A new kind of laser

[Fatleaf]

Yeah, I also like the idea very much! Can we expect something like that to be implemented?

With the current level of the Dev team... Not a chance. Unless some really cleaver boffin manages to find a way to do it with JS (like the player multiple laser work around) it will never happen.

[Cmdr James]

Changing the way lasers work is a pain, and that noone wants to do it. I am pretty sure there is no way to do it in JS because I dont think the lasers can be changed at all.

I also do not really see a benefit. This might be a feature that is popular (not sure) but I dont really see what it brings to the game. All it does is make any decision about which laser to buy redundant -- the best is the have it all ways laser. Currently there are (barely) reasons to buy a mining laser instead of a military laser. If we make a laser that is selectable then this will be gone, there will simply be no reason to not just buy the best. This is, in my humble opinion a negative.

If someone wants to implement it, then thats fine by me, but I honestly think its a negative. If anything Id like to see the beam laser improved so it makes a decision about buying military or beam more difficult (ie they both have advantages), thereby making the game more interesting.

[Kaks]

With the current level of the Dev team... Not a chance.

Err, not quite. Any member of the dev team could implement the switching laser 'feature' fairly easily. Still not a chance, though!

We do draw the line at switching & cooling lasers via script. Allowing that would just change Oolite too much: after all, the game's supposed to present some challenge to the player.


Anyway, this particular debate will go on and on: there's a number of OXPs out there that make the game amazingly easy already! And of course this has led to other OXPs that make the game more difficult, just to reintroduce some balance...


Btw, CSOTB's dual laser thing is already very close to that line, but since it's actually simpler to flip a cobra3, I personally didn't feel the need to belabour the point...

[SandJ]

The lasers we used at school were lightweight and fairly accurate jobbies that could allow their beam to hit a prism at 5 metres.

The Oolite lasers dissolve plate shields at 25km and are aligned to the sights in the cockpit. The must be HUGE pieces of kit that consume huge amounts of power and are not easily moved and aligned. To be accurate at 25,000 metres, despite all the turning and acceleration going on, with tens of tonnes of cargo also providing inertia, they must be attached to the hull.

I cannot see how lasers can be treated like turrets and pointed wherever you want them and yet expect any kind of accuracy.

Does that help?

[Ironfist]

SandJ,

Check out Airborne Laser Test Bed (ABL) mounted in a Boeing Aircraft it has a steerable final mirror.

Ironfist

[Thargoid]

"School grade" lasers (in terms of power) these days can be made to a physical size of roughly your fingertip. A good example is the laser pointer, which I've seen versions of which happily hang from a keychain. And "application" lasers (like in your DVD player) are semiconductor components, with dimensions measured in millimeters, and the actual operational bits less than that.

Modern "weapon" lasers (again in terms of power) take up the bulk of a jumbo jet, but are not very efficient nor that advanced. And given how electronics have shrunk, as we now have semiconductor-based lasers too it's not too far-fetched to think that something similar can occur in lasers too if there is a need for it (and if cooling can be sorted out, plus toxic by-products and such).

The problem is that in an atmosphere lasers are a crap weapon - the two simplest defenses against them are a mirror and fog. Atmospheric conditions and scattering are a killer for any usefulness as a damaging weapon over any distance.

Editted to add - as I cross-posted with IronFist, allow me to add a link to the Boeing laser testbed.

And some links on the subject from el Reg - here and here, plus links from them both (at the bottom of each).

[DaddyHoggy]

So far the best Military laser weapons are not for attacking the aircraft but for attacking the eyeballs of the pilot - although it's against the Geneva convention it's possible to accidentally burst a "scanning" pulse that will blind a pilot from many miles away.

The US have a "retroreflection" detection system for their Bradley's - it's supposed to detect binoculars and sniper scopes etc (scanning with a low power CO2 laser) - it remembers the position of all the retroreflections and then hits them with a high powered pulse so a 20x Sniper scope will deliver 20x the pulse to Mark One Eyeball... PHUT - goes the eyeball - I've seen the trauma shots - it's not pretty - but very very effective.

[Disembodied]

Presumably if you can have aimable lasers that use a steerable mirror, then you could just coat yourself with whatever the mirror's made out of ...

Another hop from one of Thargoid's El Reg articles brings up this one, on just why our lasers have such problems with heat in the first place.

[Cmdr. Maegil]

I would be highly interested in having a laser I could dial between beam, military and mining, and would be willing to work with a wait time for such.

All it does is make any decision about which laser to buy redundant -- the best is the have it all ways laser

At, let's say, 30K credits? And if besides having atrocious switch times, it being also prone to damage-blocked into the current mode, with a stiff repair bill?

No you can't, or else you could open the possibility of the infamous laser cooler

Any member of the dev team could implement the switching laser 'feature' fairly easily. Still not a chance, though!
(...)We do draw the line at switching & cooling lasers via script. Allowing that would just change Oolite too much: after all, the game's supposed to present some challenge to the player.
(...)Btw, CSOTB's dual laser thing is already very close to that line, but since it's actually simpler to flip a cobra3, I personally didn't feel the need to belabour the point...

Also simpler than forcing modders to waste time and brainpower (often unsuccessfully) looking for workaround ways of doing things so many players would like to have, it'd be to "fairly easily" make the required changes on the core and let the modders come forward with their optional OXPs...

