Dodging a laser would be impossible. They travel at the speed of light which means by the time you know they've fired the laser that it's already hit you. Impossible to dodge something that is almost instantaneous.

For me it has nothing to do with dodging, rather it has to do with firing arcs, and spreading damage evenly.
Since all the capital ships in this game have different weapons load outs depending on facing (i.e. fore, aft, port, starboard) it makes total sense that they would maneuver around. i for one would like to assign a fire target for my capital ship and then set a heading. so i could send the ship in one direction,and have it fire in another with whichever weapons are available in that arc, on the target that I specified.

further, a smart ai commander would maneuver the guns such that there is always a recharged on to fire at the target.

and finally, it would be most accurate to have location specific hull damage, so if a capital ship was taking heavy damage to port, it just may make sense to move the ship so that fire is spread around more evenly (perhaps to aft or starboard). I realize that Sins is not that sophisticated, and that the damage model is abstracted (that is, hull damage is by default spread evenly) but were location specific damage implemented in this game, it would make total sense to have a capital ship more around.it should be.

As I see it most capital ships that have more weapons on the sides turn to broadside an opponent and those that have more on the front stay positioned straight.

Exactly the other way around... You want a game with firing arcs and ships moving around? take sword of the stars.. I stopped playing it because it was impossible to get the damn ships to stand still and get their weapong banks to face the enemy...

Notice that ships with mostly side mounted weapons WILL turn so that their major weapons face the enemy. So the argument that "moving around gets the weapons banks to cover more enemies" is invalid since they just turn to do exactly that...

The only "benefit" of moving around so far is to confuse the AI... and thats just being cheap.

It seems to me that I'm the only person who realized that the ships in SoaSE do have turrets that can only fire within a certain field of view of the ship. Watch your capital ships, they do this the most of all ships (as they have front/rear/left/right turrets). I believe that the Akkan Battlecruiser (TEC Colony Capital Ship) typically tries to attack other ships by facing the left side of the ship towards the battle. The small turrets on the capital ships also move slightly when they are firing.

Maybe everyone else realizes this and I'm misinterpreting the posts, but I just thought I'd stop and say that.

(By the way, I do like the idea of ships moving in combat. If anyone has played Mass Effect and read the lore in-game about ship-to-ship combat, it explains pretty well how space combat would logically play out. But I understand that it'd be pretty difficult to program into the game post-release and that the turning arcs of ships can get troublesome when static defenses come into play.)

Scratch my post, I guess I didn't read far enough through the thread.

Instantaneous on a normal scale, yes. When you're talking about interplanetary scales, far from it. It takes 8 minutes for light to get from the sun to Earth, and we're pretty damn close to the Sun when you take into account the size of the solar system. I'm not saying that the ships in SoaSE are 93 million miles apart, I'm just saying that there'd still be enough of a time gap to maybe rotate the ship just enough so you can avoid the beam.

I don't want the ship to move around to cover more enemies, I want my ship to move around so it focuses All its fire on the target I have specified. I want it to duel with the capital ship that I have assigned as its target, not waste a portion of its firepower on support ships. The whole point for is to assign a target and the be assured that my capital ship will do everything in its power to put as much fire on that target as possible, and not to micromanage it.

and no one has addressed the issue of location specific damage.

and I just thought, wouldn't it make sense for a ship commander to want to maneuver such that your ship was not in the optimal firing arc of your opponent's capital ship?

Now I understand... it already moves around to focus the MOST firepower it can on the specified enemy. Support battleships with their side mounted weapons simply can not spin fast enough to focus ALL their weapons on a single opponent.. so they turn their side to it at exactly 90 degrees and focus half their firepower on it while the other half covers the other side...
Combat capitals have MOST of their weapons fire forward... but you will still see a few weapons firing on targets to the side...
If they moved around any more then that then they will be focusing LESS firepower on the current target, as the main weapons will not longer be facing the enemy while the back turrets hit them.

So to your request, they already do so without moving around, moving around will only detract from it, making it harder for them to hit...

Have you tried manually moving your ships around? It cripples their effectiveness. The capital ship WILL go out of range and force enemy forces to remanuever, casing it to take less damage, but it will also be unable to fire most its weapons... I have noticed it reduces the enemy's damage by about 50% and my own damage by about 80%. (very rough estimates). and its not through dodging, its through firing arc manipulation and the AI not handling moving targets very well... which is rather cheap because if there were real people on those ships then they would... (or military grade AI). If the AI was to handle it better and more realistically (spin in place with maneuvering thrusters) then it would have resulted in the ship moving around taking the EXACT SAME amount of damage, while the ships standing still will take LESS...

You can not dodge a laser because you can only detect something being shot at you at the speed of light.. So you can SEE that a canon fires before the shell hits, but "seeing" the laser fire occurs at the same time it hits, since it is focused light.

