Actually that has everything to do with it.Originally posted by Arthur Denger:
It really has absolutely nothing to do with the aircraft-atmosphere analog, nor with sensors and turret weapon response times.
The problem is simple ballistics. I need to throw my rock at the appropriate vector to hit your rock.
If your ship is accelerating to mid-point, flipping, and decelerating on a nice clean constant vector, then your rocks future position is easy to predict, making it much easier for my rock to hit it.
If you've ever done any rifle or pistol shooting, particularly at a moving target, you've experienced this directly. Even shooting at a static target requires compensation for bullet drop, and smart shooters know through either experiment or actual charts the ballistic performance of their ammunition to properly aim the firearm.
Maneuverability and agility are all focused on NOT being a nice, clean, smooth plotted vector in order to make it more difficulty for my rock to hit your rock.
Air frames in atmosphere give flying objects the ability to convert their velocity into lateral manuevers. Witness a simple wing-over for a fighter plane. The faster they're going, the faster the maneuver is made. The more structurally sound the aircraft is also affects how fast the transition can be made. The forces involved will tear apart a weaker craft versus a stronger craft.
So, a stronger craft can turn faster than a weaker craft, and by being able to turn faster, it can "get out of the way" faster, and be more unpredictable, thus being harder to hit -- more agile.
Put a typical fighter plane behind another, and the attacking pilot tries to predict where the other pilot's plane will be, and then fires his guns or cannon to fill that particular piece of space with lead debris, ideally impacting on the target and damaging it.
With a fast and maneverable plane, the target is jinking, and diving, and turning and climbing and anything to stay out of the way of the attacking aircraft. While the other craft is trying to play catch up with the unpredictable target, the attacking pilot may or may not be firing.
Now, if you change the weapon on the aircraft from a ballistic platform like a gun or cannon to a laser or particle accelerator -- i.e. a light speed platform, the game is completely different.
At any reasonable visual contact or "dogfighting" range, there is no ballistic problem. The weapon fires so fast, the target simply doesn't move in relation to the energy of the weapon.
At a range of 200 miles, light takes 1/1000 of a second to travel. At 600 mph, a plane will move roughly 10 inches in that time. That plane simply can not get out of the way of the laser, no matter how fast it turns, climbs, dives, or anything else. Laser gets targeted at center of mass, and that plane is hit. In all practical matters, there is no ballistic problem with light speed weapons at such short ranges.
But in space, where the ranges are measured in light-seconds, and target velocities are measured in km/sec, then every second DOES count. Laser weapons now become ballistic weapons, just like normal guns. You need to "lead" the target with your lasers (or PAW) in order to score a hit. The more you have to lead the target, then the more chance that the target can potentially do something to its vector to "get out of the way".
That target lead is also affected by the detection time. In terrestrial situations with guns, the speed of light far out speeds the speed of the gun, so as a shooter you do not need to compensate for when you actually "see" the target as part of your ballistic calculation, it's just noise in the final result.
But when your light speed weapon is the same speed as your sensor, and you're dealing with long ranges. then all of that goes in to your ballistic calculation.
If the target is 300,000km away (1 light second), then by the time the sensor records the targeting data, the target has already moved. 1G hour of acceleration is 36000m/sec, that means that in the time it took for the firing vessel to even SEE the target, it's already moved 36,000 meters, and if it could fire "instantaneously", it would move another 36,000 meters by the time the laser reached the target.
So, the firing ship would need to "lead" the target by 72,000m to ensure a hit with its laser. But the key here is that those two seconds provide the target time to "do something" in order to NOT be 72,000 meters down its vector.
This is why sensor response time, and weapon tracking times are quite important. The longer it takes to get the image of the target from the sensor to a firing solution and a laser burst down range, the more time the target has to evade.
Mind, none of this has to do with actual game mechanics, this is just physics sticking its nose under the tent.
Anything that takes longer than the response time of the firing ships combined sensors and weapons to change vector, is going to get hit. Whether it's to flip the ship over to decelerate, or deploy an X-Ray laser warhead, if the vector of the target stays stable long enough to let a sensor locate, plot a solution, and decide to fire, it's going to get hit. And with light speed weapons, those response time are incredibly fast, particularly once the computers and sensors have "locked on" and the mounts start tracking the target.
In a second, a jet fighter can change its position dramatically if it is going fast. But in space, a ship doesn't get any value from its velocity in being able to change direction. If a fighter wants to flip over, it needs to fire a jet to start the manuever and then fire a jet to stop it.
How easy do you think it would be make a, say, 10 meter long space fighter to fire a jet, accelerate to 90 degrees, and then fire a jet to decelerate at 180 degrees, and then fire its main drive to change its vector. At 10 hex range, 300,000 kms, it would have to perform that maneuver within 3 seconds to avoid getting hit by a tracking attacker, IMHO. In one sense, that's a long time, but it another, it's no time at all.
Of course, at 5 hex range, it would have to do it in 2 seconds. (1/2 the travel time, but the same computing time).
Now imagine a larger ship trying the same manuever.
So, yes, all of those factors are quite important to the targeting equation of space combat with light speed weapons. Also realize that for most of these operations, the man is out of the loop. If someone presses the "fire" button on a laser turret, that to me means "hey computer, fire as soon when you get a stable solution on the target", which may be anything from 1-10 seconds from pressing the fire button. But once the decision is made, the machines do all of the work.
Happy hunting.
