Targeting Laser Questions, Concerns, and Ideas

[Eluem]

A recent video showed a red laser pointer being used to guide a torpedo to a target.
This is a really cool feature and I'm excited at the potential it can bring.

Questions:
1) How does the laser communicate with the torpedo?
-Is it directly paired with the torpedo
-Does it emit a frequency that the torpedo tunes into
2) How does the torpedo use this communication?
-Does it directly control the torpedo and manipulate the thrust so that it can navigate to the target?
-Does it communicate some positional data that can be used by YOLO?
-What kind of positional data is communicated?


Concerns:
I'm nervous that the torpedo will be getting some special features/treatment and I hope that's not the case.


Ideas:
It's extremely likely that this is already how the torpedo and targeting laser work, but we don't know yet, and I enjoy thinking about these things.

It would be best if every feature a torpedo gets is simply a module that can be swapped out, balancing between:
Fuel, payload size/type(s), YOLOL chip capacity, utilities (proxy sensor, targeting laser sensor, radio receiver/transmitter, ect)

I'm pretty sure that torpedoes are already confirmed to work that way to some degree.

Regarding the targeting laser, it would be best if there are simply things that can emit targeting frequencies (possibly corresponding to the color of the laser).
There would be a larger scale device, like the one we saw in the video, and a handheld device.

Targeting laser detectors would exist, both as standalone mountable devices and as special modules that can be built into a torpedo.
The detectors would simply pick up the nearest (or possibly an ordered list based on distance) targeting laser that's within range.
It would output a number indicating distance and another set of numbers indicating the direction relative to the orientation of the targeting laser sensor.

In a torpedo the sensor is aligned facing forward by default. In a ship it's aligned based on how you place it.

From here, you can use YOLOL to control the torpedo and make use of the guidance information.



The reason I would prefer this is that it allows players to make different methods for tracking to a targeting laser and would enable the tools to be used for many other applications.
For example, you could make multiple arrays of turrets on a ship, tuned to different frequencies, and then use a hand held targeting laser to control different fire groups while remaining mobile on a ship.
You could also use it for all kinds of manufacturing tools. An arm could be programmed to reach towards a targeting laser, for example.

That does everyone think?

 

[PopeUrban]

I think this laser should be limited to torpedo targeting.

You'll notice that the torpedo examples we have seen are relatively slow moving objects. When this same logic is applied to turrets, smaller missiles, or any other device you run the risk of over-automating ship weaponry functions and making engineering and crewmates largely irrelevant.

The reason torpedos get a pass is because they seem designed to be actively counterplayed against by moving out of the way or shooting them down. Even in instances of full macross level swarms of torpedo's the target still has several options to deal with them in a way that makes ship design and piloting skill important for both players.

Were you to allow turrets or fast moving rockets to point at a laser painting signal, one player could control a virtually infinite amount of uncounterable munitions with perfect accuracy and a single button from a single chair. This would make all of combat engineering an arms race of who can stack the most guns on a thing and make multi-person ships essentially obsolete. This makes engineering the only important factor in combat and virtually removes pilot skill from the equation in favor of giant automated saturation fire devices.

Artificially limiting the number of guns that can receive a laser signal would be antithetical to the freeform nature of the building systems and YOLOL itself, so it would be inappropriate to got that way. The execution time limit of YOLOL makes turret automation sufficiently costly. You CAN automate unlimited turrets through scriping, but because scripting is slow your turrets are also going to be slow compared to a live human.

"Point at laser" doesn't have that limitation, and if it did it would severely undercut the amount of power and network engineering the YOLOL based system would require, which is a significantly large vulnerability in such a vessel.

Ditto for other uses. There's a reason rangefinders have a maximum limit and yolol is slow. It means that the most efficient way to do a task is to do it yourself, and that automation isn't don't for efficiency but for redundancy. If means that while automating a gun or production line is slower and less efficient than getting a player to do it, you can do more of that action with less players, do is more frequently, or do it while also doing a second thing. Hoever if you want something built FAST a player is always going to be the best option. Players MUST be more efficient at tasks than YOLOL is for players to remain relevant to any job in the game that isn't engineering YOLOL systems.

That mindset is vital to the long term health of the game. The moment you can YOLOL engineer a system that does the job better than a player, that's one less activity for players to do.

