Oolite Bulletins

Commander Wilmot wrote:

What if the lasers crossed at their max range? If the lasers are close or next to each other, then they would be fairly accurate against all but the smallest ships, which would be a fair trade off, I think.

Max range is indeed the point which would make most sense, I think. If we want the beams to cross in the first place. Isn't something terrible to happen if the beams cross?

Commander Wilmot wrote:

and the neolite version of the cobra rapier has the forward laser appear at the top of screen when you are looking forward, which gives a similar effect, I think.

This would be because the laser position is higher than the view position. I think I did the same thing for the rear laser of one of the Boas. Looking at the ship's geometry it seemed natural that the view position would be below the laser position.

Commander McLane wrote:

The Caddy is the only ship with view position = laser position, amongst what may well be hundreds of different ship types available for Oolite. This makes it into an exception, not the general rule. And given the numbers (hundreds to 1) it's not even an exception that has to be especially mentioned each time.

The Vortex also has a gun camera for the forward view (it's one of its external views), which does the same as a Caddy in looking along the beamline. So when flying that ship, for normal forward combat operations you have the choice of either the offset cockpit view or the sniper beam aiming.

So it's hundreds to 3 along with the Kirin

Perhaps I misspoke, I didn't mean cross, so much as intersect; their end point (points?) would be the same.

Also as for the fact that the camera would have to be in the middle of the laser, couldn't the laser beam be bent around the camera? My understanding is that reflecting telescopes work this way, the light goes around the tiny mirror directing the light to the eye piece and reflects off the mirror in the back. You can't see the hole left by the tiny mirror because it is so small and the image is so large that the light going around the mirror fills in the blind spot.

This is the same reason (or a similar one) why putting the tip of your index finger on the bridge of your nose doesn't interfere with you seeing your other index finger or another object when you hold it up a few centimeters from your nose.

Commander Wilmot wrote:

Also as for the fact that the camera would have to be in the middle of the laser, couldn't the laser beam be bent around the camera? My understanding is that reflecting telescopes work this way, the light goes around the tiny mirror directing the light to the eye piece and reflects off the mirror in the back. You can't see the hole left by the tiny mirror because it is so small and the image is so large that the light going around the mirror fills in the blind spot.

If the camera point would be mid-beam, it wouldn't be possible without a mirror. That much we can safely guess. I would add that it would have to be a halfway mirror.

However, a laser beam has much, much more energy than the light collected from distant sources. In case of a laser weapon it is designed to damage/destroy any object it hits. So how would a mirror in the middle of the beam survive? Wouldn't it be the very first thing to be destroyed by the laser beam?

The ship's laser is actually an array of lasers in close proximity that fire in parallel according to some fluff I've read. There might even need to be some space between the laser banks just for active heat sinks. Maybe in that bundle is a special camera that isn't utterly blinded when they fire?

Well, even if a camera actually inside the beam itself would be problematical, having the view close enough to consider it a "gun camera" view shouldn't be. If it was say, one metre above the gun aperture, and (assuming something analogous to current known tech) we imagine something like a telephoto lens in a dark tube to protect the camera from any aperture flare from the laser, it'd be accurate enough for some sharp shooting.

I find it a bit odd that a combat viewpoint is done far enough away from the weapon's "muzzle" to introduce an inaccuracy in the targeting reticle in the first place. Admittedly, I don't think in the "it has windows" paradigm, and more think of the views as being from external cameras in armour reinforced blisters on the hull. Maybe it needs to be at least a few meters away to protect it from the heat or something, but still one would think the reticle would have been made to compensate for that.

When I've flown a Vortex, I usually switched to the gun-cam for long shots. Most of the time I prefer to get in close enough that the reticle being a bit off really isn't going to matter anyway, but the gun cam was good for the occasional bit of sharp shooting. Now, on the Griff Boa proto, I can say that the cargo scoop cam is quite useful.

Now, if you want to consider something weird regarding views and weapon mounts, why do so few ships have views or weapon mounts available on the top or the keel? The game is played in three dimensions, but from the views and weapons directions, you'd think we're in an arcade playing Galaxian or something. LOL

An argument could maybe be made against weapons on the keel/belly of the ship due to the possibility of them getting damaged when landing, but only if we assume there is no landing gear and the ships actually land flat on their hull. So that's a weak argument at best. But I've never figured out any good reason why the ships in the game have no way for the pilot to at least look upwards. On most ships, the top and bottom present the widest targets for an opponent to be shooting at, so not being able to look in those directions is a bit of disability that just doesn't make sense to me.

Ganelon wrote:

I find it a bit odd that a combat viewpoint is done far enough away from the weapon's "muzzle" to introduce an inaccuracy in the targeting reticle in the first place.

You could always buy the Target_Reticle_Sensitive. This one takes the parallax into account (at least since Oolite 1.75). It turns the target reticle red when on target. Some huds have this equipment incorporated in the hud itself and for all other huds you can buy the Target_Reticle_Sensitive upgrade.

