Ambrosia Software Web Board: A rant about ship classes - Ambrosia Software Web Board

But we've already said that most sub capitol ships don't stay out for very long. If there is a risk of damage, the crew can wear pressure suits(gemini astronauts wore them for almost 14 days straight) In fact, I think the crews do wear pressure suits, because if you look at your ejected body after your ship explodes, you're wearing one. However, it seems that ships themselves are very fragile in Ares, and that compared to the shields, the Armor is like paper, therefore, there isn't a need for damage control, as by the time a pulse hits the metal, the ship loses structural integrity and pops like a baloon.


------------------
NEW NAME FOR THE DREADNOUGHT
The Hard-Boiled Egg
Why?
Because she cant be beaten!

Ohhh, c'mon! It's just a G-A-M-E, man!

------------------
--Talon_Karrde, MoD, 61:4--
Visit [url="http://"http://www.planetarion.com"]www.planetarion.com[/url] and sign up for some real gaming experience!

I dont think that beings (humans) will give weapons to AIs because they break down, they can malfunction and they can be tampered with. All of this makes them easy to turn against the builders. Weapons may be given to AIs if there are numerous failsafes to prevent all of the above problems (including codes to prevent unauthorised use), the AIs dont do anything until told by a being and they stop or return to base after doing it and there is a being with a button to press that shuts down/self destructs the AIs. Therefore I think that Ares ships have crews but only small ones.

------------------
Grand Fleet Admiral Slathkill, Supreme Commander I.M.A. Fleet

I agree entirely. I'm not saying that they have AIs, I'm saying they use computer augmented controls to allow for a smaller crew (and therefore a smaller risk of life when they are deployed) Even modern planes and ships make extensive use of such technology. How else do you think that a crew of two can run a complicated plane like a 777 ? (Trust me, that sucker is a LOT more complicated than older airliners) More importantly, the Autopilot is used extensively on commercial airliners. Of course there are pilots there, but autopilots nowadays can literally take the plane from a standing stop at the end of one runway to a standing stop at any ILS-equipped runway anywhere else in the world. This system is used every time you fly, in fact they are used MORE if there is bad weather, as the autopilot doesn't care about fog or clouds. Now, if airliners trust tens of thousands of lives to computers on a daily basis, in order to allow pilots to doze a bit, what would the Ishimans do? Replace as many people as possible with computers, and only use people where their judgement was needed, as pilots and the like, leaving at most a single engineer as backup to the computer. Computers are perfectly capable of running a plane or something just as complicated safely, and if there's an alternative to risking an extra Ishiman, I think that the Ish would take it.

------------------
NEW NAME FOR THE DREADNOUGHT
The Hard-Boiled Egg
Why?
Because she cant be beaten!

Maybe that's true for the Ish and Sals (who also fear death, as it is the ultimate mystery and they fear mysteries), but not the Cantharans (who don't give a f***), and the Gaitori and humans, who use old tech that might be unreliable and need in-flight corrections/fixes.

No fricking clue on the Eleej/Obish/Baz.

------------------
Formerly-Rampant Human-Coded AI

Well, that is entirely possible, but humans seem very capable of building advanced computer equipment now(everything is becoming fly-by-wire) and I hardly see them taking a step backwards when it comes to making ships. Just because its going into space doesn't mean they're starting all the way over from the beginning. (Though the Ish probably have computers replaceing crewmembers down to an art, or perhaps a science.)



------------------
NEW NAME FOR THE DREADNOUGHT
The Hard-Boiled Egg
Why?
Because she cant be beaten!

The UNS is a resistance movement. They might need to do a lot from scratch. Also, their gunships have turrets, which have to be aimed.

------------------
Formerly-Rampant Human-Coded AI

Um, Darkk - Do you have to aim those turrets? No. Do they fire in the approximately correct direction? Yes. Who aims them? The computer.

------------------
"I think I have discovered the problem with humans. It is not entirely stupidity, as I once thought. It is their pigheaded and baseless philosophy: "If it isn't me, then it's opinions, feelings, and life do not matter, and it was meant to serve me." They also have this ability for creating excuses that are pointless, but they get others to believe it. A few examples: "It's only some savages. It's only five acres of rain forest. It's only one semi-truck. It's only fifty gallons of toxic waste..." After this realization, I marvelled at how humans, and the rest of the planet, have survived for so very long."
- Me

Game!=stuff depicted in game.
The turrets might simply be aimed by another crew member. Computers would have to be awfully smart to hit a sentient pilot that knew how to jinx and weave.

