I am in agreement with you guys that think small fighter craft in space would be useless. Also as a veteran of other 4X games that did use Carriers and fighters, they wound up being way over powered.



The only exception to this that I can think of, was perhaps MOO3 with the appropiate Mods. Where the fighters could be countered with Point Defense Weapons, interceptor fighter craft and dedicated Point Defense ships to protect the capitol ships, . It was interesting, but unrealistic.



I am happy with the current combat mechanics. But would like to see more variety of ships, along with System only ships (no FTL engines) to defend systems and make the population feel more secure, thus improving happiness.



Just my two cents worth.

Nosferatiel wrote:
If the target traveled at a relativistic speed and you did the same, both ships alongside at exactly the same speeds, you wouldn't be able not to hit it. As long as you obey lightspeed as the absolute limit and provided you'd actually manage to fire anything.

First for the "cannot not hit"-argument: If both ships travel in the same direction at the same speed, everything in the ships, including projectiles, moves in the same direction with the same speed. Seen from any of the ships, the other ship would not move. Everything else moves, but in the coordinate system of either ship, the other wouldn't move. Imagine driving on a highway with two lanes. If someone drives at exactly the same speed as you, they don't seem to move from your perspective. Only the background moves.

In our world with an atmosphere, if you throw a bomb at your fellow driver, it wouldn't hit. Why? Because of air friction. Both cars have a motor that accelerates them and that overcompensates air friction, if you want to move. Your bomb hasn't. Make it a little flyer and let it exactly compensate the air friction at that speed, then set it out of the car. It will not move, seen from your perspective. Give it a shove and it will hit the other car.

Same happens in space. You just have to match speeds, go alongside and throw whatever you want at them.



The problem lies in the case when both ships are flying at relativistic speeds and don't fly in the same direction. Most extreme case: Both ships light speed, heading in opposite direction. If c is the limit, any sensor information telling you "Oh my god, a ship is coming!" would travel at the same speed as the ship, so you get a characteristic relativistic light cone trailing the ship like a supersonic boom in air, in which you'd actually be able to see the ship. You wouldn't fire at it, because you wouldn't even know it is there.



Any "in between"-case is a matter of lots of calculations and would actually be difficult. You'd need to compute the position and velocity of the ship at time t. For that you'd need to find it's position x(t) at two points in time and for each position measurement, you'd need to triangulate the position, which is not exact in three dimensions. And you'd have to do it relativistically, so with a time-dependent measurement. In the end, it'd need a lot of computing power, produce interesting error bars and you'd hope you fire at something that's where you guess your weaponry should shoot.

Even today in fighters, computers are doing more of the work to actually fly them than humans do, anymore (most crash, if all computers crash). If you fight at subrelativistic speeds, the situation simply wouldn't change. If you fought at relativistic speeds, you'd have a whole lot of other stuff to worry about.





I personally like the Starlancer battles. Old PC-game. Anyways, the idea was to have large hullbreaking torpedos that either the huge battleships could field (which were too bulky to move a lot) or specialized bombers could bring to bear. The torpedoes and the bombers were easy to shoot down, though. So fighters to intercept torpedoes and bombers made a lot of sense.

The engine technology was actually a jumpdrive, so ships simply couldn't flee. The drive had to recharge. Nice excuse for interesting battles, in my opinion.







I think the best bet for ground invasions is to simply have one-way-dropships, roll out air-fighters on the ground and quick-construct a few airfields, hijack a few as first priority or rework a few highways to that effect. Bringing anything in and out of the atmosphere simply isn't worth it, due to heat-shielding and energy requirements severely reducing the effective weapon payload, possible.

And this kids is why Physics rules!



And to add to the discussion, there is no reason to lose pilots in fighters, they could perfectly remote control the drones from the Carrier while drinking a soda...



Fighters and bombers can be usefull at any phase of the combat - they launch at the begginnig and fight the rest of the time. Fighters and bombers can be equiped with any of the weapon tecs the player researchs but on a smaler format not changing a thing on the combat mechanics because you wouldn't need to develop new counters. But could force you to research AA like flak to counter them instead of only negating the damage they deliver using shields or deflectors.



