in any mission so far. But it certainly exists in FRED.
It used to be used in Delenda Est, iirc (I'm not sure it's still the case).
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TerSlashBlueAAAs are cool and i plan to use more of them.
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Distance traveled by slasher beams are directly proportional to target's dimensions. A slasher beam travels far, far smaller distance when it targets a fighter as opposed to a cruiser. As a matter of fact, I believe BP should have at least one slasher type anti-fighter beam. It'd be nice if there was a way to override slasher starting and ending point distance to a fixed value regardless of target's dimensions.
Well, the slasher targeting code could be modified to adjust the distance between the two target points to fit some tabled value...
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I think the biggest obstacle is to come up with a way to take accuracy into account. You can't just take two random spots in space.
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Since we're talking about jamming in general:
If GTVA wins this war and gets free/unfettered access to UEF technology, could beam jamming be used against the Shivans?
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I suppose so, though not for long, since they'd pretty quickly adjust to block the jamming.
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On the technology of this, how does a TAG beacon 'override' the beam jamming? (IIRC, in "Delenda Est" the AWACS was TAGed first before the Carthage destroyed it)
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My guess is that, in addition to lighting up a target, a TAG beacon can be used to provide sort of a magnetic anchor or something on the target, allowing Alliance ships to overcome various aspects of the jamming.
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Slash beams fire during Delenda Est, which means the ECM environment is not so extreme that magnetic bottles can't form at all. With the precise data from the TAG beacon, presumably enough of the difficulty of forming the magnetic bottle is overcome that it allows direct-fire beams to form.
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I've personally rationalized it by assuming that beam generation and targeting involves very complex math and possibly subspace mechanics beyond just forming a magnetic bottle. I mean, how do you make such a bottle without sucking in every ferromagnetic object for miles if not with subspace trickery? How do simultaneous beams not create a hilariously dangerous plasma storm? You cannot point and shoot them just like you cannot point and jump with jump drives. Do anything to **** up or spoof the reading/generation of local gravity/EM/subspace tensors with ECMs, and the beam is liable to miss by several degrees. Slash beams don't care if you miss by several degrees, but a point beam does.
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Slightly off-topic, but how is GTVA jamming different than UEF jamming (i.e., the GTVA jamming that can temporarily disable UEF torpedoes)?
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Presumably it works the obvious way, jamming their guidance so it'd be useless to fire them (not necessarily actively preventing them from being fired).