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I've only played this game for a few hours, but I have a lot of thoughts on it. And I've enjoyed thse skirmish games I've played, as well as the extensive ship designing. I've only really played as the Protectorate because I like the fantasy of converted civilian freighters turned into flimsy warships. But I have just been thinking, is this really even sci-fi?

The game is basically a modern naval sim with sci-fi paint. It's not really spaceship combat. Yes it feels like the Expanse when playing and it is certainly has a lot of dna from that show, but apart from the visuals in practice the gameplay is literally just naval warfare. Like… rear aspect IR missiles in space? That doesn't make any sense if you think about it for more than a second.

The game does a bunch of stuff common in modern warfare that isn't depicted very well outside of simulators, namely electronic warfare and long range missiles. But electronic warfare of this type wouldn't even be a thing in space I don't think, because you would always have such a good thermal image of the enemy it doesn't matter what radar distortions you do in space when they will always have a perfect image of you. But it does these systems really well. Like having decoys with really big radar signatures to fool the enemy is a real thing in naval warfare. Same with big missiles that have a really fast terminal phase. Having your carrier send fighters to deploy said long range missiles.

It depicts modern naval warfare (or maybe 90s naval warfare tbh) really well. It's a fun game because of this. But there is no thought at all to how space battles would actually happen IRL other than the token retro rockets. Like why are all the guns chemical weapons when every ship has a nuclear reactor, it makes no sense to waste so much mass on shell propellent when you could do economy of scale and have a bigger reactor. Why are there space fighters? In space its all about fuel and economy of scale, fighters just don't have a place. Where's the lasers? The only ones are for point defence because the game is stuck in modern naval fighting rather than space where they are extremely efficient. The ridiculously close engagement ranges. And then obviously there is the lack of radiators.

It is fun as an Expanse simulator and I don't want to make the game seem bad, I enjoy it. But when people are saying that this is 'realistic' space warfare I just think they are being misled by pop-culture. I actually made a reddit post recently about if there were realistic use cases for anything other than lasers (and maybe railguns in like the near future) in space warfare and I was swamped by replies saying how good missiles were using modern ground to air missiles as examples and literally using the Expanse as proof. And like… I just want to think about how this would actually happen. I have so many issues with Children of a Dead Earth but its the only game that actually is about space warfare. I do appreciate what Nebulous is doing so much but I just wish it was a space game.

>there is no thought at all to how space battles would actually happen IRL
I would like to hear more of your thoughts on space combat. Do you think Legend of the Galactic Heroes is a likely depiction with its spatial formations and engagements consisting of long-range artillery, short-range fighters and boarding maneuvers, not to mention the scale of it all?
>In space its all about fuel and economy of scale, fighters just don't have a place.
Assuming nuclear missiles are neither fast nor precise enough to be fired at spaceship distance, wouldn't that make it feasible to employ high-yield bomber spacecrafts, causing the dynamic around "air superiority" to reemerge in some form or another?

>>42538
LotGH gets the scale right but its not really trying to be realistic. It's napoleonic warfare in space. Still there are lots of interesting parts about it, and I unironically don't think boarding would be as impossible as some people claim it is (because of the amount of situations it would be useful in).

Fighters don't make any sense because of economy of scale. Spaceships will always tent towards being big because of the rocket equation firstly, and secondly because nuclear reactors benefit massively from economy of scale and being bigger. Fighters just don't make any sense here, this isn't like planes and aircraft carriers where the planes have really long ranges. Space fighters would be way slower due to a smaller engine, have way less range due to lack of space for propellent, and wouldn't be able to have good enough weapons due to their tiny power plant. They would be worse at dodging attacks, not better. There is no advantage to having them.

Anyway nuclear missiles might be the only missile that makes sense but I'm still unconvinced. Probably in the form of like a shaped nuclear explosive that can shoot a fairly long distance. Still the issue is… why doesn't the enemy just fly away from it? Or shoot it down with a laser.

>>42626
>Still the issue is… why doesn't the enemy just fly away from it? Or shoot it down with a laser.
Yeah, bombers would make sense from this perspective. With this in mind i think small spacecrafts would justify their higher production costs, simply from the type of warfare they open up. Assuming a battle of attrition would consist of large, perfectly amortized spaceships slinging rays at each others shields or plating, small, mobile bombers could cause qualitatively different damage and be hard to counter in the direct vicinity of their target.
>They would be worse at dodging attacks
What about inertia? Dodging depends more on bursts of acceleration than net speed, so i think they could outmaneouver large spaceships at close ranges.

