Bombs

[FD3242]

I have not heard anything about bomb like weapons. Maybe they could do less damage but have a wide area of effect or something like that.

 

This is something that would not make sense in a laser which is very focused but would make sense in a bomb.

 

A Missile would be different because it is lighter so It could not have such a large area of effect.

 

Edit: This would add bomber game play and ship design.

[Haunty]

Suppose they could make bombs that are essentially very slow missiles, mechanics-wise. Good idea if it can be balanced well.

[Halo381]

Well the difference between bombs and missiles is that missiles have propulsion and guidance systems, whereas bombs don't. They're either dropped from planes or thrown or simply placed.

[Hades]

I think mines could play a very interesting role in DU.

[Anaximander]

An interesting thing being said by JC Baillie, is that weaponry will "spread" damage from a point of impact - think of a weapon on a ship doing the saeme thing like the mining bubble, only applied in a different model of "voxel editing".

 

A bomb, COULD do spread damage in a very neat "layers of damage sphere" model.

 

I.E. the closer you are the epicenter of the Area of Effect (AOE) the more damage you take.

 

But this brings up a very interesting conundrum. Lasers are directed explosions - at least, fission based ones, lamp-guns are more precision based but at a reletively lesser intensity.

 

Should a laser apply a "spotlighting" damage area, the decreases with distance? 

Let's say your laser has 10 degrees cone of fire (I know quite huge). That means that at 50km range, the laser would spread in a surface area of 749876 Km2. 
If your laser was to deal 10000 damage, it would have to spread the damage in the whole area evenly and since it's an explosion, given a laser's Wattage, the damage  could drop RAPIDLY the further you shoot a target at. That means, also, that if you shoot at the surface area of a ship with a slim side profile, you would waste A LOT OF DAMAGE shooting at it. Your 10000 gun, would do very very little dps actually. But at closer ranes? Do the math, you would punch holes in ships, with a POSSIBLE tradeoff of very very slow rate of fire, because the laser's accumulator / capacitor would take a long time to recharge. 

 

Same deal with bombs. You can shoot a 500 meters radius bomb with a 1.5 second explosion, at 300 m/s of explosive speed. If I go faster than 300 m/s I can outrun your explosion and if I am flying a 30 meter profile ship, I will take very very little damage.  All these, have been emulated in EVE online's formula on missile damage calculations, same model DU devs seem to follow.

Explosions in space != not Star Citizen
Explosions in space != not Star Wars
Explosions in space != not Star Trek

Big bombs, are meant for big targes and big missiles, are meant for bigger ships.

 

It's an interesting idea, and something that COULD also make a certain distance around a star a "hot zone", with ships taking damage if they were to stay near a star for too long - after all, stars are very large, very very slow explosions in space that go off for billions of years. Also, in planets, bombs would have to work differently, or at least, have a caveat of "kinetic damage" to them ,as they displace atmosphere - if atmoshpere is present to begin with- on a planet. Or, to the very least, apply "a push" to a certain direction, causing players to even take "fall damage" when colliding with a wall.

Certainly, a very interesting concept for many reasons. It's a sandbox game what DU is, one mechanic, can apply to MANY others - and the Devs do love themselves some modular game design, as demonstrated so far  
 

This "spread damage" model on bombs, could also work with a cover system, i.e. the bomb goes off 3 seconds ( or however long the server cycles are) and the server checks if the bomb going off has a direct line of sight with you - and to anyone who says "this can't be done", go check Sapphiron's frost breath from WoW and its mechanics involved, same deal. After the bomb has a line of sight, your distance  plays the role on how much damage you can take before mitigation through armor and stuff like that. If you don't believe me, check how many people survived Hiroshima's atom bomb by simply taking cover behind desks, see, duck and cover does work.

 

If you haven't checked EVE, I suggest you do, just to get a small taste of how a sandbox game with clever game mechanics can be a series of mental gymnastics. Their explosion models are spot on accurate with reality. You may shoot a 10km explosion radius missile at my ship, but if I only have to take 1% of it, because of my size, I will take 1% of its pressure out of the explosion, multiplied by how long your missile's explosion lasts. But a smaller missile? Oh boy, that missile would apply almost all of its force on impact and would ruin my craft.

 

Boy oh boy, if people can't take a hint in WoW about "don't stand in the midst of the burning spot on the floor", I only wonder how bad players in DU will just get obliterated by bombing runs.

