f13.net

I've never played Eve but I like following the war news since the number of people invovled make it interesting to me. I understand that a large problem with fleet battles is that players naturally form massive fleets that cause show-stopping lag on a regular basis. The devs have tried to deal with this in a variety of ways that have all been (I think) ineffective or have backfired.

Now I might have missed something, since like I said I've never played the game, but if you look at the history of warfare massing bunches of your soldiers into a big group (those thingies called armies) has been standard operating procedure for most of history. Aside from guerilla warfare, which while commong in Eve, I don't see really appling to POS warfare, things only changed with the rise of front-based warfare, which was fairly recent. So what CCP should be doing is getting players to deploy in fronts and look at the historical reasons for the rise of front-based warfare. They don't seem to be doing so at all.

Historically the reason why things changed from having clumped up armies to having front lines is that armies became big enough that supplying them by foraging/stealing shit from the local peasants became increasingly difficult and you can't really forage for fuel to supply a mechanized army on the move. This meant that if the enemy gets behind you they can cut off your supplies, which causes you to become fucked in short order. In order to keep enemies from cutting off your supplies you need to cover your flanks, which caused armies in wars like WW I to spread out across hundreds of miles.

In Eve, as far as my never having played the game self knows, there's no real penalty to having the enemy get between you and your base of operations. Because of this there isn't any reason to guard the flanks/rear of an advancing fleet so there isn't any real reason to split up your fleet and do anything but blob.

So basically to break up blogs, Eve needs to incorporate logistics and logistics are notoriously not fun. I'm not sure how fun the following solution would be, but I think it would break up blobs:

1. Non-capitol ships stay as is.
2. Capitol ships need some kind of fuel that they run through damn fast wether shooting or moving. The cost of this fuel isn't too important but they need to burn through it very fast and it needs to be bulky. I think I heard something about capitol ships already needing fuel, so I guess whatever fuel they need lasts too long and/or isn't bulky enough. It'd have to be bulky enough to have fleets that bring along a bunch of freighters to provide refueling still run out of fuel while in siege mode.
3. While attacking they burn through the fuel fast enough that they need freighters coming in from their base of supply on a constant basis to resupply the capitol ships as if they don't get their fuel they become sitting ducks.
4. This means that if enemies get in between a fleet and its source of fuel, the capitol ships' fuel can be interdicted.
5. This means that in order to keep the fuel flowing to a capitol fleet, an attacking alliance would have to guard their fleets flanks and rear in order to keep the fuel flowing.
6. Gangs that are doing that aren't in the main blob.
7. So the blob gets smaller.

Am I on the right track here, or is there something I'm missing?

There's no collision in EVE and unlike RL where you can definitely detect and intercept a moving force that's trying to get anywhere, you can't do so in EVE; ships in warp will get past your supposed front lines, and jump drives allow a fleet to jump several systems behind you instantaneously.  In addition, when two forces meet, either can run away unless steps are taken to actively jam / scramble all avenues for running away.

There's also no death/destruction like in RL, where blowing up tanks and ships doesn't mean the people inside will just reappear and drive replacement tanks / ships to the fight scene within 10 minutes.

Finally, why?  There have been hundreds of suggestions to change the way the game is, and bottom line, it hasn't changed and the current player base (and the devs) seem to like it the way it is.

The cause of blobbing is POS warfare. The only sane way to run an extended POS war is dread fleets. However, a dread in siege is vulnerable to sudden counterattacks, therefore a smart FC will minimize the length of time his capital fleet is in siege.

At the moment, the only way to do that is to bring more dreads - what will take one dread 24 hours will take two 12hrs, four 6hrs, and so on. Of course, the dreads will need a support fleet and the more dreads, the bigger that fleet.

Naturally, the opponant will try to counter this and will bring at least an equal sized force...and more if he can arrange it.

Suddenly, you've got thirty dreads in siege, thirty other capitals, a 150 ship support fleet and a T2 kitchen sink on one side, and fifty dreads, thirty carriers, three motherships, a titan, 75 HACs, 75 BS, 20 intderdictors & a Officer-named partridge in a pear tree on the other. Plus assorted drones, fighters, pods, anchored bubbles, wrecks, GSCs full of ammo, very lost macrominers, and random passersby.

CCP keep trying to fix the symptoms, not the cause.

And the cause is because the only way to do warfare in a system where you're invulnerable and undetectable while in transit is to set up bases of operation and defend them.  Look at the Star Wars universe, too; an enemy can hyper in to any planet, and the only way to "defend" a territory is to be able to hyper in your own navy to defend it, plus have strong planetary defenses.

The way the POSes are set up, and the dreads required to take them down, etc., that's basically the best possible solution to the effects that this warping and jumpgate travel have had on the game.  Front lines are meaningless; it's a game of fortified bases and rapid response / deployment.

I was surprised that the new constellation sovereignty doesn't force you to attack all bases in a constellation simultaneously to have a chance of success. If ships can jump around through warp gates, couldn't bases reinforce each other through warp tunnels or something? That would at least spread the blob out a bit.

CCP should have built some basic physics into the universe that discouraged big fleets. Warp fields being pretty much magical from our current point of view, they could have given them some "instabilities" that made massive fleet operations undesirable.

Or AoE weapons 100 KM explosion radius.

The thing with the blob lag is, part of it is client lag, but a big part of it is the node on which the entire solar system resides not being able to handle the load.  Jita is laggy around the stations where everyone sits, but Jita is also laggy everywhere else too.

And you can't force players to disperse if they don't want to.  Attacking one base means dealing with only the defenses of one base, so even if they reinforce each other with shields and capacitor etc., it's probably still the most effective way to bring them down, just attack one until you suck out the shields of every base in the system, then go take them out one by one.

THose would be the new bombs -- fired from stealth bombers. Expensive, but I expect to see more of that.

One solution might be multiple players per ship but EVE isn't that kind of game. One player per high slot and make the guns twitch.

Simond, you left off ISD reporters.  Otherwise, good list.

As long as "teams" in the game number in the thousands, you are never going to get rid of blobs. Even if you made everything else equal, SkillPoints, resources, cash, ability etc... nothing is going to deter "hay Joe, we are going to kick some ass tonight, wanna come?".

People want to participate, the more people, the more participation. /shrug

That is the heart of the problem. I would like to remind you gentlemen that blobs existed even before POS (not to mention cap ships) were introduced. As long as increasing numbers cause linear increase in firepower, blobbing isn't going to stop. You would need something that would make blobbing up actually lower the effective power of your gang(s), nothing else will help.

This is probably very bad in the long run though. "Sorry Joe, you can't come along we already have X people for the op". Not being able to be included in play gets people unsubscribed very fast.

Imagine loosing a POS because you couldn't bring everyone that wanted to come along to help defend. 

