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Starsector 0.97a is out! (02/02/24); In-development patch notes for Starsector 0.98a (2/8/25)

Author Topic: About weapon types  (Read 4457 times)

pigreko

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About weapon types
« on: February 03, 2013, 10:32:45 AM »

Hello friends.

Recently I'm thinking about the weapons bonuses versus shield/armor/hull.
What strucks me is the fact many "old" weapons are kinetic. I cannot understand why, since shields are really a recent intriduction. Then I thought that, usually, high impact kinetic slugs are used to destroy armor plating. But instead here kinetic do half damage to armors! Isn't it strange?

On the otherside, explosions are easy deflected by layers of armor or shields, since most of the brute force would go into space. But explosives are deadly in closed spaces, so hitting the bare hull with explosive projectiles would likely put explosions right inside the hull for maximum damage. It seems logical for them to do more damage to the hull, more then a simple high speed slug of bare metal.

In the end, energy weapons should be the perfect anti shield / good versus the rest.
After all they are designed in the era of shields. Beams could even work as subtype, doing good damage versus armor cause of concentrated fire, while being less effective vs hull (and still being partly absorbed by shields as soft flux)

What do you think?
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PerturbedPug

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Re: About weapon types
« Reply #1 on: February 03, 2013, 10:51:34 AM »

1. Actually, even early epoch ships have shields, like the Onslaught or Lasher so anti-shield weapons are not that farfetched. 2. Aren't modern day anti-tank weapons explosive let keep the RPG? 3. Now on to the slugs. I don't think that armor piercing rounds are meant destroy armor, just pierce it. 4. I think energy is fine as it is.
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Alex

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Re: About weapon types
« Reply #2 on: February 03, 2013, 10:54:35 AM »

From the lore perspective, HE weapons behave like shaped charges do (i.e. HEAT rounds irl). Kinetics are ineffective vs armor because armor is typically spaced and angled to deflect impacts.

So, the evolution is something like this:
1) Kinetics - simple, and effective against unspecialized armor.
2) Spaced armor - counters kinetics.
3) HE rounds and energy weapons are developed to counter armor; these represent two different approaches to dealing with the issue due to shields being developed around this time. Energy weapons represent a more balanced approach, while HE weapons are specialized for anti-armor duty.
4) Newer kinetics are developed to deal with improving shields, and shields are installed on older designs.

Now, any real history wouldn't be as clear cut as that, but these are roughly the driving forces, with the many cycles of developments playing out over a very long timescale.

As far as explosive weapons as you're envisioning them: that's "fragmentation", in game terms, and it is indeed very effective vs hull.
« Last Edit: February 03, 2013, 11:58:03 AM by Gothars »
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arcibalde

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Re: About weapon types
« Reply #3 on: February 03, 2013, 11:29:23 AM »

HEAT should pierce through one section of armor but our HE destroy great portion of it. And there is difference between HEAT and HE, right? HEAT should be ballistic weapons and HE should be torpedo's and rockets.
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Alex

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Re: About weapon types
« Reply #4 on: February 03, 2013, 02:01:38 PM »

HEAT should pierce through one section of armor but our HE destroy great portion of it. And there is difference between HEAT and HE, right? HEAT should be ballistic weapons and HE should be torpedo's and rockets.

Right, it's not exactly HEAT, but some advanced tech version thereof, likely operating on entirely different principles - which gives adequate reasons to hand-wave away any inconsistencies. Just mentioned HEAT to provide a real-life example of where HE weaponry is used against armor. In any case, the implementation isn't striving for realism, in particular regarding the size of the hole in the armor that HE rounds produce :)
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Histidine

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Re: About weapon types
« Reply #5 on: February 03, 2013, 07:35:19 PM »

From the lore perspective, HE weapons behave like shaped charges do (i.e. HEAT rounds irl). Kinetics are ineffective vs armor because armor is typically spaced and angled to deflect impacts.
See, this bit bugged me for quite a bit, because RL present day tank armor is much more effective against HEAT (let alone plain HE) than armor-piercing sabots (i.e. kinetics).

