Stuart Price
Caldari
The Black Rabbits
The Gurlstas Associates
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Posted - 2008.07.10 02:59:00 -
[1]
Edited by: Stuart Price on 10/07/2008 03:03:35
Edited by: Stuart Price on 10/07/2008 03:00:42
If you want a made up sci-fi answer then:
Missiles in eve are several magnitudes larger and more powerful than anything 21st century Earth has to offer. The fuel needed to propel such missiles is therefore also much larger not only to propel them but to control their flight. All maneuvering would use fuel as they'd have to use lateral thrusters to change direction as opposed to fins or wings as 21st century missiles do. Missiles can only contain a limited amount of fuel before the sheer amount of fuel compromises the size of the warhead - resulting in the limited ranges of the in game missiles. Shorter range missiles (rockets, lights, HAM's, torps etc) are designed for dogfighting and therefore have greater maneuverability (therefore greater fuel consumption) meaning shorter ranges as the trade-off OR they have massive payloads, limited the amout of fuel that can be loaded onto the missile without making it too large. Longer range missiles are not as maneuverable so they need less fuel for the lateral thrusters and can use more for pure propulsion.
Make any sense?
With guns it's purely a case of how accurately you can project non-guided munitions onto a target, often a moving target. Blasters have short range because of the nature of the weapon - the particles disperse rapidly after firing. Railguns have a long range because the projectiles are fired incredibly fast, meaning tracking calculations are reduced and the effects of target mobility are similarly reduced. Howitzers and autocannons are similarly affected (this time limited) by the speed of the round and lasers can be assumed to have perfect long range accuracy (diffraction through clouds of gas aside) - instead they're limited by the laser losing energy the farther it has to travel (beam lasers being more focused - more range, pulse lasers being faster firing but less focused - less range). So with weapons requiring ammo it's accuracy affecting the effective range, with lasers its the loss of energy on far away targets.
This still allows you to separate range from tracking since range is a measure of a given weapon's ability to hit a stationary target accurately whereas tracking speed is a weapon's ability to follow a moving target. As any marksman will tell you, the two skills are completely different. Try firing a heavy bolt action rifle at a small, fast moving clay target. Then try a shotgun. Then try the same weapons on a stationary target 500 yards away.
That's roughly how I see it in my head, barring some horrific scientific inaccuracies. Considering the physics models for ship movement my own fallacy doesn't bother me overly.
"I got soul but I'm not a soldier" |