Shield generators

Wait what did you just say??? and you are a backer??? PLANET BLOWING UP IS EVERY THING!!!!

You are missing the point.

btw if there were shields, there would be more reason to blow the entire planet ... right?

>implying dropping an EMP isn't indefinitely easier

I all for umbrella shields. Bubble shields too but its not really important to me.

Im a defensive player and i love how FAF takes into consideration of players like me too.

It seems like the majority of posts in this thread(with notable exceptions) assume SupComm balance. People who have played enough TA know that shields are a fundamental balance shift. Indeed SupComm would be a horrible game without shields, as two artillery shells would destroy a base, but that is SupComm, which DOES have shields. TA, which DOESN'T, has far more interesting artillery. Artillery, by it's nature, shouldn't fire quickly, and the longer the range the worse the accuracy.

Assuming that repair patrols do not randomly assist factories or building projects, which they shouldn't, and assuming my buildings are not made of glass, I think we're ok. Also, please consider that this is a game with multiple bloody planets! You won't have 'a base', you'll have 'many bases'. If someone is moving asteroid based artillery from planet to planet killing your bases, then kill his asteroid. Equally, rebuild the bombed base the minute it leaves for another planet, or land troops on his little asteroid. He's going to need more than artillery to kill you, assuming you aren't stupid with your Commander and quite frankly I doubt he could keep an entire planet shelled, there simply wouldn't be the room for that much artillery on one asteroid.

All of this boils down to one simple concept. There should be no 'game ender'. There should be no unit (or combination of units), that, if I allow my opponent to succeed in building, I lose. There should be units in situations which cause me to lose, but 'don't let them build it' should never be the only counter-strategy.

Rebuild the second he moves away? These artillery are interplanetary. Also, can you really kill your economy like that by rebuilding constantly while he has nothing to lose keeping you pinned with his asteroid? If he's smart, he'd target things that are a threat to his asteroid first. If worst comes to worst, he'll just nuke the planet with it.

Threats I would eliminate first:
1: nuke launchers from long range shots
2: unit cannons while moving closer to the enemy planet
3: enemy artillery while entering orbit (because its expensive)
4: all the other little things
You don't need lots of artillery to do a lot of damage. You only need a maximum of four. That can easily fit on one rock.
BTW, one artillery shell will kill any engineer within the presumably large blast radius.

So... when did the Devs confirm this is in the game?

I meant they shoot from asteroid to planet.

Which means they're in orbit and can only target what's below them. How fast do you expect this asteroid to be orbiting? How does it have a firing solution to the other side of the planet?

and again... I still see no confirmation that even inter-orbital artillery is confirmed

Think of artillery shells as aerodynamic things. If there's no air, fire it retrograde and see where the decreased speed takes it.
Regarding the speed: does geostationary sound good?

I suppose you'll cite hyper-intelligence robotic voodoo-magic for how they get an accurate firing solution to the other side of the planet, hmm?

Still nothing on whether this Inter-Orbital Artillery is even a thing yet, I remind you.

What? It was literally in the kickstarter video. It shot peewees.

So you think that the Cold War was fought with voodoo magic then? If a 1960s ICBM can hit a city on the other side of a 12,000km planet with a reasonable chance of success, you'd better hope a Futuristic Space Gun can hit a base on the other side of a 100km planet. Not that I think these units are likely to exist, but if they do they're going to be capable of hitting anywhere on a planet.

The Unit-Cannon is not conventional Artillery.

I can see how dropping Peewees from the sky in drop pods from the moon is fun for both the attacker and the defender.

I cannot see how dropping shells from the sky from the moon is any fun for the defender... especially if he cannot shell the moon back.

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Why would robots be hucking space rocks at each other if they can build Artillery that hits from orbit with pinpoint accuracy?

I'll tell you why... coz that's not fun.

The Cold War, *shock* wasn't fun.

No. It's more DIFFICULT than conventional artillery, because it has to throw functional machines and have them still work on the other side. It's so much easier to lob hunks of metal/energy at maximum speed.

