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Which team did you play in the last game?

Glorious Arstotzka
- 17 (16%)
Glorious Moskurg
- 13 (12.3%)
Ingloriously Didn't Play
- 76 (71.7%)

Total Members Voted: 106


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Author Topic: Intercontinental Arms Race: Finale  (Read 604184 times)

evictedSaint

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Re: Intercontinental Arms Race: Spring 1942 (Revison Phase)
« Reply #5580 on: February 03, 2018, 01:15:29 am »

We NEED to make the Fair Fight longer range. At 300 meters, it's literally nothing. The first jammer Americans made worked at over 1 kilometer range. At 300 meters it's still knife-fight distance, and to be honest, if it's so weak it only covers 300 meters they might be capable of trying to revise the fuses to be resistant, and 300 meters is null standoff distance for things such as proximity fuze artillery or anti-shipping rockets. It's not about action economy, it's about making the thing actually useful in it's intended role.

It's role is to keep their prox fuzes from exploding near our forces.  300 meters isn't great, but does it not do the job?  What's the difference if a warhead detonates 300 meters away vs 1 kilometer?  Their intended detonation range is 12 yards, so 300 meters seems fine.

Not trying to put you down, I'm just legitimately curious what the benefit is to extending the range to a kilometer. 

Kot

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Re: Intercontinental Arms Race: Spring 1942 (Revison Phase)
« Reply #5581 on: February 03, 2018, 01:36:12 am »

Exploding their own planes of course.
That aside, at 300 meters proximity fuze artillery (which was considered a war changing invention by Allies, to the point they made sure they have jammers for it in case Germans make their own) it might not be effective - even if it sets off the fuse at 300 meters, the shell will probably continue to fall for a while, and even at 300 meters an airbust shell might be deadly. I am kind of worried about Sensei saying they are enough to damage our planes even when thrown off by flares, which means he considers them ridiculously fucking huge. In general I am worried about their power too, because if Americans literally made a shitty box that set off proximity fuses at 1200 meters, which is four times the range we had, and also because even modern proximity fuse jammers like the Soviet ones aren't considered to have 100% success rate, which makes me want to have as much reduntant overlapping jamming fields.
Also, memes.
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QuakeIV

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Re: Intercontinental Arms Race: Spring 1942 (Revison Phase)
« Reply #5582 on: February 03, 2018, 02:12:08 am »

Well as mentioned, given that the flare distraction barely phases their missiles, I think we can assume they go off like small nukes and we therefore need as much jamming range as possible.
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RAM

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Re: Intercontinental Arms Race: Spring 1942 (Revison Phase)
« Reply #5583 on: February 03, 2018, 03:06:28 am »

I rather suspect that, given the description of the missiles, that they are being launched from more than a kilometre away. A kilometre is far enough that escorts are sort-of leaving their bombers exposed, but it is plenty close enough to spot and intercept incoming craft. Not reliably maybe, but the description leads me to believe that they are launching missiles from far enough away that initial interception just isn't plausible. A fighter can get into 300 metres if it wants to, especially if it is using cannons. Yes, the missiles are huge, but they are not that huge. 300 metres in open-air is insane for explosives. Yes, they might hit once in a blue moon, but practically, the blast just won't stretch that far. A sphere with a radius of 300 metres has, umm, 113,097,335m3 volume? And it has, maybe, assuming a complete lack of sanity, 200 kilograms of explosive to fill that space? No, wait, it actually said... the old missile was 50 pounds and the new one is 25. Which is something puny in metric... let's say 25 kg... the density of air is... Oh, let's say 1m3=kg. Yes, certainly, the initial blast is is doing its own thing, but 6 orders of magnitude? Then there is stray bits of missile that might somehow be travelling in the direction of a plane occupies... a proportion of its view that I am really not interested in calculating, but a 20 metre long plane at 300 metres is not large compared to the area that is not plane... and a projectile would have lost a very great amount of velocity over that distance, and it wasn't exactly a bullet to begin with, and there are bullets that aren't much good after 300 metres... If it works as advertised and blows up triggers at 300 metres, then it should be plenty to protect our planes and plenty for escorts to blow up enemy planes if they get the things close. And a timed arming trigger is not a difficult revision. On the other hand, maybe they are armed in transit for some reason, like they never bothered to do basic safety checks or they somehow managed to have a homing missile that doesn't have a complex enough trigger to include an arming signal, in which case they go boom as soon as our fighters get close... Likely, the enemy planes, if there is one of our heavier interceptors equipped with one of these things(and I recommend we include some with our formations, it would have to be worth a couple of cannons on at least a third of our thunder whatevers and most of our Haasts.) in range, will explode as soon as they hit the missile button, which is going to spray enemy plane all over the place. Not "300 metres" all over the place, but enough that our fighters may not want to spend too long dogfighting anything with missiles. Of course, anything with missiles ought to steer like a cow, so dogfighting shouldn't take long...
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evictedSaint