------------------
Formerly-Rampant Human-Coded AI

Not true, not true! There are radar guided machine gun turrets on naval vessels that shoot down missiles. Modern Anti-ship missiles are pretty hard to hit as bogies go, but the same guns are used to shoot down planes too. There are pretty compitent computer programs out there, they make cameras that can lock on to cars and running people, and follow them through all sorts of stuff. In fact, many modern AA guns are radar guided (Why do you think they were inneffective at shooting down stealth bombers? You think that they expected the gunners to see fighters at night over baghdad? Computers can predict motion pretty well based on the motion of the preceeding few frames of Radar, video, or whatever. it's possible, crew are not the only answer.

------------------
NEW NAME FOR THE DREADNOUGHT
The Hard-Boiled Egg
Why?
Because she cant be beaten!

Quote

It doesn't matter what was supposedly aiming the turret, but the computer sitting right in front of you as you read this was doing the aiming. Read what Captain Pharris said, and also know that there are plenty of 3D games where the computer aims turrets just fine.

------------------
"I think I have discovered the problem with humans. It is not entirely stupidity, as I once thought. It is their pigheaded and baseless philosophy: "If it isn't me, then it's opinions, feelings, and life do not matter, and it was meant to serve me." They also have this ability for creating excuses that are pointless, but they get others to believe it. A few examples: "It's only some savages. It's only five acres of rain forest. It's only one semi-truck. It's only fifty gallons of toxic waste..." After this realization, I marvelled at how humans, and the rest of the planet, have survived for so very long."
- Me

Yeah, but the computer was also flying the ship it's hitting. Anybody ever heard of the circle and the monty python? I can dodge quite a few shots with those. In real space combat (riiiggghttt), aiming would be a few million times more tricky.

------------------
Formerly-Rampant Human-Coded AI

So? It's still shooting in the right direction. And that's even a game that is, by itself, one megabyte in size, developed by one person who isn't military trained, and it's running on a personal computer. Now, imagine a program that's about half a gig, developed by a large team of military-trained programmers, with millions of dollars spent on its development, and hooked up to a computer that can do several gigahertz, and hooked up to extremely powerful military-grade sensing equipment. What makes you so sure it's gonna shoot the wrong way?

------------------
"I think I have discovered the problem with humans. It is not entirely stupidity, as I once thought. It is their pigheaded and baseless philosophy: "If it isn't me, then it's opinions, feelings, and life do not matter, and it was meant to serve me." They also have this ability for creating excuses that are pointless, but they get others to believe it. A few examples: "It's only some savages. It's only five acres of rain forest. It's only one semi-truck. It's only fifty gallons of toxic waste..." After this realization, I marvelled at how humans, and the rest of the planet, have survived for so very long."
- Me

Which is why they don't trust humans to do it. After some more research, I have discovered that almost every large AA gun since the 80's has had the capability to be hooked into a radar array for targeting. Guns like the SA-88(I think that's the designation) are entirely radar guided. The operator points to the target on his screen, and hits the trigger when the gun beeps "locked". The guns on navy ships are even more straigntforward. The operator turns the switch on, and anything without an encrypted friendly IFF transponder that enters a mile of the ship has five seconds before a large wall of lead turns it into flying debris. Needless to say, these are usually left in the "wait for confirmation" setting unless the ship is in combat.

------------------
NEW NAME FOR THE DREADNOUGHT
The Hard-Boiled Egg
Why?
Because she cant be beaten!

Okay. First off, there's the immense difficulty inherant to rebellions with getting parts/equipment/hardware/software. It wouldn't be surprising if they have to make those programs from scratch, as the Cantharans aren't about to give them up. How many people do you know that could program the Ares AI, let alone something that can hit a reletivistic object 10000+ km away?

------------------
Formerly-Rampant Human-Coded AI

Quote

I doubt the Cantharans would manage to destroy every single computer that the various militaries around the globe own. And I don't know what you mean about "as the Cantharans aren't about to give them up". Do you mean the Cantharans have the programs? And are therefore undermining your argument? Also, do we know that the Cantharans have computers that humans are capable of using? And they have targeting software loaded on these computers that are in concentration camps?

Quote

None, but, then again, resistance movements have many more people in them, and the people in them often have some military background. And distance, when put into computers, is one thing that doesn't make much difference. It's just another variable to plug into an equation. Massive distances would simply mean that the equation would give back a different answer than if they were extremely short distances.

------------------
"I think I have discovered the problem with humans. It is not entirely stupidity, as I once thought. It is their pigheaded and baseless philosophy: "If it isn't me, then it's opinions, feelings, and life do not matter, and it was meant to serve me." They also have this ability for creating excuses that are pointless, but they get others to believe it. A few examples: "It's only some savages. It's only five acres of rain forest. It's only one semi-truck. It's only fifty gallons of toxic waste..." After this realization, I marvelled at how humans, and the rest of the planet, have survived for so very long."
- Me

How many people do you know that can hit a ship 10,000 km away moving at relativistic speeds? At that range you can hardly see the ships. Radar guided guns are the only way.