Super artillery traditionally has large energy demands to work. The design of the economy can very well determine how easy or difficult these weapons are to use. If energy is freely used anywhere in the sector, than high energy units can similarly be set up and used anywhere. If it demands a more planetary locale, then high energy weapons can't be deployed without setting up some kind of base. It is not a decision to be made lightly, as the repercussions are powerful and far reaching for most things.

So? This is quite obviously a case where realism is boring and fantasy is awesome.

Shelling my enemy with a cannon is not as awesome as shelling him with Drop-Podding Robots.

Err... guided munitions are not unguided munitions. ICBMs are considered guided munitions; they have engines and vanes and stuff and make navigation decisions mid-flight. Classic artillery (the allegedly inaccurate kind) is unguided, you impart force to a lump of metal and let gravity and friction do the rest.

While classic artillery can indeed attack targets over the horizon fairly easily, a basic ballistic trajectory does not lend itself to hitting antipodean targets; the further from planet surface your munition gets, the lower the gravity (inverse square law), therefore the more likely that a powerful shot (one required for a long range) will actually need to achieve escape velocity, and therefore never land again. This means there is a finite limit to range on a curved body for any ballistic weapon, based upon the local gravity.

Bizarre as it might sound, the higher the gravity compared to the radius of curvature, the better "range" you get; range on a gas giant (low overall density) will be less as a percentage of radius than range on a neutron star (ridiculously high overall density), assuming you can impart unbounded projectile energy. I seriously doubt any projectile weapon in PA is going to be fully utilising those kinds of mechanics though. It'll be interesting to see how the proposed unit cannon ends up working in that sense :mrgreen:

Ballistic missiles are ballistic, the clue is in their name. They don't use their engines after the first four minutes and spend most of their time outside of atmosphere where control surfaces are useless, and any terminal guidance their reentry vehicles have during the reentry phase can be used on an artillery shell because at this point they're equivalent. The main reason why intercontinental artillery isn't a thing is because space guns have none of the energy efficiency due to atmospheric drag. If your firing platform is already in space you don't care about atmospheric losses in the boost phase so guns actually beat out ballistic missiles due to not having to accelerate their own fuel with them.

Incorrect. Ballistic trajectories are not really parabolae, but ellipses. You can always draw an ellipse which intersects the planet at two places (your desired impact point and your firing location), and that ellipse will always correspond to a muzzle velocity less than escape velocity. The standard extreme example is setting an object in circular motion at sea level, which requires a speed of 8 km/s, while escape velocity is 11 km/s. Adjust your launch velocity to slightly less than the circular motion value and your projectile will drop short at some point and hit the ground. This obviously doesn't actually work because the Earth isn't a perfect sphere, there's the rotation of the Earth to consider and atmospheric effects, but the atmosphere is thin and there's a lot of leeway between 8km/s and 11 km/s to launch a projectile out of the atmosphere and have it land at a desired point near the antipodes without exceeding escape velocity. Nobody would every build such a gun because it'd be stupidly inefficient, but ICBMs work on basically the same principle. For very light objects there may however be a limit on the maximum reasonable range of an indirect fire weapon. In the case of tiny asteroids where you can easily jump out of orbit, the muzzle velocity of a paraboloid trajectory may be hilariously low and your projectile could be intercepted by a dude with a steady hand and a pistol.

But this is all irrelevant because the artillery piece in question is in orbit and what it's doing isn't firing projectiles at the planet, it's deorbiting them and letting them hit the planet.

I suspect that using artillery from orbit will be doable. I wouldn't bet on not being able to fire back, though. Regardless, you still wouldn't be able to hit more than half the planet at any one time, and accuracy would be crap towards the edges.

Also, to repeat my earlier point, why do you assume artillery could wipe the surface clean? While you could probably annoy the hell out of a player on the surface below, I don't think you'd come close to killing things faster than he can rebuild them. There's only so many guns that fit on a asteroid. We are not talking about hyper-accurate fast firing artillery such as SupComm's.

Why? Basic orbital mechanics disagrees with you.