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Re: Intercontinental Arms Race: Spring 1942 (Revison Phase)
« Reply #5584 on: February 03, 2018, 04:10:11 am »

The fuzes probably aren't gonna detonate their own planes. The safety likely won't disarm until it's a safe distance away, and even if it DOES damage their own stuff then they'll simply stop using it after the first time it happens.

300 meters is about three football fields in length. That is plenty far; even airburst artillery is nonlethal at that altitude.  Saying "other nations have greater jammer range" doesn't explain why we need it to to be 1 km instead of 300 m.  As far as I can see, other than the slim, 1-time chance of possibly hurting them with their own munitions, there's no real benefit to a range increase. 

From what I can tell in the BR, the flares work fine in distracting the missiles.  It's the proxy fuzes that make the flares not matter; as soon as there's no proxy fuzes, the flares will be able to defeat the non-airburst missiles as intended.

If there's some benefit to increasing the range that I've missed thusfar, please tell me.  I just can't see the benefit in spending the revision on something that works, even if it's sub-optimal.  We already have so many things that don't work that it just doesn't seem economical.

Kot

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Re: Intercontinental Arms Race: Spring 1942 (Revison Phase)
« Reply #5585 on: February 03, 2018, 04:18:25 am »

From what I can tell in the BR, the flares work fine in distracting the missiles.  It's the proxy fuzes that make the flares not matter; as soon as there's no proxy fuzes, the flares will be able to defeat the non-airburst missiles as intended.
So flares throw away missiles, probably by fair distance, considering, you know, they're flares, but somehow proximity fuses matter?  :thinking:
Sensei said their missiles are big enough to still do damage while thrown off, and while I agree that's bullshit, and I called Sensei out on it, but his answer was "yeah they like have a ton of explosives idk", so maybe go explain to him why the missiles shouldn't be capable of doing that.
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evictedSaint

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Re: Intercontinental Arms Race: Spring 1942 (Revison Phase)
« Reply #5586 on: February 03, 2018, 04:21:00 am »

If they miss within 12 yards, their proximity triggers go off and they explode and do damage.  If they dont have working proxy triggers, a miss goes back to being a miss....right?

And yes, that is bullshit and sensei should be ashamed.
« Last Edit: February 03, 2018, 04:24:33 am by evictedSaint »
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Kot

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Re: Intercontinental Arms Race: Spring 1942 (Revison Phase)
« Reply #5587 on: February 03, 2018, 04:28:34 am »

If a flare throws off a missile by less than 12 yards then you're fucked anyway - the missiles are going to explode on contact with the flare, at which point you don't even need proximity fuses.
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evictedSaint

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Re: Intercontinental Arms Race: Spring 1942 (Revison Phase)
« Reply #5588 on: February 03, 2018, 04:36:11 am »

How is it exploding on contact with the flare?  There's no way a flare is dense enough to trigger an inertia fuze on their missile, even if their idiot-idiot missiles were precise enough to hit a falling 2-inch wide flare dead-on in the first place.  What, are our flares strapped to bricks?
« Last Edit: February 03, 2018, 04:42:28 am by evictedSaint »
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Kashyyk

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Re: Intercontinental Arms Race: Spring 1942 (Revison Phase)
« Reply #5589 on: February 03, 2018, 04:39:37 am »

I feel like we've slipped away from the point here, which is that a 300m radar jammer will defeat the proxi-fuses, whilst the flares defeat the heat-guidance. It's not an argument of which is better, we can use both surely?