 

[CalenLoki]

@PopeUrban

General purpose laser designator wouldn't be even close to as OP for turrets and rockets. Or any other weapon that is not a hitscan or guided.
Laser need to hit something to create aiming point. That doesn't work if you have to lead way ahead of the target (so against any decent combat ship).
And even if it provides virtual point (i.e. at max range) sensor would still give you x,y offset. Exactly the same x.y offset as between master and slave turret. Automation already possible and encouraged by devs.

Designator provides the same possibilities as rangefinder, just without tedious angle calculations and intra-ship communication. IMO it's good to open such options to people with lower coding skills.

Yolol space and energy usage won't be high enough to really impact engineering aspect. With the amount oy chips we can see in dev ships, 5 more or less would change nothing.

And hand-held version provides unique infantry-ship synergy. Being able to directly guide fire support vessel while being on the "ground" would greatly enhance any boarding or station battles.

Controling turrets without swiveling the master chair around is also welcome feature IMO, especially for compact gunboats.

@Eluem

Torpedoes are already modular. You can stack as many modules as you want. Except front and rear modules of course.

 

[Burnside]

on the frequency homing issue, it'd be cool if you could put a frequency-homing guidance package on a torp that makes it seek out transmitters within a certain frequency range and have the yolol module switch the frequency detection between a list of valid frequency targets, so then you not only have laser-guided torps, but emission-homing ones as well. After that we only need heat-based warheads that seek radiators, coolant boards, and thrusters for a nice trifecta as well as a locking module so you can get that sweet, sweet, tone before firing.

Oh, I almost forgot, short range wire-guided missiles (wire-spool rear module + offset thruster module) that can be controlled from an ops station

 

[Eluem]

Players MUST be more efficient at tasks than YOLOL is for players to remain relevant to any job in the game that isn't engineering YOLOL systems.

That mindset is vital to the long term health of the game. The moment you can YOLOL engineer a system that does the job better than a player, that's one less activity for players to do.

The quote above is the crux of your argument and the reason you believe that the laser pointer should be hard coded to only work with torpedoes.
I completely agree with your reason but disagree with your conclusion. I disagree with the fear that targeting lasers being more versatile will make it too easy to over automate processes.

Warning: Massive rant below. TL;DR: there's already a way to slave tons of guns to a player controlled chair. This is easier and better than a targeting laser in almost every situation. I go into more detail explaining why below but it basically boils down to: being able to manually lead, requiring less math and thus being more responsive, requiring less hardware on the ship overall.

The targeting laser system that I've described so far has competition in the game already. There's already YOLOL that developers have demonstrated which can slave many turrets to a single chair.
Those system actually require far less YOLOL code to work, because you can manually lead with them and the rotation of the weapons can map very directly to the rotation of the control chair.

The system I'm describing requires far more YOLOL to work correctly in a real time system, and as such would have even more lag and/or would require even more chips running in parallel with far more complex code running.

Other people have already mentioned in this thread why that's the case, but I'll take my own crack at explaining it because I can't stop thinking about this game lol

The targeting laser can only indicate a target by directly pointing at it. If I try to aim in front of a target, my laser will be pointing out into space and not collide with anything.
This prevents it from actually creating a targeting point for a sensor to pick up on. If you agree with this, you must accept that the targeting laser will only be able to point directly at my target unless there happens to be something behind the target for me to aim at.

If I'm only aiming directly at my target, even if my weapon is using hitscan and doesn't need to lead (which almost every ship based weapon in the game DOES need to lead except for a few that have other drawbacks), it'll still need to lead for the YOLOL delay.
The math required to calculate the exact direction the guns should be pointing in to aim at the point (since the sensor will only be able to obtain a bunch of values for an angle and a value for distance) will require.. probably roughly a second or longer of delay to process and find the correct angle for each gun to face.
You'd probably also need one chip per gun, all slightly differently coded to adjust for their different positioning relative to the targeting laser sensor. Unless each gun has its own dedicated targeting laser sensor, which would cost more power and resources.

The setup that competes with this is a chair that has multiple guns slaved to it. This would require similar code but wouldn't need to do as much to resolve the direction because the chair is directly communicating the direction... you just need to use some trig to convert the direction to each gun if you want the weapons to focus to a single point in the distance.
It requires even less if you don't want to do that. Another reason this works is because I can simply aim my chair ahead of the target to adjust for the YOLOL lag and projectile speed manually.