------------------
NEW NAME FOR THE DREADNOUGHT
The Hard-Boiled Egg
Why?
Because she cant be beaten!

Good point Pharris. Perhaps I am a little prejudaced by the ending of Star Wars: A New Hope.

Oh, Mag: it's rather hard to start from scratch. Humans are pretty much where the slaves in the US were in 1848 or so education-wise. They've got to steal EVERYTHING, including knowledge. While the Cantharans probably didn't get all the computers, it's hard to imagine there being more than 3 or so members of the military that are still living, and having untrained (in teaching) people impart knowledge to you really isn't effective (that's why teachers are certified). Then there's the problem of maintinance...

Also, those arguments about not having computers humans can use prove my point.

There aren't really enough of those left to be able to do much with them. The UNS is using Cantharan computers it stole or it's doing anything really tricky by hand.

Man this argument goes off on wierd tangents.

------------------
Formerly-Rampant Human-Coded AI

I was thinking more along the lines of a few people being in the resistance movement, and not getting killed or captured by the Cantharans. They'd be able to use and maintain computers, although I do think that finding spare parts would be difficult.

------------------
"I think I have discovered the problem with humans. It is not entirely stupidity, as I once thought. It is their pigheaded and baseless philosophy: "If it isn't me, then it's opinions, feelings, and life do not matter, and it was meant to serve me." They also have this ability for creating excuses that are pointless, but they get others to believe it. A few examples: "It's only some savages. It's only five acres of rain forest. It's only one semi-truck. It's only fifty gallons of toxic waste..." After this realization, I marvelled at how humans, and the rest of the planet, have survived for so very long."
- Me

Well there are obviously large extrasolar colonies that have not been crushed yet, and they are advanced enough that they can be rapidly upgraded to produce ish carriers, so they can't be that backwater.

------------------
NEW NAME FOR THE DREADNOUGHT
The Hard-Boiled Egg
Why?
Because she cant be beaten!

Oh yeah, I forgot that.
Okay, the UNS probably uses computers to aim.
Any idea on how many in their crews?

------------------
Formerly-Rampant Human-Coded AI

Well this whole big fight started out because I wanted to say that computers like that are exactly what allows a crew of five or six to effectively pilot a ship like a gunship, and a crew of seven or eight to fly an HVD. (Note, this is the crew assumeing the ships arn'tout for more then 18-24 hours at the most. An interesting thing I noticed today is that half of the HVDs look like souped up gunships:

Human HVD = gunship+2 pod things on back

Ish HVD = gunship with long front thing

Aud HVD = Gunship with long front thing

anyone else notice that? I really think that the extra space is for weapons only.

------------------
NEW NAME FOR THE DREADNOUGHT
The Hard-Boiled Egg
Why?
Because she cant be beaten!

Here's a new theory about carriers(but it really depends on what you think the tactical capabilities of fighters is)

Modern wet carriers carry a serious ammount of power with them. They have an entire air wing on board, nearly 100 aircraft. Whenever the US commits a carrier to a combat arena, they send a fleet with it, because if they lost the carrier, it would be ridiculously hard to replace.

Now, Carriers in Ares seem to be much smaller. They carry only twelve fighters. I would suggest that carriers are of this size because making them larger would only make them bigger targets. It would seem that there are not many instances where the benefiets of having a large fighter wing out weigh the risks involved in having a bigger ship with larger crew and the like. Carriers are not large ships because they are only tactical, small scale deployment ships. They only carry fighters to support themselves, not to support a fleet.

Perhaps there are Auxilliary carriers that are nothng but flight bays, and enter large engagements only to drop fighters. But in actuality, I would suggest that carriers don't carry the value of an aircraft carrier in the modern wet navy. I think that Gateships hold a tactical and financial value closer to a modern carrier. (Thus even a major military power could still be strong with relatively few gateships) Gateships have fleets assigned to them, much like carriers have air wings assiged to them to improve the air wing's mobility.

------------------
NEW NAME FOR THE DREADNOUGHT
The Hard-Boiled Egg
Why?
Because she cant be beaten!

And that having a carrier launch a hundred fighters would mean that the game engine has to support a lot more sprites than usual...

------------------
--Talon_Karrde, MoD, 61:4--
Visit [url="http://"http://www.planetarion.com"]www.planetarion.com[/url] and sign up for some real gaming experience!

I think the reason there aren't many fighters is that it would
A) make the carriers too powerful and
seriously slow the game on older computers.

I'd love to have more fighters, as they have one major role: distracting the enemy.
A carrier with 20+ fighters and decent ammo/weapons could probably take out a wing of gunships without serious risk, as they would spend too much time attacking the fighters.

If this was done "for real", the carriers probably would have more fighters, as Gateships are too rare (1 per race) to do power projection.

------------------
Formerly-Rampant Human-Coded AI