They could also be usefull and provide an extended bonus to invasion since they can go down to the planet and deliver the damage more effectively.

Nosferatiel wrote:
If the target traveled at a relativistic speed and you did the same, both ships alongside at exactly the same speeds, you wouldn't be able not to hit it. As long as you obey lightspeed as the absolute limit and provided you'd actually manage to fire anything.

First for the "cannot not hit"-argument: If both ships travel in the same direction at the same speed, everything in the ships, including projectiles, moves in the same direction with the same speed. Seen from any of the ships, the other ship would not move. Everything else moves, but in the coordinate system of either ship, the other wouldn't move. Imagine driving on a highway with two lanes. If someone drives at exactly the same speed as you, they don't seem to move from your perspective. Only the background moves.

In our world with an atmosphere, if you throw a bomb at your fellow driver, it wouldn't hit. Why? Because of air friction. Both cars have a motor that accelerates them and that overcompensates air friction, if you want to move. Your bomb hasn't. Make it a little flyer and let it exactly compensate the air friction at that speed, then set it out of the car. It will not move, seen from your perspective. Give it a shove and it will hit the other car.

Same happens in space. You just have to match speeds, go alongside and throw whatever you want at them.



The problem lies in the case when both ships are flying at relativistic speeds and don't fly in the same direction. Most extreme case: Both ships light speed, heading in opposite direction. If c is the limit, any sensor information telling you "Oh my god, a ship is coming!" would travel at the same speed as the ship, so you get a characteristic relativistic light cone trailing the ship like a supersonic boom in air, in which you'd actually be able to see the ship. You wouldn't fire at it, because you wouldn't even know it is there.



Any "in between"-case is a matter of lots of calculations and would actually be difficult. You'd need to compute the position and velocity of the ship at time t. For that you'd need to find it's position x(t) at two points in time and for each position measurement, you'd need to triangulate the position, which is not exact in three dimensions. And you'd have to do it relativistically, so with a time-dependent measurement. In the end, it'd need a lot of computing power, produce interesting error bars and you'd hope you fire at something that's where you guess your weaponry should shoot.

Even today in fighters, computers are doing more of the work to actually fly them than humans do, anymore (most crash, if all computers crash). If you fight at subrelativistic speeds, the situation simply wouldn't change. If you fought at relativistic speeds, you'd have a whole lot of other stuff to worry about.

Wow, I completely looked over the fact that in ES's battle, the ship are along side each other, going the same speed. So, a big chunk of my argument is gone, as I was imagining battles where fleets were coming in at each other from opposing directions. In the case of how it is now...Fighters might work then, I think, maybe. I might need a bit to re-read this a few times and make sure I understand it.



Help me understand the relativistic speeds a bit more, though (if this should be taken to a different thread, or in private messages, let me know). I doubt battles would be fought at light speed. Bringing in The Lost Fleet again, most of the fleets were only going between .3-.7 light speed when battles started (depended on the battle and situation). Now, if Fleet A is heading towards Fleet B at .5 light, and Fleet B is charging A at .3 light, they would meet as if they were going .8 light, correct? Or, at least, that is how it would seem when weapons hit ships? And Fleet B would possibly have the advantage, because it could pull a maneuver at the last second to throw A's aiming off, while still having his own aiming be more or less correct?



The ships in the series did have to take into account distances, travel times, how long it takes for them to see new information (and realizing that, at times, info may be hours old, etc). Once I can get home, I can type up an example. I might have to do that anyway, because I'm struggling to find the right way to keep asking the questions I have on this. But still, considering the size of space, going subrelativistic speeds makes no sense to me (I'm under the impression that these speeds would be below .1 light). It would take forever for anything to happen and resolve. At long range you would see the attack coming possibly hours in advance and maneuver out of the way.



