Subsystem damage ideas

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Post by klauss »

Privateer Ferrius wrote:
Privateer Ferrius wrote:Another idea: ammo-feed failures. For the mass drivers, that is.
Quoted for emphasis :P :mrgreen:
Saw it. Noted.
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Post by Privateer Ferrius »

By the way, is anything else in WC ammo driven? The mass driver is the only thing I can think of, unless you consider missiles ammo driven :P

Another thought: tachyons are supposed to be an unstable thing in WC, so hitting a tachyon gun could make very bad things happen.
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Post by klauss »

Mass drivers are the only ones I can think of.
Obviously, missiles are ammo-driven. What are missiles, if not ammo?

I mean... unless you have a hardpoint-based setting as in the Ferret (and many others in the WC1 style), Priv-ish ships have a more ammo-ish way of looking at missiles (with one launcher and a missile supply).

Hm... so we would have to differentiate between the two. That's easy - just make Ferret launchers less prone to failures, while ammo-based ones are less reliable. That would mean having one launcher for each type of ship, but that's no problem since those (Ferret-like) are fixed hardpoints you can't buy, they simply come attached to the ship.
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Post by Privateer Ferrius »

In the vein of my other thread about ship customizations, it would be nice if a haproint upgrade/downgrade was possible.
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

Indeed; and maybe Privateer ships should be converted to Ferret/Hornet style; and when you're rich you can get double or triple hard-point upgrades. I can't think how missiles could launch from a tube, with all those fins...
Besides, missiles should be horrendously expensive, and, unlike in Privateer, very effective.

LOL. I didn't know that LFSR's stuff. That's hilarious! Well, as long as they fight guys of the IQ level of Saddam, that's not a problem. :) Osama might be a different story, tho...

R.E. mass drivers: Shouldn't they have limited ammo supply?
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Post by Spaceman Spiff »

Stormfires are for sure ammo driven.
I can't remember a WC game where Massdrivers had only limited ammo.
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Post by Zeog »

A realistic mass driver should have limited ammo. (I know that realism isn't a big strength of WC.) However, one could explain the virtually unlimited ammo by the fact that projectiles are very very small and damage is only due to their high kinetic energy. Due to the projectile's very small mass you have very many shots with you and they last, let's say, longer that your fuel and are automaticly refilled at the carrier so that a "shots remaining" counter serves no purpose and is therefore omitted for the sake of the holy canon and original game play feeling. :P
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Post by Spaceman Spiff »

I don't think we ought to stick to canon just because it's some kind of dogma (is it dogma in English?)or stuff. But if we want to provide a datapool for all kind of WC-games, the equipment ought to be canonwise. Such a pool makes no sence at all if those who want to use it have to edit all units back first, in order to be able to do so...
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Post by klauss »

chuck_starchaser wrote:Indeed; and maybe Privateer ships should be converted to Ferret/Hornet style; and when you're rich you can get double or triple hard-point upgrades. I can't think how missiles could launch from a tube, with all those fins...
Those fins are foldable.
At least real missiles have them foldable. They unfold into position when they leave the tube (real Sparrows are like that, IIRC. Let me google a bit.)
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chuck_starchaser wrote:LOL. I didn't know that LFSR's stuff. That's hilarious! Well, as long as they fight guys of the IQ level of Saddam, that's not a problem. :) Osama might be a different story, tho...
Ehm.. RSA - Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman. (I hope I didn't get any name misspelled).
Half of the best cryptographers are Arab or German (either in origin or nationality).
chuck_starchaser wrote:R.E. mass drivers: Shouldn't they have limited ammo supply?
They should, by common sense. But I don't think they were in any WC game.
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

klauss wrote:
chuck_starchaser wrote:LOL. I didn't know that LFSR's stuff. That's hilarious! Well, as long as they fight guys of the IQ level of Saddam, that's not a problem. :) Osama might be a different story, tho...
Ehm.. RSA - Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman. (I hope I didn't get any name misspelled).
Half of the best cryptographers are Arab or German (either in origin or nationality).
I know arabs pretty much invented cryptography; I was speaking of Saddam specifically. If he knew he had a good cryptographer he'd probably kill him, so smart that guy is.
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Post by Privateer Ferrius »

