Igncom1 wrote:
Yeah! there is no real range in space! your balistics can travel just as far as any missile!

There is no range in space but the important point is the accuracy. Kinetics are "short range" because they don't often hit the target in medium and long range.

i have to say the discovery of kinetics is only effective in medium and short range is something i dont share. iniative wise kinetics fire firstslightly bevor laser and normaly kinetik weapon ships easy own most enemy fleets on longrange even faster then missels cause of thier low initiative.



normaly i think the it should be something like longrange = missels after that medrange = laser and missels and shortrange = kinetik,laser,missels

Igncom1 wrote:
Yeah! there is no real range in space! your balistics can travel just as far as any missile!

There is no range? You battle in a solar system so you have problems with gravity and other stuff.

And now tell me that the range in not important. It is a lot easier to hit with a auto aiming missle or a laser than with a kinect

weapon on long range. Also an beam looses a bit of his power by traveling through the space if it is not well adjustet to the distance.

And rockets are more easy to shoot down if they start in close combat and are killed by the flaks in the starting situation.

No, gravity wouldn't affect range, if you managed to fire a slug near the speed of light (Good luck with that) it would be unaffected by gravity because its moving to fast plus would be to small for gravity to affect it in a sizable way. Comets move through our solar system and keep going without end and they have considerably more mass than a mass driver round would.

After playing around with the game for a bit, and trying both sides of the tech tree, I've realized that beams greatly outclass kinetics in both damage and range. The only disadvantage I've found with beams is that they fire slower, yet still put out more damage. Kinetics tear things apart at close range, but they SUCK at range.



So here is my idea; split both weapons mods in two. One would be for range, the other would be for close range.



Long range:



Beams - Actual beams, they have a slow fire rate, but do have high accuracy and damage output. If you don't have shields, this will mess you up.



Kinetics - Railguns/Mass drivers, they have a slow fire speed as well, but have similar damage to their beam counterpart. You are going to need armor for this, don't hope to deflect it.



Medium-melee range:



Beams - The lasers we have now, with scaled back damage



Kinetics - Similar to what there is now, or maybe something like cannons?





Anyways, just a thought on how to balance the weapons groups.

Xetherius wrote:
Agreed, the Gunnery Chief from ME2 put it best:



Gunnery Chief: This, recruits, is a 20-kilo ferrous slug. Feel the weight. Every five seconds, the main gun of an Everest-class dreadnought accelerates one to 1.3 percent of light speed. It impacts with the force of a 38-kilotomb bomb. That is three times the yield of the city buster dropped on Hiroshima back on Earth.That means Sir Isaac Newton is the deadliest son-of-a-***** in space. Now! Serviceman Burnside! What is Newton's First Law?



Recruit: Sir! A object in motion stays in motion, sir!



Gunnery Chief: No credit for partial answers, maggot!



Recruit: Sir! Unless acted on by an outside force, sir!



Gunnery Chief: Damn straight! I dare to assume you ignorant jackasses know that space is empty. Once you fire a husk of metal, it keeps going until it hits something. That can be a ship, or the planet behind that ship. It might go off into deep space and hit somebody else in ten thousand years.If you pull the trigger on this, you're ruining someone's day somewhere and sometime. That is why you check your **** targets! That is why you wait for the computer to give you a **** firing solution! That is why, Serviceman Chung, we do not "eyeball it!" This is a weapon of mass destruction. You are not a cowboy shooting from the hip.



Recruit: Sir, yes sir!

LOL Indeed. One of the best moments in ME2.



I have also given a thought for this and seems that kinetic weapons are the best way to counter destroyer spam while mounted on a capital ship. Normally bigger ships do overkill damage which basically can be counted as an extra armor for the enemy. If you however create anti-destroyer capital ship with crap load of kinetics the damage will be divided among the targets in long range. I haven't tried this yet but the inaccuracy of the weapon type should guarantee hitting multiple targets at the same time.

Virus wrote:
There is no range? You battle in a solar system so you have problems with gravity and other stuff.

And now tell me that the range in not important. It is a lot easier to hit with a auto aiming missle or a laser than with a kinect

weapon on long range. Also an beam looses a bit of his power by traveling through the space if it is not well adjustet to the distance.

And rockets are more easy to shoot down if they start in close combat and are killed by the flaks in the starting situation.

you know that you are within sight distance of an enemy fleet right? as in it doesent rally matter when your weapons already fire like a shotgun?