With the targeting laser you'll need to do more math to resolve how the weapons should aim at that point.. though you could simply have them aim in the general direction of the point and ignore the distance, which would make it even less accurate while reducing the code complexity.

However, even if you make all those optimizations, you'll still be aiming behind a moving target unless you have the YOLOL do even more to try and keep track of the positioning and lead.. but then that means you need to take more details about the position into account and have even more logic going on.


Overall, having a manually controlled chair slaved to the guns will work better in 99% of ships.
The targeting laser system has two main advantages:
-Allowing you to move around your ship more (assuming there are handheld targeting lasers)
-Allowing you to get an exact position if you paint the target reliably... enabling you to resolve more advanced leading algorithms


These advantages will be valuable, but a good manually controlled dog fighter or larger ship with lots of well trained crew will be better. It just makes it POSSIBLE to have this level of automation.
I believe a manned ship will still be better.

In fact, I'm honestly entirely in favor of fully manually controlled ships being the meta. I am HEAVILY BIASED towards wanting the game to be balanced AGAINST automation in combat.
However, I still want the game to have tons of interesting emergent properties.

Also, if this targeting system works the way I suggest by using a frequency system to pair YOLOL to the targeting lasers, then there will be interesting counter measures that can be devised that either scan frequencies until something comes up, and then puts out additional targeting lasers to confuse their systems, forcing them to constantly reconfigure their system and making it less reliable, then it'll be even weaker in actual combat scenarios.

In manufacturing scenarios, I believe they've already actually shown a plan to enable a targeting laser type control over crane arms and such. I see no reason for this to be avoided in factories and other building tools. It still requires having a single person directly controlling a machine.

Players manually building will always be the most dynamic way to build new parts. Factories hopefully will and SHOULD be infinitely more efficient at building one specific thing over and over... but building something novel or simply too low in demand to sit and design an efficient factory for will be done better by players.
Keep in mind that building a factory that is better than players at building a specific ship, for example, will require tons of engineering... and then it'll only be able to build that one ship and it might still require a few steps that players get involved in to finish up.
This is how real factories work, after all. They're only more efficient than humans at building specific things because someone sat down and essentially engineered one massive machine (a factory) that is capable of automating tons and tons and tons of steps more reliably and quickly than humans can do them... but they're also VERY specifically engineered and it's very difficult to repurpose a factory to do anything else without heavily modifying it.. even if that thing is very similar or in the same category.


Let me know.. after reading all this, do you still think that targeting lasers would allow you to automate a combat ship too much? Even more than turrets slaved to a chair? I feel like having tons of turrets slaved to one chair is already stronger automation than the targeting laser would enable in combat in most situations, unless your ship is HUGE and has a VERY complex computer.. but that's the give and take imo... those ships would be huge targets with lots of very expensive components and probably wouldn't be too hard to take out with a fighter/bomber. It would need to be protected by fighters and would probably only be good as a support gunship.

 

[Eluem]

Torpedoes are already modular. You can stack as many modules as you want. Except front and rear modules of course.

Thanks for the info! I thought this was the case but wasn't sure of the details. I'm hoping the way the targeting laser and torpedo communicate is via a targeting laser sensor module. This just listens to a specific targeting laser frequency and reports the information to the internal YOLOL network. The rest is up to you.

Also, I completely feel that turrets slaved to a chair would be far superior in normal ship to ship combat scenarios mainly for the reasons you mentioned. Though, I do think it should be possible to have automated leading occur if a player maintains tracking a target reliably enough. However, I think this would start to require a fairly complex YOLOL array for it to be intelligent enough to be useful.... Which is inherently balanced.

Do we know how much power YOLOL chips take to power compared to other ship components? Is the only real cost of tons of YOLOL in ship design space? If so, having proper built in leading might not really cost much at all in terms of power and space. It's only balancing factor compared to other methods would be responsiveness. You would need to aim at the target for a couple seconds before it would have a chance at hitting them and if they're maneuvering enough, it probably couldn't resolve accurately reliably.

With a manually aimed chair system, you'd have the ability to lead both directly in front of the target and with predicting what maneuvers they might do based on how they seem to behave.

