Realism Issues Center: Lets make this game make more sense

[GizmoGomez]

Don't worry, I'll save the ARDA stuffs.

Whew, thanks.

Hey, we should write a Xenopedia mod and fill it with fantastical stuff. Waddaya say?

[TrashMan]

Because of in-air-refueling, sacrificing that much firepwoer for fuel isn't really a good reason either.

[EchoFourDelta]

OK, I've just finished the Xenopedia research project descriptions and I'm now starting to write the descriptions for the starting equipment. I've also had a read of the current thread...or at least the points listed on the front page. Here goes:

ARDA - No, it's a radar and it'll stay that way. People know what radar does. Changing it doesn't really give any benefit I see, but could cause confusion.

Then just call it a sensor array or something; if it's just "radar," then how are the Xenonauts a unique force? The whole point of differentiation is to make it clear that these guys are the only ones really banging this job out, right?

Aircraft armour - the two conventional aircraft descriptions don't refer to armour. They just say that the airframe is built out of something resistant to alien weapons...for example building the airframe out of steel rather than glass isn't adding more armour, but still makes it more resistant to combat damage. Would happily have updated any actual reference to "armour" for the first two planes though.

So... armor. The reason we brought this up is that this isn't how aircraft work; "reinforcing" the airframe isn't what keeps one from falling out of the sky, and it also brings up the point: hey, we have a lightweight aircraft-grade metal that's resistant to alien weapons (or we believe it so strongly that we're willing to replace the guts on an entire fleet of aircraft to prep them, and lo and behold it turns out it DOES work); why aren't we using this material for our ground troops? I mean, we're not even caking this stuff onto the aircraft, but its mere inclusion stops an air to air weapon from ripping the plane in half? Come on, you're a writer; you have to see the nonsensical fallacy that's here.

What you're talking about is a thin skin usually a couple millimeters thick; if you've got something we can make that is both something as light as a titanium blend AND only millimeters thick that can somehow withstand and survive huge air-to-air cannons... well, that's even worse. There wouldn't be any shooting through that with a small arm on an infantry-carryable vest, much less an actual armored vehicle with a glacis like... 3 inches thick. What we've been getting at is that what makes an aircraft survive a hit on an air-to-air strike is simply having enough control surface intact following a hit, and having redundant systems that survived the initial attack enough to maintain control of flight systems and avionics.

Everything you keep on about raises the question of "Well, why isn't this ultralight material that can stop these massive air-to-air cannons being used on in the same capacity literally everywhere else?"

I've added the word "safely" to the roll description for the Foxtrot. I think explaining why it doesn't have a cannon even though the MiG-31 did is taking things too far, I don't see that as necessary.

Then why in their right minds would they take a massive cannon out of the aircraft? What's the explanation otherwise. "Well, yeah, Commander, the MiGs we bought actually do have cannons, but we pulled them out on account of I didn't think it'd be fair. Or something. I dunno. The engineers and pilots couldn't figure it out either."

Clips / Mags - I suppose at this point I should stop trolling everyone and just change this. Aaron and I both find it amusing quite how worked up people get about it, but with release coming up it's time to correct it. MAG weapons are still going to use "clips", though. I'm not letting the Xenonauts carry a "MAG mag" into battle.

Something to keep in mind as you do this; not everything listed uses a magazine either; for example, the shotgun. Its magazine is fixed and internal (the magazine on most shotguns is that long tube you see below the barrel; you just feed shotgun shells into it from just forward of the trigger through a little "gate") - what we see as its ammo are simply "Shotgun Shells." Similarly, the machine gun there (as Gizmo mentioned, two different words) fires from a belt of linked ammunition that feeds from the container it sits in; Machine Gun Drum or Machine Gun Belt.

Edited September 5, 2013 by EchoFourDelta

[Ishantil]

GizmoGomez: I captured text files of all the ones that we wrote. I was already thinking of starting a Xenopedia mod. I wanted to wait until the Xenopedia was stable, though, so I didn't have to change it every twelve seconds.

[TrashMan]

I've been testing more realistic loadouts.

Light missiles come in double or tripple mounts:

Missiles have a bigger re-fire rate, so you can't spam missiles.

It isn't overpowered, yet it gives aircraft some staying power. You can manage 2 intercepts in a row without returning to base.

[Ishantil]

Game balance is basically the rationale. Our attempts here have been to construct some sort of plausible reason why the aircraft have so few weapons.

Basically, the intent of the UFO waves is for you to not have enough resources to deal with all of them, or it to be a very near thing.

I'm certainly not advocating two missiles per plane, though. I would like to see the light missiles have dual mounts, and every aircraft should have a cannon.

The idea of a missile truck was used for a while (the F-4 Phantom didn't have a cannon) but later discarded. They realized there's a lot of good reasons to have a cannon. Such as when you need strafe something. Or you need to firing warning shots. Or when you are out of missiles. Or when you want to shoot down a UFO.

[Newfr]

The idea of a missile truck was used for a while (the F-4 Phantom didn't have a cannon) but later discarded.