>>42627
But the bombers wouldn't even be able to get close to the target unless they are as big as a warship themselves because of a lack of propellent. They would have to be one way trip vehicles and at that point they might as well be an extra stage for a nuclear missile, and even then they would probably have to be really big and unpractical for them to even reach a target that is manouvering. And that's ignoring the necessary compromises on armour you would make which would leave the bomber vulnerable lasers.
>What about inertia? Dodging depends more on bursts of acceleration than net speed, so i think they could outmaneouver large spaceships at close ranges.
Basically all spaceship engines I can think of work on an economy of scale too. A nuclear reactor is better the bigger it is. So you will be accelerating much faster with a bigger ship too. Obviously if you cut out all the armour a smaller ship could accelerate faster… but then the ship would just be killed basically immediately by lasers. Maybe you could have a few lighter varieties of vessel but idk.

I was thinking about a way missiles (talking about guided missiles when I use this word, obviously anything is a missile) could be useful. Basically they would be tie breakers or like wildcards, a way for a losing force to maybe have a chance of equalizing things. Space battles will take a really long time and you will know who will lose very early into it (not saying tactics won't happen but it will be obvious when both have been lasing each other for a month who will run out of armour mass first). So you can have a missile, as smart as any other ship and even more armoured but maybe with slightly less propellent because it doesn't need to come back, and if the enemy runs away from it for long enough that will be a mission kill basically. It could even have weapons of its own. So it is fired off, maybe accelerated up to speed by a laser from its home base if possible, and when the battle happens there is something just ramming for the enemy, or detonating a fission lance nearby to hit it. But at that point… why not just make another normal warship? That's how I came to the conclusion missiles are useless.

The only weapons I think are practical are lasers and other electromagnetic weapons, and magnetically accelerated particle cannons like dust guns, or basically coilguns shooting a stream of really tiny projectiles at a fraction of the speed of light.

>>42637
>So it is fired off, maybe accelerated up to speed by a laser
This is what i envision bomber spacecraft would do as well. Maneouvering could then be done purely by ion thrusters, which consume relatively little propellant and would be powered by batteries leeching off the mothership. They wouldn't even have to make the trip back either, just sequester pilots in a heavily armored pod, that is ejected after firing the payload and pick them up after the battle. Bombers could even be piloted as drones or by on-board AI, to avoid the morally dubious decision of leaving someone stranded in a battle zone.

>>42638
But what is the point in this? Why accelerate the bomber (basically a missile) with a laser when you can just lase the enemy vessel and transfer energy to it much more efficiently? Also bombers would not be using ion thrusters, if it was it would basically be stationary compared to the nuclear-thermal warships. Ion engines like the ones we have today have a lot of seconds of specific impulse (how long you can be burning for) but very very low thrust. And as for the pilot, we need to stop differentiating between a piloted ship and a drone. There would be no difference, every ship would be a drone basically because having space for human habitation is a massive waste of resources (that's not to say you wouldn't have human consciousness on board but you would certainly not be bringing the bodies along with them).

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>>42536
Well no space game is really going to be realistic at all. I know we talked about Children of a Dead Earth on here before, but that's how all space combat would be. It would all be in orbit, and then you do a flyby where you are in range of the enemy for like 30 seconds at most, then you have to wait a few hours for another flyby in which time they may try and evade you.

> I actually made a reddit post recently about if there were realistic use cases for anything other than lasers (and maybe railguns in like the near future) in space warfare and I was swamped by replies saying how good missiles were using modern ground to air missiles as examples and literally using the Expanse as proof. And like… I just want to think about how this would actually happen. I have so many issues with Children of a Dead Earth but its the only game that actually is about space warfare. I do appreciate what Nebulous is doing so much but I just wish it was a space game.
I had better luck with projectiles in Children of a Dead Earth. If anything I think they were underpowered. I found that the smallest projectiles possible, and spam them as much as possible. That shit will tear through any instruments and radiators on the outside of the ship. The armor won't be able to help anything. The only problem with this strategy is it quickly makes the game have to simulate half a million projectiles, and there's no way it can simulate that in real time.

https://www.esa.int/Space_Safety/Space_Debris/Hypervelocity_impacts_and_protecting_spacecraft

>>42639
>But what is the point in this?
Finding a use for nuclear weapons, that's it. Once you bridge the problem of getting the bomb to the enemy, an enormous amount of energy can be generated at once, causing damage qualitatively superior to any ray or projectile weapon.

