Subset Games Forum

textheavy wrote:

cicobuff wrote:The OP is not carrying out his own rational to its logical conclusion. If cloak does not prevent charging because modern systems can acquire firing resolution in milliseconds. Why does systems even need to charge? Shouldn't all weapons just fire without wait times?

Actually, I had considered that, but decided that energy weapons powerful enough to smash hull plating on a ship, but which draw power from a reactor with a fixed output, would require a charging time. You can't expect that the ship's reactor is putting out enough power at any given moment to punch through a force shield or smash plating.

In addition to a powerful energy weapon's charge time, I imagine its barrel would need a cooldown period to avoid damage which would result in reduction of power and/or accuracy. Which leaves the possibilty of firing faster than the military "standard," because if you're in imminent danger of getting blown up, saving the ship is more important than firing at the most efficient rate.

That does leave the question of why missile systems take time to charge. The energy payload is physical, built into the missile itself, and no charge time would be required (although a physical loading time would be). And if the missiles aren't self guiding, they would need targeting solutions to be pre-programmed. Since missiles tend to have slightly shorter "charge" times than energy weapons, maybe a significant part of the wait is actually in target acquisition.

But then, as mentioned, when your target comes out of cloak, it seems like you would need to restart your targeting calculations pretty nearly from scratch. ...

I don't think that a missile is going to fire its own engine(s) till it is outside of the ship, so some system to eject it from its tube will be necessary, and it will have a charge time. But that's likely less than the physical loading time - after all, you're not going to be moving a massive explosive object at a high rate of speed through your ship. Which makes me think that missiles fire rather too fast in FTL for "realism" (and probably, to a lesser extent, energy weapons, too).