Link? Source?

Any old Joe Blow in a dime a dozen destroyer shelling a planet and zipping off at the first sign of trouble

Why would a battleship waste time firing into a 24 man skirmish?

DUST is not Planetside 2, the scale is tiny.

[quote=Keno Skir]well if we used Abaddon and fired lasers from orbit , the atmosphere would negates most of the EM .

Bunnies can also blow up said destroyer.

I have every confidence CCP will - sort things out.

Let's not be hasty, here. Don't forget, DUST is still in beta - by limiting OB to small turrets, they are limiting the load on their servers

I do find it funny that in space small guns can't hit a stationary target 20km away, but somehow they can hit a target 300km away on the surface of a planet with accuracy on the order of a few meters.

This choice has been made for the benefit of DUST players, who will want to try out EVE and be shelling a planet within a few minutes.

If battleships are ever allowed to fire at planets it will only be 1.2x as good as a destroyer.

I was actually thinking of the extra code required to implement more ammo types, not so much the server load - I've been drinking. More code just to make the beta more like the final? Probably not necessary. A beta is like a "demo" - it's not the full version.

It may be worth remembering just how big and powerful the shells are that we use in EVE when compared to standard ground based weaponry. Gallente destroyers with rails will usually fire 125mm shells, slightly smaller than the 130mm shells fired by modern naval destroyers.

We know how much damage that kind of real life shell can cause, now imagine those shells being filled with anti-matter! And now imagine a shell half a metre across made of the same stuff travelling a good percentage the speed of light, the kind fired from a 425mm battleship railgun. The kinetic damage alone would vaporise a large portion of the area. Add in the anti--matter and you wouldn't just kill a few DUST soldiers, you would vaporise a few square kilometres.

You may want to read up on EVE's lore. The 425mm shells fired by Gallente Hybrid weapons do contain anti-matter (most likely suspended as it is in real life in a magnetic bottle) and are fired at a considerable percentage of the speed of light.

[quote=Lipbite] I can understand why CCP want to scale this from the bottom up - because that's the only sensible way you can balance it. Anything else, and you'd kill off the new population base of dust before it established.

Now that seems like a perfectly acceptable reason to me. For other shells, perhaps a simple explosive charge to facilitate the same dignified and safe "end" to a shells existence should it fail to strike its target. Poor shells They either explode on impact, or they just explode Not much of a life really.