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Messages - Balisarda

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World / Re: Air force or Navy
« on: August 20, 2013, 11:38:38 pm »
I like Zenark's idea.  The whole airship carrier full of airships is rather amusing, but that type of thing has been done before.  I don't think smaller airships would be carried, but given that there are monoplanes existing in the Guns of Icarus world, I could see something like the USS Akron (a rigid airship that carried Sparrowhawk pursuit biplanes) or heck, Don Karnage's Iron Vulture from TaleSpin (am I dating myself here?).  That would be rather neat to see monoplanes being launched from underneath a behemoth airship.

And putting a heavy gun in an airborne craft is nothing new.  Aircraft that I can think of are the British Mosquito Mk.18, the Ju-88P, and the B-25G Mitchell.  All with super-heavies (for aircraft).  I think something like 75mm or so.

But that brings to point what HamsterIV was talking about.  The airspeed velocity of a coconut-laden swallow.  No, not really, but it is a matter of weight ratio.  Airships, steampunk or otherwise, will always be carrying the lighter-weight weapons.  They need to.  Whereas ground installations can have as heavy and as powerful as they possibly can field; weapons that can not only out-distance the effective range of an airborne arsenal, but out explodey it too.  Hitting a stationary target is fine, it sucks when that stationary target can also bring to bear more firepower and withstand more beating than you for a longer period of time.

The hitting of moving targets isn't much an issue, because all you need to do is hit the section of the airspace that they're in.  One thing my great-uncle, who was a waist gunner for a B-24 during the Second World War, always mentioned, was how terrifying the flak fields were.  Because it was so thick, so precise, so impersonal, and so invisible.  All you saw was the puff of black smoke, not the fragments of shrapnel nor the rounds ascending.  And there were tens of thousands of rounds all trying to occupy the same airspace that you were in.

Also, in the concept that you can just bombard a defense into submission and it'll work, well, I have an island to sell you on that idea.  It's called Iwo Jima, and the American brass thought that after a three days of bombardment (some of which was 14-inch munitions) that the Japanese would be so shell-shocked that the American forces could just relatively waltz in.  Instead, the Japanese kept their heads down, dusted themselves off, and some 36 days later, after 26,000 American casualties and almost 22,000 Japanese dead, Americans had secured the island.

Defense and offense are always vying against each other, and ground to air defense is always a better bet than air to ground assault (given relatively equal technology advances).

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Feedback and Suggestions / Re: Displaying fields of fire.
« on: August 20, 2013, 08:24:37 pm »
Something that might be nice in the Ship Customization screen would be the display of fields of fire per gun mounted.

Ugh, I can't believe that I'm quoting myself, but I guess it has to be done.  From my OP, bolded, italicized, and underlined for emphasis.

To all those who say, "Test it out in Practice or Sandbox."  Yes, understood, but it is time consuming, particularly if you lack a full crew.  This way, you could easily and quickly whip together a loadout in Ship Customization, and then give it a test in Practice without having to bounce in and out of Practice sessions to make one little change.  As Thaago smartly stated, just because the weapon variety is there, doesn't mean that certain combinations benefit each other, even if their arcs would overlap.

This is merely a suggestion for another tool in a toolbox.  I don't understand how this would be dumbing down anything.

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World / Re: Air force or Navy
« on: August 19, 2013, 11:42:39 pm »
Quite a big difference between a DD (destroyer), a FF (frigate), a CG (cruiser) and a LCS (I'm assuming that you meant the Littoral); although the LCS is an apt modern day comparison.  Small, sleek, lightly armed and armored, minimally crewed, and a survivability of close to nothing.  Yep, those're our airships.  :P  Although I'm a little more old-fashioned when it comes to comparing the airships to waterborne ships; I always think of them as sailing vessels.

Charon, see your PM.

4
World / Re: Air force or Navy
« on: August 19, 2013, 07:47:10 pm »
Okay, have you ever had something that sounded better in your mind than when you wrote it down?  Well, that's kind of what I did with the steam portion on my post.  Learned a thing or two about closed steam systems after Thug Willis' post.  I was thinking more of open system without any regard for closed systems.  Closed systems with superheated steam do perform excellently at altitude.  I think an issue would be air induction for heating the boiler, but I don't recall seeing boilers on the ships.  And I meant to say the speed to boil water is faster at altitude, and the condensation is quicker.  Grah.  But thanks for the boot to the rear.

The plane that you're talking about is the SR-71, built in the 60's.  Its fuselage and other components would expand into place because of the heat caused by the friction of the molecules in the atmosphere being compressed against the leading edges of the aircraft.  The U2 is a high-altitude, relatively slow-speed, jet-powered sailplane.

Marines are a tricky thing, because we're not very good at long-term strategic occupation.  We don't have the logistics for that.  We're assaulters.  Occupation is usually what the army is there for.  But that's not saying that the merchant marine had the ability to move vast numbers of troops.  Look at the Liberty vessels during the Second World War; Navy civilian merchant marine and moved hundreds of thousands of troops.