Do you really think that highly complex YOLOL won't really change how you have to engineer a ship in terms of space and energy costs?

 

[PopeUrban]

The targeting laser system that I've described so far has competition in the game already. There's already YOLOL that developers have demonstrated which can slave many turrets to a single chair.
Those system actually require far less YOLOL code to work, because you can manually lead with them and the rotation of the weapons can map very directly to the rotation of the control chair.

Which uses YOLOL, an intentionally laggy language that makes those turrets incapable of updating their crosshair position more than once every 0.2 to 0.6 seconds depending on how YOLOL handles rotation vector commands.

Players in those chairs are more efficient than slaving the turrets to a single chair. Automation in this case follows the golden rule. You can do more things with less players, but you can't do it better than if you had skilled players doing the task. Putting crack shot players in those turret chairs is going to the the superior option, which means players are still something you want to have on your ship.

The targeting laser system has two main advantages:
-Allowing you to move around your ship more (assuming there are handheld targeting lasers)
-Allowing you to get an exact position if you paint the target reliably... enabling you to resolve more advanced leading algorithms

This is exactly the problem with your proposal. You're making it easier for a single player to automate the work of many AND allowing them to do said work more efficiently than multiple players all at once.

Also, if this targeting system works the way I suggest by using a frequency system to pair YOLOL to the targeting lasers, then there will be interesting counter measures that can be devised that either scan frequencies until something comes up, and then puts out additional targeting lasers to confuse their systems, forcing them to constantly reconfigure their system and making it less reliable, then it'll be even weaker in actual combat scenarios.

Your entire targeting laser rant relies on the assumption that we add an overpowered system and then add a bunch of counters to that system that would then become required equipment for pretty much any combat ship. by adding the ability for one person with a hand tool to aim N guns with both precision and automation, you are setting a default that will define all further shipbuilding meta. By doing this you are creating a world in which that meta dictates that these scramble systems aren't an option, they're a requirement. We already have a tightly designed system of weaponry and counters. We have verying weapon behaviors opposed by varying designs of thrusters and armor. We don't need to also demand everyone strap laser pointers to every surface of their hull and devote a supercomputer to scanning frequencies to counter literally one player with a bunch of copypasted turrets that say "point at laser"

This violates the second law of PvP engineering design. The solution must always be roughly equivalent in complexity to the problem. In the theoretical system you've mentioned, the engineered problem is a few lines of YOLOL that say "point turret at dot named X" and the solution is a convoluted system of scans and even more pointers than the attacker. You're creating the gateway for an easy to implement system which requires a far more complex counter. This is bad design for a pvp building game.

In contrast, take a look at the torpedo. It is reasonably simple to design as a self contained unit with limited YOLOL interfaces, and it has a similarly simple counter: Outfly it with the equipment you already have on your ship. most weapons systems follow the model. The counter is "don't get hit, and if you do, soak it"

YOUR weapons system opens a door to a situation in which a single handheld device targets an overwhelming number of wireless guns with extreme precision from any distance AND you intend it to model lead velocities so its even easier to aim than a manual operator. Surely you can see why this is overly simply compared to the required counter.

In manufacturing scenarios, I believe they've already actually shown a plan to enable a targeting laser type control over crane arms and such. I see no reason for this to be avoided in factories and other building tools. It still requires having a single person directly controlling a machine.

These systems use rangefinders, which have a hard limited range of operation, and can only report the range from transmitter to surface, not the actual location of that surface. The amount of YOLOL and thus the time required for these machines to calculate and execute their jobs is far slower than a skilled human operator doing the same job for this reason. Again, these systems follow the first rule of automation balance: the player can not be replaced by a machine, but can be inefficiently emulated by one.

Let me know.. after reading all this, do you still think that targeting lasers would allow you to automate a combat ship too much? Even more than turrets slaved to a chair?

Yes. If I slave a bunch of turrets to a single chair, that system has a single point of failure, a chair, which is affixed to the vulnerable exterior of a spaceship. That chair is controlling turrets that imperfectly and slowly track it, which makes it terrible at aligning those turrets to fast moving or distant targets. The only way to make this system not entirely vulnerable to its single point of failure is to build a shitload of complex switches and computers to make those systems redundant. That additional engineering then creates additional points of failure. in the end the superior option is, obviously, to get players to sit in those chairs. They'll use less power, aim better, and they don't require backup computer systems to work if the turret next to them explodes.