One of the troubles here is that it is desireable to have large groups of people work together in games like this.  If you limit the numbers that can attack a POS in one location and force them around to others at the sametime you could be seen as favouring one side in the fight because of difference in S&T used, one side uses lots of little ships compared to a side that is big ship themed.  One of those sides will of course see the change as determental to their way of doing things, forcing them to fight in the way of the otherside. 

[Sir Bruce]

What about gate camps?

Well there's a limited supply of Titans :)

From what I've heard the lag in fleet battles is something of an inconvenience.

Right and unless I misunderstand things there's reason for those dread fleet to try to avoid an enemy getting between them and their home base. If an enemy getting in between a dread fleet and their home base was a VERY BAD THING then blogs would spread out a bit into a few different system to cover their flanks. At least I think they would.

Right.

And in that sort of tactical environment there's no reason no to bring all the forces you can to any given battle. This result servers dieing.

Isn't that basically Titans? Titans don't seem to have solved anything...

An idea situation would make it desirable for players to split up their forces between different systems in order to guard their flanks.

But you can make it advantageous for them to do so. In WW I the armies formed spread out front lines instead of massed armies because it was advantageous not because someone was forcing them.


Real life armies in the World Wars numbered in the millions and they formed spread out front lines instead of blobbed armies. If anyone in the World Wars had blobbed their armies they would have been outflanked, cut off from their supplies and annihilated. Its the lack of a logistics system in Eve that causes blobbing.

Unless getting outflanked is a very bad thing, which is not the case in any MMORPG that I know of.

Why?

[/Sir Bruce]

If the German forces had all been in Arras, and Vimy and Bullecourt were undefended, the latter towns could have been easily taken. The Germans would not have been able to quickly warp their artillery and soldiers inside the time taken to capture the towns. Not so in Eve. If you put all your forces in one place, and the enemy splits its strength and tries to capture positions you are not defending, you can just warp to another area and eliminate their weaker forces before they have a time to gain anything. With long capture times and short travel times, there is no advantage to splitting your forces. The differences are not actually related to supply lines at all.

I don't think that its either or. I expect that if the speed of capital ships were slowed waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay down (for example saying that they're too big to warp properly) or if a logistics system were implemented forcing people to guard their flanks, either would kill off blobs. The problem is the CCP is doing neither.

To keep on going with the Hitler example, if Hitler had a shitload of 100 mph tanks he still wouldn't have wanted to put them all in one big blob and head of Moscow because the Ruskies would've come around on either side of the tanks and then behind them, cutting off their supply of gas and tanks without gas aren't worth much.

The best technical fixes would be for CCP to change their server codes so that you could have more than one node per system (which is the current limit), and have the server farm do dynamic load balancing (rather than the manual "Lol, an overloaded node crashed and wiped out half a dozen systems. Better change the busiest one to a dedicated node").

It's a fundamental limitation of their server code - take a look at Jita, for example. That has one node permanently dedicated to it and it still runs like treacle in December. Now if they could split the system up into multiple nodes (one for 4-4, one for the rest of 4-*, etc), things might go a little better.

Dammit man, I gave you a WW I reference and you go and change to Hitler?

Flanking isn't a good analogy, because there is no flanking in space, Khaan.  The issue of supply lines is a better problem, but without an actual fuel source used by all ships (which would force carriers to actually carry ships so they could refuel) it's pointless.

There's several things 'wrong' with why blobs are the best method for EvE fighting.  The least of which is LOS Fire and Friendly Fire, both of which would tear-apart blobs as they currently exsist 'in reality.'   

For all it does differently, the Diku combat mechanics of EvE are the reason for blobbing.  You're NEVER going to fix it without radically altering those fundamentals.

I really don't see why you would want to take the radically-different combat of Eve and force it to conform to some historical version of limited-manuever warfare.

If you really feel that way inclined, I suspect Mycenean-era warfare, with isolated palace-cities and island statelets as star systems, naval movement essential and hard to interrupt away from shore, and no semblance of contiguous or continuous "lines" might be a slight and basic parallel.  Fuck all that WW2 discovery channel shit.

Eve is different, presents different tactical, logistical and strategic issues.  That's novel.  Why straitjacket it?

And Joe presents the best idea, I suspect: make the effect of growing fleet sizes asymtotic or even have it decline in effectiveness beyond a certain size.  Fordel's concern about exclusion of players is valid, but in Eve warfare there are plenty of things to do, plenty of tasks to perform.  we only tend to cluster at one or another task because the game mechanics currently reward such behaviour.  As has been shown in the Goon-Bob fights in the last couple of weeks, drawing your opponent into one system then hitting him with another force in two different places is far more effective than piling into his capital shipyard system and hoping CCP han't pre-gimped you with a login limit (or, conversely, that you won't be lagged and wiped out by the arriving swarm).

They really, really, really are resistant to splitting systems. They designed from the beginning with that limitation in mind, and I shudder to think of the work it would take to change it.

You wouldn't any more than you'd want to start telling a portion of your crew, "Sorry dude, we're at optimal effectiveness.  Stay away because you'd just gimp our size: effectiveness ratio."   

One's a game play limitation and one's a meta gaming limitation, granted, but they're both "straightjacketing" your players.

A recent dev chat stated they are working on this. They are also upgrading their server architecture from  message passing through TCP/IP over ethernet to some standard cluster computing protocol (don't think they used name) to Infiniband or Myrinet, which will enable the low-cost message passing that makes a single system on multiple nodes possible.
http://ccp.vo.llnwd.net/o2/devblog/livedevblog1-pp.mp3 (about 17 minutes in)
Transcripts (gets some words wrong)
http://www.scrapheap-challenge.com/viewtopic.php?p=111070#111070
http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=510759

Are they doing that to move to multi-threading Solar Systems server-side (basically running, say, Jita on 2+ nodes) -- or are they trying to fragment off server-side operations -- perhaps allow for Jita DB needs to be threaded to supporting nodes, while Jita proper (collision, combat, etc) runs single-threaded?

I haven't read anything that stated how it would be done. My naive guess is that Jita (or F-T) would be split up by grids and stations and warping and docking would initiate handoff to another node.

I do not think they admitted to looking into dynamic node allocation, unfortunately. Still, if all the major battlegrounds have a bunch of nodes working them, it'll be a happier situation.

Their primary roadblock, as I understand it, was that server synchronization was handled by using a no more than one node per System (with a node capable of handling multiple systems, synch was in for that). So if you start breaking up Jita onto multiple servers, you start creating boundary lines -- with all the potentials for exploits that causes -- plus CCP now has to rewrite everything to handle actions across zone lines, because you can bet your ass if they just "assume" no one will ever fight on some zone line in the middle of nowhere that people will start dragging battles out there.