I briefly toyed with a suggestion for switching kinetic and explosive damage, so HE is strong vs. shields and kinetics vs. armor. Ballistic weapons have a lot of diversity, so they wouldn't really be affected (you could basically swap weapons 1-1 to rerole your ships).
Problem, though, is that almost all missiles do HE damage, so their role would change from finishers against ships with shields down to first-strike weapons against shielded ships. Bombers would also be affected. While this wouldn't be a strictly negative change, I mostly like them as they are, and such a drastic change would likely require quite a bit of rebalancing.

So yeah, just come up with your own technobabble handwave for why shields are so good against HE (they can easily absorb thermal/explosive effects, but not kinetic projectiles) and why armor is so good against kinetics but vulnerable to HE (it's made up of an ultrahard but brittle/thermal-vulnerable material). Then recite the MST3k mantra  ;D
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Pelly

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Re: About weapon types
« Reply #6 on: February 04, 2013, 03:47:34 AM »

The way I see shields in games such as these are big balloons with a limited amount of elasticity so when a Kinetic projectile hits it it causes more stress therefor more strain and then more damage, where as HE would be moving slower and distribute the damage of an area reducing the pressure (remember low impact area = high force) so the kinetic a small projectile hitting the balloon would cause more damage, now there are the energy weapons which in many lore's overload the shields (or in this metaphor expand the ballon until it pops).

Now armour, as people have said there are different types of armour, now I believe that in spaceships of starsector that they would have:
1)Heat Resistance layer
2)Plated Armour
3)Metal Shielding
4)Alloy levels of armour (Tungsten-Titanium alloy?)

So a Kinetic round would have to go through maybe 10 metres thick armour, add into the equation extra armour/specialised hulls then the effect would be reduced greatly now HE that is a different matter, it would destroy the armour gradually making the ship weaker and weaker therefore more damage occurs.

Energy weapons would act like super powered lasers/plasma so would melt/evaporate the armour and hull causing massive damage, while the energy transferred would cause overloads in the ships systems.

This is my opinion remember, and that will differ from the actual makers of the game and lore masters, it is just how I think it happens/should happen.
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Gaizokubanou

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Re: About weapon types
« Reply #7 on: February 04, 2013, 01:08:18 PM »

So a Kinetic round would have to go through maybe 10 metres thick armour, add into the equation extra armour/specialised hulls then the effect would be reduced greatly now HE that is a different matter, it would destroy the armour gradually making the ship weaker and weaker therefore more damage occurs.

Armor penetration doesn't work like that.  Throughout history, the only way to "defeat" (not bypass/ignore) armor (not active protection systems), be it medieval knights or tanks, was to apply an overwhelming force to achieve a full penetration.  It was always all or nothing because the odds of attacker hitting the same spot over and over to wear that part of armor down is too slim for practical discussion.

Some may say "hey what about GAU that thing on the A10?"  That thing is actually not a "tank killer" as people may believe in what the word "killer" means.  People think the gun will chrew threw tank armor and blow it up easily because they say it "kills" tanks.  What experts say by "kill" is mission kill.  It can disable tanks by hitting much less armored components like engine grill, tracks, optics, etc. and maybe achieve armor penetration if it gets right angle on much weaker armor of top/rear, but compared to 120mm cannons which are popular among MBTs, it doesn't hold much against frontal armor even if it shoots hundreds of rounds in split second.

Here is a picture to illustrate just how big of a trade off we make in in rate of fire (3900 rounds per minute vs to about 5 ~ 6 rounds per minute) vs single power to achieve armor penetration.

http://www.mindfully.org/Nucs/2005/Depleted-Uranium-Ethics9may05p11.jpg

Given all that, Starsector is pure sci-fi with speed cap in space so I'm not too bothered if there are inconsistency with how things work IRL because the universe of Starsector clearly uses technology that cannot even be compared other than that weapons point and go pew pew.
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Pelly

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Re: About weapon types
« Reply #8 on: February 05, 2013, 01:54:43 AM »

I know that, my grandfather was in the royal engineers, but as these are space guns (fuckin mass drivers!) that shoot at greater velocity than conventional weapons of our era, and you are not taking into account that the armour is sloped (meaning some will reflect off into space), and you are arguing that a mini-gun will be used to shoot a giant slab of metal.

