How will the artillery work in this game? For the past three games, my favorite was always bombing the hell outta people. I was thinking that in the planetary perspective, small scale it is considering the size of actual planets, the artillery rounds wouldn't be able to hit the other side of the planet since it would actually shoot outside the planets gravitational pull. I would just think that artillery is just more of a defensive purpose unless built close on the other side of the planet. But putting on the moon would be awesome! But with the moon, would the moon rotate or would it rotate with the planet? Personally I think it should be random, more likely that way. Also, there should be a random amount of moons per planet, with a probability of how many planets per planet (simulation techniques). With a rotating moon, it should make it harder to use artillery on that moon as apposed to one that rotates with the planet. But also the planet rotates so timing is always the key. This game is extremely exciting, and i'm happy that the best crew is on the job. Please, everyone respond your ideas. I think this is a great topic of the game that might be hard to figure out. Artillery always decides the battles.
Sure would artillery be able to hit the opposite side of a sphere. In fact only projectiles which exceed escape velocity would leave the orbit and even below this velocity, a projectile could travel several times around the planet before impacting. Moon to planet bombardment will probably be existent, planet to planet on the other hand, who knows... Btw.: Rotation of celestial bodies has been declined as far as i know. Made things to complex as it requires constant recalculations for trajectories. But doesn't make much of a difference. Artillery is not direct fire, so it would be able to reach ANY point of the planet when fired from a moon anyway (and vice versa). What do you think, where we got the pictures of the "dark side" of the moon from?
The thing with interplanetary artillery and similar mass drivers is that if you have variable power cannon you can do all sorts of crazy stuff by abusing orbital mechanics. time delay strikes, simultaneous strikes, walk the artillery. like trick shots in pool only with far longer ranges. rotating bodies can be easily accounted for. the key thing to remember is that at those ranges a minutely slight deviation (.001%) of cannon power.accuracy can mean the difference between hitting their base with orbital shells and hitting your base.
Ranges will not be at scale and i doubt that the projectile will "really" take the precise trajectory which would be required to hit the point, it's sufficient if it's just an believable approximation with slight course corrections over time to make up for rounding errors.
this is not true, if the physics are like in reality Either a projectile is in orbit, then it doesnt hit the planet surface again, or it has less speed, then it hits the surface. But it will never travel several times around a planet and hit then. (exception: it is a propelled projectile). A cannon btw is not able to shoot something in orbit. It either will hit the surface, or it will send the projectile in an escape trajectory. Why no orbit? The canon will always sit in the pericenter, and no matter how fast the muzzle velocity is, you will not raise the pericenter above the canon. So a project that would be in an orbit would always hit the canon itself xD (ok not if the planet rotates ) orbit mechanics are fascinating, but will be too hardcore for anyone who is not a student of physics, aerospace engineering or something comparable
Hmmm. Will planets spin? If so that makes artillery positioning and timing alot more important. I'd actually love to see that :lol: , instead of just setting your moon-based rail-gun(or whatever) to constantly bombard a base on a nearby planet and forget about it, you only have limited windows to hit the target while the planetoids spin. Would give your opponent time to scramble a strike force after being bombarded before they come into targeting alignment again.
if the artillery has variable power it could constantly fire but the changing trajectory would mean that the landing times of shells fired constantly would vary, as would their paths and impact velocities.
If you are using even a simple model of orbital mechanics/ballistics you can actually find a trajectory that will hit your target. Now, you might say, but the Mars window is only every 2 years, and they talk about seconds long launch windows. I think this is best explained by example. You can launch to Mars at any time you want, there is something you need to remember though. First is synchronization, every 2 years it lines up nicely, but you don't need it, you just need lots more energy otherwise(more fuel, bigger rockets) or to wait a really long times in a slightly different orbit till you get orbital sync. With today's rockets and a given mission, we can't afford the extra fuel, and the extra wait gets to the point where it might be faster to wait till the natural sync and launch then. If your goal is to launch an occasional mars mission, might as well wait, but if your goal is to hit a target as much as possible, might as well shoot now AND later. Sure the one gets delayed, if you have a stream of shots, they might hit in waves basically, why not? It's a waste for the cannon to NOT be shooting. Another example, ICBM's with a minor midcorse correction you can do a lot to hit a lot of things. Just replace the rocket at launch with a cannon. TL;DR: You can always shoot, it just gets interesting in the details *if* it's realistic.
