Bigger weapons should have greater range

[hakkarin]

It doesn't make sense to me that a giant cannon or beam has the same range as a much smaller version. Don't bigger guns have a greater range in real life? Isn't that the reason riffles have a longer range than handguns for example?

I think it would make larger guns more powerful and thus more worth the investment compared to smaller guns. As it stands I don't really see the point in building one super powerful weapon when I can just build lots of smaller individual ones instead. What is the advantage really? More firepower? Does it even matter if you have lots of weaker but more numerous guns?

 

[Panpiper]

Doing as you suggest would make smaller ships even more useless, resulting in ever more pressure to build server and graphics card breaking titans. As things stand, the pressure is to do the opposite, to come up with mechanics that give some sort of utility to smaller craft such as fighters. Yes, bigger weapons having more range makes perfect sense in terms of how reality really works, but this is a game, not reality, and sacrifices to realism must be made in favor of making a good game. Rendering small ships utterly useless relatively speaking would be sacrificing an 'enormous' degree of gaming goodness in favor of what would be in my opinion a rather small element of realism.

The advantage to larger guns as opposed to lots of smaller ones are several. A human flying a ship can only depress so many buttons. There is an energy cost penalty associated with linking several smaller weapons to the same computer as opposed to a single bigger one. And it is really nice to have weapons big enough to crack advanced armor even while the HP reserve is still sucking damage, and that takes a certain degree of bigness.

 

[GRHayes]

It doesn't make sense to me that a giant cannon or beam has the same range as a much smaller version. Don't bigger guns have a greater range in real life? Isn't that the reason riffles have a longer range than handguns for example?

I think it would make larger guns more powerful and thus more worth the investment compared to smaller guns. As it stands I don't really see the point in building one super powerful weapon when I can just build lots of smaller individual ones instead. What is the advantage really? More firepower? Does it even matter if you have lots of weaker but more numerous guns?

Well bigger in real life doesn't always mean greater range either. IT all come down to energy equations. If your mass increases the energy required to reach the same velocity increases. Which would mean your damage increase. However if your mass didn't increase and you increased the energy you could reach a higher velocity and travel a greater distance. Granted this is supposed to be space and things really shouldn't be slowing down the way they do.

Also if you have something like a laser it still has dispersion over distance and gets weaker. So the effect you get when increasing the size of a laser beam in real life is greater damage at the same range or equal damage at a further distance.

Honestly if they went by formulas more closely modeled after real life it would balance this game out a lot better. But the point was larger doesn't mean always greater distance.

 

[CrunkPrime]

Do you really want people flying around with massive 200K turrets that will auto target you from 3 sectors away?

 

[Nauvran]

We used to have this.
It lead to AI killing stuff several sectors away.

 

[Lecic]

Anyone else remember the spawn camping super guns on Illusive that would constantly wrack up kills on newbies who made the mistake of travelling the wrong way out of spawn?

Yeah. Let's NOT have that type of thing again.

 

[Sven_The_Slayer]

You want more range you have to use beam slave on your cannons or fire missiles. Most large ships are nothing more than flying machine guns currently so I think it would be really bad if they could shoot super far as well.

 

[Tunk]

There was a time when the larger the weapon the better all of its stats, and you could dynamically re-assign those stats.
Imagine 20 RPS multi-sector (or multi-system) relativistic nuclear bombs being fired from a single gun, that was the standard long range weapon at the time.
Under the control of the AI it would core you pretty promptly.

We now have the revamped weapon and slave system with stat caps and linear growth as well as group penalties.

 

[Lecic]

There was a time when the larger the weapon the better all of its stats

Except damage. Waffleboards ruled the world.

 

[Tunk]

Waffle boards ruled the 600m in front of the waffle board

 

[Spartan-228]

Even if it was a good idea to simply increase the range of all large weapons it would be useless for every thing but guided missiles. Right now just hitting a target further away than 1000 m is tricky. Then go out to about 5000 m and it becomes nearly impossible. We don't need longer range guns, we need a camera that can zoom, and a weapons targeting computer that can help you calculate where you need to aim.
Come on I'm not asking for all the fancy targeting computers and optics they put in tanks, jet fighters, and helicopters. I just want the basics.

 

[Ithirahad]

OHGODNOOO... We had this before and it was ridiculous. People would mount massive turret-bricks to their homebases and nobody could even go within around 6 or more sectors of them.

 

[Edymnion]

Do you really want people flying around with massive 200K turrets that will auto target you from 3 sectors away?

No, but I want to be the guy with said turrets. :D