odyssey: can I aistrike?

[Samad Al-Hyade]

I got a mission to kill some dudes on the surface and I'm wondering if I can strafe the place with my missles and whatnot from the air or I gotta land and fight 'em

[Dolphin Bottlenose]

Absolutely! Dumb missiles are very good at killing foot soldiers.

[Holeypaladin]

Dumb fire missiles are pretty much the only weapon that works, but it's pretty common to use them to clear salvage sites of scavengers before landing.

[0Samuel]

Technically yes; in practice, not very well. Guys on foot are small, ships are large, and all the ship weapons are built for shooting ships. Your sensors will not pick up foot soldiers, and fixed targeting reticles aren't accurate enough to aim at them directly. You can still do it by eye, but not easily or well.

The solution to that would be area of effect weapons, but most of the nominally explosive weapons just kinda.. aren't. Mines, dumbfire missiles, flak launchers, and flechette launchers do have AOE, but whether because their damage is minuscule, weirdly volumetric, or still hard to aim, they all still end up being lackluster.

This is troublesome because the reverse is sort of also true; handguns can hit ships very easily, and do not do much damage. However, while a ship's shields will easily shrug off one or two people shooting at them, they have a much harder time with 10 or 20. Now, your ship can very easily accelerate faster than a guy on foot can aim, but if you are holding still to very carefully point a railgun at one guy while 15 others are shooting at you...


For combined arms, you want a Scarab. Not a Scorpion, strangely enough, those are specifically for Spires; but the Scarab repeater will shred shields and health from enemies very reliably. You do need to be careful; the anti-shield grenade works on SRV shields too, and that makes getting surrounded dangerous, but if you can string them out one at a time the SRV will be more effective against personnel than on-foot weapons.

[Samad Al-Hyade]

ok sweet ta very much

[Sighman]

Originally posted by Holeypaladin:

Dumb fire missiles are pretty much the only weapon that works, but it's pretty common to use them to clear salvage sites of scavengers before landing.

And mines. Much bigger area of effect than missiles, and you can dive-bomb on the settlement and launch half a dozen spread out. No more enemies.

[Holeypaladin]

Originally posted by Sighman:

And mines. Much bigger area of effect than missiles, and you can dive-bomb on the settlement and launch half a dozen spread out. No more enemies.

This is brilliant.

I doubt they'll ever release any dedicated air to ground weapons, since they don't want airstrikes to dominate ground CZs the way they do in real life, but using mines as makeshift bombs is the next best option.

[gerald2]

Originally posted by Dolphin Bottlenose:

Absolutely! Dumb missiles are very good at killing foot soldiers.

and their tiny riflers are awesome for taking ur heavy shielded ship down LOL its absurd.

[Dolphin Bottlenose]

Originally posted by gerald2:

and their tiny riflers are awesome for taking ur heavy shielded ship down LOL its absurd.

Yes, it is. That's what we have for them trying to balance on foot vs ships gameplay. Ships that withstand hits from multi-ton huge ship mounted weapons, got stripped from shields and hull by handheld weapons. Yet ship's plasmas, cannons or lasers do no damage to on foot soldiers (and no, I don't need to target a soldier - I can just spray the whole area with fixed beam lasers that should burn through soldiers like through butter).

I mean, a small fixed burst laser weights 2 ton and has DPS of 8.1. And the TK Aphelion handheld laser assault rifle that weights what, 10kg..20kg, has base DPS of 9.0? And if you upgrade it, you get DPS of 25.0 - that's the power of a huge 16t gimballed burst laser! Like, really?! It doesn't burn your hands when you shoot a whole clip?

[Sighman]

Originally posted by Dolphin Bottlenose:

Originally posted by gerald2:

and their tiny riflers are awesome for taking ur heavy shielded ship down LOL its absurd.

Yes, it is. That's what we have for them trying to balance on foot vs ships gameplay. Ships that withstand hits from multi-ton huge ship mounted weapons, got stripped from shields and hull by handheld weapons. Yet ship's plasmas, cannons or lasers do no damage to on foot soldiers (and no, I don't need to target a soldier - I can just spray the whole area with fixed beam lasers that should burn through soldiers like through butter).

I mean, a small fixed burst laser weights 2 ton and has DPS of 8.1. And the TK Aphelion handheld laser assault rifle that weights what, 10kg..20kg, has base DPS of 9.0? And if you upgrade it, you get DPS of 25.0 - that's the power of a huge 16t gimballed burst laser! Like, really?! It doesn't burn your hands when you shoot a whole clip?

I don't know why people still harp on about this one. Yes, in real life it would be absurd that a laser the size of a small house can't easily vapourise someone on foot.

But if ships could target and nuke people on foot in 0.1 of a second, conflict zones would be impossible.

When you're fleeing a settlement on foot, NPC ships don't shoot at you until you board a vehicle. If they did, attacking all settlements on foot would be impossible.

If NPC ships nuked you with rockets or mines the second you stepped outside, instead of dropping 4-6 scavs/guards off, all settlement missions would be impossible.