It might be interesting to see if they can effectively instance a POS fight, but triggering a handoff to a seperate node for a POS (or moon, whatnot) whenever ship density hits a certain amount. Everyone after would jump into the instance, at least allieviating lag for everyone else in the area who isn't seiging or defending.

The fact that they're actively considering it is a major step forwards.

If I had a CS degree this would be a kick-ass real-life issue to solve. Talk about putting hardware/software/etc to extreme use. (*And* get paid for it).

IANA(CS major), but I am a computer engineer. Devs who decompose problems into work queues which any available processing element can execute in isolation appreciate threading. Devs with shared data structures are sad pandas. When threading existing code, it is easier to share your existing data structures across threads, though. Dunno how much effort is going into the engine rewrite, so I wouldn't lay any bets on which approach they'd take.

I do think they could get away with the naive approach above, though. If I fly my fleet to some deep safe on a zone boundary, informed enemies simply won't engage. They'll take my POS or station services instead.     

The other good news is new hardware by the end of the year.

Because the alternative is insane lag every big battle?

You'd only get that sort of warfare if you made travel (or at least capitol ship travel) much much slower. Which wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing...

But looking at history is a good way of figuring out how warfare works and Eve conforms to real history much closer than other MMORPGs since the supply of big ships isn't infinite like the supply of characters is in other games.

No, I wasn't saying that's what it should be like.  I meant that's already the closest parallel to what goes on in 0.0.  Especially that most famous of incidents of Mycenean warfare - Troy - being a good example: head to a key place; sit there for years plinking away ineffectualy and occasionally squabbling violently; opposition eventually collapses through logistics fuckup and insertion of agents; loot; grand alliance promptly and merrily collapses into free-for-all fighting.  The situation in the south is more like Orchomenos and Thebes, of course.

Stront, ice products and more: those already impose limits on both sieges and movement.  Logistics and space control matter.  Long range raiding through enemy rear areas is important, after the style of Nathan Bedford Forrest.  Ammo supplies are also a key item: we had to force through convoys in order to keep blowing up bob POSes in 9-9 last night.  Of course, now we have big stockpiles  :evil:

Yep. You would have to combine minimizing the blob in one system with strong incentives for the surplus dudes to fight in another system. Which is where constellation sovereignty comes in. Maybe add devices in one system that reinforce defences in other systems, unless they themselves are under attack. A bit artificial, but it would give an  incentive to attack several systems in parallel. So all your dudes are fighting, just not all in the same system. Its tricky to do though, because you also need to make sure the defenders get an advantage from defending systems that aren't directly under attack.

I think multizoning a system would be pretty easy considering current game technology. It would just be instancing after all. Each planet would be it's own instance. UO had seamless zoning 10 years ago. Granted it lagged like shit when you crossed the zone line (because it had to copy thousands of items from bank to bank) but in EVE you're most likely going to be crossing the zone line while in warp which is as effective as a blind turn in EQ.

Just put the ships into cloak while they are crossing the zone line. EVE already takes you into an instance via missions and they are planning on converting asteroid belts to instances so I don't see the big deal.

Mostly exploit potential and synch issues in combat near zone lines -- however, their changes over the last year+ show they're slowly working the issue. The main problem is once they zone a solar system -- you'll still have 200v200 blobs (or however many it takes to start lagging it) running on a single node. It just means the poor saps shopping two moons away aren't lagged by the battle, which is at least something.

I just wanted to point out that the original post is incorrect in assuming the lines of WWI were caused by needing to protect your flanks.  They were caused because it became EASY to protect your flanks.  With the machine gun.  As soon as a good counter to the machine gun appeared (the tank) trench warfare ceased to exist.  If you want to see solid defensive lines to form in Eve then there has to be a way to create a solid defense.  I.E. and easy method of establishing an effective defense.

That means that the enemy cannot just appear in your back yard at random, at least not without facing complete obliteration, and that any arbitrary system on the line can be made to rebuff any arbitrarily large attack.

Personally, I doubt if trench warfare is the model Eve developers should be seeking to emulate.  It would be stagnant and tedious with gains eked out at great loss and battles mostly determined by attrition.  Trench warfare is probably the least interesting model the devs could be aiming for.  A better model might be the battles of the pacific in WWII but that would require there be a strategic reason why certain systems would have to be held over others.

Additionally, they have no way of dynamically rebalancing nodes, they have to shut a node down completely to transfer it to different hardware.  So, if you can warn them ahead of time, they can provide a dedicated node.  Even then you can get a situation like the F-T honeypot, where over 2000 players were prepared to fight in a single system.  But often there's no such warning, a battle may not even occur in the systems *either* side expected it to, but at some other system 3 jumps away because that's the chokepoint where some FC decided to make a stand (or got trapped).

If they implemented some kind of clustering virtualization, where the physical hardware and the logical system image weren't bound in stone, that would solve that problem.  But it would doubtless introduce overhead and inefficiency they'd have to throw more cycles at, and they're already using a staggering amount of hardware.

--Dave

Disclaimer: I don't play Eve, but the general "warfare picture" appears similar to other warfare scenarios.

I would think some type of rapid response interdiction (possibly automated somehow) would both avoid trench warfare, and also make supply lines/spheres much more important.

I didn't really mean WW I specifically but more front warfare in general. Throughout most of history big armies formed and attacked each other in big showdowns. Now if the hardware can't handle that the devs have to give people an incentive to fight wars in a different style (either front-based warfare or guerilla warfare would be the historical options). What's wierd is that in attempting to break up blobs the devs don't seem to look at military history AT ALL for any of the things that historically caused concentrated armies to spread out into fronts.

I keep writing complete flameposts about this thread then not posting them.  Here is what I hope is a calmer version.

If you haven't played Eve, don't try and fix its most complex issues.  It is abundantly clear you have no idea what happens in large scale eve warfare, either tactically or logistically.  Eve Online may be Strategic Historical Analogy Online, and I do that as much as anyone, but, ultimately, the tactics and logistics are utterly unlike any real-world military problem, given its strange mixture of short- and long-range teleportation with highly-restricted movement.  Operationally and strategically, concepts of weight, concentration, manuevre, mobility and so on apply to some extent, but the game mechanics do not reflect real-world problems.  Don't bother weighing in with "oh but the gank-squads are just like Bedford Forrest's deep raiding" or "oh but Goons are just like second-echelon Soviet-era army groups" or "Bob tactics are just like the late-phase AirLand Battle Nato doctrine".  Everyone does that (I am prone to Stalingrad rhetoric, myself) and it's all very fun but unless you work on the very vaguest operational or strategic level (Sun Tzu, the Cunctator, occasional Napoleon, some Zhukov or Belisarius etc...) then the strangeness of Eve movement and engagement mechanics make comparisons facile.

