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[TrashMan]

Lol. Realism in such game means very boring gameplay, cause maneuvering in a space costs too much, beam weapons absolutely irrelevant, because defender can simply spray some gas to disperse the beam, and lot more other problems...

Realistic game about space even if you accept some advanced techs means mostly economic simulator. Not Cowboy Beebop game.

LOl. You know nothing, John Snow.
Do you really think a little bit of gass sprayed into the VACCUM (which would spread it instantly) could stop a multi-GW laser beam? Or the sheer advantage of range lasers would have?

[Serenitis]

The principal of dispersing a laser by putting "stuff" in it's way would work. In theory. After all, lasers in atmosphere perform far worse than in vacuum.
Although you'd need something a little less prone to dissipating than a gas.
These things are called Sandcasters, and they're essentially giant shotguns that throw particles of matter into the path of incoming fire in an effort to diffract/diffuse/detonate whatever is approaching.
They appear in several works of fiction / settings.

How effective this would actually be is entirely guesswork though.

[TrashMan]

Heck, if you ask me salvaging is currently garbage. It is instant (instead of taking days, as it should), and no one bats an eye.

If salvaging is instant, why is there a cooldown for it?
It already takes several in-game days to pull salvage from debris. Why does that need to be increased?

As to why you get the "results" instantly - that's a gameplay abstraction. And a perfectly good one which is meant to help the game flow more smoothly.
This is a good thing because gameplay > realism.

Wait wait? How does a cooldown NOT make it non-instant?
Do you realize what salvaging is? Sending out people and equipment with shuttles to a hulk, attempting to repair it enough to make it mobile again, or stripping, cutting up metals, ripping out electronics, etc..
These kinds of operation would normally take DAYS.

Yet, you press a bottun and get everything instantly teleported to you ship. The enemy fleet that was moving towards you didn't move an inch, time hasn't passed while you were doing this.

If instead you got a progress bar and time ticking, you couldn't easily loot in the middle of an active warzone. However, to make it not a complete waste, as the progress bar fills, so do your holds . Meaning that you don't have to go to 100% to get stuff. You can stop at any time, and you'll get part of the loot. Same for ruins and station exploration.
The same should hold true for restoring a ship, the progress would be saved. If it takes 1000 ticks to restore an Onslaught derelict, but you were chased away by a remnant patrol after 700 ticks, when you get back it should only take 300 ticks to get it operational.

Right now, the system is both abuseable and silly. You can cruise around a remnant system with 20 fleets chasing you, and still loot every debris field and explore every ruin, because the universe is kind enough to freeze time for you. Sure, you're not allowed to salvage/explore, but only if there is a fleet in spitting distance that is specifically targeting you. Funny enough, if there is a hostile fleet right on top of you that is doing something else, you can still salvage.
And yet time is a resource. Things happen, fleet move, bounties are created, markets fluctuate, supplies are spent. Except when they are not.

And finally, you are not the authority on good gameplay. There is no suspense in current implementation. No need for actual stealth. I burn trough remnant systems with transponder on and loot everything, precisely because the system doesn't require me to STAY hidden to salvage. Stealth mean very little in the game when outrunning the enemy is so easy and they are frozen in place while you do whatever.

A completely banged up fleet? Chances by the enemy? No problem, just dock at a planet, hit repair and restore and all of you ships are instantly battle ready again. Instantly.
Such mechanic wouldn't be a problem in a turn based game, or a game that doesn't try to be a simulation, but here? It stick out like a sore thumb.

[TrashMan]

The principal of dispersing a laser by putting "stuff" in it's way would work. In theory. After all, lasers in atmosphere perform far worse than in vacuum.
Although you'd need something a little less prone to dissipating than a gas.
These things are called Sandcasters, and they're essentially giant shotguns that throw particles of matter into the path of incoming fire in an effort to diffract/diffuse/detonate whatever is approaching.
They appear in several works of fiction / settings.

How effective this would actually be is entirely guesswork though.

Not very. First, you'd need a whole lot of ammo (and extra mass) for those sandcasters, and the sand itself would disperse very fast. Mind you, lasers still work in atmosphere, and there's a whole lot of a lot denser stuff to go trough than any sandcaster could throw.

Here:
http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacegunintro.php

And sandcasters are mentioned here:
http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacewardefense.php

to quote:

And you can forget about laser defenses like Traveller style Sandcasters. These fire clouds of magic "prismatic" dust that provide protection from hostile laser fire. In reality they would not work. There is no way that they can project a cloud dense enough to do any good.

