Orbital units - 2 directions

Live Free or Die: John Ringo, Troy rising series?

So what would you allow in the way of ground defenses? Using a real orbit you would cover a lot of the ground on the planet which means it's likely you would go over defenses.[/quote]


considering how much effort it takes to get anything at all into orbit to begin with (high cost of launcher, size of rocket relative to payload) .... this is a fun question with many variables .... lots of balance experimentation in beta of course

with the orbital layer being so high up, and the projectiles having to fight gravity to get up there, a ground based defence would need to be launched by it's own rocket, or be laser based. A rocket could be intercepted by an anti-rocket laser though .... some ideas

1) ground based laser that consumes a large amount of power would make the most sense. To make it interesting, maybe this colossal laser should get stronger the longer it continuously fires, consuming more and more power as it does so (similar to Void Ray in SC) but as it becomes stronger, it saps more and more power from your eco. Strategic implementation being that over-reliance on this weapon could allow your opponent to cripple your power eco by flooding cheap (maybe dummy?) sats

2) perhaps there should be a high atmosphere bomber/anti-sat plane that can launch an atmosphere-to-orbital weapons payload rocket (similar to how spaceshipone plans on getting it's rockets into orbit, launched from a plane) This rocket would contain a small swarm of MKV (multiple kill vehicle)

these fast, highly manoeuvrable kamikaze drones would swarm and overwhelm anti-missile defences on the sat, zipping in for a kill.

3) another option would be to disable the sats with a direct-energy microwave-type beam that fries their electronics. This would cause the sat to continue it's current motion path indefinitely, eventually crashing into other stuff in orbit. A good battery of these disable based defenses could lead to some nice orbital clutter, making it tough for your enemy to get in there to fight you from above

side note - any plans on having space elevators be a thing in this game? Seems like it would fit with the setting really well, and would be a high value late game structure that provides more continuous transit from surface to orbit than a rocket. Drawback being vulnerability of structure.

Interplanetary launchers were launched from a moon in the Kickstarter video. Moons have signficantly less of a gravity well.

I think Landers are an easy way to cheaply bridge the distances between low-mass low-profile celestial bodies (asteroid -> asteroid, moon -> moon, moon -> asteroid), or moon/asteroid -> planet if need be. The way I am interpreting it, the Egg is a special Lander for the Commander. You can stick either the Egg or a Lander in a T2 Rocket and send it from a high-mass body to a low-mass body.

This way you get an interesting fissure between players starting in outer space and players starting on a planet. Players on-planet have a high metal income and more space to build on, but are much more vulnerable to attacks by other players, both on the planet and from orbit. On the other hand, players in deep space are much more hard-pressed for metal and space, but they can easily attack and retreat without revealing their location or needlessly exposing their base.

Uhm it kinda is that simple you know where the satellite is going to be if you've a decent radar and all you need to do is get something in it's orbital path (not that hard if the orbital path is right over your head) & then watch the Satellite tear it's self to shreds once it runs into a couple of the 10,000 ball bearings you threw up there just before it arrived... It doesn't even have to go into orbit just cross the orbit at roughly the right time as it falls back to earth, requires alot less energy than trying to put something into orbit.
Seeing once you get something into space there's nothing to knock it off course so all it needs is a little correction to put it into the correct place, release it's ball bearing and boom no Sat.

Also why can't you aim a Laser? You know where it's going, how fast it's going and you can actively track the laser along it's orbit until it hits it, very very simple much easier than kinetic weapons as long as you can put enough power behind it.

Or you simply do a Star Fish prime http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starfish_Prime and that's good bye to every Satellite in that orbit and most near bye ones from the EMP.

I don't think that's thinking about that type of engagement completely or correctly, but I'm not claiming expertise. Just that it doesn't sound right to me.

If there are uses outside of intelligence, fabrication, harvesting, and ground-targeted annihilation, I'd like to hear what those concepts are. I have a pretty good handle on what I'm thinking about what I listed, and I just don't like the idea of unit spam of those types in that layer. It doesn't sound right. It falls too far away from true-to-life. And I'm not looking for true-to-life, but I think a sense of analog is important - and the rest of the game tiers have that.

If we're talking about orbital fighters - I'm really, Really, REALLY not a fan.

Anyways, I gotta go offline for the night - Mrs. Sechastain is tired of my internet friends.

@neutrino - I hope you're not frustrated with me. I really appreciate the time you're taking to talk with us. Bottom line, I just want an awesome game. What I have played so far has been a BLAST. You asked for my ideas, here they are. We both know you're not obligated to listen (but thanks for taking the time to let me have a bit of say)

Beers!!

Beam type weapons are ineffective versus spacecraft - for various reasons.
The simplest reason: Aim. You would have to aim with a precision of less than 0.00005° per meter of the spacecrafts diameter just to hit at all. That is as little as it sounds, so far, no human build aperture is capable of achieving that type of precision.