Instead of fighter suppression and missile destruction. Who in their right mind would say lets shoot 'peashooters at a tank, we will win!", in this metaphysics they would never use that! Instead mass drivers and plasma accelerators are used which melt/penetrate the armour and hull.

Why are you arguing with, essentially a machine gun?

You point on weak spots, is not as important in this battleground as in the game the only weak spots are the engines and weapons, which are hard to damage, especially with shielded opponents.
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Gaizokubanou

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Re: About weapon types
« Reply #9 on: February 05, 2013, 05:08:49 AM »

I know that, my grandfather was in the royal engineers, but as these are space guns (fuckin mass drivers!) that shoot at greater velocity than conventional weapons of our era, and you are not taking into account that the armour is sloped (meaning some will reflect off into space), and you are arguing that a mini-gun will be used to shoot a giant slab of metal.

Instead of fighter suppression and missile destruction. Who in their right mind would say lets shoot 'peashooters at a tank, we will win!", in this metaphysics they would never use that! Instead mass drivers and plasma accelerators are used which melt/penetrate the armour and hull.

Why are you arguing with, essentially a machine gun?

You point on weak spots, is not as important in this battleground as in the game the only weak spots are the engines and weapons, which are hard to damage, especially with shielded opponents.

You are completely misreading what I wrote.  I brought up GAU to counter potential argument that multiple weak attacks would "wither down" armor.  And that ties in to show historical problem with your original suggestion of withering down, or "gradually destroy" armor through multiple explosions.

I don't even know why the hell you would bring up mass drivers and plasma accelerators...

My point on weak spot has no relation to how armor works in this game (I explicitly stated that tech in this game is borderline "magic").  That's why it's confusing you.  The point is how non-penetration hits can score a "kill" IRL, which can often confuse non experts to believe that such weapons can indeed penetrate armor.

I mean come on man, I pretty much spelled out that I find tech in Starsector to be incomparable to what we have now... then you quote me to argue how tech in Starsector is more advanced than IRL?  Seriously, WTF?
« Last Edit: February 05, 2013, 05:18:52 AM by Gaizokubanou »
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pigreko

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Re: About weapon types
« Reply #10 on: February 05, 2013, 05:57:12 PM »

Ok ok I messed up a bit my arguments. But your response was very interesting.

For starter, on the old ships there were no shield at all. It got installed and bluprinted much later, for 1000 possible reasonable reasons.

The actual armor killer is a combination of kinetic and he, like the new tank shells, or the bunkerkiller bombs. Which could be our HE. But the point is not to blast the armor... But to bypass it! Oh well lets suppose it is a mix which explode mid perforation, cause we want to expose the hull!! Ok!
Surely only kinetic would just punch a hole in the structure or be deflected, it is actually right. No real damage would be done... But the same goes for the hull. I understand a "100%" value had to stay there, lets say it is ok this time... cause there could be good reasons for kinetics to do damage if fired into the bare hull.

Now what about beams? Beams should cut thru armor like butter!! Well the shield mechanic is still good: no burst no stress, it is ok! But no armor bonus?
Really, Why does energy weapons are so average against shields? Just one beam with kinetic properties, we are in the shield era, and an arbalest autocannon is better than my high intensity laser... I understand ballistic having a sweet spot with the shield weakness and stuff, but the high tech world requires some ideas fight their own kind.

Last argument: In a conventional closed space, you have a minigun, a load of C4, a bunch of frag granades, and an enhanced diamond cutter... They do nor deal the same amount of damage.

I mean I know this is a game, but when you throw in a lot of details and specifications, it easy to start reasoning about them... find interesting stuff or strange one.
In general i think the combat is well balanced, but the weapons need some general tuning and revisioning...

And please make beam weapons a damage type per se... It is really another world of play style.

Peace!
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