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Fix the Fair Fight (2): Kot, Piratejoe
Improve the Fair Fight (1): QuakeIV
UF-RTS-43 'Long Shot' B (6): Jilladilla, eS, RAM, Madman, Stabby, Kashyyk
UF-SPMLR-42 'Macross' (1): Zanzetkuken
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RAM

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Re: Intercontinental Arms Race: Spring 1942 (Revison Phase)
« Reply #5590 on: February 03, 2018, 05:06:44 am »

I read the radio detonator as being mostly useful against their munitions. Their A.A. is the real problem here. The missiles are, as I understand it, often missing, and the prox fuses don't make that much difference to them. It is the proximity detonating ack-ack that is tearing us up, and this should put that safely 300 metres away. If ALL of their missiles are prox fusing and blowing up planes then yes, that is ridiculous, but if it is just an increased rate of effective missile attacks then it is just the few instances where the flares just confused it a little before returning to the plane or the flares were launched too late or the flares did nothing at all but the prox fuse went off so it counts as a victory for prox fuses even though it was irrelevant.
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Light forger

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Re: Intercontinental Arms Race: Spring 1942 (Revison Phase)
« Reply #5591 on: February 03, 2018, 06:00:51 am »

UFAF-AR-42 'Matchmaker'
The matchmaker is a dedicated modification of the reckless effect into an airborne radar system. Our cavity radar system is scaled to fit within the reckless effect allowing it to preform a C3 role within our air-force. Thanks to it's radar it can locate the enemy's forces from several miles away and send a force of our fighters to engage them safely away from our transports and bombers. In addition the nose mounted radar can preform limited night time mapping. This opens up two major uses, first is highly effective night bombings on ground targets. The second similar but, much more important role is to let us for the first time launch night time naval attacks.

My main concern is if they increase the range of their missile and combo that with making it flare proof they will be able to snipe our transports. After all they more or less have cold war level missiles that can reliably hit just about anything other then our fighters. With airborne radar we can not only engage safely away from our slower planes but, it's also much easier to dodge missiles head on. On the naval side the mapping means we can launch nighttime attacks on their ships. They don't have radar gun laying so their ability to even attack our aircraft at nighttime is extremely limited. If they try to use spotlights to see our planes then all they did was make it easier to torpedo the crap out of their ships. Also kot, chances are we are going to need to redesign the jammer the turn after next. All that revising a better one now does is tell them what revision they need to do to beat it(swap to radar, doppler shifting, variable signal, etc..)

Quote from: Designs
Fix the Fair Fight (2): Kot, Piratejoe
Improve the Fair Fight (1): QuakeIV
UF-RTS-43 'Long Shot' B (6): Jilladilla, eS, RAM, Madman, Stabby, Kashyyk
UF-SPMLR-42 'Macross' (1): Zanzetkuken
UFAF-AR-42 'Matchmaker' (1): Lightforger
« Last Edit: February 03, 2018, 06:06:29 am by Light forger »
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Kot

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Re: Intercontinental Arms Race: Spring 1942 (Revison Phase)
« Reply #5592 on: February 03, 2018, 06:26:00 am »

How is it exploding on contact with the flare?  There's no way a flare is dense enough to trigger an inertia fuze on their missile, even if their idiot-idiot missiles were precise enough to hit a falling 2-inch wide flare dead-on in the first place.  What, are our flares strapped to bricks?
That's what missiles do.
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RAM

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Re: Intercontinental Arms Race: Spring 1942 (Revison Phase)
« Reply #5593 on: February 03, 2018, 07:34:11 am »

How is it exploding on contact with the flare?  There's no way a flare is dense enough to trigger an inertia fuze on their missile, even if their idiot-idiot missiles were precise enough to hit a falling 2-inch wide flare dead-on in the first place.  What, are our flares strapped to bricks?
That's what missiles do.
Detonation mechanism   IR proximity fuse
That is what that missile does. A missile with a "fuse" that detonates on proximity to an I.R. emission would typically be expected to explode when near to a heat source...
« Last Edit: February 03, 2018, 07:36:12 am by RAM »
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VoidSlayer

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Re: Intercontinental Arms Race: Spring 1942 (Revison Phase)
« Reply #5594 on: February 03, 2018, 08:40:37 am »


Quote from: Designs
Fix the Fair Fight (3): Kot, Piratejoe, voidslayer
Improve the Fair Fight (1): QuakeIV
UF-RTS-43 'Long Shot' B (6): Jilladilla, eS, RAM, Madman, Stabby, Kashyyk
UF-SPMLR-42 'Macross' (1): Zanzetkuken
UFAF-AR-42 'Matchmaker' (1): Lightforger
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