As an aside regarding your specific prescriptions, there is a reason that wargames tend not to be based around static front warfare.

You see, Goonfleet is a lot like the Indomitable Gauls from the Asterix books....  8-)

Nonono, RA are the Indomitable Gauls: they were reduced to a single village for a while, but ran Roman Encampments all across the empire, no matter who the locals were.  Goonfleet are...

Actually I dunno.. who are GF from Asterix?  The hilarious pirates, perhaps, who invariably lose fleets of ships but always turn up in new ones several times in every episode, apparently incapable of knowing when they are beaten?

I disagree, in that though WW2 doesn't match to The Great Eve War that much (though LV's collapse and BoB's failure to save them matches with the Italian experience), but you get parallels in warfare coming up in Eve all the time. Morale issues, logistics, movement of armies, great leadership and not-so-great leadership etc etc. D2 didn't really die from losing combat vs MC as more they lost (or never had) the will to fight them (conversely, MC failed to beat IAC twice because IAC didn't have the same morale problems, though IAC never beat MC in a straight up fight in Prohibition I and II).

Hell, when CRS was demoing it's game to the Pentagon, the game itself didn't get so much attention in how it was an example of taking some completly untrained civilans and forming them into a rough and ready army. Leadership and Logisitics are what really run wars in both real life and online.

Someones PHD is going to write about Eve-Online (or some future MMOG) warfare and it's applications to 21st century combat .

I'd love to read that. I can think of several topics. "Rape Train Hasn't Brakes: Forum Trash Talking and Morale in Space Combat" would be one. "Band of Developers: Is Claiming "God's on Their Side' an effective morale tool?", for two.

I Didn't Want That Titan Anyways: A Study in Online Propaganda and Forum Whoring

'Twas a Fair Kill, Gov'ner: Popular Opinion Shaping And Personal Pwn'mobiles.
Bowling For Goonies: Pushing the envelope for 4th Generation Combat.

Wins the thread so far.

That's what I said!  Specific analogies and tactical levels don't work.  Trying to say that covops are like submarines or pos guns like machine guns is wrong.  Trying to impose specific, foreign logistical challenges is foolish.   But fundamental issues or morale, mass, velocity (those two in their very specific manuevre-warfare senses) on the "vaguest operational or strategic level" are fine.

But in Eve, it all boils down to numbers, resources and morale.  And the greatest of these is morale.

Endie: Yup I know fuck-all about Eve mechanics and less about the logicalic POS stuff you're talking about, but I don't think that applying historical examples to videogames is all that inappropriate as long as you take a very very broad view. Of course comparing POS guns to machine guns is silly but looking at similarities in the way that war is waged is still valid, at least I think it is. Basically Eve tactics are completely alien to anything in the real world, but I don't think that the broad strategies really are.

Basically in all of history and in Eve territorial warfare in the real world you don't want to split your forces up when you don't have to. Pretty much all real world generals preferred to "blob" when they could get away with it by concentrating their forces. I don't see any real differences between this and Eve. Of course you can only stretch analogies so far, but there's definite similarities there.

In all of the history that I can think of (I'm sure there's a few more I'm forgetting) generals generally spread out their forces for the following reasons:
1. Long borders and slow moving soldiers so if you bunch your forces you leave a lot of undefended border.
2. Armies that couldn't forage at they marched and who had to split up their forces to protect their lines to supply
3. Armies that split up to hit enemy lines of supply or to outflank the enemy.
4. Feints (to some extent)

As far as I can tell (in my Eve ignorance) none of those historical reasons really apply very well to Eve and there's nothing else in Eve that gets people to split their forces up. I don't think that looking at historical reasons why generals split their forces up in order to figure out how to make Eve generals split their forces up is completely stupid as long as you don't take the analogies far, but then what do I know...

Of course there's probably some ways to get people to split their forces up that would apply to Eve but not the real world, but so far CCP has had a horrible track record of making this work.

Why are you still talking Daztur? You're trying to speculate and force parallels when you admit that you know fuck all about a game.

EVE players, they're not playing EVE in order to draw fun from re-creating historical events of any kind.  The developers did not set out to make a historical combat re-enactment game; in fact to me it looks like they invented, on the spot, a bunch of rules about how they wanted a fight between two spaceships to happen, and then they made it complicated, and voila the game took shape.

Nothing and nobody in EVE pays any attention to history, and they don't care to, and so when you sugest to "look at history" in order to fix an EVE problem (blobs), everyone refuses to and finds ways to show you how it won't work.

But there are things to split up forces for: last night we had forces at D2 facing Bob forces, while Bob had Rise in significant strength holding a blocking position about five jumps out to try and interdict our movement.  Similarly, when Bob reached the high water mark of their offensive (JV-1V, I think) and were attacking our station system, we launched a substantial second fleet two systems to their rear in 9-9, with a blocking force in the way, and ended up holding our system (and starting the retaking of 9-9).

Blobs are not necessarily a bad thing, any more than someone with 20,000,000 skill points in a T2 craft being able to reliably beat two newbies in T1 craft is a problem.  The fundamental quandary is: how do you keep numbers at a level manageable by the current iteration of the back end (software and hardware) while ensuring that everyone can do something valuable, and that alliances with high participation levels gain the benefit of attracting those members.

Spaceships should explode when they are destroyed.
Like Edge of Extinction from GW,  a tightly packed blob should fall like dominoes once they start significant damage.

They do explode, heh, and "tightly packed blob" probably has kilometers between ships, if not distances measured in 10k chunks.

In any case, you have 900m+ armored/shielded chunks of metal capable of withstanding direct hits from multiple megaton nukes or impacts with car-sized metal projectiles travelling at serious speeds (not c-fractional, of course); they're not going to worry about shrapnel and debris from something blowing up 10k away.

They got the realism of it down, I think, as far as physics at the local level are concerned, and the problem with blobs is, as it's been said, simply that the current hardware cannot support them.  They're otherwise desired by the players and I'd say devs too, so much so that as soon as they beef up the hardware, the blobs increase taking up all available resources again, as soon as they're made available.

Make it so the fleet/wing/squad commanders have to equip certain modules to support the number of people under their command. Anything over that limit will start to give negative bonuses. Eventually filling that gang up with too many "unsupported" people would cripple (negative bonuses) it. If the enemy destroyed a wing commander, his wing would have to replace him quickly or break off from the fleet. If the fleet commander dies then the whole fleet would have to retreat (a new purpose for capital ships) or quickly replace him. Also make it so that the range for gang bonuses is 600km. If their fleet commander is sitting inside a POS 1AU away, he doesn't count.

The leadership would actually have a job to do other than spamming invites. Hopefully this would discourage them from bringing more people than they actually need.