As for the argument that multiple forward lasers and colling boosters unbalance the game: there are plenty of toughening OXPs out there.
Or would you dare to fit all of them on your game, especially without extra equipment packs? Well, maybe if you're just that heroic, or masochistic; but then again there are those who'd rather relax, take it easy and have a couple of hours of unstressful fun. In the end, most of us find a comfortable middle term and fit both kinds of OXPs to fine tune the desired difficulty level.

Finally, I'll risk a beating:








FE2 and FFE had cooling boosters and plasma accelerators.
</me jumps in a foxhole>

[CommonSenseOTB]

Finally, I'll risk a beating:

Which leg?

[Cmdr James]

All it does is make any decision about which laser to buy redundant -- the best is the have it all ways laser

At, let's say, 30K credits? And if besides having atrocious switch times, it being also prone to damage-blocked into the current mode, with a stiff repair bill?

Sure, you might delay getting the best weapon by a few days play, but really that isnt a solution to the problem.

Also simpler than forcing modders to waste time and brainpower (often unsuccessfully) looking for workaround ways of doing things so many players would like to have, it'd be to "fairly easily" make the required changes on the core and let the modders come forward with their optional OXPs...

No one is forcing. You are welcome to take the code and add it yourself. Or convince me its a positive. Or modders can just accept it wont happen. There is no forcing of anyone to waste time on it.

FE2 and FFE had cooling boosters and plasma accelerators.
</me jumps in a foxhole>

So? Doom had a BFG, I dont see that as a reason to add a BFG to oolite :p

[Cmdr. Maegil]

Or convince me its a positive.

Yo, chimp, gimme that bat !

</me takes a deep breath>

OK, I'm calmer now.
Cmdr. James, although I'm absolutely certain that everybody is most thankful for the dev team's hard work improving the game and opening new modding opportunities, these are pieces of equipment many people have asked for, and would like to have in their own games; there are even several volunteers to do the OXPs.

Only what's preventing them isn't the core changes' technical difficulty as with the multiplayer issue, but an arbitrary decision from the dev team which can neither be attributed to canon - or we couldn't have turrets for instance, much less yaw thrusters (which aren't even from an optional OXP, but on the core itself*) - nor to game balance, as there are plenty of hardening OXPs, and in any case one can always choose not use the OXPs they dislike or find offensive.

As I see it, the devs are volunteers trying to help others to have more fun; you don't earn anything doing this and have no business taking abuse from others... but after the first denial for whatever reasons, it became tradition that it shouldn't be done, and it ended up with being so hassled for these changes you just got fed up and pigheadedly decided you wouldn't do it; but the level of hassling shows there's a wish for them.

There's a simple way to measure positiveness in this case: a poll. If the majority of voters wish you to give them the option to have cooling boosters, more front lasers or this newfangled multimodal gun, will you respect the will of the majority, or remain in that "we know better" attitude?









*yes, you can always refrain from using them, but an OXP must be chosen and downloaded - then possibly discarded.

[Switeck]

The coding to make Laser mods "accessible" to javascript add-on OXPs is probably not as trivial as you might think.
Not like the devs will be doing a laser cooler in the core game, so it's not going to happen.

[Cmdr. Maegil]

I'm not saying otherwise, and I do value the dev team's work; what I took offence at was is this kind of attitude:

Any member of the dev team could implement the switching laser 'feature' fairly easily. Still not a chance, though! (...)We do draw the line at switching & cooling lasers via script.

Also simpler than forcing modders to waste time and brainpower (often unsuccessfully) looking for workaround ways of doing things so many players would like to have, it'd be to "fairly easily" make the required changes on the core and let the modders come forward with their optional OXPs...

No one is forcing. You are welcome to take the code and add it yourself. Or convince me its a positive. Or modders can just accept it wont happen. There is no forcing of anyone to waste time on it.

If it were for technical reasons, it'd be one thing, but the sheer derisive smugness in the replies would indicate our opinion mean intellectually as much as if we were posting on 4chan.
We're not brats, but for the most part adults, and many of us are asking to have the option of installing such OXPs - which they're denying for no reason other than this "we know better what's good for you, so STFU and put up with it"; sometimes this may be necessary for parenting but is in fact no good reason and even offensive when you're addressing a mature audience.

[another_commander]

We are in a code freeze with a stable release pending, so this is a moot point really. Changes to laser handling and other requests like laser coolers etc. cannot happen right now anyway, because no new features are going in since February 12th of this year.

Having said that, even if a poll is made, it is really up to the willingness of individuals to add these features or not. These individuals right now are the members of the dev team, who have their own schedules, personal lives and Oolite-related things they would like to dedicate their free time on. Maybe these requests just don't fit in and there is no reason to demand anything from them if they don't feel like doing it.

On the other hand, we are more than willing to welcome new members to the dev team, who can take Oolite to the next level in the future. So, what I would propose at this time is: Seeing that noone from the current devs is interested in adding these features in, if there is someone out there who is willing to code them, please do so and send us the patch(es). I will try to put time aside to review and test the patches and, if they are not messing up anything in the game from a technical point of view, will insert them in the code, initially as preference-file controlled switches, with the possibility of full integration later on (obviously after the next stable has gone gold). The way I see it, if OXP writers want to add laser cooling, why not, it's OK if the core code allows it, we already have OXPs that do worse than that. But, I would like to see this coming from someone else, not the current team, who have clearly expressed their lack of desire to do it.