Energy weapons would not lose power over any viable range of combat, unless you intend to shoot planets from another solar system there would be little to no degridation of the weapons power.



And missiles only lose effectivness when you can shoot them down, otherwise they are always effective.

Ronnek wrote:
After playing around with the game for a bit, and trying both sides of the tech tree, I've realized that beams greatly outclass kinetics in both damage and range.

How did you come to this conclusion? My research indicates that Kinetics put out the best damage toward end game. Perhaps the range penalty for Kinetics is severe? ( see table here )



Are you seeing something differently?

It might be a accuracy diffrence.

Virus wrote:
There is no range? You battle in a solar system so you have problems with gravity and other stuff.

And now tell me that the range in not important. It is a lot easier to hit with a auto aiming missle or a laser than with a kinect

weapon on long range. Also an beam looses a bit of his power by traveling through the space if it is not well adjustet to the distance.

And rockets are more easy to shoot down if they start in close combat and are killed by the flaks in the starting situation.

Doesn't really matter the the battle takes place in a star system. The battle itself takes place in the tiny area you weapons can reach each other in. Any more then the Americans and Japanese were firing their guns at each other from across the Pacific.

Also, the counter missiles only shoot when the missiles get TO the ship shot at. They don't reach out and touch someone just cause they launched in "melee" range. They don't even provide coverage to nearby ships, a serious flaw imho.

AngleWyrm wrote:
How did you come to this conclusion? My research indicates that beam weapons have the smallest damage output for any given research level. And not just by a little bit either, it's substantial, and the gap gets larger as time goes on. ( see table here )



Are you seeing something differently?

I experienced it. Kinetics have terrible range compared to beams. Beams hit more often, thus more damage is caused, where as kinetics don't start hitting constantly until mid-melee range.

Igncom1 wrote:
Yeah! there is no real range in space! your balistics can travel just as far as any missile!

It's called effective range. Ballistics can't follow a dodging target. All someone has to do to dodge a bullet, is step to the side half their width. They may not animate ships moving, but that is why you miss, at least in part.

LordErrorprone wrote:
No, gravity wouldn't affect range, if you managed to fire a slug near the speed of light (Good luck with that) it would be unaffected by gravity because its moving to fast plus would be to small for gravity to affect it in a sizable way. Comets move through our solar system and keep going without end and they have considerably more mass than a mass driver round would.

It would be affected by gravity. Light is affected by gravity. It just has less time for a given gravity well to affect it as it passes by, so less deflection. The real issue is that ballistics can't follow anything that can maneuver, so their effective range is limited. A slugs size has nothing to do with how the gravity of a planet or a star would affect it. And comets are affected by mass, it's kinda why they are held in orbit and don't go flinging off into space.

Ronnek wrote:
I experienced it. Kinetics have terrible range compared to beams. Beams hit more often, thus more damage is caused, where as kinetics don't start hitting constantly until mid-melee range.

My experience too. My last win, the Hissho were all about advanced kinetics. They were shooting stuff at me that was purple and showed 3 purple dots in a triangle, whatever those are. Dunno since I've never bothered to research that far up the kinetics tree. I'm always about my best beams. Was using Collapsors and the next tier after that later in the war. Tho started the war with merely plasma beams, their armour took the damage well. That changed with the upgrade.



My ships laid waste to theirs in the first volley, it rarely needed a second. The only reason I research the kinetic side of things is for the deflectors. Tried rail guns and the like, was just a flashier class of useless compared to my beams. Don't even bother with missiles. Beams take out missile throwers before they can even launch.

Sleel wrote:
It would be affected by gravity. Light is affected by gravity. It just has less time for a given gravity well to affect it as it passes by, so less deflection. The real issue is that ballistics can't follow anything that can maneuver, so their effective range is limited. A slugs size has nothing to do with how the gravity of a planet or a star would affect it. And comets are affected by mass, it's kinda why they are held in orbit and don't go flinging off into space.

Yes, unaffected is the wrong word to use, gravity still affects them just not in a way that matters to this discussion, gravity does have a greater affect the more mass there is, for instance pounds (lb) or kilograms (kg) basically measure how much force is being exerted on the object by gravity. Light is affected by gravity because photons have mass but is only noticeable when observing distant Astronomical Objects.

Igncom1 wrote:
you know that you are within sight distance of an enemy fleet right? as in it doesent rally matter when your weapons already fire like a shotgun?



