A small but important buff coming to the plasma weapon projectile speed. This will make it easier to hit smaller and faster targets.
Vanduul Blade getting a buff
- Thread starter Montoya
- Start date
Shadow Reaper
Space Marshal
Good review, but I would remind that the Vanduul don't think much of stealth. The Gladius is significantly quieter in both EM and IR, and it carries twice the missile load including twice as many launchers. 1 missile spread from the Blade is an anemic 4,600 pts while the Gladius wearing all Bullets is 11,200. Even with missiles needing a new balance that is significant. The big advantage the Blade has is its maneuvering acceleration is 21Gs, while the Gladius is only 9, so the Blade can cut much tighter circles because it is half the weight of the Gladius. Unless you want to master those tight turns and ramming aspects, the Gladius may be a better choice at 1/3 the Blade's price.
Lemming
Admiral
Yes. It is a Vanduul light fighter produced by Esperia for training the UEE military.
how does a plasma projectile travel at anything less than the speed of light?
sounds immersion-breaking
sounds immersion-breaking
No, that's alright. Plasma is stuff like flames, the glowing gas inside a neon light, stars, the tail of a comet. Plasma is still a state of matter, with mass, and can't reach the speed of light.
Intelligent part of the community: You need to increase time to kill, cos we don't get to see or use any of the cool mechanics you plan to implement like fire/module repairs mid combat/targeted module destruction to cripple and so on! It's all just click-Boom with small/mid sized ships!
CIG: plasma faster, ship go boom!
CIG: plasma faster, ship go boom!
Nice to hear good news about the Blade.
I see real value of the Blade (and Glaive) as enabling fleets like ours to run mock Vanduul vs UEE PVP events.
Split into two teams, one team jumps in their Esperia Vanduul ships, and then go at it. Lots of fun scenarios to play out.
I see real value of the Blade (and Glaive) as enabling fleets like ours to run mock Vanduul vs UEE PVP events.
Split into two teams, one team jumps in their Esperia Vanduul ships, and then go at it. Lots of fun scenarios to play out.
Shadow Reaper
Space Marshal
Technically, all laser weapons should move at the speed of light, but they do not for game purposes. The Banu Defender's original tachyon weapons were an experiment into such zero-time weapons and they proved to be much too powerful, because they hit so much more often than all other weapons.
Whats your thoughts on energy bolts like Plasma?
Take Ball Lightening it 'aint half the speed of regular lightening but maaaan does it go boom.
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As a practical matter, ALL the cannons in the game fire projectiles that are far too slow for legitimate dogfighting, a mere 700 m/s. As Yogi stated in his post on this, they want to bring the Blade closer in performance to the Gladius. Since CIG won't let us change those weapons the remaining option is to buff them closer to repeaters.
Even 1400 m/s is inadequate for some gameplay.. wasn't too long ago John Crewe was on about getting code into the game that allows specific ships/turrets to buff their fitted weapons. The Hammerhead has lost much of it's original punch with the weapons changes that have been introduced, and it has a difficult time hitting fighters out near the range of it's guns simply because it is easy to dodge the projectiles. It has become pretty easy to kill, not at all where they want it to be.
Also, as @Raven_King stated, plasma (in the context of ship weapons) is matter in a very angry state. It has no inherent 'speed'; that would be a function of whatever device or condition that created the plasma in the first place. What it does have is an overabundance of energy that really, really wants to comply with the Second Law of Thermodynamics. And in SC, your face is a legitimate point of dissipation.
Even 1400 m/s is inadequate for some gameplay.. wasn't too long ago John Crewe was on about getting code into the game that allows specific ships/turrets to buff their fitted weapons. The Hammerhead has lost much of it's original punch with the weapons changes that have been introduced, and it has a difficult time hitting fighters out near the range of it's guns simply because it is easy to dodge the projectiles. It has become pretty easy to kill, not at all where they want it to be.
Also, as @Raven_King stated, plasma (in the context of ship weapons) is matter in a very angry state. It has no inherent 'speed'; that would be a function of whatever device or condition that created the plasma in the first place. What it does have is an overabundance of energy that really, really wants to comply with the Second Law of Thermodynamics. And in SC, your face is a legitimate point of dissipation.
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Patrick Spaceman
Grand Admiral
I had a Hornet sitting around....
I watch video..
