Oolite Bulletins

Oh...{faints}

cim wrote:

Multiple lasers will be available in tomorrow's build.

Do remember the joke about the mathematicians out hunting when you set up the weapon mount positions.

So can you fire forward and abaft simultaneously?
Can you have two beams slightly angled so they converge?

Three statisticians go out hunting together. After a while they spot a solitary rabbit. The first statistician takes aim and overshoots. The second aims and undershoots. The third shouts out “We got him!”

Wildeblood wrote:

Three statisticians go out hunting together...

Ha! Classic!

Wildeblood wrote:

Can you have two beams slightly angled so they converge?

THIS!

Furthermore, I would like for it to be possible to adjust the range at which they converge. I don't think it should be adjustable on-the-fly, but see it as something that could be altered by Station mechanics when docked. Perhaps only at stations above a certain TL, not at rock hermits, etc.. If not practical to set via the F3 menu, perhaps from the F2 Options page instead.

Wikipedia has an extremely interesting article on the subject (known as "gun harmonisation", incidentally), as employed during WWII (wing-mounted guns were largely phased out by the '60s).

Point-convergence harmonisation of the 8-gun Hawker Hurricane:

(illustration not to scale)

Having this capability in-game would be fantastic. Dogfighters such as Cody and myself could adjust the convergence in close, to a kilometre or less, sniper types would probably put the convergence out at maximum range.

Oh yeah, convergence would be amazing (otherwise, for smaller targets, one of the lasers would nearly always miss).

Zireael wrote:

Oh yeah, convergence would be amazing (otherwise, for smaller targets, one of the lasers would nearly always miss).

I'm curious to see what I could do with my Pitviper.. one dead-ahead laser mounted on the nose, and one mounted on each of the 3 nacelles, converging at 1000 metres or so, is what I have in mind.

Being able to toggle the extra lasers on or off as a group would be the icing on the cake.

I'm wondering what this does to game balance - is there going to be a down side to it, such as being unable to mount rear facing lasers if you have dual forward guns?

ffutures wrote:

I'm wondering what this does to game balance - is there going to be a down side to it, such as being unable to mount rear facing lasers if you have dual forward guns?

Any facing can have split/multiplied lasers - split means what it says, so the more lasers sharing the facing the weaker they are individually, and multiplied means your laser temp is going to shoot through the roof very quickly.

Zireael wrote:

ffutures wrote:

I'm wondering what this does to game balance - is there going to be a down side to it, such as being unable to mount rear facing lasers if you have dual forward guns?

Any facing can have split/multiplied lasers - split means what it says, so the more lasers sharing the facing the weaker they are individually, and multiplied means your laser temp is going to shoot through the roof very quickly.

And you're probably going to miss with at least one beam at least some of the time on top of that.

A very tightly clustered group set to "multiply" would do a lot of burst damage if it hit ... but you could build a single-mounted custom laser which had the same properties, so this doesn't have any balance implications over 1.82.

This is basically a feature for building ships which look good. Serious combateers will still want a single axis-centered laser, I think.


Regarding beam convergence, this would essentially be a special case of setting per-mount quaternions, which is somewhat complicated to implement and really not supported by the current code.

cim wrote:

Regarding beam convergence, this would essentially be a special case of setting per-mount quaternions, which is somewhat complicated to implement and really not supported by the current code.

If this was done at the ship level, would the game handle it properly, or would it assume the lasers were aligned to the z-axis? In other words, could it be OXP'd?

Diziet Sma wrote:

If this was done at the ship level, would the game handle it properly, or would it assume the lasers were aligned to the z-axis? In other words, could it be OXP'd?

Laser alignment is currently hard-coded to each mount direction.

cim wrote:

Diziet Sma wrote:

If this was done at the ship level, would the game handle it properly, or would it assume the lasers were aligned to the z-axis? In other words, could it be OXP'd?

Laser alignment is currently hard-coded to each mount direction.

Fair enough. Would it be possible to open that up to OXP control, so that ship builders could do all the hard work of figuring out the quaternions themselves, if they chose to do so?

So you're firing two guns with half the power but you heat up twice as fast? Sounds a bit odd.

ffutures wrote:

So you're firing two guns with half the power but you heat up twice as fast? Sounds a bit odd.

No. You're either firing two guns with half the power and heat up at normal rate or you're firing two guns at full power and heat up twice as fast.

Diziet Sma wrote:

Would it be possible to open that up to OXP control, so that ship builders could do all the hard work of figuring out the quaternions themselves, if they chose to do so?

Allowing a non-fixed quaternion at all is the hard part. Working out what it should be - especially for basic convergence control - is relatively easy, as is allowing OXPs to set non-fixed quaternions if they're possible.