[Wanderer]

Are there any real limits to the velocity you can give to a primary weapon. I have tried for some time to create near instant (laserlike) weapons to replace things like Circe and the basic 'laser'. I got those working by giving them velocity of 100 000 and lifetime of 0.02 but if i tried to tweak those values to even faster the weapons simply didn't do anything in about four shots out of a five. I thought it might be a problem with weapons lifetime being so short that the game didn't register it at all, but is that possible? Or are there some other limits?

Also another thing, should be different table entries for turrets having 1, 2 or 3 firing points. Mean it would be reasonable to expect twinbarreled weapon firing nearly twice as often (alternating barrels) compared to a turret with a single firing point.

[StratComm]

A velocity that high really isn't practical, as collisions get very unpredictable at that speed.  That's why most of your shots aren't hitting anything.  A better solution would be to use fighterbeams to simulate lasers, since they are much more like instantaneous weapons than any bolt weapon could ever be made to simulate.

[Wanderer]

I tested with that velocity of 100 000 and i did not  suffer any failed firings. With lifetime of 0.02 s it is practically instantaneous. That was an attempt to create 'laser' weapon firing with very high rate of fire. That is to use pulses instead of continous beam.

Perhaps i have check those beams through.

[StratComm]

I know how you did it, and I also know why.  What I'm trying to point out is that you're exceeding the limitations on how well the engine can compute collisions - the point at which your shots will no longer work.  However, you're right; a lifetime of .02 seconds is roughly equivalent to the 50 FPS average you're probably getting out of the game and, barring that, your monitor.  If you shorten the time to, say, .01 seconds, the game isn't making physics calculations in that time frame so by the time it gets around to calculating its final position the projectile is no longer in play.  It's an implimentation limitation, and really there's not a good way to make things "more" precise.

[Raptor]

Originally posted by Wanderer
Also another thing, should be different table entries for turrets having 1, 2 or 3 firing points. Mean it would be reasonable to expect twinbarreled weapon firing nearly twice as often (alternating barrels) compared to a turret with a single firing point.

I've done that.  I've even done versions for Multi-part turrets too.

Unfortunatly there seems to be a limit on the number of weapons allowed...

[Ulala]

Were you going for a railgun or mass driver or something?

[Wanderer]

Originally posted by Ulala
Were you going for a railgun or mass driver or something?

No, i was simply trying to use standard weapons (i.e. not fighterbeams) to create replacement for EM weapons, like Circe, standard subach and so on. As i thought that em weapons should be instantaneous. I had 'standard' slow veloocity blob guns with them in the table file and the 'new' lasers were just an alternative weapons with good range, near instant hit ability but had practically no mass, quite low damage and quite large $fof -value to compensate for the improvements as well as a small trail added for cinematic effects.

My railguns had much lower velocities (only about 3000) and were ballistic primaries and either cannons with heavy damage and very limited ammunition (like 200 rounds) or machine gun like weapons with low damage and loads of ammunition.