I used to have that, but I got kind of annoyed a while back when between it and the missile analyser and whatever else I was running, it kept targeting missiles as soon as they were launched or sometimes even my own ship, for reasons I could never figure out. So I took out pretty much all enhancements and went back to running with the bare reticle.

That would have been before 1.75 in any case, so maybe I should try it again. But even if it can be corrected with an OXP, it seems to me an odd flaw in the basic logic to have weapons, particularly something like a military laser, not shooting "on the mark" in the first place.

Ganelon wrote:

I find it a bit odd that a combat viewpoint is done far enough away from the weapon's "muzzle" to introduce an inaccuracy in the targeting reticle in the first place.

I think the simple reason is that most ship designers still tend to lean towards the window-paradigm. Therefore the visible 'window' is where they stick their viewpoint to. And for most ships it's easy to assume that the laser comes from its very tip. (Talking about front lasers here; for the other sides it's usually not that obvious what the view position and laser position is; therefore in the end one simply has to make a decision.)

Obviously it depends on the ship type how many meters the 'window' is above the tip.

Some ships may feature a 'gun camera' with a much closer viewpoint as an external view. The same is possible for an upward- or downward-pointing camera. I suppose the four 'classic' view positions are there because they represent the directions into which you can fire.

For me personally it was always natural that my laser originates from the bottom of my screen, not from its centre. Perhaps it's just because I got used to it (and the resulting parallax) since 1985 when I first played Elite. It really doesn't bother me. It's the way I like to look at my laser. The flickering cross effect if the view- and laser-position are the same does bother me. I don't like it aesthetically and therefore wouldn't want it on my ship. For me it doesn't add accuracy (therefore no advantage), but on the other hand it kind of annoys me (disadvantage). Not wanting something which has a downside without having an upside is a no-brainer.

But that's my personal opinion. If you guys don't mind the optical effect, please go for it for your next ship-building project. Coming up with some technobabble about how and why it works should be the least of your worries.

Well, it's possible to add up and down views by using the "v" external views, but when you're looking around in the middle of a furball, it's not very practical to cycle through those views. I do plenty of looking around using the default directions (f1-f4 or number row keys 1-4 in the default game, though I have them set to the "hat switch" on my joystick), but since there's no way as I recall to actually add new keypress options from an OXP or keyconfig edit, the options for up and down aren't available in the same sense.

I don't know actually how much the average player even uses those views to look around. Maybe most folks just turn the ship to face in the direction they want to look? But up and down have always seemed odd to leave out in a three dimensional game to me, personally. Come to think of it, though, most space games leave them out. I don't know what the logic is on that.

0 parallax visual aiming systems for weapon systems is not impossible. In fact many are in use in today's helicopter gunships, fighters and anti aircraft systems etc. There are many ways to achieve this, the most common being electronically adjusting the cross hairs based on the distance to the target (sort of cheating). Others are actually altering/adjusting the actual image from the camera on the fly, using two cameras and interpolating, and even using a missile cam (Hellfire) as your aiming system. There are more, I'm sure.

Done a lot in radar missiles where the missile is activated on the aircraft pylon and it's radar is fed into that of the aircraft's.

Personally, but derailing slightly, I like the DAS (Distributed Aperture System) on the JSF - pilot flies in a virtual cockpit taking feeds from external overlapping camera views - which means, when he looks down, he can see through the bottom of his aircraft, very useful for slow, nose up, carrier landings...

Gimi wrote:

0 parallax visual aiming systems for weapon systems is not impossible. … There are many ways to achieve this

If you’re shooting a laser in a straight line over several kilometres at targets hundreds of metres across, putting a camera right next to the gun should be good enough. :-)

I think that in practice it works well enough. Maybe the difference can be seen when sniping a small stationary target at the extreme range of the laser, but in most fights where the range and position of both the player and the NPC ship are constantly changing, the small chance of parallax being the problem as opposed to just an honest miss is small enough to ignore.

I'm kind of surprised I never noticed it before it was mentioned, since I do fly a few different ships often. It's a fairly small factor, and I never actually expect all shots to hit even though the sights look dead on, if the range is more than a few km. I've just always assumed I was sometimes a little ham-handed with the trigger and would remind myself to relax and then I'd line up the next shot. But my style is more to fight in close, and the little bit of parallax doesn't much matter then.

Maybe on some ships I haven't tried, it's more of a problem. But it's still probably something one gets used to compensating for pretty quick, and I'd assume we'd have been hearing a lot more about it over the months if it was anything serious enough to keep the game from being fun.

Ganelon wrote:

Maybe on some ships I haven't tried, it's more of a problem. But it's still probably something one gets used to compensating for pretty quick, and I'd assume we'd have been hearing a lot more about it over the months if it was anything serious enough to keep the game from being fun.

As I said: the exact same parallax exists in Elite since 1984, and in Oolite since 2004, without any change to it. In your classic Cobra III you always had to aim slightly above your target. It has never worked other than that for a single day.

So I assume that indeed all of us who are playing this game for a couple of years have not only learned, but absolutely internalized to compensate for it, most likely completely subconsciously at that.