[Shadow86]

i like how my post was completely ignored
do i have to spell it out for you all?

<snip>

at 2k a pop theres not much this little corvette cant kill. and should those not be big enough, it can lob a meson torpedo out of one of its coilguns

Well, if you get into deep modding on the attacker ship and leave the defenders as they were, of course it can kill everything. With just as much effort, you could give the defenders more numerous, stronger beams. It wouldn't be such an easy battle then.

[GTF Hercules]

Well...

If you have a capital ship, you can have a launching mechanism for the Helios.

Remove the propulsion from the Helios, make it lighter, and make it's propulsion purely ballistic.

Ballistics do not apply in the vaccum of space, if the helios was just tossed at a ship it would travel in a straight line.
And then if you do not have a controlled propultion system the whole thing would probably break from the continued force put on it; no air resistance means ever increasing speed which would probably break the hapless Helios.

Saying you keep the propulsion.  What happens when you are hit by a high intensity laser beam and your ammunition bays are hit?  Even if the warheads don't blow, which is doubtful, the fuel would cause the ship to explode.
One last thing is what happens when you run out of missles?  You'd be pretty screwed.  And can you immagine the fleets of ships having to follow your missle destroyers to keep it supplied, or the down time it would take to resupply?
I can see a compromise, where there are smaller specialized ships designed for firing missles supporting the main force, but I cannot see a total replacement of beams by missles.
It's too expensive and risky for fleets large ships to have all those missles aboard.

[Shadow86]

Just a little detail. The lack of air resistance also means the Helios would keep flying in a straight line indefinitely, without suffering any damage from the movement itself. If reasonably modern aircraft disintegrate due to flying too fast (SR-71), it's due to the friction between the airframe and the air, not the speed itself.

If the force is too much, the torpedo would break shortly after launch, but the ordnance would be designed to withstand a specific amount of force. Given acceleration would be linear, the torpedo wouldn't break at any point, if properly designed.

[Colonol Dekker]

I'm all for beam weapons. Always have, been always will. But regarding resupply to limited ammo heavy ships. We all coped in wws 1 + 2 the big naval battles etc. Assuming that the big ships are operating well out of port, a small dedicated convoy could extend operational life by a week before resupply. <still prefers though>

[Herra Tohtori]

Ballistics is the only thing that applies in space.

It's just that everything in a limited area tends to be affected by the same gravitational acceleration (especially in free space, pun intended, where significant gravitational bodies are far enough to make the gravitation field close to homogenous), which means that the all free trajectories are parabels.

Locally on high orbit, trajectories of high velocity projectiles may look like straight lines, but basically you would just be placing them on a heliocentric orbit (or, if given escape velocity, shoot them out of the system)... they definitely wouldn't be moving in straight lines forever and indefinitely.

Also, it's not directly the friction that rips airplanes to shreds at high velocity. They are designed to withstand the heat generated by air friction; it's the dynamic pressure that will demolish an airplane if it gets into a bad attitude regarding the high velocity airflow. That's what killed Challenger and Columbia, and that one SR-71 whose pilot survived the airplane disintegrating around him at about mach 3... they all lost stability, turned sideways in the airflow and bang, there you go. Challenger due to fuel tank becoming an additional and rather unwanted thruster due to a hole burned into it, Columbia due to previous structural damage making control impossible and possibly by already destroying main flight surface, SR-71 due to inlet unstart causing asymmetric thrust and consequent loss of control.

Regarding acceleration causing damage to the projectiles, you only need to worry about that if you have moving parts in them. Electronics can tolerate pretty high accelerations (especially if wrapped into non-conductive, semi-solid heat tranferring substance that gives support to components - and printed circuit boards and microchips have no problems surviving a cannon firing grade accelerations, as proved by various high tech munitions of present day), mechanics too if properly designed but it gets that much more difficult by every moving part...

If you drop independent propulsion, it's pretty easy to make a warhead that can tolerate the accelerations you're speaking about.

Self-propelled bombs don't make much sense in space to be honest. Propulsion system just reduces the portion of payload from the munitions' total weight, it would be better to use some kind of mass accelerator to get the warheads to the target. Then again, if you're going for kinetic energy weapons only, I guess the only thing defining the winner between a large scale KEW and beams in energy output is the energy efficiency of the process. How much of used energy can be converted into kinetic energy or beams energy? and how much damage each GJ of kinetic energy accomplishes versus each GJ poured into beam cannons?