So you are left with rocket type weapons anyway. But they also have to catch up with the spacecraft, since the chances of intercepting when flying in an orthogonal orbit are ... rather low. That however means, whatever rocket you are using to intercept the spacecraft, needs to be close to being able to go into orbit itself.
Funny side effect: A rocket capable of going into specifc orbit, is also capable of hitting spacecraft in almost ANY orbit, all over the planet.

The ball bearings would have to be IN ORBIT as well. If you can get them into an orbit which is just stable enough to have a realistic chance of intercepting the target, you could as well intercept the target straight ahead with an ballistic missile.

Only a little problem with that: EMP can be shielded, and any military grade satellite IS shielded, and if it was only to protect from the next solar flare.
Also most of the satellites damaged by Starfish Prime haven't been hit by the EMP, they have been damage by the radiation which was caught in the magnetic field, just in the orbit where the satellites passed through over and over again, until they would fail due to decay of sensible components.

It would be great if you could visually seperate the orbital layer from the air/land. Essentially a sort of build and manage mode, where a larger sphere is projected on the planet to provide a building grid for orbital buildings. In this mode, the camera would not focus itself on a particular point on the planet, but more like a single point if the earth wasn't rotating or it snaps to a unit or groups of units moving around. This would also mean the opposite, the ability to filter out orbital units entirely. Of course for visuals you could still choose to render both.

Orbital should be simplistic enough to allow for the grouping of several units that run on parallel orbits without the speed differentiating. For gameplay purposes we should presume that fuel is only a concept that is freely manipulated in order to strike a balance between the adjustability of an orbit, and the unit actually being in orbit as opposed to just flying around.

Perhaps in order to determine an orbit, you could place a sort of orbit blueprints on the ground within a limited area, and the game would automatically put the unit in the right orbit.

The Russians were using Lasers to blind american spy Sats in the 70's and 80's. The Chinese were apparently doing it in the last 10 or so years as well. So you certainly can target a Satellite with laser & hit it often and then it's simply a matter of having enough power...

They put laser reflectors on the Moon and hit them from earth, so hitting a Satellite isn't much of an issue with a Laser: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Laser_Ranging_experiment

Even assuming you can't aim which the above suggests is completely wrong. You don't really have to aim you simply wave it across the orbital path rapidly at low power and as soon as you see a reflection indicating it's touched the sat you pulse it to full power and the Satellite is gone...

Blinding requires WAY less power than taking it down. They fired with lasers with an output of several dozen kilowatt, and only a few MILLIwatt would hit the satellite because the beam had to be extremly wide spread or they wouldn't have been able to aim at all. Enough to blind an extremely sensitive optical sensor, but not even enough to produce a visible reflection, leave alone causing any damage.
Also:
Blinding did only work back then due to a flaw in the technology used for optical sensors, causing an cascading effect in the semiconductor. You do know that flares you would get if you took a picture against a source of light with an old digital camera? They are caused by that flaw, such flares no longer exist with modern sensors, so your attempt to blind it would just show up the origin of the laser beam, but thats just it.

Even if you did fire with a megawatt laser, you still wouldn't be able to hit with a focused beam. And without focus, beam based weapons are merely flashlights.

http://what-if.xkcd.com/13/
They are aiming at the moon, but it's not that different.

A deathlaser which is fired from space is actually a lot scarier since it does not need to aim, and the laser beam is already focused. But you can't aim at anything smaller than ~50x50 meters.

Aiming for energy weapons in space is only a problem at great distances, and only if you have time for the one shot.

But for the galaxy wide conflict where satellites only are expected to shoot down other satellites in the same orbit, you can easily expect them to be the most effective weapons in space.

As it's not like accuracy is what's holding back most other weapons, even in this day and age we have drones firing missiles that can hit specific school desks they were aimed at, let alone light speed lasers.

Interesting ideas so far, glad this thread was opened up. Thanks, Neutrino.

As much as I love the concept of playing KSP while playing an RTS, the concept terrifies me and I see all the plus sides of the "fake" orbit.
Going to point out the ideas I read above and my 2 cents on them, then some ideas of my own. Attempting to go around quoting everybody will be pointless, so if I "take" your idea, im just agreeing. ***
Im going to skip the movement related stuff a bit as its heavily discussed, but for the record I am all for the "fake" orbit, with perhaps some orbity patrol options. As much as I liked Paul's idea of the 40degree limit on the equator, I see where it hurts balance with the poles in gameplay, but much like Paul had said, we could have that grey area on the tops and bottom that become more limiting, making the poles advantageous but not impossible or overpowered depending on the party.

Moving forward.

