Artillery, and the lack of it

No Full Scale RTS like this can exist without artillery, which I saw was still being thought about. Even Starcraft 2 had artillery, in the form of Siege tanks. There needs to be Artillery and Missiles, maybe not in the alpha or beta, but when the game comes out I am sure that a very large amount of people will be disappointed if it is just units and engineers, there needs to be more levels of gameplay, arty and counter arty, missiles and missile defenses, etc...

I don't doubt this game will have many types of artillery, and quite strong artillery at that.

I am not sure about the need for counter-artillery though. Most "counter artillery" solutions tend to devolve into something along the lines of bubble shield defenses. There was no such thing in TA- artillery would sting, and prompted more interesting, more inventive ways to deal with artillery.

Bombardment artillery's disadvantage is how inaccurate it is, and is countered by not putting a lot of targets together in one place. Precision artillery needs to be much more expensive and with less power and range for cost. Long range direct fire weapons, such as sniper type weapons, might be extremely precise non-splashing 'artillery' that requires a direct line of fire, with much less range than comparable ballistic trajectory artillery.

I want to see a large emphasis on mobile artillery in addition to static artillery. Especially with quite long-range light bombardment artillery pieces which, in groups, can shell a large area quite heavily. Having mobile guns allows repositioning, and are more interesting than relying on expensive fixed-position artillery with tremendous range.

And in either case, extensive recon should be critical in order to use artillery effectively. Depriving the enemy of vision is another "counter" to artillery, since they won't know where your mobile assets are. Firing blind is at least a waste of time- and should probably be a waste of some resources as well.

Who said their wouldn't be artillery? I'm pretty sure everyone and their mom's are expecting artillery at least in the stationary "big bertha" form. Most other are also expecting mobile and missile based variants as well.

One other thing to consider, unless the planets are sufficiently large artillery could look quite silly with shells needing to arc round the curvature of the planet to achieve meaningful ranges (definitely not a hint I want huge planets).

If artillery have that kind of range, then why not just shoot at a higher or lower angle?

This is how gravity works. I don't see the problem....

let me put it with some crudely drawn pictures.

Sensible:


Not sensible:



But I'm sure you guys have all this figured out, I just worry about sacrificing large planets so that we can have several of them. Also obviously theres nothing scientifically wrong with it arcing round half the planet, if the planet was smaller and gravity weaker then im sure you could do that, its just our earthling brains would think it odd. Theres a reason we have Ballistic missiles after all and not just massive artillery guns.

Both look sensible to me.

And that reason is technological limitations(until we get rail/coil guns) and nothing to do with it "feeling odd".

Mike

Newton disagrees.

Also, we are talking about planets with a significantly smaller radius than the earth, so even before factoring in the scaled gravity it is possible. (Still needs to be balanced and fun, true)

@neutrino: that planet in the kickstarter video, couldn't be more than 2km radius?

This (missing?) counter-artillery stuff is something that bothers me, too. When the enemy detected your base(s) there isn't anything which hinders him to destroy it, since buildings usually don't move.
Someone may argue to destroying the artillery is the solution, but this argument could also be used on StratMissiles and they have a counter which seems to be commonly accepted.

@elexis
Newton is OP

Current default planet radius for screwing around is 1200m so yeah it's smaller than 2km.

Also I see no problem with either of the two presented images. Especially if the world is airless.

If you go to the "confirmed features" one, artillery is orange, meaning probably not, but still debatable, I am trying to transform that into Definitely'

One interesting thing about low arcs is that artillery shells can deviate in a big way with distance. Also, they're running nearly parallel to the terrain, allowing even simple barriers to shield large areas of terrain.

Arcing a shell too high up might cause some problems with escape velocity and/or waiting stupid amounts of time for the shot to connect. Low and level gets the shot to its target as quickly as possible, with the disadvantage (or deliberate feature) of terrain blocking it.

Why waste all that energy on bubble shields, when you can destroy the artillery shell mid-flight? It'll suck if he starts using cluster bombs or direct shots, though.

What im mostly talking about is adding more levels of gameplay, instead of just having to macromanage my army and engineers, i would like to be able to set up artillery, shields, and nuclear and tactical missile sights, because what if my enemy has control of another planet, and I just want to take out his bases not the entire planet since my other enemy is nearby and the planet has resources, shouldn't I be able to just send in a swarm of units, take out his missile defenses, and fire an IPNM, Inter Planetary Nuclear Missile to take out his base, instead of the entire planet? And also if we both have a base on the same planet, i would like to be able to harass him with artillery fire slowing his buildup of units while building up my own at a faster pace, that way all battles dont end in stalemate wars.