Put simply, a layer of sand is no more effective at stopping a laser beam than a similar areal density of monolithic armor (in fact, it's a bit less effective due to structural issues); you can simply shoot holes in a cloud of sand, just like you can shoot holes in armor. As such, why spend X tons of your mass budget on temporary armor when you can just spend the same X tons on permanent armor?
In addition, a cloud of sand
- needs to be somewhat larger than the ship it shields (reducing areal density, and thus armor value)
- cannot maneuver if the parent ship maneuvers (so if you deploy sand, you're stuck in your current position)
- without some form of containment will simply disperse in a time frame that's comparable to the deployment time (if the cloud can cover the entire ship in 10 seconds, after 20 seconds it will have expanded to twice the size of the ship, reducing protection by a factor of 4. You can improve this time somewhat by using multiple projectors)

[bobucles]

Auction on some hidden asteroid, perhaps. But again, you wouldn't be able to dock in any civilized port with a stolen capital ship on you.

"Oi, you have a loicense for that ship" is a very different question than "How'd he end up with a ship in a post war sector filled with wreckage, lost empires and entire planets with the population of a single village".

The former is a game mechanic that doesn't exist. Players don't have ship licenses and no one particularly cares about what ships you fly. Commissions would be more meaningful if players needed a government license to use some of their fancy ships. However in this era the rules of the free ocean override all. Finders Keepers. If hegies picked a fight every time tritachyon flew a captured legion they'd be back to war in seconds.

The latter is a question of setting. Just because the sector is kind of okay today does not mean it lacks a history of chaos or is incapable of chaotic behavior. There was a war not many years before the game start, and there was hardly enough time to clean up half of the mess. Ships blow up, ships get lost, ships change sides, and paperwork gets screwed up either by accident or deliberately. The truth of events is often stranger than fiction, *** happens. Just look at the number of wrecks scattered across the sector. If anything it's unrealistic to expect a setting where military ships aren't stolen, they're a hot item that everyone and every planet wants.

[Thaago]

If we want realism: Lasers aren't an effective weapon at long space ranges at all because of minimum dispersion and the vulnerability of super large optics, not to mention the issues of heat buildup from the required power. They would be good at 'painting' incoming kinetic/missile rounds for interdiction as a component in an active sensor/counterfire system, and might be able to blind the sensors of incoming guided ordinance by saturating/burning out their detectors, but they are not at all practical for cutting through materials.

Something like a H-bomb-pulsed x ray laser might be a good payload for a missile, rather than a kinetic head or an explosive of some sort, because a good one might be able to inflict damage at ~10^6 meters (being generous). On the other hand that kind of missile would be far more vulnerable to interdiction/fooling/damage than a guided high velocity kinetic.

[Goumindong]

The principal of dispersing a laser by putting "stuff" in it's way would work. In theory. After all, lasers in atmosphere perform far worse than in vacuum.
Although you'd need something a little less prone to dissipating than a gas.
These things are called Sandcasters, and they're essentially giant shotguns that throw particles of matter into the path of incoming fire in an effort to diffract/diffuse/detonate whatever is approaching.
They appear in several works of fiction / settings.

How effective this would actually be is entirely guesswork though.

Since this is the realism thread. If the lasers were sufficiently powerful then throwing sand or gas in the way would kill you. The laser would turn the gas and sand particles into relativistic charged particles. The better solution is highly reflective armor and gimbled paneling to maximize reflection/refraction. After all if you can build a good enough mirror to focus a sufficiently powerful laser you can build a good enough mirror to reflect it. (Provided youre far enough away from its focal point)

Re: high velocity kinetics. The problem with high velocity kinetics is that theyre atomized by similarly powerful lasers the same as ships are. Plus all the same problems of “relatively low velocity” objects attempting to impact a dodging target at long range.

Missiles have efficiency problems (plus the same problems kinetics have in dealing with the zone of destruction caused by sufficiently powerful lasers).

So the real king of space warfare are laser missiles. That is. Missiles that fly to the edge of the zone of destruction and then explode with a nuclear laser.

[DatonKallandor]

The real king of Space Warfare is the humble rock. Because a planet can't dodge and that's where you live. Mass + Speed + static target = ded.

Which is why realistic space combat is boring if you don't ban the ultimate winnning move of just sniping the other side's immobile population centers.

[Goumindong]

Rocks get vaporized by the planets zone of death. If a ship can have a zone of death a planet can have a bigger and better one.

Alternately they can just shoot the rock with another rock. After all, we have established that high velocity rocks are part of the technological milieu.

Plus, by the time you have the technoogy to shoot high velocity rocks you probably have the technology to live off world.

[lechibang]

The moment realism kicks in, Starsector isn't a great game anymore. Stop trying to bring over realism into games unless it's a simulator. End of story.

[Goumindong]

Apologies. I, at least, am not really talking about starsector, just talking about the hilarity of realistic space combat

[TrashMan]

Auction on some hidden asteroid, perhaps. But again, you wouldn't be able to dock in any civilized port with a stolen capital ship on you.