But pulling up alongside each other at these speeds, relativistic or sub, now strikes me as, well...stupid. Especially since these ships aren't constrained to an essentially 2D plane (the sea) but can maneuver in 3D (space). I think I've just over-thought myself out of any point I had now...I don't think I'm cut out to manage any space fleets...

I personally like the Starlancer battles. Old PC-game. Anyways, the idea was to have large hullbreaking torpedos that either the huge battleships could field (which were too bulky to move a lot) or specialized bombers could bring to bear. The torpedoes and the bombers were easy to shoot down, though. So fighters to intercept torpedoes and bombers made a lot of sense.

The engine technology was actually a jumpdrive, so ships simply couldn't flee. The drive had to recharge. Nice excuse for interesting battles, in my opinion.

If this were the case in game, I could get behind it. Although, what did the jump drives do? Allow them to jump between systems, I imagine...How did they travel while in-system? Just take our own solar system as an example. It takes light about five and a half hours to reach Pluto, and let's assume it is roughly around Pluto's distance ships jump into the system (and yes, I know Pluto has a very oblong orbit, this is just an example based on averages from a few Google searches). Being unable to go the speed of light, how long would it take to get anywhere? Days, weeks? Now, I am assuming that you jump in at the edges of a system, so if they were precise enough to come in much closer to worlds of interest, okay, nevermind this.

I think the best bet for ground invasions is to simply have one-way-dropships, roll out air-fighters on the ground and quick-construct a few airfields, hijack a few as first priority or rework a few highways to that effect. Bringing anything in and out of the atmosphere simply isn't worth it, due to heat-shielding and energy requirements severely reducing the effective weapon payload, possible.

The only problem I have with one-way ships is, well, how do you get your guys back afterwards? You'd still need ships that can get those exit speeds to get your Marines back. Now, if this is a long term thing and you aren't planning on leaving any time soon, never mind. But then I wonder if you'd even have the manpower for a long operation. We don't know how many soldiers/Marines the fleets might be carrying, but would it be enough for a long-term conflict on a planet, that may have several large, standing armies? Civilian resistances? Yeah, you have big guns in space, but you'd risk hurting you own people if you tried to use them. And if you tried to take out the land armies before your boots hit the ground, you're also destroying those assets like airfield that you could really use.



Now, I could be looking and imagining things all wrong. I really don't know enough about military operations to even have an idea if I'm just spouting BS. This is just how things seem to me, so if I'm coming off as stupid/crazy, um....Sorry. The same goes in terms of all the physics. I don't know that much, or anything really solid and concrete. Just basic ideas that I think I might understand, that's I've read in passing. Nothing that I've actually studied. So, sorry again if I'm making your head hurt.

FinalStrigon wrote:
Help me understand the relativistic speeds a bit more, though (if this should be taken to a different thread, or in private messages, let me know). I doubt battles would be fought at light speed. Bringing in The Lost Fleet again, most of the fleets were only going between .3-.7 light speed when battles started (depended on the battle and situation). Now, if Fleet A is heading towards Fleet B at .5 light, and Fleet B is charging A at .3 light, they would meet as if they were going .8 light, correct? Or, at least, that is how it would seem when weapons hit ships? And Fleet B would possibly have the advantage, because it could pull a maneuver at the last second to throw A's aiming off, while still having his own aiming be more or less correct?

The advantage would be there, if they anticipated the shot and had so powerful side-thrusters that the big ship could change trajectory faster than the projectile could close in.

Anyways, to calculate such things you don't simply use galileo-transformation of velocity (velocity A + velocity B), but Lorentz transformation of velocities, in this case antiparallel ones. Just follow the example there and you'll see that it doesn't add up to 0.8c, but a lot less, relatively seen. Tip: Antiparallel velocities mean, that one velocity is negative.

As you'll find out, neither ship would agree on the other one's velocity. And you make me dig out very old maths.

FinalStrigon wrote:
The ships in the series did have to take into account distances, travel times, how long it takes for them to see new information (and realizing that, at times, info may be hours old, etc). Once I can get home, I can type up an example. I might have to do that anyway, because I'm struggling to find the right way to keep asking the questions I have on this. But still, considering the size of space, going subrelativistic speeds makes no sense to me (I'm under the impression that these speeds would be below .1 light). It would take forever for anything to happen and resolve. At long range you would see the attack coming possibly hours in advance and maneuver out of the way.