Your hand laser assumes the single point of failure is the system's gunner, the one element of the ship that is going to be present no matter what I shoot. This makes it not only a more efficient system to engineer, but a more secure system as I am unable to disable this weapon system unless the ship is literally incapable of combat (The target painting player is dead) or I destroy every single turret on the ship (there is nothing left for the painter to connect to) I don't need to build redundancies. Every turret connected to a yolol chip that says "point at laser" is a self contained system because the hand laser itself is a wireless device. as such there is no reason to physically connect the turrets either.

If the laser is affixed to the exterior of the ship then it is pointless as you may has well have just built a forward firing weapons system. if I have a laser pointing forward and a turret scripted "shoot at this point" its always going to shoot at the same vector relative to my pilot's chair.. so I may as well have just bolted the gun to the hull and wired it to a button.

As such the veracity of this system implies that its only use is automating systems that rangefinder's can't, specifically, automating more weapons systems more efficiently from a less vulnerable position like inside the armored hull of the ship, or from a completely different ship. It makes proxy automated systems the ONLY logical option rather than a system of logical tradeoffs between using a proxy or using a player.

 

[Eluem]

@PopeUrban
You don't need to argue to me that players should be more valuable than automation in combat. I agree with you.

I disagree with how good you think targeting lasers will be based on what we know about YOLOL. If you want to put forth a valid argument, you'll have to only explain why you think this is so much stronger than being able to slave many turrets to a single chair.

I've talked to ship builders and YOLOL coders on discord that have been following the game closely and working with the info with have so far... And it's way more complex to make velocity extrapolation work well enough in real time with how slow YOLOL is than you think. It's not just "aim at the laser pointer"... It's "aim where the laser pointer will be in x seconds depending on how far away they are and how slow the projectiles are"... Even with laser turrets instead of projectiles it's "aim where the laser pointer will be, taking YOLOL lag and turret rotation speeds into account".

You're entirely ignoring how much slower the code is to get a targeting system to work compared to slaving turrets to a chair.

Also, you too a huge amount of time talking about my counter measure idea. You wouldn't NEED that to counter these systems, and the code required to counter it is easier than the code required to make a trade-in m targeting computer. You just loop through frequencies until you find one that picks up a laser.. However, it depends on how many frequencies exist and if the color changes based on frequency. You don't need this to counter it though. This is just a tool that HARD COUNTERS all this engineering. You wouldn't need to do it because these things would suck. You could just move your ship. They would only be good at aiming at targets that don't move a lot.

Also, unless the player's aim is really smooth and reliable.. It's going to make the velocity predictions even more difficult and probably nearly impossible to use with only one line running every .2 seconds. Doing this kind of math velocity extrapolation with even more smooth/less noisy data and much faster processing times is still not perfect. In starbase, it'll probably be really weak.

The torpedo CAN just constantly try to move towards the targeting laser and be useful because it can keep changing it's velocity. With automated guns they'll be constantly shooting around the target and missing unless they're stationary or you hook up TONS if guns to shoot all around the target... But now you're talking about being a massive ship that will have tons of weaknesses and will be very expensive and slow moving.

You're directly arguing that using multiple turrets slaved to one chair is too slow to be that good in combat. The same issue applies 100 fold to a targeting laser system. Targeting laser controlled ships will only be good at firing on EXTREMELY slow moving, slow maneuvering, or stationary targets.

It won't be good against ships that can maneuver at all. Even if you held your targeting laser on the target perfectly for an entire fight, if they're actually maneuvering at all, you'll probably miss every shot.

The amount of time it would take to calculate your trajectory in YOLOL is long enough that it can change before a shot is taken. If you try to compensate for that, it becomes less and less accurate. I'll be extremely inefficient.

I'm pretty sure the targeting laser isn't going to be hard coded for torpedoes... But I don't know if we'll get handheld lasers. Possibly only ship mounted ones. Either way, we'll see when the devs put them in the game. You'll see that it can't possibly track well enough to matter.

The reason it works for a torpedo is that it can float towards the target and continually adjust to maneuvers.

