Oolite Bulletins

Ganelon - I suggested something similar to the short range laser some time ago and there were various issues implementing something like that. The main one being that it would have tbe written into the core script for the game and couldn't (easily) be done as an oxp. The concept was something akin to a pulse laser, but with a much faster cycle time and damage per hit. I think it had slightly higher damage overall than the mil laser, but was supposed to heat up faster and couldn't be used for sniping. A weapon for those who liked to dogfight, rather than snipe.

As the core script for Oolite is supposed to be faithful to the original elite, its unlikely something like this would be added to the game.

I'd have to dig my post out, but there was something in that about making plasma gun (in the script purely for the purpose of ships with turrets irrc) available to ships on their EQ lists. That is a short range weapon, but is decidedly more crappy than the pulse laser.

I think someone, a while back, posited the idea of a projectyle weapon oxp that used missiles as its ammo. Small, low damage, fast firing, short range, missiles.

If one went with a pod type weapon that fired a series of very small non-tracking missiles, it could approximate "guns". But I'm not at all sure that the engine could cope with it. At the very least, it'd be an awful lot of moving objects and I figure that would chew up the frame-rate pretty bad.

Understood on it being too far out of Elite canon, Sendraks. I think that at some point somewhere in the future Oolite will pretty much have to exceed the limits of the original Elite. (It already does in some ways, like having OXPs in the first place.) People looking for the original Elite experience are probably more likely to use an emulator and run the old versions of the original game. I have done that myself in years gone by. I doubt anything short of that would really be satisfying to some purists anyway. But the ideas of Elite are time-tested as a classic and make a good backbone. Not good generally to deviate the spine too much in developmental/growth periods.

Core oolite without OXPs is intended to be more or less elite, and in strict mode is very close.

Adding lasers to the core is probably not viable as it would take the game further from elite than we would like. In principle OXP scriptable lasers should be OK, however oolite does not, and canot easily be made to support OXPable lasers.

Faking it with missile types or plasma is the closest that can be done right now.

Ganelon wrote:

An alternative might be a new type of laser/beam. For the sake of argument, let's call it a Burst Laser. It could fire a series of short pulses in a cluster, and as such would do less damage per second at long range than a steadier beam, but would heat up slower because of the on/off nature of it's duty cycle.

Am I missing something...this sounds like a Pulse Laser.

Smivs wrote:

Am I missing something...this sounds like a Pulse Laser.

Kind of a moot point, now.. But I was talking about something with more limited range than the pulse laser and firing more like 10 pulses a second. The idea was a weapon that would only cause good damage when "up close and personal" so that at least once in a while something more resembling a good old-fashioned dogfight might occur.

At present, it's possible for either the player or the game AI to clobber an opponent without even getting close enough for a visual ID of the type of ship they're shooting. That's realistic, in some senses. Long range laser weaponry and computer aided targeting like the Target Reticle Sensitive OXP *would* lead to that sort of fight being the most common. But it feels more like sharpshooting/sniping than an old school dogfight.

Since machineguns or particle beams don't seem likely due to game engine and Elite canon conflicts, I was postulating a type of laser weapon that would cycle with faster pulses than the current pulse laser and would be firing several small beams at once that are not exactly parallel. They would have a "spread" sort of like a shotgun loaded with buckshot does. That way they could be very effective at close ranges, but too dispersed to do much damage at long range. Since, while it would indeed be firing in pulses, each pulse would be a pattern of beams with some spread to them, I referred to it as a "Burst Laser" for the sake of argument.

It wouldn't be an illogical weapon development, since a pattern of simultaneous hits on a section of hull could melt enough spots at once that a larger section could blow out due to the air pressure inside and etc. It could also reduce damage from "friendly fire" since a ship further away would get hit by less shots in the "burst" if you overshot your intended target. Back to the firearm analogy, the current military laser is a very strong beam that punches a relatively small hole even when it's at great distance, rather like a high powered rifle. The "Burst Laser" I was talking about could conceivably blow a considerably bigger hole, but only at very close ranges. The Pulse Laser already in the game does less damage then the Beam or Military lasers, but it is still essentially a long-range weapon. That would be the difference.

It was just an attempt to figure out how some "up close and personal" fighting behaviour could be forced a certain percentage of the time and not unduly unbalance the game or be too counter to original Elite canon. At least on that last point, it obviously failed miserably. LOL

I'd rather like a "gun pod" that takes a missile slot which has limited ammo and very limited range.
It'd actually be firing tiny non-homing missiles (the "bullets") which do low damage individually...but would have the advantage of not causing extra heat.
Shots would have to be limited in number, speeds of the bullets would have to be only about ~0.5 LM, and range would probably have to be limited to about 5-10 km -- though at 10 km if the target even wiggles before the shots get to it, you miss.

