In regards to DF missile weapons I have a lot of ideas about them bouncing around my head which I will record here. Thinking out loud keeps me sane, and heck, you might learn something
. So here goes:
1. Rangefinder:
One thing we need badly is a "rangefinding" tool built into the interface. What its for is to make sure your markdwarves have adequate coverage of the surrounding area and can properly see the terrain you want them to defend. The way it works is simple, you designate ghost "marksdwarfs" with your cursor, all tiles within crossbow range of these "ghosts" are highlighted in green. You can also pick out a single ghost whos line of sight is marked in red instead to check on individual firing lanes. Line of sight markers on the other side of fortifications from the shooter are displayed in yellow instead. The view also respects Z levels.
Also, one very important part of this system is that these "ghosts" can see into and through spaces that have been designated, but not yet dug/built. You can go ahead and build bunkers, siege defences and the like and check how they WOULD work without actually going ahead and building them. Unconstructed solid walls block ghost line of sight, fortifications work as normal and so on.
So if you were making a bunker, in this case a square building with one side made of fortifications. Upon placing a ghost inside, every tile that the defender can shoot at is highlighted. The bunker can then be adjusted as needed.
This tool also works in reverse, if you put a marksdwarf "ghost" outside your fortifications, you can see how much of the inside is threatened, assuming the enemy managed to shoot through which is unlikely.
Lastly, this also works for catapults and balistae. The only difference is that siege engine "ghosts" take up 3X3 tiles and thier line of sight is limited to 4 cones in the compass directions.
2. Modular bolts:
Making bolts out of single materials is quick and easy, however if we make the system a bit more realistic then we can do all kinds of fun stuff. To start with, bolts are seperated into 3 parts: tip, shaft and fletches. The tips and shafts can be made of stone, wood, glass, metal and bone. Fletches can be made of leather, cloth and (prefferably) bird feathers.
The shaft:
The quality of the bolt shaft is the part that affects base accuracy the most. No matter how good the fletching is, a twisted bolt is still going to fly circles. Because of this, when crafting shafts you may not get as many useable shafts as possible for the materials used. However making shafts is good practice and crafters with a moderate skill level will soon be making perfect shafts with a 100% success rate. Shafts that are less than perfect actually have a penalty to accuracy. Perfect shafts have zero penalty, everything after that point is dependant on the skill of the marksman using the finished bolt.
- Bone shafts are comparable to wood in flight performance but shatter easily.
- Glass bolt shafts *can* be done in a pinch but will shatter on anything other than a soft target. They are also thicker than normal and can not be used in small crossbows.
- Wood is the baseline and probably the most efficient production wise, assuming the map you are on has trees.
- Solid stone shafts are very heavy and hard to make but on contact with a hard target they do blungeoning damage instead of piercing. Useful against heavily armoured targets, better at knocking people off bridges and tend to leave less of a bloody mess upon impact.
- Solid metal shafts are very expensive but highly effective. Large siege crossbows, generally termed "arbalests" need metal shafted bolts because lesser bolts would warp or explode upon firing. One key advantage of metal shafts is that they can be gathered up and reforged when damaged.
Shafts of the same material and quality stack with each other automatically into bundles of 100. Since you will soon be making only perfect shafts this helps reduce clutter.
Fletching:
In the beginning your dwarves will be making bolts that consist of a pointed bare shaft without added tip or fletches. While relatively crude these are still very dangerous, at least in close quarters. In order to mount a heavy tip on the bolt or to just improve accuracy in general some sort of balancing is needed. Fletches impart stability and well crafted fletches will also make the bolt spin, improving accuracy.
- Cloth fletches are easy to make but kind of floppy. Good for practice bolts as they pretty much never need to be replaced, unless they get wet or muddy.
- Leather fletches are more durable but tend to slightly affect accuracy on launch because the fins are stiff. Unlike cloth fletches leather tends to get kinks when bent and kinked fletches must be replaced after a while.
- Feather fletches are the best option. The only problem with them is that not all bird feathers are suitable or large enough for such a use. In order to get them you must of course, kill some birds. Now duck hunting and such has yet to be implemented but I am sure those things will make it in eventually. Cats will on occaision kill birds and bring them home. Regardless of type any given bird will yield enough feathers for many stacks of bolts.
- String stabilization is a rare option for projectiles. The way it works is pretty simple, a string trails behind the missile and creates drag, acting as a single fin. A small cloth/leather triangle or other shape can be tied to the end of the string to improve the effect. The disadvantage of this type is that it only works on very light bolts, heavier bolts require a longer string and a bigger fin, both of which would get tangled in the crossbow upon launch.
Fletches also come in 3 sizes, bar, wedge and wide.
- Bar fletches are long thin paralellogram shaped fins. These are streamlined to avoid snagging on the crossbow upon launch but do not stabilize as much as thicker fins. They use up extra thread needed to attach the longer shape but are the best shape for leather fletching.
