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.

assuming the payload of the destroyer shell is a cylinder with 115mm diameter and 600mm height, its volume would be pi*600mm*(100mm/2)^2 = ~4,712,389mm^3

It would reasonable to use some relatively heavy antimatter as ammunition, for the sake of the argument lead ions will do.

Lead has a density of 11,340 kg/m^3 or 1.1340 *10^-5 kg/mm^3, therefore our (anti-)lead cylinder would have a mass of ~53.44kg.

Using E = m*c^2 one antimatter shell would be converted into ~4.8*10^18 joules, the equivalent of 1,148 megatons of TNT.

The most powerful nuclear weapon detonated on earth so far had a yield of 57 megatons.

One single destroyer shell - the equivalent of 20 extremely powerful hydrogen bombs.

Those DUST mercs better watch out.

I suspect the magnetic bottle runs out of energy to susain it's containment field, in which case the shell would just evaporate. I'd do it the same way, it's a nice safety mechanism to prevent stray shots hitting anything You dont want to hit, outside of a certain range ofc.

DUST is in its very first stages of integration, and is not even released in full yet. I'd imagine that destroyers were chosen as the first vessel for bombardment because small ship sized guns would be the easiest to balance from a DUST point of view...A single thrasher will be firing a volley of 280mm artillery shells, remember. Stuff like battleships and dreads would do enough damage to wipe out huge portions of a DUST battlefield and thus while it would be cool to have, would need to be carefully balanced.

The concerns raised about a destroyer just leaving at the first sign of trouble are valid. Hopefully there's some sort of mechanic (perhaps a mini siege mode?) that forces pilots bombarding planets to be vulnerable.

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.

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

DUST is not Planetside 2, the scale is tiny.

optimal range + falloff in EVE isn't a measure of how long your round last before disintegrating (except with blasters) it's a measure of how far out the ship can reliably hit stuff with that kind of gun before things get so extreme that any hit you did score would constitute divine intervention.

Fire a hybrid round, and it will fly off into space to ruin somebody's day, somewhere, sometime. If you got things right, the person whose day it ruins is your intended target's.

An object in motion remains in motion unless acted on by an outside force.

optimal range + falloff in EVE isn't a measure of how long your round last before disintegrating (except with blasters) it's a measure of how far out the ship can reliably hit stuff with that kind of gun before things get so extreme that any hit you did score would constitute divine intervention.

Fire a hybrid round, and it will fly off into space to ruin somebody's day, somewhere, sometime. If you got things right, the person whose day it ruins is your intended target's.

I suspect the magnetic bottle runs out of energy to susain it's containment field, in which case the shell would just evaporate. I'd do it the same way, it's a nice safety mechanism to prevent stray shots hitting anything You dont want to hit, outside of a certain range ofc.

See??? It's a SUBMARINE game!!