Thargoid wrote:

I might have a quick play with some code on this concept, but to be any good the "bullets" would have to fly fast enough that the target is at least somewhere in the vicinity of where it was when the bullets were fired when they get there.

Bullets which travel at 0.8lm for a certain duration thus limiting range.

Btw - this is thread with my gatling pulse laser in it.
https://bb.oolite.space/viewtopic.php?p= ... ght=#95645

Thargoid wrote:

OK, I've got a semi-working entity floating around in my ooniverse.

Unfortunately it seems to currently have the side-effect of periodically ending the universe...

Nice one, a Doomsday Weapon There must be dozens of psychopathic megalomaniacs out there who'd love one of these.

Smivs wrote:

Thargoid wrote:

OK, I've got a semi-working entity floating around in my ooniverse.

Unfortunately it seems to currently have the side-effect of periodically ending the universe...

Nice one, a Doomsday Weapon There must be dozens of psychopathic megalomaniacs out there who'd love one of these.

With over 2000 worlds signed up with GalCop, and who knows how many outlanders...not to mention the Bugs...and the Weevils...and the Duvals...there's plenty of megalomaniacs itching to grab a doomsday device, I'm sure.

"An armed society is a polite society"? Yeah, right. More like look out for that wacko with the bomb.

And by the way, there is already a doomsday weapon at hand for the player (and completely in-ooniverse, not involving desktops.)

Going back to the gatling laser idea, the twin plasma cannon almost fits the bill.
It's cycle rate is good, it's range, energy demand and heatup is right for an up close and personal blaster... But it's shot power is little more than a lovetap, and that's the only thing that makes it useless. You might as well swear like a dockhand at the pirate, for all the damage the TPC can currently do.
Amp up the shot power to about the same as a mil laser, and presto, a good go at the gatling laser idea, sans the laser. Raise the price to match, of course.

IMHO, the beam laser would still be the better dogfighting weapon.

Cmdr Wyvern wrote:

IMHO, the beam laser would still be the better dogfighting weapon.

Yeah, it'd be my preference, personally. If the NPCs would actually tie in and fight like, well.. good dogs. My thought was if there was a weapon some of them could be equipped with that had a range short enough to keep them doing repeated "close and engage" action, it'd be some better fights.

At present, it's tantalisingly close to a good dogfight sometimes. If you manage to get in close and stay on them, they'll weave and jink and pull a lot of evasive moves, but they don't really try to turn it around and go after you. If you slow to a stop or a near stop, they'll start running, you slip up on their 6 and it's over. But their evasive moves when you're dogging tight on them are so close to over half of what they'd need to be some tough dogfight opponents. They just need to decide to come around and go after you once in a while rather than just trying to shake you enough to run. Tantalisingly close to the right stuff, like I already said.

About the only time they actually go after your 6 is when you're trying to chase down one of their buddies who's gone on the run, and that *does* make sense and can make things interesting.

The running behaviour especially doesn't make sense when their ship is slower than yours. Any player in that situation would turn and fight because they'd know they had to. Sure, if they're in a faster ship and you shave some of the fur off them, it'd make sense to shake you off and run for the hills. If they're in a slower ship and have taken some damage, then they should go aggro in preference to avoiding collision, since it's about the only logical chance they have for survival.

The thing is, if I run up against a pack of maybe five opponents, even with a tolerably iron-ass Cobra, I shouldn't come through that with minimal damage and not even spend a missile. I'd love to think I'm actually that good, but I know damn well that I'm not! LOL If it was 5 Kraits, for example, Kraits are *great* little ships for dogfighting. They're fast enough, turn tight enough, and going up against a bigger heavier faster Cobra, they should stay in tight and carve the Cobra up while flying circles around it. They should be trying to get in close and stay in close where that tight turn speed they have would be the deadly advantage.

But it'd probably be better/easier to beef up the AI than to invent a whole new type of weapon. Even if the AI could just adjust it's style a bit more for the type of ship the NPC was in, they'd do much better. A Krait and Boa (for example) shouldn't attack in the same way. The Krait should try to move in close while the Boa would be more suited to sniping or "boom and zoom" tactics where it would start firing from further away and then peel off and come around for another approach as it gets close or takes damage.

Ah well, I'm going into too much detail, I think. Maybe I played a few too many hours today or something? LOL