The ships that we have in game are more comparable to brown water corvettes or gunships.  Relatively lightly armed and armored, with a minimal crew manning it.  Could you put troops on them?  Sure.  We did something similar with Marine Raiders during WWII.  Does it have long term viability?  Need the logistics.  Completely viable in a fictional Steampunk world where the engines don't make any mechanical sense?  Absolutely.  I look forward to where they go with it.

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World / Re: Air force or Navy
« on: August 17, 2013, 10:48:07 pm »
I hate to burst your balloon, Keon, but there are plenty of WW2 aircrew that never made it home because of FLugzeugAbwehrKanone (flak), and they were flying a lot higher than 5,000 meters.  Heck, they were pushing 6,500+ and that was without pressurization or heaters.  Anything over 3,000 meters for extended periods and you'll want to be sucking air from a canister.

Also, the pressure that steam operates at would dramatically decrease at altitude, even super-heated or super-pressurized steam, so you'd be seeing almost no gain from steam-powered anything at height.  For those of you who live in high-altitude areas (looking at you, Colorado), think how much longer it takes you to boil water and how much quicker the water cools down.  I think the anime Steamboy legitimately put all the real issues with steampunk together into one movie and solved them with a wavy-handy-ignore-the-man-behind-the-curtain type manner.

Pickle is right, you gotta land sometime and somewhere, and airships don't capture and control ground.  Just like a navy can't retain control of land that it rains lead onto, it can set up some awesome blockades.  (Hence, my support for the airships as navy viewpoint.)

But, wavy-handy aside, communities and nations are isolated, airships are the major mode of transportation, and land routes are limited and treacherous.  That's the awesome thing about fiction, and Muse seems to have theirs fleshed out fairly well.

Edit: Fixed Pickle's name.  No 's' involved.

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Feedback and Suggestions / Re: Displaying fields of fire.
« on: August 15, 2013, 07:28:08 pm »
To be clear though, this suggestion would be for Ship Customization only.  I am a sparse or no HUD type of player.  Honestly, I'd like to see the HUD compass go away and be replaced by a legitimate helm compass to the left of the ship's wheel.  I'd like to see the impact markers go away and be replaced with physical indications of the damage that I'm doing (honestly, it does a pretty good job of damage modeling for the game type).  I'd like to have everyone understand things like port, starboard, stern, bow, and location call outs with highs and lows.  I'd like to see the HUD names go away and legitimate and unique ship visual customizations come into play.

To pull from "Master and Commander", I'd like that experience of dread that Captain Aubrey realized when he looked through his spyglass into the fog and the Acheron emerged with her cannons ablaze, and I'd also like that satisfaction when you take her down with experience, wit, and good teamwork over that of rapidly clicking away hoping that she'll pop up on your HUD and then plastering a reticle in the clouds.

But I'd also like a million dollars.  :P

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Feedback and Suggestions / Re: Displaying fields of fire.
« on: August 15, 2013, 06:35:55 pm »
"...removes the intelligence factor from the game.  Real gamers find their gun's traverse limits by hours of experimentation in game, not by looking at a handy chart."

I'm not going grind into the meat and potatoes of that (I lie), but from that little quote, apparently every grunt who's ever drawn up a field of fire diagram to figure where to lay their guns for fire interlocking and terrain masking clearly have no idea what they're doing.  Hell, I utilize fire overlays for live-fire ranges with fixed lateral limits and known distances just to see what the effective distance and possible errant travel that a round can do.  Clearly, I'd much rather find out the traverse limits of my M240 on my vehicle in combat rather than beforehand.  /sarcasm

You talk about removing the intelligence factor from the game, but what you describe is more a matter of experience, but seeing as guns' traversal can be changed from patch to patch (I give you the Field Gun for 1.3.1), experience is subjective.  This would actually put into the game a legitimate intelligence factor, seeing as it is an inject of data that allows you to better equip and focus your firepower prior to stepping off.  Hell, a real tidbit of intelligence would be allowing players to look at enemy airships while still in the Game Lobby (but that would eliminate a lot of the fun factor and add way too much frustration).

Hence my suggestion that it be a toggled option, to allow young hard-chargers who don't need to look at a handy chart or read the instructions from getting their "hours of experimentation" and those of us who like to spend a few minutes configuring an airship that has good fields of fire and hours honing effective air combat getting our, well, hours effectively honing our air combat.

Just saying.  :)

Edit: Also to note, no ill will is meant in my commentary, I usually come of pretty direct and intonation never translates well when typed.

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Feedback and Suggestions / Displaying fields of fire.
« on: August 15, 2013, 04:17:54 pm »
Something that might be nice in the Ship Customization screen would be the display of fields of fire per gun mounted.  Since the ship is a model which can be rotated around the Y-axis, a three dimension pyramid (which could be toggled on and off) of each gun's firing arcs as mounted would allow one the ability to figure a good estimate of interlocking fields.  This might also be beneficial to put in the ability to rotate the ship around the X-axis as well, as to allow a top-down perspective of gun arcs.

Just a machine gunner's thought.

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