I think that such a cannon could work similar to satellite launches. A cannon would launch it into the troposhere, and at it's apex the projectile would push itself into a decaying low-earth orbit, calculated to crash at the target. In this case it indeed could orbit several times before impact.
I'd prefer artillery NOT being able to shoot far around the arc of a planet. Would give incentive to push your front line forward and build new artillery emplacements, or race to high ground on the moon and build there. Gives people a distinct home field advantage on their side of the planet, and a distinct risk to invading enemy territory. I like that!
To be fair, modern artillery designs are moving to being guide-able. I'm sure advanced robots could manage that.
modern artillery shells are guidable, they tap into gps data and actively steer to their targets and can even correct the course of shells fired at incorrect angles, too a certain degree
I like tactical missiles and artillery with medium range. Taking rotation into account would be interesting. But weapons with a range to shoot across the whole planet should be extremly expensive! (like in supcom 1, not like in supcom 2; Cheap heavy arty like in supcom 2 would be fine if range in relation to map size would be reduced.)
Guideable is still different from a missile. Once you argue that the shell can put itself into a low-earth orbit, what exactly is your justification for explaining why this shell can't actually just hit anywhere on the planet you want?
Good thing I used forum search before posting about this... I have three issues I want to bring up in this discussion. -"Smart" artillery aside, what if you build the artillery on the wrong side of the moon altogether? There's no way to make the shot swing around and hit the planet then. The physics doesn't work out. -What about death-star type beam weapons? Those can't hit the other side of a planet. -If artillery built on the "high ground" can really hit any location on any planet within range, I don't think there's going to be any way to balance it. But there's also no way to fix the problem that is simple to understand in game terms. Assuming bodies in the game don't actually orbit and revolve, you might set something up so you can see the weapon's field-of-fire on the solar map before you build it.
Not true, as long as the weapon is capable of firing at less than the escape velocity of the planet at the orbit of the moon and greater than the escape velocity of the moon at the moon's surface (in the first order approximation), a firing solution exists for anywhere on the planet. The easiest example is to have a gun fire in the opposite direction to the moon's velocity vector at a speed close to the moon's speed relative to the planet. The shell loses all its momentum and falls down onto the planet. Vary the amount of remaining speed and you can have it hit anywhere you want. This isn't the optimum firing solution, but it's the one that doesn't need any actual maths to calculate.
It can lead to some rather dodgy trajectory angles though, combine with ground terrain and there may still be areas which cant be hit. I'm just sayin' this, don't really want to be dragged into the larger discussion.
This topic got me thinking about some things I read a while back. the Germans made a gun in 1918 called Paris-Geschütz or the Paris gun, which as you might imagine they used to shell Paris from Germany. It could cover a distance of 81 miles and fired into the stratosphere. There was another, larger calibre railway gun that fired bigger (800mm as opposed to the 238mm Paris gun) shells, but only over a distance of 30 miles called the Schwerer Gustav. There were plans for a lager gun called "Langer Gustav" which was to have a range of nearly 120 miles. That's 1/200th the circumference of our planet. I think, if we look at this for inspiration and consider that this was going on in WW1 it's not a stretch of the imagination to think that super-advanced robots will be able to make an artillery piece that could fire half way around a small planet. Half way is all you need after all! I'm all for some planets being large enough that artillery can't fire all the way around every planet. I think it's relative for gameplay purposes. But I don't see why super long range artillery wouldn't be considered as viable.
It's actually not a big deal to make a gun that can shoot all the way across the globe, TODAY. It's one of the low cost solutions to putting solid payloads into orbit. The political issues of building such a gun is another matter entirely, of course. Shooting between planets could be very interesting. The only potential issues would be with the software. Hopefully it can be done in an exciting and stable way.