However the total efficiency of each weapon type is not as easily defined as total damage output per second; assuming that the combat drags on, beam equipped ships become more efficient because they don't need to haul the huge amount of ammunition to assure that it lasts through the fight.

[Wanderer]

Self-propelled bombs don't make much sense in space to be honest. Propulsion system just reduces the portion of payload from the munitions' total weight, it would be better to use some kind of mass accelerator to get the warheads to the target. Then again, if you're going for kinetic energy weapons only, I guess the only thing defining the winner between a large scale KEW and beams in energy output is the energy efficiency of the process. How much of used energy can be converted into kinetic energy or beams energy? and how much damage each GJ of kinetic energy accomplishes versus each GJ poured into beam cannons?

Given that it is most likely impossible to create enegy weapons with ability to maintain beam coherence to infinite distances it would probably break down into beams for close range combat and ballistic weapons further out. Also as distances become greater the accuracy of the ballistic weapons (with their muzzle velocity waaaay below that of the energy weapons by any sense) become more and more inaccurate the homing (ie self-powered) bombs become the best option regardless of their drawbacks.

[Colonol Dekker]

KEW refire rate is a major factor too, comm lines from tactical down to the individual fire control teams. Then there are reload drills to consider. The beams obviously just dump the old core (after a few hundred or thousand shots) and replace. Missiles would require teams of people employed just to reload each tube or ammo loading system.

[NGTM-1R]

I'm all for beam weapons. Always have, been always will. But regarding resupply to limited ammo heavy ships. We all coped in wws 1 + 2 the big naval battles etc. Assuming that the big ships are operating well out of port, a small dedicated convoy could extend operational life by a week before resupply. <still prefers though>

Fun fact: the outfit of main battery shells for a heavy ship such as a battleship or heavy cruiser tended to be no more than 150 rounds per gun. 105 to 120 was more common. They could get away with that because they had very big guns that fired very slowly. The monster light cruisers the US built (designated light for their 6" guns, but a Brooklyn or Cleveland would have eaten the majority of contemporary heavy cruisers alive in a 1v1) often had as many as 403 rounds per gun due to their impressive firing rates; with only fifteen main battery guns it was not unheard of for a Brooklyn-class ship to pour out over 1100 rounds in under 15 minutes. Most light cruiser designs from other nations tended to have closer to 200-250 rounds per gun. Destroyers varied wildly, from 200 to as many as 500 rounds per gun. The key fact here is that most of these ships had a combat endurance of perhaps one hour at maximum firing rate before they would run out of ammunition.

Today, with modern fully-automatic rapid-fire guns, an outfit of less than 150 rounds is very uncommon, and 250 or 300 rounds is much more likely. Ships using 3" main gun battery can have as many as 1000 rounds for their gun. But at maximum firing rate most modern ships can expend their total supply of gun ammunition in as little as ten minutes, and very rarely more than half an hour.

[Akalabeth Angel]

Today, with modern fully-automatic rapid-fire guns, an outfit of less than 150 rounds is very uncommon, and 250 or 300 rounds is much more likely. Ships using 3" main gun battery can have as many as 1000 rounds for their gun. But at maximum firing rate most modern ships can expend their total supply of gun ammunition in as little as ten minutes, and very rarely more than half an hour.

       Well that's okay, most people complain about FS battles if they're more than 10 minutes long anyway

[NGTM-1R]

Doesn't leave you much of a margin of error for multiple engagements, though, does it?

[Nuke]

in an fs sense the ragnarok class makes since. the volume of incoming bombs makes interception a very dangerous affair. i put one of theese with 2 wings of maras and 2 wings dragons and a ravana. even with missiles firing at long range and fighters intercepting them, the ravana was dead before it or the ragnarok was in beam range. i coulda tipped the balence if i had ordered a wing to disarm the ragnarok, or sent a wing of bombers after it. its subsystems are fairly weak.

but that said the ragnarok is pretty fast for a warship, and could actually outrun an ursa at default power settings. its best deployed in hit and run attacks against really big ships.

freespace isnt really all that balenced as far as big ships go. blind spots are abundant on all ships. and most capships are capable of destroying a ship one or two classes above it, given the right positioning and no fighters. turret density drops off as the size of the ships increase. freespace is not all that realistic. as far as realism goes a fighter would be obsolete, ships would be big masses of fuel tanks and engines, and while beam cannons would still work in this scenario, your better off using a missile with its own delta v.