 

[PopeUrban]

You've talked to people that haven't built a single ship and YOLOL coders with a language reference with zero practical application experience with the language because literally none of those people has either built a ship or written and field tested a YOLOL network. I have reference manuals for seven programming languages on my hard drive right now. I've written programs in some of them. I've studied the YOLOL ref as well. This does not and has never made me anything other than a guy with an instruction manual for a car that has never actually built a car. These opinions are the same theorycrafting as we're doing right now. You should also be aware that this sort of "appeal to authority" is a common logical fallacy and if you're trying to convince someone of something on a logical basis you should read up on common fallacies and make an effort to avoid them. As of this moment the only legitimate authority that exists is FrozenByte. No player, regardless of how many epidosed of boltcrackers they've watched or how many ships they've mocked up in blender or how much emulated YOLOL they're written has the slightest idea how practical any given engineering system is. They're just as clueless as you and I.

Lets say we live in your world where there's no functional difference in YOLOL tracking rate, or the wireless nature of your handheld is actually even slower. Why do you want any of this?

My question for you is if its effectively impossible to precisely target turrets with a handheld laser the how is there a compelling use case for them, and in that world, why should they exist, and why did you mention such a useless idea in the first place as a reason why we need this system? If automatic target leading is so slow it's essentially impossible then why bring it up? If every time I poke holes in this concept you have to toss out another use case, what's the point? I mean judging your ideal on its face what you propose seems either redundant with rangefinders, or too hands off to be sensible.

Are you seriously suggesting that "run through every possible frequency and do a thing" is faster than a loop of three lines of code that states "match this objects rotation to this point" Have you ever run a recursive algorithm against an N data set, or considered the signal traffic and arms race of "who can broadcast the most fake signals" this would engender? Recursion is EXTREMELY pricy when you don't know what you're looking for, and if that's really your endgame congrats you've now created a fake pointer arms race. Look forward to all ships being loaded with dummy transmitters nad torpedo's being essentially useless.

You also haven't addressed the wired vs wireless engineering and point of failure complexity issues for the handheld device.

It seems to me you've already theorycrafted a system in your head that is either game breaking or pointless depending on which way FB leans on this issue so we should probably just agree to disagree. There doesn't seem to be anything to gain from this conversation for either of us.

Your original post asked the question "what does everyone think?" and I've given you my opinion on the matter.

 

[Eluem]

@PopeUrban
I'm aware of the appeal to authority logical fallacy. It was not my intent to appeal to authority. I just meant to say that there are people testing the limits of what can be reasonably done in emulators and it's slow enough that this won't work.

The main reasons I want the laser pointer to work this way are:
1) I don't want torpedoes (or anything) to get magic data and calculations that undermine the FUNDAMENTAL theme and concept behind the game and YOLOL networks

2) I want this tool because it's useful for other interesting scenarios:
-ship too infantry precision support on stations. Infantry can paint a target for support ships to bombard. It would work here because the target wouldn't be mobile.

-Control robot arms to accurately and dynamically reach to a point. You can do this less dynamically with range finders if you have a lot of hard coded information about the way the target is positioned relative to the arm. With his, you can do just a bit more dynamically and it doesn't remove any players from the equation.

-Command really simple drone ships that are basically exactly the same as a torpedo, just less efficient and more customizable.


Yes, this being wireless would make it have different points of failure when compared to a chair. However, I've stated many times that it has other inherent drawbacks... Like being so slow to aim that it would be strictly worse than the chair... It also can fail if the sensor gets destroyed. We're not sure if the targeting lasers require line of sight or can only be seen through thin armor. If that's the case, you can't armor your sensors. Overall though, the main drawback is that this couldn't be used to do that you're saying.

You keep starting this notion that the code would be as simple as a few lines to match rotation. First of all, it would be far more complex than that. Even if you assume you have a dedicated sensor for every gun, which would reduce the amount of math needed to adjust the rotation for each gun (you can't just match it if there's one sensor in the ship somewhere). You would still need to do some math, so it's already probably at least 6 lines and would require trig, so the most expensive chip... For each gun.. As well as a sensor and additional power for these devices.

Even if you ignore all that, now you have a gun that takes about .6-1 second to aim where you're pointing. In other words, if the target is moving in a straight line that isn't directly away from or towards the gun, it'll be shooting BEHIND the target.