The penalties could be:

Locking speed - Who do I target? Imagine waiting 90 seconds to get target information because your chain of command has broken down.
Movement speed - Where do I go? You can't move around very fast in a fleet formation without orders.

People would just stop using the gang & fleet systems altogether then. I mean, they're laggy at the best of times - start adding penalties to them and people will just fly solo or in gangs and co-ordinate over TS/Vent/whatever.

Which means they can't "Warp to gang member" anymore. It will be hard to effectively blob that way.

Then simply disable the "warp to member" feature, if that's what's causing the problem (in your opinion).  What's the point of creating the whole gang mechanic, with bonuses to being in the gang, and then slapping penalties on it so big that people won't touch it with a 10 foot pole?

I'm saying it should go both ways. Bonuses for a well made/managed gang. Penalties for a poorly managed one. The larger your gang gets the harder it will be to manage it.

Removing warp to gang member would limit the ability of gangs to do anything together.

I don't know the answer to this but I most certainly find blobs annoying.

Maybe there should be some kind of detection penalty if there is a large number of ships near each other - make it easier for folks to sneak up to or away from a blob of ships pinging the heck out of each other.

They got the realism of it and the speeds down?  Am I misremembering that the average speed of a large ship in this game was ~140m/s?  (There are CARS faster than that)  Also, 10k away is still within the fireball of a moderately sized nuke much less megaton ranged devices.

Lets not try and equate Eve with reality.

Not many cars can go 313 MPH, although, granted, the rocket ones probably go that fast.  And a nuke's fireball only happens in an atmosphere; in space you get a bright flash of light and a tiny pop.  I imagine that the flash of light from a nuke would hit with the same energy/square inch as a laser (but on a wide area).  Shrapnel flies forever but does disperse, and is smaller that the projectiles used.  All in all, the EVE ship defenses could theoretically deal with nukes and shrapnel, since they already deal with laser and projectile damage just fine.

Yes, EVE physics suck in terms of drag in space, maximum speeds, and all that other crap.

Shrug, they can put in the "if one ship blows up, the whole blob blows up" stuff, I don't care.  They can also reduce targetting effectiveness (lock time) based on how many ships are in the area around you, they could prevent you from locking frigates hiding in a blob of cap ships, or they could enlarge the collision box of all ship models so that you cannot make two ships get closer than 20km to each other.  Shrug.

The actual literal blobs of ships, don't have any real benefit game wise, just a side effect of the warp system. Spacing everyone out wouldn't really have any benefits either outside of avoiding a dictor bubble.

I would estimate 80-90% of a fleet fight for most grunts revolves around "Is it in range of my guns? Is it big enough and slow enough to track? Okay pew pew" Being 2k or 20k away from anyone else is mostly moot. It isn't like the ships are forming a shield wall or anything. You can't even block LoS, since everyone shows up on a nice ordered list to the right. Not that EVE has any kind of LoS mechanics to begin with, or any kind of 'terrain'.



As to the physics, I remember reading a Dev post long ago saying that they could make EVE near true to actual space flight, it would just suck incredibly for a game system. Even something as simple as removing the Up/Down to EVE space, would probably screw over three quarters of the player base.

An airburst one-megaton nuke will generate a fireball way less than one kilometer wide.  (In space, as pointed out, there is no fireball.)  At ten kilometers distance it won't do anything that would bother a starship, unless for some reason the crew is all walking around on the outside of the hull.

I'm curious as to what you thinks happens to dissipate energy in space?  4,000 Tera Joules at 10km even with the inverse square law isn't just going to feel like a soft breeze you know.  That there is no fire does not mean it is not hot.

Anyway, my point wasn't to drag this down into yet another bout of WUA induced stupidity but rather to point out that it's silly to say that the physics are 'done right' and to stay away from that line of discussion.  That there are cars on the earth that go faster than interstellar spacecraft in Eve is really all that needs to be said on the matter.

How can they entice corps to remain big, and keep recruiting, and join together to form huge-ass alliances, yet not have combat operations that involve so many people/ships?  I don't think it's possible.

Now that, is a salient point.  The other games do it by artificially limiting who gets to play.  A big guild in WoW or EQ2 will have to turn people away from a raid, this is acceptable to a point because while it means you don't get to go on the raid sometimes you do get to go MUCH more often in general that if you were with a guild that only raids but rarely because they can't get enough bodies.  How you could manage the same thing in Eve is a very good question.

The physics model is awful, sure, but playable.  We'd not be having this discussion if even newtonian mechancs were modelled, and if constant accelleration rather than capped speed were allowed, because the game would have a few dozen neck-bearded players, not counting occasional goons lining themselves up with stations from 400AU away and accelerating constantly at the huge rate allowed by interceptors in order to hit them at relativistic speeds.  Which, of course, would not answer the question of where the expelled propellant is stored in order to maintain such huge changes of velocity etc etc...

Re the other question, if you set off a nuke in space then almost all the energy is expelled as electro-magnetic radiation, rather than being converted into other forms due to atmospheric interaction, such as kinetic energy in the form of a shock wave.  Of course, if you are in a ship a few km away you're going to receive a substantial dose of radiation, but since we theorise fairly solidly already about near-future nuclear ramjets for space propulsion, the shielding involved is by no means impractical, especially since the joys of the inverse cube law make the fall-off in absorbed radiation substantial.

Morat works for NASA, though, doesn't he?  He can just ask the nearest von Neumann...

You're the fucking twat who thinks a sub-megaton nuke generates a fireball 20+ kilometers in diameter.  In space, no less.  So quit talking about "Tera Joules" like you have the faintest clue as to what the fuck you're talking about, when you've made it painfully obvious that you don't.


Oh, you don't need me to induce your stupidity.  You walked into a thread, and in this all-knowing tone started spewing shit that wasn't just dubious or over-simplified, but factually wrong to such a massive extent that it's obvious you were just making shit up.

But who cares, right?  It's not a big deal, which is why my initial correction of your nonsense was so short and dry.  But you can't just go "Whatever, my bad."  Oh no.  You've got to be a fucking pissant and blather about "Tera Joules" and how WUA is "inducing stupidity" by pointing out that you're basically a bullshitter.


Then quit making shit up.

WUA catches em with a straight right, Murgos is visually stunned!!! Can he recover!?!?!1questionmark1?1?!!!

More nerd drama after this!!! ;)

This one time I sat my Tera Joules on my passed out buddy's face, thus the term T-Bag.

True story.

Wasn't Tera Joules the gap-toothed one with the dark hair in Gang Bang Auditions 14?

I saw this guy get kicked in the Tera Joules once.  It looks like it Mega Hertz.

The only reason there is no fireball in space is because there is NO AIR.  The radiated energy from the nuke hasn't magically stopped propagating through space or disappeared.