It was used by both USA and USSR only because both sides believed that cannons are useless in air combat on supersonic speed. They saw an air combat like fighters trading missile blows from afar. But Vietnam war showed that for various reasons this idea was wrong. So both F-4 and MiG-21 were using external gunpods at first and internal guns later.

[Hairyscreech]

We seem to be fixated on the idea that the materials used for the aircraft have to be stronger than the conventional set up, there is historical and engineering precedent for the use of an inferior design that actually produces greater survivability.

A good case is the hawker hurricane, the canvas over wood and steel tube construction mean that heavy cannon fire would pass through the skin and exit the other side without punching the fist sized holes that it would in a metal skinned aircraft, this also allows the aircraft to sustain some incoming fire as a lot of it would pass harmlessly between the spars.

Now using that method to try to protect a man would just be plain stupid.

In this instance we are dealing with heat weapons, everyone seems to be thinking inside the earth tech box and applying earth logic. The plasma weapons are not mass based physical weapons, the damage they cause comes from the effects of super heating the target.

The space race had been and gone and heat resistant materials were developed to survive the sustained heating associated with re-entry, ceramics and beryllium based compounds were developed that are extremely toxic and the dust they produce would probably do your troops in by the end of the month on its own.

In this case and ablative system would be the way to go, using a material that doesn't melt but instead sublimes would prevent a situation where the blast would melt off the entire wing.

My solution to this would be the use of AVCOAT, a fiberglass honeycomb material weighing about 5x less than the aluminium used in aerospace applications, (32lb/ft^3 vs ~170lb/ft^3). This material would be useless against a physical weapon but would protect against a significant flash heat. It was also available in 1979 but would have been hideously expensive.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVCOAT_5026-39

As for not giving it to the ground troops, well protecting from a thermal blast to the chest by creating a super heated boundary layer would probably mean the chest would survive, the rest of the body? not so much. (think bursting into flames/instantly cocked down to the bone, probably better to die instantly).

Edit - Oh and this is probably another good reason for not using it for troops.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2744783

Edited September 5, 2013 by Hairyscreech

[Hairyscreech]

Oh and a couple of comments on weapons loadout.

In air refueling was not really possible with the mig31 until late in its production, certainly the mig31 of 1979 would not have been equipped with a a2a refueling rig.

Any gap in the ablative coating would pose a significant weak point, mounting external weapons would mean a gap, without the bay mounted systems of the 5th gen aircraft a compromise would have to be reached between the ability to mount external weapons systems and protecting the aircraft. Perhaps the trade off in this case is worth it?

[Elydo]

In this instance we are dealing with heat weapons, everyone seems to be thinking inside the earth tech box and applying earth logic. The plasma weapons are not mass based physical weapons, the damage they cause comes from the effects of super heating the target.

Likely incorrect. We don't really know what the physical properties of a plasma bolt would be, but it's more likely the thermal effects would be secondary rather than primary. The energy transfer would be so large the target material would either be penetrated akin to kinetics, or simply explode as its matrix received so much energy it atomised. Thermal effects would come into play after the initial energy transfer, when all the previously focused energy contained within the bolt dissipated throughout the target. I went into this a bit in the pistol and shield thread elsewhere.

It's all about energy transfer. Heating a material takes time, heat it too fast and it explodes. Take lasers, a beam laser with sustained output will melt/burn a target. A pulse laser dumping energy in bursts, heightening the energy transfer per time unit, vapourise the surface of the target material instead. Then typically ionise the vapour causing a plasma explosion.

That's not to say you don't have to deal with the thermal effects. If you can develop a material that can withstand the initial bolt well enough to serve as armour, THEN you have to deal with all that energy wanting to dissipate and heating up the impact area.

[Hairyscreech]

Just quoting from the xenopedia:

Plasma pistol

"Though it bears some resemblance to a human firearm, it does not fire a bullet but rather a searing bolt of superheated plasma."

So going by that I assumed most of the potential damage is thermal.

I never suggested an ablative system would be perfect, just that it's likely to have a much better suitability than a rather conductive material such as say, aluminium.

Certainly the potential for instant ionisation would explain why the basic aircraft are still pretty weak and go down to not much core than 1 hit from a landing ship.

Edit - a little off topic but also I can see a weapon that has physical mass to its projectile being a horrendously bad idea in space, fire 10k rounds of conventional ammo and watch as they keep going until they hit something, be that you, your enemy, friendlies, your home planet etc etc.

Probably good reason a space fairing race would go for thermal damage that would dissipate relatively quickly rather than kinetic damage which would be preserved until it hit something.

Edited September 5, 2013 by Hairyscreech

[Elydo]

"Sir Issac Newton is the deadliest son of a bitch in space!"

A packet of plasma, as far as any physics we so far can imagine goes, is a packet of ionised gas, typically at high temperature as the temperature is what strips the electrons from the atoms and ionises the gas, contained by some sort of projected magnetic field. As the magnetic bottle loses containment the integrity of the bolt would decrease until it effectively evaporated. Good weapon for use in an otherwise constraintless environment.