Spaceman Spiff wrote:Stormfires are for sure ammo driven.
I can't remember a WC game where Massdrivers had only limited ammo.
They had unlimited ammo (for some reason) but they were still firing metal slugs, so they were ammo driven, even if they had some sort of unlimited ammo generator or something :P
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Post by mike_secrist »

Privateer Ferrius wrote:
chuck_starchaser wrote:Sure, Ferrius; like you have a perfectly deep understanding of the underlying electronics... LOL! Capacitors...
What Klauss was saying, FYI, is that the friend/foe singnal would NOT be communicated between one subsystem and another as a single bit, 1 or 0, but as part of a larger packet of info that would include error detection and possibly error correction codes.
Capacitors...
You do know what it does, right?

Error correction codes aren't what would be sent. More likely an MD5 checksum (or whatever is the WC equivalent) The problem lies in when the error-checking generation works properly but the circuitry or software generating the actual information is malfunctioning.

Regardless of the mechanincs of the matter, it HAS happened before IRL. And it's happened in no damage situations too - Patriot missiles, anyone?

from what I understand about friend or foe transponder systems, is thay look for friendly transopnder codes, if there is no code or the code is changed by battle damage or can not be read beacose of battle damage than the conctact is consedered hastaial, some systems can use radair and outher actave emitions as well but thows are unrealable at best*
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Post by klauss »

Since those posts I've done a lot of reading on signal processing - for school, mostly, and I stumbled on a lot of radar-ish stuff. It so happens that moderns IFF don't use codes anymore... they use a database of radar signatures. Maybe backed up with codes. But most important is the ship identification thing. It so happens that, in modern warfare, only the US has an F-22 or B-2, and they rely on that to tell who's friend and who isn't (recognizing allied designs vs enemy designs).

The technology that allows that is ISAR - inverse synthetic aperture, a technique that allows you to make a - look how crazy this is - a remote 3d image of the target, much like an x-ray shot of it.

Radars are soooo advanced nowadays, with advancement limited only by mathematical cunning and processing power - that says something about the future of it: we can't predict it. So... I was thinking of simply doing some kind of weirded out model of modern radars, but of course that takes a lot of time and a lot of user interface power which VS doesn't have right now - it may have that when 0.5.x reaches release, which is a still goodly while ahead.

A source of inspiration for me was this old game... Falcon something (IV?). Pretty realistic game - where did I put it?

Only problem is that with electronically scanning radars, there isn't that cool (gameplay-wise) thing that is the radar sweep - the radar almost instantaneously picks up targets in almost any direction - bummer.
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

I'm rather skeptical... a fast sweep, ok, but all directions simultaneously would imply wide angle send, as well as receive; with a colossal loss of signal strength. In any case, if this is the direction things are taking, so be it. There's three issues I can think of, though:

1) Distance: I'm sure the "inverse synthetic aperture" tricks may tell you you're looking at a mig when you can read "MIG" written on the tail, but can it tell you this when the plane is 200 miles away?

2) Aperture and Perspective: As a US pilot you'd immediately know if a Mig is flying towards you 400 miles away, but that's because there's surely an AWACS around uploading theatre data to your plane's computer. On the other hand, future technology will probably dispense with specialized AWACS platforms, and implement distributed synthetic aperture, whereby all the planes/ships in your group act as a larger radar than any single ship could hope to have installed. (This, btw, should have an impact on flying formation; and viceversa.) Mkruer has distributed synthetic aperture optics in Rylix. Not sure where he pulled it from but it sounds like a good idea to me.

3) La Trampa: For every new technology there's going to be some counter-technology. All you have to do, really, is store the signatures of your plane or ship from multiple angles, or model the reflections in real time, send-back a counter-signature signal, and mix in the signature of some other plane or ship, and you're good to go. Easier said than done, but not theoretically impossible.
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Post by klauss »

Chuck, wiki is your friend - I got most of my data by following links from wikipedia articles.

