It is interesting that in all the explanations regarding gunnery, the lack of piloting/dodging skill, and so on, all the proponents have also reduced gunnery to someone hitting "ok". So, the reasoning still stands, if that is the methodology that is taking place, then we really also need to remove gunnery skill from having any relevance.
Oh I agree. I think a "gunner" is someone who is trained to operate the gun, but not necessarily targeting the gun.
There are also very few arguments regarding evasion, and most address some sort of dodge-after-the-beam-is-in-the-air. Or the assumption that the beam can infact be trained correctly at an erratically moving target 10s of thousands of kilometers away. This is not a factor of the beam nor the speed of the "lazur", but of the turret/mechanism/control device.
Come on people
Lets move past this notion where someone is dodging a beam that has already been fired at him/her.
It's not about "dodging a beam that has been fired". It's about out maneuvering an integrated sensor/fire control system combined with a mount that is designed to track "targets that are 10's of thousands of kilometers away".
The actual, physical distance the mount must move to track objects is extremely minor. Consider a modern telescope with a tracking equatorial mount. This mount is compensating the movement of the Earth plus it's rotation plus the motion of the target (moon, start, planet, satellite, space station...). All of the modern mounts can track these items easily. The International Space Station is REALLY close in terms of combat scale. And moves "pretty fast", but the mount can still track it.
Are these off the shelf, consumer quality telescope mounts precise to track a target 50,000 km away with the resolution necessary for a combat laser? I dunno, it doesn't really matter because the simple fact that we CAN fire ship based lasers at target's 50Kkm away tells me that the ship based lasers ARE precise enough and have enough resolution. Hi tech sic-fi and material engineering for the win.
So, consider that for most targets, the telescope mount moves like an hour hand on a clock. It moves, imperceptibly to the human eye, but it moves. Consider how much actual space is being compensated for in minuscule, rare move.
See, the point isn't the ship dodging a "beam in the air", it's the ship struggling to be someplace that the fire control system and mount decide that it SHOULD be in the next few 10ths of a second.
"How can you shoot women, children? You lead them less!" -- Full Metal Jacket.
If you're moving on a ballistic course, it is trivial to plot that course, apply t + dT and rerun the math and predict where you will be in dT time. That is the game of a marksman. Anticipate target speed, compensate for wind, shooting angle, and bullet drop (within the margins of the tolerances of the cartridge and bullet) and aim the bullet where he thinks the target will be by the time the bullet gets there.
Longest sniper shot in the world was 2800m, firing a round that's flying 850m/s. A flight time of 3.3s. The sniper had to guess where that target would be in 3.3s. Likely, he was just standing still. But he could have coughed, or sneezed, or just stepped right or left after the bullet was fired and there's nothing the sniper could have done about it.
At "close" ranges of 10's of thousands of Km, we're talking about sub second response times and activities. Having a starship doing much of ANYTHING measured in fractions of a second is difficult. Having a starship doing one thing, and then doing another within those sub second windows (i.e. evading) is pretty much down right impossible. It's a lumbering behemoth at these time frames.
All the mount needs to do is compute where it thinks your ship will be in the next 2 or 3 tenths of a second, and get its mount to track that vector, "lead" the target by "2-3 tenths of a second", and fire.
You need a very high resolution mount, with high resolution stepper motors to move the micro arc seconds necessary to track these targets. But, again, we assume this exists simply because this is possible at all. Once you have a high quality mount, the ballistics problem become trivial to where the target simply can not get out of the way fast enough.
If you want to make lower tech mounts crummier shots at longer ranges because they don't have the precision necessary, fine. But AS PRESENTED via the game, these technologies MUST exist for hits to be made at all!
This is premised all over in the systems that turned missiles in to bomb pumped lasers. The premise simply being that at some specific range, chance of "missing" a missile with a defensive laser is "zero", it's a given. The missiles task is to get "close enough" to deploy the lasers while being "far enough away" to be a less than 100% kill chance for the defenders.
Space combat is a sensor and targeting game, not a maneuver game. If it can see you it can kill you.
If you want to win a space battle -- bring more guns, and shoot earlier. Typically space battles are not a who will or won't win, but how much will the win cost.
). In fact, it helps explain the long turn times when dealing with near light speed weapons. As with personal combat (the armor thing) - its not a 'to hit' roll, so much as a 'to hit with damage' roll.