It's also debatable how much recoil a plasma weapon would have, and recoil is something any space-based weapon would have to take into account.

[Hairyscreech]

Not really played mass effect, the mrs has it but never looked at it, might have to.

I would assume in this case as stated it would be a light gas, going out on a limb I would err on helium in this case being both an nonreactive nobel gas and also being the second most available element in known space.

Thus the recoil of the weapon would be minimal as the plasma bolts are not very large thus a small mass of helium, even accelerated to incredible speeds the energy required to accelerate such a small amount of mass wouldn't be very high, I guess perhaps a recoil similar to a self propelled weapon which produces a backwards push rather than a insta-shove of a balistic.

The difference between a shotguns whump and a machine guns crack.

Defiantly (at least personally) erring on the side of thermal energy being the larger of the two possible with the kinetic being simply a secondary effect of the super heated payload. For conventional helium plasma we are talking 13000 deg Kelvin, pretty hot by any standard.

[Ishantil]

Well, if you are tossing around particles, you might as well use positrons, and convert the enemy into the energy that destroys them.

[Elydo]

Oh the temperatures are extreme, but the energy transfer happens over such a small amount of time that the target material doesn't 'heat' so much as 'explosively turn into constituent atoms'. Heating of the materiel is what happens further out when the molecular agitation isn't enough to violently break the chemical bonds. The bolt wouldn't actually have a kinetic damage profile, it'd just inflict damage closer to a kinetic weapon than a thermal one. Another paradigm to consider involves hypervelocity projectiles: they travel so fast that upon contact with the target the energy transfer is again so instantaneously large that the target simply explodes. The delivery mechanism is just different. Tests conducted by the U.S. Navy into railgun prototypes have demonstrated that the projectile sheds enough energy into the air through friction to ionise it during travel, creating a particularly impressive plume of plasma in it's wake.

The motto of this project is Velocitas Eradico. I laughed.

Did you mean defiantly or definitely? [grin]

Edit: Antimatter would only be effective in a vacuum, which even space isn't. Otherwise your 'bullet' would annihilate itself before ever reaching the target. Possibly within patricidal range of the firing weapon.

[Hairyscreech]

Well, if you are tossing around particles, you might as well use positrons, and convert the enemy into the energy that destroys them.

Is that not the principal of jujitsu?

Edited September 5, 2013 by Hairyscreech

[Elydo]

"Use the enemies strength against him" is a premise of Judo. I thought the premise of Ju Jitsu was "You are going to be pain"

[Hairyscreech]

Judo was derived from Jujitsu, so both really.

[Newfr]

Edit: Antimatter would only be effective in a vacuum, which even space isn't. Otherwise your 'bullet' would annihilate itself before ever reaching the target. Possibly within patricidal range of the firing weapon.

Errrr...no. It's like saying "you cant fire explosives from cannon because it use (almost) explosion to propel it so your explosives will detonate too". You forgot that antimatter can be sustained in warhead by some means and be realised on impact only. Ofc it's just theoretical (as well as plasma weapons) but we are talking about space magic here.

[Elydo]

I was assuming that, as the discussions referenced particle weaponry, the use of positrons would be as some sort of projected particle bolt or beam, rather than isolated within a containment system and used as the explosive agent in a 'standard' projectile.

[Newfr]

I was assuming that, as the discussions referenced particle weaponry, the use of positrons would be as some sort of projected particle bolt or beam, rather than isolated within a containment system and used as the explosive agent in a 'standard' projectile.

Oh, sorry, misunderstood you. In this case you are right.

[Ishantil]

Delivery of a stream of positrons or a packet of them inside a collapsing magnetic field. You could also fire a laser a split-second before, tuned to the atmosphere for thermal blooming, and fire the particle beam through vacuum before it collapses.

Again, space magic.

[EchoFourDelta]

After watching one of my little interceptors zip around for a bit, I was thinking about how far it was actually going; what we see in-game is in parity with the stated range of 15000 kilometers. We're told the F-16s carry more fuel. Well... I did some thinking.

An unloaded F-16 weighs a little under 19000 pounds, and can travel 550 kilometers on a combat mission before it has to turn around on 7000 pounds of fuel.

It would take 191000 pounds of fuel to travel 15000 kilometers. For those keeping score, that's over 10 times what the aircraft itself weighs.

As a measure of comparison, our F-16 here would be carrying half of a flight-ready Boeing 737 passenger jet.

[Ishantil]

It's something that I noticed early on. I just sort of ignored it, heh. Yeah, well...I'm going to guess we'll just chalk that up to in-flight refueling.

Chasing UFOs all over the goddamn place would be a nightmare to coordinate. Yeesh. You'd have to do it with multiple teams of aircraft and scramble on the UFO as it passed close to the bases. With KC-135s basically standing by to assist.

Edited September 7, 2013 by Ishantil

[Elydo]

It's one of the biggest issues of setting the game in the late '70s. In a near-future setting we can just handwave with "Oh, we've developed interceptors capable of hypersonic cruising." As it is... Shut Up Is How. [grin]