It's also silly that a small hand weapon can take out shields and destroy a ship. But if they didn't, you could park your ship at a settlement, stand underneath in the shielded area, and use your sniper rifle or rocket launcher to kill everything while they couldn't hit you.

So it's for gameplay balance, as you correctly guessed. It doesn't have to be realistic, it just has to afford some kind of challenge whether you're on foot or in a ship, not tilt the balance so far in one direction that the opposite side has zero chance.

[Dolphin Bottlenose]

Originally posted by Sighman:

I don't know why people still harp on about this one.

Because it's too much of a stretch to believe, even for a make-believe game. It's not just unrealistic - it is absurd. And while unrealistic things can be accepted in a game with some stretch of imagination, it's very hard to accept absurd things.

[Holeypaladin]

They could add a large shield generator that covers the entire settlement and protects people within from ship weapons. Or a series of smaller ones around the buildings. It's what I would have done, honestly.

They could add a .01 multiplier for all handheld weapons when dealing damage to a ship, and a 10x multiplier for all ship weapons hitting people.

But they didn't.

[0Samuel]

Originally posted by Sighman:

I don't know why people still harp on about this one. Yes, in real life it would be absurd that a laser the size of a small house can't easily vapourise someone on foot.

Would it, though? I mean, consider the example of the microwave [en.wikipedia.org]; clearly dangerous in higher concentrations, but not enough to noticeably overcome homeostasis in the amounts that escaped the early radio sets; he needed to note the chocalate bar, rather than feeling warm himself. Similarly, we would expect that a laser the size of a house is meant to hit a target the size of a house; and if you multiply the energy density by the area of the foot it hits, you might find almost all of the energy is going past the foot into the ground.

I can see a strong argument to be made that personal shields, while weaker in aggregate, are far more concentrated than ship shields because they cover a smaller area. This would be consistent with established mechanics, such as comparing the shield strength on the Courier vs the much larger Clipper, and would explain why anti-personnel lasers need to be unexpectedly potent. Ship-to-ship lasers can be far less collimated to take down the overall stronger but similarly less concentrated shields on ships. And that would further explain why hand weapons end up costing more than ships.

Now, that wouldn't explain the kinetics, not completely. But very concentrated personal shields would also explain how they can take exactly one hit from a ship's gun, or shrug off explosive shrapnel fairly easily. And have you tried firing a multicannon or railgun against on-foot enemies? While almost impossible to hit, they do reliably one-shot unshielded targets.

Originally posted by Sighman:

It's also silly that a small hand weapon can take out shields and destroy a ship. But if they didn't, you could park your ship at a settlement, stand underneath in the shielded area, and use your sniper rifle or rocket launcher to kill everything while they couldn't hit you.

That's actually a very viable strategy for massacre missions. What screws it up is that they'll run up to and under the shield bubble where you are hiding, long before they take the shield down. Even if they do, it's usually because of the disruptor grenades rather than laser fire.

From what I can tell, however badly tuned it may have been at launch, at this point the relationship seems logical. They'll get through the shields, if you sit there and let them; but it takes a lot of enemies shooting for quite a long time to take a ship down.

[Holeypaladin]

Originally posted by 0Samuel:

I can see a strong argument to be made that personal shields, while weaker in aggregate, are far more concentrated than ship shields because they cover a smaller area. This would be consistent with established mechanics, such as comparing the shield strength on the Courier vs the much larger Clipper, and would explain why anti-personnel lasers need to be unexpectedly potent. Ship-to-ship lasers can be far less collimated to take down the overall stronger but similarly less concentrated shields on ships. And that would further explain why hand weapons end up costing more than ships.

No, there are still way too many holes in this argument, and it's completely nonsensical. Because if the technology existed to make tiny lasers with a ton of firepower, ship weapon designers would use this technology to make stronger ship lasers that can strip the shields of other ships almost instantly. And if the technology existed to make super strong personal shields, the exact same technology would be applied to ship shields, because humans aren't morons. It might make them more expensive "S-grade" lasers and shields, but they would exist.

[Dolphin Bottlenose]

Originally posted by Holeypaladin:

They could add a large shield generator that covers the entire settlement and protects people within from ship weapons. Or a series of smaller ones around the buildings. It's what I would have done, honestly.

Precisely! Instead of trying to balance powers that differ by several magnitudes and can't logically be balanced, they should have added possibilities to avoid being hit by ship devastating weapons. Stealth, covers, mobility, stuff like that. This would have been much more believable, than people standing up against ships.

[Dolphin Bottlenose]

Originally posted by Holeypaladin:

Because if the technology existed to make tiny lasers with a ton of firepower, ship weapon designers would use this technology to make stronger ship lasers that can strip the shields of other ships almost instantly.

Yes, why should I install a 16t huge burst laser on my ship, if I can put a 20kg laser rifle there with the same power and no produced heat? Why don't I just duct-tape a dozen of those rifles together and have a 250 DPS superweapon that weights 1/10th of a small ship laser?