You, know, like the mother fucking sun?

Anyway, math lols.

1 kiloton of TNT = 4.184 TJ (from physics factbook and also wikipedia)
1 megaton = 4.184 TJ * 1,000 = 4184 TJ or 4.184 x10^15 J

Surface of a sphere is calculated using 4*pi*r^2

If r = 10,000 m then the surface area that sphere is 1.25663706 × 10^9 m^2

4.184 * 10^15 J/ 1.26*10^9 m^2 ~= 3.3*10^6 J/m^2

OR for you idiots (Looking at you WUA) out there a 1 megaton explosion in outer space will have an energy density of 3.3 Mega Joules per square meter at 10 Kilometers.  Which in terms of force is 1 Mega Newton per meter square or about 250,000 lbs of force per meter square.

250,000 lbs of force PER SQUARE METER at 10 Kilometers.  They talk about the ships in Eve being a kilometer long.  Were talking about BILLIONS of pounds of force at 10 kilometers distance from a ONE megaton weapon being exerted on an object 1000 meters long x 50 meters high.

OH NOES, Murgos was playing possum and lands a devastating uppercut!!! Does WUA have the intestinal fortitude to get back up and keep throwing??!?!??1111?1!!!?!?

There is no force. No blast. No thermal transmission at all. There'd be lots of radiation (http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/conghand/nuclear.htm), however. If I'm reading that chart right, a 20kt blast will yield lethal radiation doses out to about 14 miles -- that's assuming the absence of any shielding. (I'm considering a 500 roet dose as 'lethal').

Actual blast and heat? Squat.

This makes no sense to me.  I mean, there are various correct pieces of arithmetic in there, but physics-wise the last bit is just plain weird.

Mind you, the mixing of imperial and metric disturbs me enough to begin with  :cry:

Jesus, Murgos, again you fucking fail.  Where the hell do I start?

Okay, first off, check your god damned numbers with a third party before you try this horseshit "Rawr math!" attack again.  Because both these guys (http://online.unitconverterpro.com) and these guys (http://www.onlineconversion.com/energy.htm) say your 3.3 megajoules convert to 0.00078 tons of TNT, or 788 food calories.  Holy shit, the raw power of a couple of Big Macs.  Where the hell are you getting this quarter-million pounds of force shit?  There aren't blast waves in space any more than there are fireballs anyway.

Secondly, as Morat pointed out helpfully, it's the radiation we care about.  And while it may be lethal at extreme ranges against those who are unshielded, or walking around on the hull as I put it, let me throw a couple of gems from Wikipedia at you.



And lastly, you can try moving the goalposts with this "Energy doesn't disappear when there's no fire, stupid WUA!" crap all you want, but who the fuck do you think you're fooling?  What did you think was supposed to bother my hypothetical guys out on the hull in the first place?  Congratulations math master, you've again proven that you don't know what the fuck you're talking about.

You are down.  You are out cold.  Take what scraps of your dignity remain and get the fuck out of here.

OK, I guess I have to get involved. You know I like superweapons, right? Yeah. OK let's begin.

In atmosphere, we are interested in the kinetic energy in a non-oscillating spherical wave, which is concentrated at the wave front -- your typical blast wave. We want a surface area figure, how much force, which happens to be inverse-cubed. We care about this in atmosphere, because once all that ionizong radiation gets absorbed by the atmosphere it ends up being ~90% of the energy released. Your end products after conversion are blast 40-60%, thermal radiation 30-50%, Ionizing radiation 5% and residual radiation 5-10% of total energy of the initial release (see below).

In space, we are interested in energy density only, which falls off as divided by radius-squared (equivalent to r=energy^1/2)

Now. 1 kiloton of TNT is not equivalent a 1 KT nuclear detonation. Your figures on this are just flat wrong, and I'm going to ignore the math here. You are trying to calculate a PSI spherical wave in space based on the released energy of TNT. I don't need to spell this out, since we are using neither TNT nor are we in atmosphere. Let's talk about what gets emitted when someone hits the big red button:

Ionizing radiation. Gamma rays and Neutrons. That's it. It does a whole bunch of funky stuff in atmosphere when it hits, converting it to thermal radiation (xrays, heat). Heating and vaporization of your immediate area creates expansion, which creates that pressure wave you keep trying to reference. We don't care about any of that. We aren't in atmosphere.

How do we stop Ionizing radiation? Dense material. It's measured in HVL or half value layer, the amount of material (in cm) that is required to reduce the radiation by half. The halving distance of lead is 1 cm, the halving distance of depleted uranium is 0.2 cm.

For all practical purposes, you could sit on top of a nuke with enough shielding. I guess I could work up the math on this, but it's pretty pointless -- you should be able to see that nukes in space don't do a whole lot unless, as was said, you were standing on the outside of the hull, assuming the hull is thick enough. You'd need no more than a few feet to stop anything but a direct hit.

Heh, I did the same math as Murgos the last time when he told me to stop and not derail, so I kept it to myself.  I also got the 3.3 Mil Joules / m2 at 10 km, but then I figured the radiation would be absorbed and converted to heat, rather than force.  So a ship would need how many centimeters of lead?  And it would need to be cooled; water-cooled I think there's like a 7 deg. C (12 deg. F) increase in the water temperature. 

Fuck it, let's do some rough back-of-the-napkin math.

1 TeraJoule is equal to 10^12 Joules
1 kiloton of TNT = 4.184 TJ

Therefore, 1 KT of TNT = 4184000000000 Joules, or 4.184 × 10^12 J. Let's work up a few scenarios. 100 meters (direct hit), 1km (1000m), and 10km  (10,000m) away with a 1KT nuke yield.

Let's work backwards and see how much shielding we would need.

One rad is an absorbed dose of 0.01 joules of energy per kilogram of tissue, and a dose of 400-450 rads is lethal to your average human. gamma and xray RBE (biological effectiveness) is 1, so we can go straight math. Let's say we want no more than 100 rads (headache, decreased immune system and temporary sterility) and that your average crew member weighs 100kg.

1 rad for this guy is 1 joule absorbed, so he can eat 100 joules of energy in the form of gamma and xray EM radiation and all he gets is a bad headache and no babies for a while.

100m:
Inverse square law fun before it hits shielding: 4.184 * 10^12J * 1 / (100^2) = 4.184 * 10^12J * .0001 = 418,400,000J
22 halvings needed to bring shielding below our needs to 99.7

1000m:
Inverse square law fun before it hits shielding: 4.184 * 10^12J * 1 / (1000^2) = 4.184 * 10^12J * .000001 = 4,184,000J
16 halvings needed to bring shielding below our needs to 63.8

10000m:
Inverse square law fun before it hits shielding: 4.184 * 10^12J * 1 / (10000^2) = 4.184 * 10^12J * .00000001 = 41,840J
9 halvings needed to bring shielding below our needs to 81.7

Halving strengths:
9 cm (3.6 inches) of packed soil or
6 cm (2.4 inches) of concrete,
1 cm (0.4 inches) of lead,
0.2 cm (0.08 inches) of depleted uranium,
150 m (500 ft) of air.