"Oi, you have a loicense for that ship" is a very different question than "How'd he end up with a ship in a post war sector filled with wreckage, lost empires and entire planets with the population of a single village".

The former is a game mechanic that doesn't exist. Players don't have ship licenses and no one particularly cares about what ships you fly. Commissions would be more meaningful if players needed a government license to use some of their fancy ships. However in this era the rules of the free ocean override all. Finders Keepers. If hegies picked a fight every time tritachyon flew a captured legion they'd be back to war in seconds.

The latter is a question of setting. Just because the sector is kind of okay today does not mean it lacks a history of chaos or is incapable of chaotic behavior. There was a war not many years before the game start, and there was hardly enough time to clean up half of the mess. Ships blow up, ships get lost, ships change sides, and paperwork gets screwed up either by accident or deliberately. The truth of events is often stranger than fiction, *** happens. Just look at the number of wrecks scattered across the sector. If anything it's unrealistic to expect a setting where military ships aren't stolen, they're a hot item that everyone and every planet wants.

That's a failure of the setting. People behaving like *** is not good writing. A great war does not make security more lax, quite the opposite. Take a look at any great war in human history - paranoia, mistrust and security all skyrocket, and for a very good reason.
No one caring what ships and weapon you posses makes no sense whatsoever, especially when every faction wants to establish dominance. You cannot have an empire without established order, and some factions clearly care a lot about order.  Market descriptions clearly mentions officer and port security. Patrols clearly stop and search for contraband. You can be denied landing. This clearly isn't an anarchists wet dream, there are organized military bases, patrols, customs.

So no, it doesn't make any sense. There being wrecks floating out there is meaningless. There have been thousands of tank wrecks after ww2, does that mean you can just take one for yourself and drive it around the streets? Of course not.
The gates collapsed a long time ago. Any chaos or data loss does not really matter, as databases wouldbe re-created and order established. Beurocracy loves data. And while it's unfeasable for a faction to impose order on the entire sector in the current state, they CAN impose order in their systems. Sure, you CAN find a wreck from an old battle floating somewhere in the boonies. You CAN restore it. But no sane power would let you keep it when they see you driving it inside their territory. They wouldn't care about Finders Keepers.

If I were to salvage and restore the Yamato, even if everyone in the world forgot it's history, so they are not sure who's ship it is, no nation would let me keep it just like that. They KNOW it's not part of their military and neither are you, and that's ALL they need to know. At the very least they'd demand removal of all weaponry.

[TrashMan]

The real king of Space Warfare is the humble rock. Because a planet can't dodge and that's where you live. Mass + Speed + static target = ded.

Which is why realistic space combat is boring if you don't ban the ultimate winnning move of just sniping the other side's immobile population centers.

This is why you don't defend your planet by putting your fleet in orbit. Interception BEFORE the enemy can get in range (pretty much in-system), is the key. The concept is called "far defense" IIRC, and it's sorely lacking from most sci-fi.

But you also have to consider that strapping some thrusters on an a asteroid and sending it towards the planet works - but such asteroids can be countered. Simply put a thruster on your own and divert it's course. And you need a far weaker ones for that.

[Igncom1]

The kind of energy needed to move a planetary killing asteroid out of position and into a course to collide with a planet, such as in our star system, within a reasonable time frame might be better applied to the planet directly.

Killing the planets mantle is overkill when you just want to scour the surface of stuff you don't want, and is you do want stuff down there then planetary annihilation is beyond overkill.

[bobucles]

And while it's unfeasable for a faction to impose order on the entire sector in the current state, they CAN impose order in their systems. Sure, you CAN find a wreck from an old battle floating somewhere in the boonies. You CAN restore it. But no sane power would let you keep it when they see you driving it inside their territory. They wouldn't care about Finders Keepers.

If I were to salvage and restore the Yamato, even if everyone in the world forgot it's history, so they are not sure who's ship it is, no nation would let me keep it just like that. They KNOW it's not part of their military and neither are you, and that's ALL they need to know. At the very least they'd demand removal of all weaponry.

There is certainly a case to be made for restricting player options more, but consider this. Dealing with red tape and bureaucracy isn't fun. There is an even higher order of rule in the galaxy, and that's to provide a fun game experience. So I'd recommend finding a way to give the player amazing loot from rare finds and difficult battles, and then confiscating it at the very next dock or risk getting into a sudden war with everyone, while making it a fun experience. Protip: You can't.

There already is a faction that refuses to have their ships confiscated at the drop of a hat. They're called pirates. If only outlaws can have battlecruisers, then the only battlecruisers will be outlaws.