[GTSVA]

I still hate the fact that a Lilith can take on a Terran Destroyer head-on.....most possibly defeat too....

[Droid803]

The Lilith is also the smallest cruiser   

[Excalibur]

Don't start this in here, there's allready a thread for that....

Anyway, beams are NOT cool, they are hot.

If they were better at moving the cannon while it was firing, they could easily take down anything, with the continuous damage being delt out as the beam allways points at it's target - assuming the 'beamer' is accurate.
Also, beams have the power to burn holes in ships, while the bombs, i.e. canon bombs, which are stupidly unadvanced compared to today's bombs, can't. And beams make nice, colourful glows on ships that aren't always red and yellow like the ones from explosions. And they look cool. Oh, and did I mention they look cool? btw, they look cool.

[terran_emperor]

Actually Cains are smaller...i think

[blowfish]

Compared to a Lilith?  Nope.

[IceFire]

Cains are the same size.

And yes we already did the Lilith thread.  Not much accomplished there.

[Droid803]

Thirteen pages of heated discussion

Actually, the Lilith is a good example. Can you cram enough Helios onto a Lilith to match the damage its LRed does? I don't think so 
Tiny ships blasting huge beams that fire continuously is the way to go.

[Stormkeeper]

Look at it this way.

Beams have limitless ammunition. Its energy after all, drawn from the ship's reactor. This also frees space normally devoted to carry ammo, and eliminates the risk of an ammo explosion. Imagine if a Hecate carrying Helios in the millions suffered an ammo explosion.

Beams deal more damage relative to their size. A beam turret consists, at most, of a firing mechanism, power supply ( the reactor ), amplifying beams and targeting systems. They also guarantee a hit. Nothing stops a beam save a shield, and no capital ship in FS2 has one. 'Cept the Lucifer. And they can be overcharge to deal more damage.

By contrast, launching a Helios to combat worthy speeds would require a torpedo tube, energy to propel the Helios, a feed mechanism. And there is no guarantee of a hit. The Helios can easily be intercepted by flak, CIWS or interceptors, even if you get it up to combat speeds. Although there is something to be said of packing 20 Helios bombs into a single torpedo that splits at a certain distance, so there are that many more projectiles to hunt down. And even then a hit is not guaranteed.

Psychologically, a beam is much scarier. Its bright, deadly, fast, accurate and very much unstoppable. In short, its intimidating. I doubt you would dare to face down a charging beam weapon. The Helios is slow, small, nearly insignificant and very stoppable. Interceptors were designed with hunting bombs in mind, and they excel at this. But there, as far as the FS2 universe is concerned, no counter to beams short of running like hell.

Cost wise, beams are cheaper. You merely pay for the beam system. Done. For bombs, you pay for the delivery system and the bomb itself. As it stands, bombers make far better delivery systems then any you can find in FS2. Bombers are capable of delivering the bomb right in the target's face, and can even defend themselves to an extent.

Pound for pound, bombs DO deal more damage. But, beams can deliver more damage simply because they cannot be stopped, while bombs can.

... If you ask me, the GTVA should design small, maneuverable ships which have a single LGreen and no CIWS, and simply escort them with fighters. Costwise they'll definitely be cheaper than destroyers, and have more potential for damage.

By the way, did anybody actually make a capital class missile/torpedo that hits like a helios but moves like a interceptor ?

[MP-Ryan]

Beams are purely for the effect.  Given the military experiments with railgun weaponry now, I would think that by 2355 a railgun launcher for large-scale munitions in space would be a fairly easy proposal.  Think of a Helios warhead sans propulsion accelerated to speeds in excess of 3000 meters per second in total vaccum.

The weaponry, propulsion, and ship design specifications of FreeSpace have no basis in reality.  You're better to take them as they are (a great fictional universe) than even begin to ask questions which remotely apply in the real world.

Photon beams as weapons?  Doubtful.  Ionizing radiation?  Hell yes.