So, only 22cm of lead or 4.4cm of depleted uranium is sufficient to stop a 1KT nuke from 100m away, a 'worse case' scenario.

Edit Disclaimer: This is gamma ray calculation only, I can't get reliable numbers on the gamma to neutron percentage or the neutron velocity, and neutron radiation goes right through this armor, but then is easier to block with a several-foot thick inner core of lighter weight material. Yes, the neutrons have mass, no it doesn't matter much. I'm too lazy to the heavy math required.

I fudged the vector (force has a direction, you know?) bit because I didn't want to do more math that would just be wasted on hamburger boy.  1 Newton is roughly .22 lbf.  I did screw up because the final number should have been closer to ~800,000 lbf, I forgot the 3.3.  I also fudged the numbers lower by a couple of orders of magnitude because the wave front of a nuclear explosion doesn't take 1 second to occur.  At a guess it's probably closer to 1 us.

The particles leaving a nuclear explosion do carry a force component, they are not all pure energy without mass, in fact, the alpha particle mass is 6.644656×10-27 kg and a beta particle is 9.109 × 10–31 kg.  I don't know how many particles are emitted in a nuclear explosion but it's not trivial and since they actually are travelling at relatavistic speeds in space, well it adds up.

Why someone would think there would be no pressure wave in the sudden acceleration of all the particles involved in the explosion is on beyond me.  Almost a hundred years ago someone correlated energy to mass.  I wonder who that was?

edit: I think most of you are missing the point that 10 km is such a small distance in stellar terms that you are confused about what's being discussed here.

Oh, for fuck's sake. Stop splitting hairs. Yes, there is radiation pressure. It's such a small amount of the whole that it's insignificant, except that a VERY SMALL part of that 4.194 x 10^12 Joules contain a force component that is calculated with inverse cube law instead of inverse squared. The force is virtually nothing when compared with the whole and so I'm not bothering to calculate it with my back-of-the-napkin math. And we're ONLY talking about the neutron component, obviously, since the gamma ray component is essentially massless.

Imagine driving a Ford F150 down the road at 60 mph. Your car slams into a cloud of mosquitos. Despite the fact that you're taking two or three mosquitos per square inch at 60km, your truck is merely messy -- not destroyed.

Same for the particle mass emitted by a nuclear blast -- although at 10 km's you'd probably only catch a particle or two per square meter.

So, in effect -- and fuck, man, I linked to NASA already, a nuclear explosion in space releases no blast wave, no heat, and nothing to "impact" your ship. It does release a lot of radiation, but a 20kt blast drops below lethal at only 15km. There is no fucking "force" on the goddamn spaceship.

What about rolled tungsten, or nanofibres?  :wink:

So in a nutshell, when John Sheridan setup the nuke minefield to destroy the BlackStar, it was in fact, totally bullshit?  :-D

Yeah, right.  Nuclear explosions have no force (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion)) when used in outer space.

What kind of crack are you smoking?

Hey dumbass, they used fucking propulsion mass heated by the gamma rays:


Let it go. You're grasping at straws and you don't know what you're talking about.

You build x-ray laser or graser emitters around the warheads, transmuting the radiation into coherent beams of x-rays/gamma rays.

Simond is correct :) Nuclear mines would actually be nuclear bomb-pumped laser/grasers with multiple spokes of death. Featured prominently in the honor harrington series.

Goes back further -- Larry Niven used them in Footfall (Fuck you! It had a goddamn elephant with a ray-gun on the cover. Anyone would read that!) -- using nukes for propulsion and channeled some of it out via lasers and the like.

Hey, killing elephants is hard work.

Hey, that one had one of my favorite weapons -- kinetic orbital bombardment, aka rods from god. AND it had the orion in it, too. I don't think it had relativistic kill vehicles in it, unfortunately.

No, but it did impress upon me the simple fact that "the high ground" means a huge amount when you're down at the bottom of a gravity well. You don't need explosives, lasers, beam-weapons, death-rays, nukes, or anything else.

Just rocks. And all you have to do is nudge them a bit, and they'll blast the shit out of whatever they hit.

I went and talked to one of the physicists here and came away with a few things.
1) I am wrong about blast effects.
2) You are wrong about radiative effects.  In space you can expect them to be maybe 20 times more effective than at sea level.
3) The energy released by a 1 megaton explosion at 10 Km would still be enough to cause severe damage due to the material attempting to dissipate that much energy into a vacuum, possibly even the vaporization of some portions of the craft and the destruction of the electronics.
4) Wrapping the nuke in a few tons of dense material would do a lot to cause highly damaging effects out to, in his terms, very large distances.

Hamburger boy still has no clue what he's talking about though.

Actually, the material would have to be accellerated, so you have the nuke at the core, surrounded by something that can absorb radiation and change from solid to high pressure gas or plasma, then your shell of jagged metal bits, and the point would be to absorb all the energy of the nuke and convert it to kinetic on the metal bits (and thus the "few tons of dense material" effectively shield your target from radiation; you're now delivering kinetic, not radiation, with such a weapon).

I don't know if it's more effective to just have a huge-ass house-sized grenade with conventional explosives than this whole nuke business; the nuke sure packs a lot of energy into a small volume, but converting radiation -> kinetic isn't very effective.  It's probably a lot more effective to just shoot projectiles at the target, really.  Actually, kinetic missiles, best.

No, you're just not reading. It was in my link and several other people talked about how when there's no atmosphere to absorb radiation, it's considerably more lethal.

As I noted, a 20kt blast in vaccuum delivers a lethal dose out to at least 12 miles. That's to someone unshielded. Many people pointed out that shielding against that level of radiation is pretty trivial -- a few inches of metal, at most.

Wrong, unless you're discussing an EMP effect. Once again, shielding handles that nicely -- and here's the cool thing about space. It's fucking cold. Since the nuke doesn't transmit heat, all that radiation your 3 inches of lead just absorbed radiates nicely into the gigantic heat sink you're floating in. Lead, DU, or plenty of carbon compounds can hold a great deal of heat -- and can even be tricked into venting it in one direction only. (It's done on the space shuttle all the time).

It's pretty easy to make sure heat flows out to space, even if the heat is generated by radiation absorption -- and the dose of radiation from a 20kt bomb in space isn't going to heat lead all that much.
You mean "shrapnal"? I suggest to you that you consider the Air Force's general views on flack -- it's a big damn sky, and the odds of a piloted plane being in the same spot as undirected flack fire is minimal.