- Wedge fins are simple triangles. They stabilize the arrow slightly more than bar fins and impart the most spin (which can be undesirable in a few cases). The simple shape and small size means that triangle fletches make the most efficient use of material in the case of leather and cloth.
- Wide fins are what you get if you take a bar fin and triple the thickness. While they look ridiculously oversized they do confer a few advantages. Wide fins impart a lot of spin and stabilize the bolt on target making the flight path more predictable. This makes them best for very long shots or steeply arced shots made between different Z levels. The main disadvantage is that the fins tend to slow down the bolts in flight reducing range, this can be fixed by using a more powerful crossbow. The minor disadvantages are many but annoying. Because of the massive size, you can fit less bolts in a quiver. You can get around this by making a wider quiver, but these quivers will be limited to wide fletched bolts because if you filled them with smaller bolts the quiver would be too heavy or the bolts would be loose and fall out too easily. After a certain point wide fletches will actually HELP strong winds push bolts off course, but as DF has yet to recieve wind mechanics this is not a concern. Wide fletches need a lot of material. Making them with leather is impossible because such fins would hit the crossbow upon launch and skew the shot. And of course, unless you manage to bag a peacock or a giant eagle you wont be making many of these with feathers.
Good fletches add to the accuracy of the bolt and are needed in order to correct the imbalance of a heavy tip. Heavier tips and shafts require larger fletches. Like shafts it is impossible to improve accuracy beyond "perfect". Ie a badly aimed xbow will always miss. In addition fletches also counteract the effects of wind and other weather.
Fletches are attached in a fletchery station. Tasks include such things as:
- Make fletches (feather/cloth/leather)
- Fletch bolts
- Deconstruct arrows
Since materials are modular in use the workshop has to be adapted a bit to accomodate this. Thread is used to attach fletches but you do not use up a whole spool for every single fletch operation. Rather spools of thread (and bags of fletches) become part of the workshop upon first use. When depleted they are replaced. To get them back you can can simply use a menu to designate stored materials and they will be put back in a stockpile. This happens automatically when the workshop is deconstructed for whatever reason.
Arrowheads:
The third component to the average bolt is the purposly built tip. Bolts can do without tips but there are many advantages to having them. For starters lets say you fire a sharpened wood shaft and it hits a rock. Even though the shaft survives intact the sharpened tip is no longer useable, the only ways to fix and resharpen the bolt involve making the bolt shorter. Bolts must be of uniform size to make repeat shots possible. If the bolts have tips then they will be much more resistant to damage, the tip will often absorb damage by falling off. Once fixed the bolt is more or less good as new.
Tips come in many shapes and sizes. The materials used to make them are wood, metal, glass, stone, bone, shell and leather.
- Wood tips are better than nothing, even if your bolt shafts are also made of wood. If you break bags upon bags of wood tips in practice it still takes less wood to make them compared to the same amount of whole shafts.
- Metal tips are expensive but can be easily reforged when damaged.
- Glass tips are quirky and useless against most armours but very effective against soft targets. On impact they tend to shatter into bits which can be quite damaging against the right foe. One big advantage of using glass is that it can be easily cast into odd shapes.
- Bone and shell tips are better than using wood. Wood bolts with bone tips are the cheapest type of complete bolts you can manufacture.
- Leather tips are for special situations but still highly useful.
Not all tips can be made of each material.
- Soft target: These are made of leather and are shaped into a thin cone. Unless you hit someone in the eye or they have cotton candy as natural armour you will never seriously hurt anyone with these. The good thing about them is that they are perfect for practice shooting. (up to a point after which you need to learn using the real thing) A secondary use is for law enforcement, even though they have little to no piercing power an impact from one of these bolts will still leave a mark, they can be used to subdue targets much the same way as rubber bullets.
- Target: These are simple cone shapes, they improve ballistics and penetrating power. Since these are quite easy to make, there are few excuses not to use them. They can be made from all materials although using leather will create a different type as shown above.
- Diamond: An angular form of target tips. A little harder to make and a little more effective.
- Broadhead: A wide triangle shape, these are better than target and diamond tips against soft targets. "soft" being anything short of metal armour these are perfect for hunting use. Broadheads have a harder time piercing mail armour than other shapes and will glance off of curved plate armour without a direct hit.
- Winged: A specialized version of broadheads. Instead of a solid triangle the shaped used is that of an inverted V with hollow spaces between the edge and shaft. These work much the same way as broadheads, take a little more effort to make and less material. Because of the shape they are extremely difficult to remove from wounds and cause a lot of bleeding.
- Barbed: Diamond tips with backward facing spikes. Works the same was as winged tips but sacrifice less piercing power against armour. Rather hard to make, unless you use glass.