Regarding the balance of Orbit vs the 3 levels of planet play.
I really like that ground units like tanks could (poorly) take a shot at air, and made single bomber attacks on tank lines a bad idea. In light of this idea, Orbital should be a show of superiority and be that similar 90% effective unless poorly provisioned concept. A player winning the space race should definately have a major advantage over his opponents, and likewise a player arriving at a planet via space should have the option to start his invasion via building units in orbit, assuming he is using the resources of an asteroid or what have you. Now I know we would absolutely hate the concept of having Anti-air turrets shooting down satelites. This thought reminded me of a game I played awhile back called "Defcon".
In defcon, when a player had dormant nuclear launchers, they became anti-nuke/ anti-air defense. When firing nukes that ability was lost until nukes ran out.
With this in mind, perhaps the ability to toggle the catapault cruise missiles to go from long range missile artillery to a similar radius anti-space artillery. This would mean that these mid-late ground game offense/defense units would become early space period defense as well until they are countered with the appropriate superior orbital units. I think these would have to be balanced as less effective against space than they would be against land units to make them rather early forms of defence. They also would not be able to alternate tasks, they must be toggled, so as to make the player choose how he balances his defense. Perhaps in order to utilize these, one would need the T2 radar to detect a limited range of space area, and of course further space developement like sattelites would improve this missile systems effectiveness, until orbital combat units take over the role.

See where I am getting here, where we have both the Orbital aggressor fighting his way in with a rudementary resistance, we have the potential underdog on surface, fighting his way out against existing orbital until he has gained a fair foothold on the battle.

i'll be back in a bit.

Correct. You launch them from the orbital factory which sits on the ground. However, once they are on smaller airless bodies they can self propel. This is one of the differences between atmosphere/deep gravity well vs. outer planets that I'm hoping to make the game more interesting.

Just to be clear there will be on orbit fabbers, but not factories. The fabbers will be launched from the ground but will be able to build larger orbital installations.

Again, scale is a primary component of the game. It's not cost effective to build entire gameplay systems if they are only going to see limited use. Keep in mind I've *tried* to design the game to be as cost effective as possible across the board. It's important to me that no particular area gets out of whack with it's cost.

So what's your proposed design then?

It's a core design point of the game. In addition there are cost concerns with systems that get limited usage.

It's a good thing realism isn't a concern here. Realism is not a core principal of the game design.

Ok, so you want an entirely new set of orders, new verbs etc. Can you queue these commands? If not you are breaking the interface.

So you are advocating completely unrealistic orbital physics that are somewhere in between realistic and what I've proposed.

When you say power over you mean what exactly? Remember the units have rules about how they move. You have to think in terms of those rules and the math involved.

Ok, how do you protect yourself from that? What does the rest of the unit interaction look like?

The same concept could be scaled down. But it makes a lot more sense for the game to "scale up" the regular mechanics into orbital. Think about how orders are given, chained etc.

Correct.

considering how much effort it takes to get anything at all into orbit to begin with (high cost of launcher, size of rocket relative to payload) .... this is a fun question with many variables .... lots of balance experimentation in beta of course

with the orbital layer being so high up, and the projectiles having to fight gravity to get up there, a ground based defence would need to be launched by it's own rocket, or be laser based. A rocket could be intercepted by an anti-rocket laser though .... some ideas

1) ground based laser that consumes a large amount of power would make the most sense. To make it interesting, maybe this colossal laser should get stronger the longer it continuously fires, consuming more and more power as it does so (similar to Void Ray in SC) but as it becomes stronger, it saps more and more power from your eco. Strategic implementation being that over-reliance on this weapon could allow your opponent to cripple your power eco by flooding cheap (maybe dummy?) sats

2) perhaps there should be a high atmosphere bomber/anti-sat plane that can launch an atmosphere-to-orbital weapons payload rocket (similar to how spaceshipone plans on getting it's rockets into orbit, launched from a plane) This rocket would contain a small swarm of MKV (multiple kill vehicle)

these fast, highly manoeuvrable kamikaze drones would swarm and overwhelm anti-missile defences on the sat, zipping in for a kill.

3) another option would be to disable the sats with a direct-energy microwave-type beam that fries their electronics. This would cause the sat to continue it's current motion path indefinitely, eventually crashing into other stuff in orbit. A good battery of these disable based defenses could lead to some nice orbital clutter, making it tough for your enemy to get in there to fight you from above

side note - any plans on having space elevators be a thing in this game? Seems like it would fit with the setting really well, and would be a high value late game structure that provides more continuous transit from surface to orbit than a rocket. Drawback being vulnerability of structure.[/quote]

My point was that if you have ground defenses and you start moving your satellite around using regular orbital mechanics that it's like you will pass over these defenses many times when trying to get into position. So what ground defenses does it make sense to use when going with realistic orbital mechanics?

This is just visualization mode stuff. Let's talk more about how the units work.

So how do you move units around? What does the interface look like? Can I chain commands? How long does it take units to move into the same position as other units? What kind of ground do I cover during that time? How easy is it for the player to predict that?

Way too hand wavy. What kind of blueprint? How would you get units to get near each other?

I'm sorry but true-to-life just means realism. The design I want to go with is just as realistic as anything else in the game when we can simply invent whatever technology we want to solve the problem.

In before shields.