The fast-scanning radars I'm talking about are active electronically scanning radar arrays, like that used on the F-22. True, it's not omnidirectional in that model, but close - just use 3 of them.

Current ISAR technology is mainly adapted to naval detection, but it also works for other situations - thing is, naval ships have very recognizable anchor points in the ISAR image that allow software to interpret the rest pretty easily - but, in theory, all you need is an oscillating part. Any such part will do. And I wouldn't be surprised if future designs could make use of other stuff, leaving the naval restriction in the past.

Still, though imaging is probably not possible yet with airborn targets, recognition is, and that's (roughly) how it's done.
1) Distance: I'm sure the "inverse synthetic aperture" tricks may tell you you're looking at a mig when you can read "MIG" written on the tail, but can it tell you this when the plane is 200 miles away?
If you read the article, you'll notice that it reads the internals of the target, not the "visible" shape. Ie: you see the internal structure - pipes, supporting frame, etc... scattering elements. And... it does work at very long distances, and not so well at short distances without serious (and expensive, but probably implemented) extra math work.
2) Aperture and Perspective: As a US pilot you'd immediately know if a Mig is flying towards you 400 miles away, but that's because there's surely an AWACS around uploading theatre data to your plane's computer. On the other hand, future technology will probably dispense with specialized AWACS platforms, and implement distributed synthetic aperture, whereby all the planes/ships in your group act as a larger radar than any single ship could hope to have installed. (This, btw, should have an impact on flying formation; and viceversa.) Mkruer has distributed synthetic aperture optics in Rylix. Not sure where he pulled it from but it sounds like a good idea to me.
Cool, though a tiny bit doubtful at such large scales - trouble is the huge amount of information that would have to be exchanged. Se F-22's Raytron processors... amazing stuff (I was researching on special-purpose RISC processors), it's not because it'll handle small amounts of data. But in Sci-fi contexts, I'll take it.
Synthetic aperture optics is something that has been done, sort of, for astronomical use. Hm... where was that... ah: Astronomical interferometers.
3) La Trampa: For every new technology there's going to be some counter-technology. All you have to do, really, is store the signatures of your plane or ship from multiple angles, or model the reflections in real time, send-back a counter-signature signal, and mix in the signature of some other plane or ship, and you're good to go. Easier said than done, but not theoretically impossible.
Ya... much easier said than done. I wonder how will they counter AESAR in its ECM resilience and low profile. Mostly its low profile, which is, as you say, theoretically attackable though practically not so much. (AESAR signals, from a target POV, are very little distinguishable from background noise).
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Post by mike_secrist »

I hate to say it, well looking at emetion and radar retrun is a cool idea. In the modern world you run in to problems with for example friendly contrys useing enamy desinged air craft as well as enamy powers useing nato craft, and that would only get worse in a place like wc where some many factions use the same ships, think about the talon and the galaxy for a moment thay would give you the same radar retrun, and posable even the same emtions, form there own radar, becouse there are only about 9 diffrent radar sets, the cats probly have a few as well and as do the few independet rases, so I dont see how your ships computer or the radar computer could tell fof with out transponder codes. i.e in the middle east you know iracq and iran use the mig 21 but you have friendly gearman air units opereating there as well and thay also fly the mig 21. it would be the same thing in troy, where you would have to ask your self is that talon a milatia, a hunter, a pirate or a reto.
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Post by klauss »

mike_secrist wrote:i.e in the middle east you know iracq and iran use the mig 21 but you have friendly gearman air units opereating there as well and thay also fly the mig 21. it would be the same thing in troy, where you would have to ask your self is that talon a milatia, a hunter, a pirate or a reto.
There the AWACS becomes important.
AWACS, bogie at 351 angels 11, mig-21
AWACS here, friendly mig-21s in the area, be advised.
IE: yep, transponder codes complement classification. But they're not the end-all-be-all as the entire thread discussion had assumed.
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