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Long range targeting

James

Inactive Member
So here’s a question that I think needs to be asked. With the range of most ship to ship weapons being measured in AU (Astronomical Units) and with ships capable of moving damn near the speed of light with conventional engines, how do you hit anything? Clearly detecting things with sensors that pick up EM emissions (light, radio waves, magnetic field, etc.) would pose a problem, since at one AU, by the time these emissions reach you, they’d be roughly eight minutes old and whatever you’re trying to target has already moved.

Clearly there is some kind of FTL sensor or something, what I want to know is what is the mechanism used for this? Just what is it detecting and how does it do this faster than light?
 
Typically, ship top speeds ought to only be about a third of the speed of light in the case of the ships with the fastest STL drive units. This makes ship-to-ship combat much more liable to take place in a light-second distance than the actual AU (which takes more than 8 minutes for light to get across, like you said, versus the more palatable 300 000 km increments). The most accurate weapons should be beam weapons, then directed beam weapons, and then direct fire projectiles. Guided projectiles are sort of wonky in SARP since some are uber fast, but there's a movement to tone them down to speed slow enough so that pressing the fire button wouldn't mean an instant hit.

But technically, since lasers are supposed to be the 'most accurate weapons', this means that most of the sensors you've outlined in your post aren't quite so useless as they seem.

With Anti-FTL technology, this binds ship battles to much smaller, more manageable distances, fortunately. SARP, though, is quirky with its weapon numbers and many try to make those numbers big to have them feel impressive. I wouldn't worry too much over it if I were you, or else you'll spend most of the time banging your forehead against your desk as you try to make sense of SARP's... lack of universal scaling in the varied technologies it offers its playerbase access to.
 
The reason I ask is I’m working on a ship that may end up the next plotship for the UOC and it’s partly an attempt on my part to scale things back to offer a different balance. Sub light engines that require more fuel but offer greater performance, shorter weapon ranges and systems to counter long range targeting. Forcing more close in, fast paced battles where a ship can be out gunned but still win by out-manoeuvring the opponent.
 
Well, the MIKO components Andrew and I cobbled together (mostly Andrew) has pretty much one of the best sensor lists you'll find in any ship. Perhaps you should give it a look?
 
Thanks, that was indeed helpful. I was about to have a Spaceballs moment “Sir, we’ve lost the bleeps the sweeps and the creeps!”
 
I believe the generally accepted maximum distance for weapon targeting is 3 light seconds. Past that I believe things just get wwwwaaaayyyy to complicated to actually aim at. That's already 3 seconds of delay, if anything at all. I don't believe ay sensors in the setting are instantaneous aside from Quantum and even then... Are they really?

I'm curious as to how many accounts I am wrong on.
 
We have a "Starship Combat Guide" that is the common standard for things: https://wiki.stararmy.com/doku.php?id=guide:starship_combat

But even that needs updating.

Thing about how difficult it is to hit something accurate from 300 meters away, let alone 20 kilometers away. So even when your weapons are controlled by computers, it's difficult to make such tiny adjustments to your ship's guns' aim. And chances are basically 100% that the ships are moving in relation to one another, even when they're trying not to, just because the nature of space.

So what I'm saying is that ships should really have to get closer to each other to reliably make hits. Besides, close combat is much better visually for RP purposes.
 
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