>>42640
The biggest problem with Children of A Dead Earth, is that every combat mission starts with you in the gravity well of a planet at full fuel which makes no sense. If the game actually made you transfer forces between bodies you were attacking, it would be completely different. I found the best method is just intercepting the enemy ships with drones that shoot projectiles. So that would be the best defense, is just intercept any fleet before it even enters the gravity well with enough drone spam. I think it would be actually impossible to attack any body from another body, because they'll be able to easily intercept you an endless amount of times before you even get there.

>>42642
Also you're going to be burning all your fuel just trying to get into orbit around another body.

>>42642
I think some of the later missions make you do hohman transfers. Idk I couldn't finish the campaign, I just couldn't get into the module building. I think the game has loads of issues caused by the developer's physics autism and lack of military thought. Like I get my lasers will be diffused if I am using them at long range but there is literally no reason I can't be shooting those missiles coming towards me to slowly overheat them or eat away at their mass, its not like I'm using that power for anything else. The game feels way too close range sometimes. And also there's flaring missiles… like you would think they would have basic pattern recognition for the sensor.

The best weapons seem to be coilguns and lasers though, with a few decoy missiles to mess up their drone formations. But tbh if you have a decent laser onboard the missiles are just useless, you just need to target a specific module and they will all insta die. Same with drones.

Anyway where even are the sensors on the missiles? I get there doesn't need to be sensors on your main ships because they can just be linked in to a thousand observatories across the solar system, but when the missiles are pitbulling what are they even using to do it? Also this brings up the question of electronic warfare. I know lasers can intefere with other lasers like radar does, so can't you do the same thing and jam their laser communication with a countermeasure laser, therfore cutting them off from their eyes and intelligence centres, and also their drones.

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File: 1748007041470-2.mp4 (23.79 MB, 1920x1080, Drones Vs Laser Skiffs..mp4)

>>42644
>The best weapons seem to be coilguns and lasers though, with a few decoy missiles to mess up their drone formations. But tbh if you have a decent laser onboard the missiles are just useless, you just need to target a specific module and they will all insta die. Same with drones.
Yeah I only use missiles to take out their drones and missiles. I have like nuclear flak missiles that shoot out multiple nuclear warheads that make a screen they fly into.

What I attack them with is the drones and I disable to range limit, because the weapons have a range that they're considered accurate to, but you can disable it, which unfortunately is what lags up the game more than anything for some reason. The engagement always start off at the range of the longest range weapon in the engagement, so that will be the lasers when I use them against lasing ships. So I have to turn off the the range limit because they start lasing my drones right away. I don't bother with any armor on the drones so I can just maximize the numbers, so they'll be lasing my drones down right away but I dump so many bullets on them it destroys all their ships even if they can lase each drone individually in a second.

Here I recorded a vid to show it off.

>3 Enemy Laser Skiffs worth: 64.4 Mc in total
Vs.
>1 Drone launcher 46.5

I probably could take on even more.

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>>42645
Also look how close the game puts the drones together. They could fly in an even wider formation, which would mean much more turning for each turret to target each drone, meanwhile bullets are flying at you from every direction.

>More guns
>More angles
>More bullets
= More better.

>>42645
Not super related to your post but have you played Delta V: Rings of Saturn?

>>42647
>Not super related to your post but have you played Delta V: Rings of Saturn?
No I haven't I saw your thread on it and I think that'll probably be my next purchase. It sounds right up my ally. I have my dream game where it would be more of a 4x game with the whole solar system with realistic mechanics. I don't think you even have to go CoaDE crazy with it. Could just prefigure out the costs of transferring in-between planets and the launch windows and all that.

I guess the biggest problem is there is just not that many bodies in the solar system really and they'd probably be really isolated for the most part.

It's way too big brain a problem for me probably to actually make.


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