You NEED to write code to make it lead. So what you're saying is immediately silly. As soon as you need to write code to lead, it's going to be far far far more complex and even slower... Now, after aiming perfectly at a Target for AT LEAST 1.5 seconds.. Probably longer... IF that target hasn't changed directions at all, the guns will be leading. If they change velocity at all during that or the targeting laser user messes up or moves the laser around in the target too much an doesn't maintain smooth, manual tracking... The guns will be missing.

This thing will only work well against stationary targets or maybe at very close ranges.

 

[PopeUrban]

This thing will only work well against stationary targets or maybe at very close ranges.

So an overcomplicated solution for a problem that a standard fixed weapon can solve, or a less complex solution for a rangefinder problem that is intentionally complex.

I'll just self quote so we can both move on with our lives.

It seems to me you've already theorycrafted a system in your head that is either game breaking or pointless.

Your original post asked the question "what does everyone think?" and I've given you my opinion on the matter.

 

[Burnside]

@PopeUrban Here are the simple and complex high concept sketches for how BVR theory shows us a method of creating turret lead data between a spotter and gunner vessel. Several variations exist from using rangefinders for accurate close-range targeting or using more complex pure-orientation methods, some espoused by other designers and theorists even make use of multiple spotters to create a massive parallax targeting array. The addition of the targeting laser as some mode of alternate sensor doesn't do much to change the current field, at best it allows a turret to slave onto the sensor's pinpoint, merely allowing a remote operator to do the same thing as a ship-board turret-slaving operation, one endo is still performing a work operation to achieve the result, accuracy systems like derivative-lead computation still require roughly the same methods and computation power, all it does is allow a spotter more direct control and have the increasingly feasible option to send remote-fire commands because they have a slightly more direct control method- again, nothing that couldn't be done with current implementation systems, and again, still possessing nearly identical drawbacks. It doesn't actually harm the field besides adding another flavor to what's already there.

 

[PopeUrban]

As I suspected, based on all avaliable data the only compelling use case for this implementation is the handheld pointer, or theoretically extending range beyond max range of a rangefinder, as using turret vector data means you've still got a turret, which has a secondary function without the network (it is still a gun) compared to a laser pointer that has no function if it is not connected to other systems.

My gut tells me the reason they exist is specifically to simplify and make faster the YOLOL interface between torpedos and pointers so that players don't need a complex set of scripts to use torpedos, because torpedos using a combination of YOLOL trig and rangefinders was too slow for torpedos to be useful in combat, or both. Again we can't know this without additional info from FB.

My assumption here is that rangefinders have a distance limit for a reason, and if we're operating under the theory that the laser pointers have the same range and capabilities then its essentially a moot point. This of course begs the question "Why did they make a new ship part to guide torpedos?" and the only answers I can come up with are either that it returns torpedo specific data so the torpedo can access it from a single YOLOL variable (the "magic pairing") and FB thought this would be too powerful when applied generically, OR that the laser returns a completely different dataset in the form of an XYZ coordinate rather than a range, which means the one module does the triangulation itself.

The second issue in the conversation is the handheld device, which has a different set of problems.

Its purely a matter of opinion whether said handheld pointer is a good or bad idea. Personally I think commuting the single point of failure of a ship system to a handheld object is a bad idea due to how much harder it would be to disable the tracker when held by a player. That seems to break form with the clear line drawn between handheld tools and vehicle systems. Handheld tools revealed thusfar are either used to make/maintain vehicles, or used as direct fire weapons. The handheld pointer would break that paradigm in a way that I feel is far too attractive to consider the alternatives, as the player has a virtually unlimited selection of secondary functions. Making a free standing player your targeting system allows that targeting system with no cost to the ship also double as pilot, electrical engineer, boarding party, and every other action the player is capable of.

 

[Eluem]

So an overcomplicated solution for a problem that a standard fixed weapon can solve, or a less complex solution for a rangefinder problem that is intentionally complex.

I'll just self quote so we can both move on with our lives.

Sure. I don't know why you're ignoring all the other reasons I don't want the targeting laser to be magically linked to torpedoes.

I'm just saying that your fear of it enabling automated guns is silly. It doesn't do that.

It is, however, useful for things it should be useful for and more importantly, it keeps the targeting laser in line with all other devices in the game.