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[RedWarrior0]

Children of a Dead Earth has been greenlit on steam.

This shit looks unreasonably neat.

Looked plenty realistic up until the combat portion, at which point all the fancy graphs and charts were replaced with point-blank dogfighting, ludicrous numbers of projectiles bouncing everywhere, curving laser beams, and ships randomly spinning off into the void.

Where are the missiles? Why are these hypervelocity projectiles bouncing off of presumably fragile solar cells? Why the heck are the ships flying so close to each other that they can practically high-five?

You can have cinematic space combat. You can have realistic space combat. I don't think the trailer manages to show either of those.

Here's a dev blog post addressing some of the issues. Not sure how true it is, but they do address missiles.

Granted, range is still really short (the 30 km mentioned in that article is basically the bombardment range of WWII battleships. Maybe they meant 30k km? Not sure what "realistic" ranges are)

[BorkBorkGoesTheCode]

Well heavy ICBMs could fly +11,000km

[EnigmaticHat]

Maybe the ships aren't to scale with everything else?  The curving lasers could be a glitch, or maybe they weren't lasers at all?

I do find it funny that these ships can apparently survive nuclear impacts.  But then, I don't know how nukes work in space.  I know in real life some significant portion of the blast is heat and radiation that would be far more dangerous to a human than a vehicle (hence all the Hiroshima horror stories, as opposed to the whole thing being a crater).  But like, the explosion itself is still enormous.  No way an actual, naval, ship would survive being hit by a nuke.

Edit:  According to this picture

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

it looks like the curved lasers are possibly drones.

[Sirus]

Well heavy ICBMs could fly +11,000km

A similar missile in space would likely have much greater range, since there would be no atmosphere nor substantial gravity to fight against. Effective range would be limited only by how much fuel it has to maneuver with, probably the relative velocities of the target and launcher as well.

[BorkBorkGoesTheCode]

 

Spoiler: Dragon trees! (click to show/hide)

[Culise]

Maybe the ships aren't to scale with everything else?  The curving lasers could be a glitch, or maybe they weren't lasers at all?

I do find it funny that these ships can apparently survive nuclear impacts.  But then, I don't know how nukes work in space.  I know in real life some significant portion of the blast is heat and radiation that would be far more dangerous to a human than a vehicle (hence all the Hiroshima horror stories, as opposed to the whole thing being a crater).  But like, the explosion itself is still enormous.  No way an actual, naval, ship would survive being hit by a nuke.

Edit:  According to this picture

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

it looks like the curved lasers are possibly drones.

Since you bring up that you're not quite sure on the details, I think I can fill in a bit of that.  Most of the actual damage by a nuke on Earth is from the concussive burst created by the atmospheric shockwave, and even the EMP you'd expect from a stratospheric burst won't exist.  Absent that, what you get out of a nuke is just the radiation; in fact, the radiation is even worse, because most of the x-rays that would have been absorbed by the atmosphere to create that shockwave is flying unconstrained.  Just as you say, a direct hit could shred a ship, especially if it hasn't been designed with defenses around this; you've got a nasty amount of radiation ripping through the ship, the energy released by the blast will vaporize a decent part of the armor/hull, what doesn't get vaporized is going to heat up quite a bit and quite quickly, creating significant stresses in the material and extremely rapid thermal shock.  Where this difference comes in is actually in the case of a miss; radiation drops off by the square of the distance, so if you miss by even a kilometer, that miss is as good as a mile, which is as good as a light-year. 

[IcyTea31]

The curving lasers could be a glitch, or maybe they weren't lasers at all?

According to the author, they are tracers left behind by projectile weapons, and actual lasers in the game will be mostly invisible.

No way an actual, naval, ship would survive being hit by a nuke.

Apparently they can withstand them because they have something called Whipple shields. According to Wikipedia, those are designed to protect the ship from micrometeoroids and space junk, not nuclear weaponry, so I don't know what that is about.

Game looks cool, but probably not my cup of tea. The design focus seems to be more on the simulation aspect, rather than gameplay itself.

[RedWarrior0]

***Note: In the video, those are not lasers, those are colored tracers on projectile weapons. Actual lasers in game are invisible, just like in real life.***

As for ranges, it looks like they're serious with the 10s of kilometers being the primary mid-range for combat, based off other blog posts. Higher is missile salvo range, and missiles can be somewhat compensated for by point defense- the real drawback to missiles is the mass cost of carrying enough to overwhelm PD.

Also:

Other payloads possible in Children of a Dead Earth include explosive payloads and nuclear payloads. Nuclear tends to be a very powerful but expensive option, though due to the lack of atmosphere, their damage is incredible within a few meters, and then it falls of painfully fast. Explosives are similarly restricted to very small areas of effect but are much weaker, though they are fantastically cheap.

[BorkBorkGoesTheCode]

Rationale?

[itisnotlogical]

I started playing Fallout: New Vegas. I went to the graveyard in Goodsprings, and right at that moment a sad song called "Johnny Guitar" was playing on the radio. I forgot the quest I was supposed to be doing there, because I was starting to feel more fore the buried people I coudln't have possibly met than I had felt for any NPC in Fallout 3.

This is gonna be a gooood game.

[Yoink]

I bought a shitload of books today for cheap.
...Well, maybe not an entire shitload. How many books to a shitload?

[Harry Baldman]

I bought a shitload of books today for cheap.
...Well, maybe not an entire shitload. How many books to a shitload?

Shitload probably starts when it's enough books to warm you for a cold winter's night or two.

[Tack]

Shitload would be when those on the bottom of the stack begin to biodegrade.

[Xantalos]

I've figured it out!

By it I mean how to get myself to write productively on purpose. Sure waiting for inspiration to hit works too, but that takes time and this seems to be working judging by how easy the words are pouring off my fingertips right now. I just need to get myself mentally unhinged!

Now, I could accomplish this by getting drunk, I know many people who do this. Or fuel myself with caffeine, this is also a common tactic and I see how it could yield dividends. However, I'm a massive cheapskate and like the taste of neither alcohol nor coffee. This is a much neater solution - I'll just deprive myself of sleep until I start feeling the slight mania that comes with it and write then - if I haven't obtained success before then, of course.

Perfect! It even plays into my chronic laziness since it means I'll only have to put effort into writing when I'm normally ... well, normally I'm sleeping but hey sacrifices for the greater good.

And then I'll look over my work the next day when I'm more sane.

Good! Good good good. Reliability and consistency in writing speed is important. However I think I shall decline to actually sit down and crank out some words tonight as I actually need to do some things on the morrow.

Good.

[Tack]

Yeah I usually lean upon a beer if I need to get it happening. Not drunk, more like reward alcohol.