It would make a lot more sense to shoot the weapons at light speed or drop mines and simply let the superlightspeed-enemy run into them.

FinalStrigon wrote:
If this were the case in game, I could get behind it. Although, what did the jump drives do? Allow them to jump between systems, I imagine...How did they travel while in-system? Just take our own solar system as an example. It takes light about five and a half hours to reach Pluto, and let's assume it is roughly around Pluto's distance ships jump into the system (and yes, I know Pluto has a very oblong orbit, this is just an example based on averages from a few Google searches). Being unable to go the speed of light, how long would it take to get anywhere? Days, weeks? Now, I am assuming that you jump in at the edges of a system, so if they were precise enough to come in much closer to worlds of interest, okay, nevermind this.

Actually, each jump took you only a distance R, so you had to make a jump, recharge, make a jump again. Meanwhile enemies could find your position while you were waiting for recharge and jump in. It was a space fighter sim, so you'd be the one killing the fighters that jumped in when they found you. Or jumped anywhere yourselves.

FinalStrigon wrote:
The only problem I have with one-way ships is, well, how do you get your guys back afterwards? You'd still need ships that can get those exit speeds to get your Marines back. Now, if this is a long term thing and you aren't planning on leaving any time soon, never mind. But then I wonder if you'd even have the manpower for a long operation. We don't know how many soldiers/Marines the fleets might be carrying, but would it be enough for a long-term conflict on a planet, that may have several large, standing armies? Civilian resistances? Yeah, you have big guns in space, but you'd risk hurting you own people if you tried to use them. And if you tried to take out the land armies before your boots hit the ground, you're also destroying those assets like airfield that you could really use.

Realistically seen, everything down there is hostile and not all of your troops will come back. Just shoot what doesn't seem too valuable. Craver style. Capture the rest. This is no conventional war where you have to apply a beachhead. You simply drop troops out of orbit and try to secure keypoints, while you have complete orbital surveilance of enemy troop movements, know where your troops are and can rain death on moving enemy troops wherever they show themselves. Sun Tzu style: Know thyself and know thy enemy!

And when the day comes the system is liberated, you probably have to station troops there, anyway, against the very civilian resistances you mentioned. So if you want to retrieve anyone, you've got a lot of time for it.

FinalStrigon wrote:
Now, I could be looking and imagining things all wrong. I really don't know enough about military operations to even have an idea if I'm just spouting BS. This is just how things seem to me, so if I'm coming off as stupid/crazy, um....Sorry. The same goes in terms of all the physics. I don't know that much, or anything really solid and concrete. Just basic ideas that I think I might understand, that's I've read in passing. Nothing that I've actually studied. So, sorry again if I'm making your head hurt.

It's my job to argue. Making my head hurt is a lot easier by doing stupid things. This is not meant as an encouragement! XD

Nosferatiel wrote:
The advantage would be there, if they anticipated the shot and had so powerful side-thrusters that the big ship could change trajectory faster than the projectile could close in.

Anyways, to calculate such things you don't simply use galileo-transformation of velocity (velocity A + velocity B), but Lorentz transformation of velocities, in this case antiparallel ones. Just follow the example there and you'll see that it doesn't add up to 0.8c, but a lot less, relatively seen. Tip: Antiparallel velocities mean, that one velocity is negative.

As you'll find out, neither ship would agree on the other one's velocity. And you make me dig out very old maths.

Oh, wow, so many letters...I'll take your word for it, as, I don't even know where to begin to try and figure something like that out. I didn't even know some of those symbols were used in math...I'm really starting to wish I had kept with the math and sciences. Figuring this stuff out used to be fun and a nice challenge when I knew how to do it (well, I was just at the calculus level when my math days ended). Now...I'm lost. ^^;;

It would make a lot more sense to shoot the weapons at light speed or drop mines and simply let the superlightspeed-enemy run into them.

