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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