I actually partially agree with him, that some things sound a bit silly. It's a "how gravity works" problem.

With ballistic artillery, you simply cannot hit the opposite side of the planet. Put that much power behind your shot, and it ends up in outer space. The size of the planet here is actually irrelevant unless you are assuming a game/simple implementation with simple fixed ranges for things. With a slightly smarter implementation your ballistic ranges just scale, planet gets too small, your ranges just have to be reduced to reflect that. larger planet, they expand up to the max range of your artillery.

Missiles however, are much more capable. With the ability to accelerate in flight, and even decelerate you suddenly gain the ability to hit any side of the planet assuming you have enough thrust to get there.

The last thing to consider, is interplanetary. With ballistics, you are basically limited to hitting only the side of a planet that is currently facing you, or will be facing you when your shot arrives (considering flight time). Again, missiles are more capable here, and with sufficient thrust and fuel, can hit anywhere.

What happened to this thread. This should be about how artillery plays, not the physics of artillery- which are readily accessible on Wikipedia, by the way. But if that's how this is going to be, fine.

Gravity is simply a constant acceleration towards the center of mass of the planet. This means the direction gravity acts changes as the object moves along its trajectory. Therefore, it is most definitely possible to calculate a ballistic trajectory to get a firing solution from anywhere, to anywhere on a planet's surface, given enough launch velocity. The math isn't even very difficult. In fact the hardest component is the Coriolis effect, because the planet is rotating, your target is actually moving while the shot is airborne.

The problem is the initial velocity required for a large planet is HUGE due to air resistance- and modern guns can't achieve that kind of muzzle velocity. Missiles, on the other hand, are independently powered, and don't really care about "muzzle velocity" since they can fly at whatever speed their thrust can manage until their propellant runs out. Put enough propellant in the rocket and they have basically unlimited effective range. With diminishing returns; adding fuel means you need still more fuel to move the weight of the other fuel, which requires yet more fuel, etc. In any case, you can definitely find a trajectory between any two points on the planet's surface.

Satellites in orbit are in "free fall" even though they experience constant gravity. Their "forward" speed in orbit matches the speed at which they are falling, meaning their height doesn't actually change.

Consider for a moment a satellite in a stable circular orbit. For simplicity let's assume the planet is not rotating. Could you cause this satellite to land on the planet within its orbital plane, anywhere you wanted, just by reducing its speed? Yes, you can. Reducing its speed more will cause it to fall more sharply, reducing its speed less will make its descent less steep. Increasing its forward speed would make it move away from the planet, and leaving it the same would leave it in its stable circular orbit, forever.

Now all you have to do is apply the same principle to a shot originating from the planet's surface. You can make that shot land anywhere on the plane containing the shot's trajectory, including hitting the shooter, or flying all the way around the planet an arbitrary number of times, landing anywhere on the planet's surface. And, since you can control that plane's orientation by what direction you point the gun, then you can hit anywhere on the planet.

EXTRA CREDIT: Can you hit anywhere on a rotating planet using an infinitely-variable-muzzle-velocity gun which cannot rotate?

Modern guns cannot be used for cross-planet firing solutions because we lack the technology to build a gun with enough muzzle velocity. Very futuristic guns, perhaps railguns (maybe even not-so-futuristic; modern railguns are impressive, but not up to military standards yet) could quite easily be able to place a shot anywhere on even a large planet. This gets much, much easier on smaller planets with less atmosphere or less gravity.

Not sure if I believe that assertion or not, Pretty sure "sufficient velocity" just means you dump your shot into space and miss entirely, but I admit I could be wrong there.

What's really going to matter here though is what feels right. I don't know about you but ballistic artillery that can hit the opposite side of the planet feels pretty wonky to me. I would much rather that such weapons scale naturally limiting their range back as planets get smaller, and expanding it out as planets get larger up until their actual true max range when they no longer have enough power behind them to reach that far.

And for missiles, I'm perfectly okay with allowing them more latitude to hit targets anywhere on the planet provided you're willing to pay the steeper costs to build and fire them. Everything comes with a price after all.

What's Wrong with artillery being able to hit the other side of the planet again?

That's because you don't know what you're talking about, as you mentioned.

Mike