That's assuming that you can fire your weapons at light speed. Perhaps you could with lasers, or particle weapons, but kinetics would require a lot of energy. Missiles, I suppose, could be possible, depending on if it would be cost efficient enough to put a small FTL drive on them. as for the mines, well...I don't know what to say. In the series, if they weren't in transit between systems or avoiding a pursuing fleet, the ships rarely went about .5 light speed. Mines could be used against a pursuing force, if the gap was small enough the enemy couldn't avoid them (unlikely), otherwise you just wasted mines. This was used, though, to booby-trap the jump exits into systems a few times in the series, though.



I guess it depends on the level of the weapon tech that the ships have, on what would be the best way to do things. To my fault, I'm assuming a lot of the stuff in the game functions similarly to how tech did in The Lost Fleet. But it depends on how it all works in Endless Space, and I simply don't know that. Maybe I should start reading the modules and tech trees again...

Actually, each jump took you only a distance R, so you had to make a jump, recharge, make a jump again. Meanwhile enemies could find your position while you were waiting for recharge and jump in. It was a space fighter sim, so you'd be the one killing the fighters that jumped in when they found you. Or jumped anywhere yourselves.

Ah, I understand now. That would make sense, then. I'm still wondering at what speeds the ships were traveling when not jumping, but that's a point that likely doesn't matter than much at all.

Realistically seen, everything down there is hostile and not all of your troops will come back. Just shoot what doesn't seem too valuable. Craver style. Capture the rest. This is no conventional war where you have to apply a beachhead. You simply drop troops out of orbit and try to secure keypoints, while you have complete orbital surveilance of enemy troop movements, know where your troops are and can rain death on moving enemy troops wherever they show themselves. Sun Tzu style: Know thyself and know thy enemy!

And when the day comes the system is liberated, you probably have to station troops there, anyway, against the very civilian resistances you mentioned. So if you want to retrieve anyone, you've got a lot of time for it.

Again, good point. The only problem I see, though, is the numbers of boots on the ground still. If you drop in to secure key points, unless those points are close to each other your forces are spread out. How many people are in your dropped forces, anyway? And how many enemy are on the ground? You could be allowing your forces to be surrounded, as those larger numbers press in too close your any effective air support. You'd risk bombing your own men as well as the enemy.



A conventional war-esque approach still may be best. Initial bombardment to soften up the target. Take out key military building/bases/silos/etc. Drop your men in far enough away from the target than an effective staging area can be set up, and go from there. If anything tries to attack your men as they are deploying, you'd see them coming and still be able to rain death on them.

It's my job to argue. Making my head hurt is a lot easier by doing stupid things. This is not meant as an encouragement! XD

I'm not planning on doing stupid things, at least not intentionally. I just meant making your head hurt in the sense of...well, someone who has no idea what they are talking about, still trying to keep up their end of the debate. Like, in my case, it would have been when I was trying to convince someone that no, Julius Caesar did not defeat Napoleon at the Battle of Hastings. And no, Alexander the Great did not kill Atilla the Hun in his attempt to invade China...



So much historical pain there that the classicist in me died a little bit...

FinalStrigon wrote:
I'm not planning on doing stupid things, at least not intentionally. I just meant making your head hurt in the sense of...well, someone who has no idea what they are talking about, still trying to keep up their end of the debate. Like, in my case, it would have been when I was trying to convince someone that no, Julius Caesar did not defeat Napoleon at the Battle of Hastings. And no, Alexander the Great did not kill Atilla the Hun in his attempt to invade China...



So much historical pain there that the classicist in me died a little bit...

We should go back2topic. Otherwise I'll make you look up the japanese Admiral of the fleet that attacked pearl harbor, the names of all aircraft carriers during WWII, the name of the first air craft carrier prototypes of all allied nations and while I'm at it, I'd be interested in knowing the name of the commander of the japanese subcarrier-fleet that surrendered after the capitulation of japan. Those subcarriers were actually sunk around Hawaii.