- Needle: A single long spike. To this type of arrowhead, mail armour is just a series of holes. Goes right through mail armour as if there was nothing there and has a much better chance of piercing plate armour than the other types (if you use metal). While these go right through most armours, because of the thin shape they do little damage compared to say, broadheads, so unless you need to open some tin cans you are better off using other types. Unless your enemy has nothing heavier than mail armour you would only want to make these out of metal. Against solid metal armour needle tips made of things like bone or glass do not perform well.
- Split chisel: These are broadheads with the diagonal edge turned inward. Basically a rectangular broadhead split by a sharpened V. These are hard to make (and only out of metal) but have one big advantage. Because of the odd shape these tips will rarely if ever glance off a target. This is important when you go up against armies where armour is very common. Even if every soldier has at the most leather armour, that will turn a lot of penetrating hits into glancing hits which do not do enough damage to kill and or disable.
- Shieldbreaker: A heavy solid wedge (like a doorstop) shaped into a long thin rectangle. The only practical use for these is to break up and damage shield walls which are otherwise immune to most missiles. The heavy splitting tip will shatter most wooden shields and leave huge dents in metal shields. When fired from an arbalest these have more than enough power to knock a man over. Can only be made from metal or stone.
There are as many other types as you can find a practical use for. You can divide them all into soft target tips (like the broadhead) hard target tips (diamond and needle) and special use. Special use tips are only meant for production in small quantities.
Mix and match:
What makes the added complexity work is that you can adapt your arsenal to any situation. Bolts can be deconstructed quickly and easily into component parts, these can then be reassembled into other configurations. The only thing missing is a spiffy interface for all this, but that will have to come later 
3. The target range
The current archery targets we have now can only be made out of stone and any bolt fired at them is lost or split up into near useless single bolts. Having been to a couple archery ranges IRL, there are a lot of improvements that can be made here. First of all ranges should be designated as a single building. To designate you pick a constructed target face and any other targets on the building footprint become part of the overall range.
Every range should have some sort of backstop. There is no penalty for not having one other than bolts landing where you dont want them to go. (like into the dining hall) The purpose of the backstop is to catch and preserve bolts fired in practice. Basic backstops are simple stone or wood walls, stone walls will damage any bolt fired at them, wood bolts will catch metal bolts and most other kinds assuming they have strong tips.
A better option is a sandpit. These are simply piles of sand inside big boxes to prevent the sand from spreading. When bolts are fired at the target and miss, they dive into the sand and come to a stop. The only bad thing about this method is that you will have to go and dig up the bolts when you want them gathered and put back the sand after you are done.
The last option is a hung leather or cloth screen. These can only be used with practice rounds but have many advantages. Bolts fired at the curtain are stopped dead and drop to the ground, the moment they touch the fabric they are trying to push back all of the air behind it and only very sharp bolts will succeed. The only disadvantage of such screen is that you can not use them with real warheads, after a certain point practice rounds are not good enough. Luckily though you can simply use a sandpit for those.
A target range wouldnt be a range without any targets. The targets you can make all serve the same purpose. Give the marksdwarf something to shoot at to hone his skill.
- Solid targets are simply slabs of wood or stone set upright. They are the simplest option but tend to damage bolts fired upon them.
- Hung targets are the same only they are suspended from the ceiling, this allows them to absorb some of the impact force and preserve more of your bolts.
- Fall down targets are small targets supported only on one side, as soon as they get shot they fall over and rarely damage whatever hit them, this makes for effective training but someone has to go and reset the targets and in the meantime no one can shoot. These targets are built 5 to a square and any "reset" task will reset all of them at once.
- The last and probably best option is frame targets. They are simply an empty frame with a sheet of leather or cloth to mark the bullseye. These rarely damage bolts (unless a dwarf manages to hit the frame dead on) but the target faces they use must be replaced regularly.
Bolt retrieval:
Depending on the type of targets you have and the backstop built into the range you can get practicing shooters to handle bolts in two ways:
- Fire and forget: In this case the shooters simply blast away until they run out of ammo or the targets need to be reset/replaced which they will then do. If all of the shooters at the range run out of bolts or you simply order a sweep then the shooters and some haulers will go and gather up all the spent bolts. Bolts are sorted by material and quality. Bolts made or marked for practice are simply lumped into quivers of 25, regardless of material.
- Fire and gather: When ordered to do this dwarves will fire off a full quiver then go retrieve all undamaged arrows. Once the stack they use drops below half in usefulness they will switch to a new one or refill the quiver to make a full stack.
The range setup itself is up to you. In most cases you simply have a line of targets and a backstop if needed. It is a good idea to spread out the firing lanes because when targets are reset or when ammo is being gathered all activity in the occupied lane must stop. Up to 4 dwarves can shoot at the same target at once. If they are set to retrieve bolts then all 4 will empty thier quivers completetly before retrieving.
4.
*Target range stuff finished, crossbow types next up.
[ December 19, 2007: Message edited by: Tamren ]
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Topic: Missile Weapons (Read 935 times)