 

TL ; DR : Excellent idea. Can be applied on Lasers as well. and can make ship building into a literal science

[Lethys]

Good idea, I like bombs. So yeah, +1

[ForlornFoe]

Lock-on system should allow at least homing bombs (SALH and the such systems), which would be much cheaper than missiles. I would love to see some good old bombing runs, and Twerk's examples sound really fabulous for spicing things up. 

 

 

Slightly off-topic when talking about aerial bombs, but hey:

How about explosive charges (=bombs too)? Would be pretty nice to have a placeable (lock-on with extremely limited range) explosives so breaching parties don't need to haul a missile launcher just for wrecking doors and walls. 

[Anaximander]

Lock-on system should allow at least homing bombs (SALH and the such systems), which would be much cheaper than missiles. I would love to see some good old bombing runs, and Twerk's examples sound really fabulous for spicing things up. 

 

 

Slightly off-topic when talking about aerial bombs, but hey:

How about explosive charges (=bombs too)? Would be pretty nice to have a placeable (lock-on with extremely limited range) explosives so breaching parties don't need to haul a missile launcher just for wrecking doors and walls.

 

 

Sure, a breaching charge could be a deployable item that requires a ceratin skill to operate.

[Halo381]

Sure, a breaching charge could be a deployable item that requires a ceratin skill to operate.

This talk of lasers and breaching charges got me thinking: what about a sort of plasma cutter? An extremely short range tool that is built to cut through doors/walls. It'd be a quiet alternative to blowing open the doors and alerting the whole base to your presence, but it'd take something like, 20-30 seconds.

[Anaximander]

This talk of lasers and breaching charges got me thinking: what about a sort of plasma cutter? An extremely short range tool that is built to cut through doors/walls. It'd be a quiet alternative to blowing open the doors and alerting the whole base to your presence, but it'd take something like, 20-30 seconds.

Well, at this point though, a laser-dril would work as well, not just a plasma-cutter. Remember, plasma-cutters, are nothing more than welding torches. Heat metal => weaken metal => destroy metal. For the purpose of going through a wall, a laser drill - a versy short-range laser "minigun" in a way - would be able to tear through most walls easily, and, well, people as well.

 

Remember, plasma weaponry, is either "flame-thrower" (dispersion weaponry) "ray-gun" (think water-gun only really hot) or good old iron spheres used as a delivery mechanism for a super-hot gas (good old railguns). A plasma cutter wouldn't - in theory - follow the mechanics of Cone of Fire for dispersion of damage, at least not in Ray-Gun and Railgun formats. But as a breaching charge, plasma would certainly be worth more buck for its bang. And, of coruse, save you time.

 

And let's be honest, if a base is a construct, the owenr alliance / org associated with running the base, is gonna be alrted of someone attack their doors with a laser-drill / breaching charge / plasma cutter. Time of the essence.

 

Unless NQ adds some sort of Combat Recon armors that do not alert the enemy when you attack their building, but the armor itself has limitatons on powergrid or processing power, thus limiting the operatives on what modules / gear they can carry on the armor's slots ( if armors in DU function like ship-class associations do in EVE that is, if not, the possibilities are endless ).

 

But yeah, if you're about to ring the door-bell, ring it hard. Use breaching charges

[zywaar]

Well the difference between bombs and missiles is that missiles have propulsion and guidance systems, whereas bombs don't. They're either dropped from planes or thrown or simply placed.

 

 

I would love to have bombs dropped from a plane over a city... Just imagine the damage you could do to a well built city by carpet bombing the top of all of the builds.

Even if the damage had a small radius it would take a lot of effort to restore the city and be more of a morale warfare.... could even maby be used to ransom a city if they had no way to take out air ships.

 

If you could do this there would be a major role in somthing like a radar and AA weapons. Orgs might even put up a no fly zone policy over different areas. Not only a destructive weapon on doors but also a political persuasive tool.

[bastanold]

AoE bombs are necessary as weaponry. And yeah, physically a futuristic laser is irradiating a small area with massive amounts of heat. Wave function mechanics are in play at that point in terms of heat. There should be quite a bit of resultant damage in the surrounding area. Beam lasers should do massive amounts of damage to stationary objects, causing explosions easily, or at least melting/vaporizing. Blasters(small particle accelerators) are shooting atomic particles at the speed of light and should do the same general thing except with a side effect of radiation.