Space is even bigger, and you're going to smear it over a constantly expanding sphere -- at 10km, you'd need more than a few tons to have any hopes of reliably impacting vessels.

This thread delivers.....astrophysics.

First, there isn't an EMP effect in space. That's created when it the gamma rays hit parts earth's atmosphere. I could whip out the details but they aren't interesting or pertinent.

For your #2, I've already said that space radiative effects are "about 20 times more effective" by explaining how it's primary emittance (gamma & neutron radiation) gets converted into thermal xrays and a blast wave. I'm not sure how that makes me wrong...

#3 is interesting, would depend heavily on the boiling point of the material plus how well it conforms to a 'perfect' black body radiator (a lot of the radiation gets reflected rather than absorbed, the question is how much). Fortunately, by eyeballing the amount of Joules that hit it at 100m indicates to me that it wouldn't even be close; you'd have to be inside that, possibly even score a direct hit.

#4 is pretty dumb if your physicist suggested it, as morat20 says, there's no such thing as effective 'flak' when we're talking about distances in km.

I think we're back at the "A nuke in space is only a problem if it goes off while in contact with your hull" zone.

You want to shoot space-ships, you either need directed energy weapons (those would be fun to target when your relative velocities started getting up about .5c) or, more likely, torpedos of some sort. Guided little mini-ships with shaped charges on the nose.

Mass drivers might work, assuming you were in really close or you had enough to blanket them no matter how they tried to manuever.

As someone else noticed, using a nuke to power an high-energy squirt would work better. Turn that energy into a lovely pumped laser that would bore a hole through an asteroid. You'd only have to worry about targetting (which, as noted, is difficult if your relative velocity is high enough).

I love bomb-pumped lasers.  Best sci-fi space opera weapon ever.

Those bomb laser thingy - I know you can theoretically make laser out of everything, but did anyone actually built it? Making mega-uber-pumped laser is cool, but how do you stop that mega uber pumping from vaporizing your uber roid driller?

The rods from god - won'tr they melt and most importantly - won't they just make a small hole that is really, really deep?

Lastly, doesn't most AA missiles use flaking efect? Noone stops you from putting an engine and proximity detonator on that nuke-grenade, you know and at least you won't have to go for direct hit. (plus, in an environment without atmosphere, evading incoming kinetic missiles doesn't seem like hard thing to do) 

Supposedly there were a couple of preliminary tests showing you could create a laser that way, but then we signed a treaty agreeing not to test nukes, even undergound.  So we know that it's possible to do it, but no actual system for creating them with a portable system or aiming them has been field-tested (or can be).  Which makes it the perfect defense contract.

--Dave

Thanks for the space physics lessons, guys! :D

You explode the bomb in vacuum, and basically create "channels" of dense material which feeds the radiation up the tubes, IIRC. Space-opera wise, either they don't explain how they're doing it, or it's a nifty side-benefit of an Orion-style drive. (Nuke-pushed drive)

First, coat them with ablative material (cheap stuff -- only has to work once). Secondly, no. When it hits, it releases a LOT of it's kinetic energy as heat. A small crowbar sized objetc would obliterate a battleship, assuming it was still crowbar-sized when it hit.

It's hull it. And melt lots of it. And superheat the water below it, which would leave you with a battleship with a huge hole in it, boiling water and superheated steam flying in every direction, and molten metal. It'd sink in seconds.

Flak works if you can aim it, to an extent. You have a much better chance of hitting something that way. But just exploding flack in the sky, hoping to knock down a plane -- not so much,

God, this is great.  He just keeps coming back for more.  Posting the nuclear propulsion article without really reading it was priceless.

EDIT:  Also, Honor Harrington is indeed made of win.  I just started the series a little while ago, finished book three and need to get four.

Not *strictly* true. You can bomb pump with conventional explosives, too, depending on desired effect. For example, a non-nuclear EMP (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explosively_pumped_flux_compression_generator) device. It's not really the same thing, I know.

You can learn everything you wanted to know about kenetic bombardment in this helpful wiki page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment). The only thing stopping us from deploying something like it right now is cost per kg to LEO.

These days that's true, but my father worked on the guidance systems for the wonderfully-named Sea Slug SAM, and that worked through putting something vaguely close with a big enough explosion that it would knock anything nearby out of the sky.  Basically, flak guided to within a sub-hundred-metre space of the target and with a big warhead. All three beam-riding modes were improved with time, but at first they seriously considered just sticking a nuke on the end of it and firing it into the Russian bomber stream somewhere mid-North Sea.

It was also rather efficient.  Dad has always joked about it, but it turns out that at the time it had a fairly high chance of killing the target with a single shot: over 90%.  It just should have been scrapped by 1970 or so.  As it was, we had County class ships equipped with it in the Falklands, and I'm sure that the Chileans at least still used it until only a few years ago.

Been avoiding this thread because I wasn't playing EVE.  Now I'm playing again, I read it.  Wish I hadn't bothered.

However, while I'm here, I thought I'd better chime in with observation of some factual inaccuracies that need to be corrected.


On average, a Big Mac contains about 575kCal so 788kCal would actually be the raw power of 1.3704 Big Macs and not "a couple".  Therefore, as Grunk would say, YOU FAIL!




You may carry on.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

As for pumped lasers, I was actually imagining lasers, not just channeling the bomb's energy through a few orifices.  As in, the bomb explodes, and sets off an initial blast of gamma radiation, which hits the back end of multiple laser mediums, which cascade-amplify it forming a laser of some sort. 

Although, the lasers wouldn't neccessarily have to be arranged as spokes; you could probably put 6 tubes together to form a cylinder (like a revolver's 6-pack) and detonate the nuke in vacuum in the middle, and you'd have a directional 6-beam laser.  Presuming that the radiation from the explosion doesn't destroy the setup.  You could actually feed nukes into the middle and have a repeat-shot nuke-pumped 6-beam laser.

I suspect it's our current treaties regarding militarization of space -- unless Bush pulled out of those when I wasn't looking.

DoD has a very nice launch system, since they do all their own launches. If they wanted a kinetic system, it'd be in place. It'd certainly be better than pouring money down ABM. At least "Rocks fall, everyone dies" has a chance of working.

I have the high ground Anikan!

+1 to hit bonus.

PS My favourite bit of those three shitty movies was just after that, when Princess Pregoo asks Obi Wan how Anekan is, and he just gives this acting-school-pained-look-into-distance-3 that says "I chopped all of your husband's limbs off and when I left him he was slowly sliding into a caldera of magma".

Or maybe it was "nooooooo".

I refuse to apologise for the derail in a thread that has already jumped the tracks and gone cross-country twice.