OK, so it's an edge case, but if you're on a small planet with your artillery, or even a large planet with tac missiles/nukes, there are multiple ways to hit a target on the other side. In TA, you could shelter behind a mountain or whatever to avoid arty fire. However, on a ball shaped planet, what's to stop you from turning the gun around and firing the other way around the planet, ignoring the shelter? If arty is too short ranged, substitute Super arty or nukes. What if i want to fire a nuke around the planet in the other direction, so they don't cross his wall of anti nuke defences, how do i do that? Will there be a selectable firing arc? or a 'shoot this direction for preference' option? If so, how will it work? If not, why not?
Depends on planet size, biome type and artillery range. I believe moons will be like that, with every one having forts firing missiles and shells at each other, few units as they would be torn to shreds by lasers that have little to no terrain to contend with. But that'll be mostly limited by the smaller size and physical shape of moons themselves, planets shouldn't have this problem unless you make them that way.
Given the current artwork, artillery can't turn. It is set to a general direction when build and can only fire in that direction, with slight corrections. But yes, you can just fire both ways around the planet, given sufficient range. Or even from a moon to a planet, if the gravity well of the moon isn't too deep. As for nukes, i don't know if nukes will be present at all in the classic form. And if they are, uhm... Setting up the arc for these seems counter intuitive, but what i would do, is to send them up into orbit and let them drop straight from orbit again once above target. So counter measures will only count if they are in target area and not somewhere in between.
We don't know for sure yet, it's possible the rotation system we've see thus far is meant to set the default orientation, we haven't yet seen how it applies to larger structures, just smaller defenses, and it's still pre-alpha so who knows that will be implemented in the end. Mike
if the planet is small enough an the range of the artillery is huge enough I dont see a reason why the artillery should not be able to shoot in many directions on the same target. But I really think this would be a special case, as I dont expect to have 2 players have bases on such a small planet. I rather think, if player A has a base, and player B wants one too, he has to destroy A's base before he can think of building his own base. ^^
As long as the projectile does not reach escape velocity it will fall back to the surface. Else you may have created a projectile satellite
That's not correct. They have an initial direction, but uber have said their rotation isn't limited (although the engine supports this, so it may change). Can't find the post though, or it may have been said in a livestream.
Not fully accurate. Escape velocity isn't the same as an orbit. It's not just changing to be under heavier influence of gravity from another body, either. The apollo moon rocket never reached earth escape veloctity, but it did coming back from the moon. I suggest you read up a little on this.
all he has to do is add the asterisk *in a single body system if you have more than one large body in a system it's possible to not reach escape velocity and end up in orbit.
okay some science because I'm cringing a little too much. (It's me, not you, really...) Escape velocity- velocity needed to LEAVE orbit (i.e. never return) ignoring all other objects Standard projectiles from a gun on the surface can never enter a traditional orbit. (they would hit the ground again before completing an orbit, sub orbital, an orbit that intersects the ground) They need propulsion at some higher point in their flight to get into a standard orbit.
The UI for choosing firing direction as well as target sounds too complicated to be included. There will probably be edge cases in which this is frustrating. It would be somewhat alleviated if weapons show their planned path during targeting if the path is not obvious.
Here's an idea that came to me: What if you could launch a missile or artillery piece with just enough velocity straight up that it would fall directly down and land on an enemy installation when the planet had rotated enough. Granted, you would need to have your artillery fire from the exact same latitude as the place you wanted to hit, and you'd need to be able to adjust the firing velocity and make it aim straight up. All in all, I feel that this is unlikely in the extreme to happen, but still, it would be neat.
Actually, it's quite trivial and doesn't need to be any different from the current UI. If an artillery piece always shoots in the direction to the target that is closest to it's current rotation. If there are multiple possible directions and you want the artillery to use a different direction, you can manually issue an attack ground command to force the artillery to rotate, then re-issue the original attack command on the target. Since this is an edge case anyway, a non-dedicated UI method (such as this) should be fine.
LMAO: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_HARP Well what did you expect when you bring gamers & science nerds together... As someone who likes to think of himself as both I actually enjoy the science vs scifi arguments that come up... most of the time
Given that the shot pathing is already determined, the computer already contains the data on how to hit the target, theoretically this could mean it contains that data from multiple angles. Perhaps a user-friendly solution would simply be to add a UI element, that would allow (after targeting) the player to cycle through potential target vectors. This would also allow designers to limit the number of computations (say 4 vectors, for example). Of course all of this may just be useless conjecture as artillery may not have the range, for this to matter, and it may require more hardware resources than it's worth to make the additional calculations.
The only reason you need propulsion at a high altitude is if there is atmosphere, which siphons away all of the energy in the form of frictional heat. As long as you can accelerate it fast enough on an airless rock getting up and out isn't a problem. for instance, The moons escape velocity is 2.4 km/s, or 7900 ft/s A quick look at a muzzle velocity chart for hand held guns shows a decent amount are around 3500 ft/s (1.0 km/s) and a few that are 4000 ft/s (1.2 km/s). Which is enough speed to escape Pluto (1.2 km/s) The navy has tested a rail gun that would actually be able to launch rounds out of orbit on the moon, it reached 2.5 km/s on 2008. So ya, we could launch stuff from the moon with little effort, and since these machines are supposed to be so advanced they could probably do it on much larger planets than the moon, if the atmosphere were gone (which I think is what will happen once earth looses its magnetic field).
That's not what I meant but that is an issue. If you use a single acceleration, like a gun, in orbital mechanics you will still pass through the same point where you made that acceleration as long as you don't hit escape velocity. accelerating only makes the far side of your orbit get higher, if you're on the ground though you're still gonna hit the ground when you come back around. You need to burn on the far side to raise your orbit on the launch side so you don't hit the planet. It is stated several times here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_gun Yes if you do crazy things in an N-body system you can get special results, but those are edge cases and will be hard to predict for the users at best. And escape velocity to leave orbit is always an option, you never need multiple burns for that