I no longer have a Hornet sitting around...
I have a Blade sitting around...
I watch video..
I no longer have a Hornet sitting around...
I have a Blade sitting around...
Shadow Reaper
Space Marshal
When Reagan kicked off the Star Wars program in the early 1980's, part of the money went to missile interceptors, some to lasers and some to charged particle of "plasma" weapons. The one we see least of today are charged particle weapons and it's only a guess how they have developed. A decade ago, the outlier and mavrick of plasma weapon research was Ken Shoulders' work on Exotic Vacuum Objects or "EVOs". That may have ended when he passed in 2013.
Charged particle weapons offer fantastic destructive capability and some advantages over lasers, but large streams of charged particles diverge over distance. EVOs are tiny bundles of charged particles wrapped in a little sphere like tiny bits of ball lightning. If anyone is ever going to make a practicle plasma weapon, it may benefit hugely from the work of Ken Shoulders. I'm pretty sure he had DARPA funding so I would not be surprised if that work continues, albeit as a black program.
So guess what you will. Ball Lightning is not a bad guess at all. We do not know how ball lightning exists, but IIRC, Shoulder's thesis was that under special conditions, an exotic vacuum can be formed that promotes these EVOs, or "charge clusters", and that the thing holding them together was some sort of unusual bit of spacetime. Whatever it is, electrons do not want to simply bunch up into balls. From the spark that jumps from your fingertip to a doorknob, to actual ball lightning, something is acting to hold those electrons together, and conventional science has not yet figured out what that is.
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Just did this, another "accidental" order my clickin buy now fingers move faster than my brain so there is no stopping it sometimes.
But now I need one for Gunar lol. No way to get them in game yet?
This things are really rad. They are also very RED. I guess in Pyro everything is "red" anyway so it'll be cool to fly it in pyro.
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I really wasn't going to get it but since I plan on being a big member of Operation Pitchfork and vanquishing Vanduul scum by the brood I figured it's best I truly get a feel for my enemy. Sun Tzu and all..
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operation pitchfork isn't happening as there will be no vanduul systems...at least at 1.0 launch and since operation pitchfork is supposed to happen just before the game goes live for the final time....
That said, you have to ask why we have WWII in space as "start of the art" in 930 years. No missiles that kill 160 or more km out (100 miles), combat speeds that are subsonic...IN SPACE...from spacecraft that have the power to take off from planets, go into space, and then traverse the star system. Combat systems that require you to visually track and fire on your opponent using the mark 1 eyeball, all while merely projecting a "possible" aim point, along with SOOO many other problems.
I remember seeing a Star Trek:TNG episode where the Enterprise D was being attacked by snub craft (shuttle types) and while it was "rule of cool", they were all pretty much just blasted to bits by short phaser bursts because they didn't have powerful shields and the D could just pour on the juice till they popped...which took about 1/2 to 1 second per shuttle.
Seriously, CIG has compromised the original design of the game so badly that they have had to keep revising it year after year to support sales of the new hotness. How long before we see a Sabre MK II with 4xS4 guns, and Hurricane NK II with S5 or S6 guns on the front and S4 guns on the turret, or the Gladiator MKII (and the Gladiator really needs an update) with S8 torps and S5 guns.
At this point I've lost my hope in SC delivering a decent game and the only thing I can hope for are enough memes that I can laugh at it and not cry.
I hear you on the realism, but it has to be fun too. To be fun it has to be at least somewhat understandable. Sure, highly skilled and experienced players with access to better sensors should be able to understand more about a given target from further away than less skilled players with inferior sensors, within some limits that feel 'fair'. We need to be able to see and understand much of what other players are doing, albeit imperfectly and not necessarily all the time; stealth definitely should be a thing, with downsides to make subjectively fair. Given what we do see, we should usually have time to react before we die. That's a more fun game experience than cruising along and suddenly pop, you're dead, which is probably more realistic given the tech. I'm happy to shrug that off as necessary for a game, but you still have a point :)
Oh, I do agree with you, but some of the stuff I see CIG doing in the name of "realism" (needing to fight fires with hand held fire extinguishers for instance, cargo loading, etc.) is just plain silly. I see the need to load and unload cargo when you are moving goods from one ship to another (or the remains of one ship to a functional ship), but seriously, needing to hand load your cargo in Loreville?