Energy weapons would not lose power over any viable range of combat, unless you intend to shoot planets from another solar system there would be little to no degridation of the weapons power.



And missiles only lose effectivness when you can shoot them down, otherwise they are always effective.

Actually the power of a laser degrades RAPIDLY in space since the laser's energy diffuses as it travels and is mostly heat energy in the near absolute zero of space. Bioware really did there homework on this stuff. Of course without Ezo, a mass driver would be less effective in real life but laser/blaster type weapons have a horrible power consumption:range ratio.

AngleWyrm wrote:
How did you come to this conclusion? My research indicates that beam weapons have the smallest damage output for any given research level. And not just by a little bit either, it's substantial, and the gap gets larger as time goes on. ( see table here )



Are you seeing something differently?

I find it amusing that by your own table beams are in the middle.

Fake edit: nevermind you messed up your chart's labels (fixed it for you). In any case, beams out perform kinetics until the 5th tech level of each.



Real edit: nope, it was the table that had the backwards labeling. Label shit properly before you release it dude. Had to really tweak the sheet to get everything properly color coded. Also, are Entropy's Missile's max damage really only 620? Down from Nonbaryonic Explosive's 1000?



Post color labeling fixes, missiles are the worst, kinetics are the "best." But it doesn't take into account miss rate at various ranges.

Well, if you really want to get nitty gritty into the Physics we'll see something amiss here,



**Don't want to be bothered with my long post? I don't blame you. Skip to the "The Short of It" and "The Real of It" to get the meat of the message.





Then Long of It

Laser weapons, by their virtue, will travel at the speed of light and relativistic tells us that the speed of light in a vacuum is our speed limit of things with mass*. So that means what stops us from being effective is actually the accuracy of our aim. With a laser we have the beam heading at the speed of light towards the other object ( and this will always be true) so your leading-target factor is much smaller than, say, a kinetic round or a missile. So, let us explore those.



To understand these two, we must know that the speed of light is the same in all reference frames, however, Newtonian mechanics do not hold. By that it's meant that by classical mechanics tell us if we fire a slug at .5C and it has a speed of .6C then the speeds should add up vectorally and give us 1.1C, but that's impossible by our current understanding of science. The speed of that slug would depend on the speed and direction of the target and thus it will affect its force (IE a huge factor of its destructive capability).



Now, the slug is launched from the ship and is undergoing projectile motion and thus has no inherit acceleration of its own (from the viewpoint of the firing object it just appears to have a greater velocity, not a higher acceleration). This means that the acceleration of the slug (and thus its impact force as told to us by F = ma) will depend entirely on the direction and speed of your target. This means that the slug is the least effective given it cannot increase its acceleration (and we can see why it's most effective in short range).



The missile runs off the same mechanics, but it has its own acceleration (given by its thrust) which means it's more effective than the slug. However, at longer ranges a missile has more time to adjust its path (if it's not dumb fired), but also has a limited amount of fuel and may have a non-impact explosion condition (like it running out of fuel and setting off a small charge to make the desired explosive reaction).



So, if we want to get really down and dirty with the realism and science, the order should be Long Range: Beams, Medium Range: Missiles, Short Range: Kinetics.







The Short of It



If we want to be ultra realistic, then Einstein would tell us Long Range: Beams, Medium Range: Missiles, Short Range: Kinetics.







The Real of It

It's just a game and the rock paper scissor mechanic is quite charming and, I feel, works very well. I don't think that anything needs to be changed about the order of weapon effectiveness or add in a whole new class of weapons (rail guns kind of falling into a new class of kinetics if they work great at long range). I think, maybe, there should just be an option to increase your speed to shorten the rounds and close in to short range faster or have a card to make the kinetic more accurate at long range and short range (Maybe call it advance targeting systems).



The only issue I can see is that missiles can really be the end all (even with nice intercepting tech). I can just amass missiles and it's over by long range and that can be an issue since, from my understanding, why bother going into the advance weapons trees of much else? Just grab the defenses so you can survive until the first volley is let loose.











*This can be seen by the fact that gamma, the boost factor for mass when undergoing high speeds is one divided by the square root of one minus your given velocity divided by the speed of light in a vacuum quantity squared. So at V = C we are dividing by 0 and that is undefined and for V > C we have an imaginary number which mean it would exist outside of our reality.