You can however theoretically dodge RANDOMLY causing the lasers to miss... If only you could accelerate at over a million G. (G = acceleration of gravity of earth). I have included the math in an earlier post...
A tiny frigate could dodge a gauss weapon IF the gauss weapons are very slow moving gauss weapons... IF it can pull 150g... the problem with that is that all personnel on board will DIE at much much less then that.

I for one think that the concept that victory in capital ship combat is decided entirely by the type and level of ship is boring. I can, however, see your point that this game does not model the concept of ship maneuvers very well, if at all.

I would love if there were some way to level up the Crew and/or Commander of ships, rather than just the ship itself. So you could have a veteran crew and commander beat a higher level ship with a less experienced crew due to better tactical positioning.

You can't detect something moving at the speed of light with realistic technology before it hits you, no. But SoaSE (and most other space-combat oriented games/media) incorporates FTL technology, in this case by using phase space technology, which the game explains to be exponentially faster than the speed of light. The Vasari have FTL transmissions, ships can move at FTL speeds, and with the right research you can detect incoming ships traveling at FTL speeds. Following the logic of that, in the SoaSE universe, you should be able to detect a laser firing at you before that laser reaches you.

Also, a ship going from a standstill to FTL speed for a phase jump should make it feasible in the SoaSE universe for a ship and its crew to withstand 100 G's of force during a simple evasive maneuver.

Perhaps it's best if there was a toggle for this on a ship-by-ship basis? It might even have a tactical effect with ships who have the toggle to be stationary could do more damage but also take more damage (being stationary and whatnot...) whereas ships who have the toggle to strafe and fly around would do less damage but take less damage as well? It doesn't have to be an unbalancing amount either, perhaps from 5% to 15%.

That's the only way I could really see this appeasing both groups as well as adding another bit of a tactical element to the game and battles ("hmm should I let this ship stay stationary and deal out a bit more damage or just let it take less damage?").

Personally, I think arguing over semantics and bits of, "realistically, this would happen in spaaaaace!" is a bit of a time-waster. Sins has realistic ommisions done for the sake of making the game "fun" and I think that should take presidence over realism in a game. If a new feature adds another layer or depth to the gameplay then I say go for it, even if it breaks the laws of science or whatever you might have seen in sci-fi shows/movies.

Yes this toggle could be like an aggressive v. neutral v. defensive toggle. good idea.

Isn't it a given that none of this works in a gravity well?

Also the crew doesn't withstand hundreds of g (and I was talking millions not hundreds...) phasing moves the whole ship and its contents at once. Otherwise it would have torn it to shreds. (the crew AND the ship itself... metal doesn't withstand those kind of g force either)
Engines provide a thrust that is mechanically transmitted through the ship...

Phasing also is not physically accelerating to trans light speed. its more esotaric then that...

However you COULD theoretically have phase dodging... with the right FTL detection mechanism to detect the enemy shots, and timing them with micro phase jumps to dodge...
Except, phasing is a thing done from gravity well to gravity well... so its useless for combat within a gravity well... so the whole thing falls apart (they somehow have phasing missiles, but those are SMALL and only for the vasari, masters of phasing).

Anyways what all this means is that if they could dodge, they would do so by phasing, and that means no "moving ships".. it means stationary ships that will randomly phase around inside the gravity well to dodge lasers. phase, shoot at last known location of enemy, phase, shoot at last location, rinse and repeat.

So there is still absolutely no reason for ships to FLY around in sub light speeds... It only hurts them.

Well, I for one am not too bothered by it. Sure it would make the combat look even more epic than it already does but the fact of the matter is, I move groups of my ships around manually all the time. Against the AI, it's actually a really good way to draw enemies to your cap ships without having to wait for them to move up. I would take say 8 Iconus Guardians and move them far forward to soak up damage and use their repulsion ability, but before I set one off, I would move two separate groups of a mix of illuminators, defense vessels, and a few Destras around behind the enemy. While I'm doing this, I'm spreading my cap ships out and making a semi-circle around the enemy fleet. I set off a couple of repulsions and push the enemy back into my waiting flankers and close them off with my cap ships and the rest of my fleet. All the while, the enemy AI is moving various groups of ships and caps into different positions to try and take out my cap ships that are father back. All the ships are moving and firing at each other at the same time. Solves that problem

Oooh... guess what? I just found out the skirantra carrier (the carrier capital ship for the vasari) has an ability called "microphase aura" that performs micro phase jumps for fighters/bombers in its range, allowing them to evade fire... So apperantly I am not the only one to have done the math on that one ...

The vasari are masters of phase tech, they can get tolerance tech reducing the gravity well size of each planet by 6 and then 12%... and they can also microphase missles and fighters... because they are small enough to do so... larger ships cannot microphase jumps to evade fire, yet.

PS. In the real world, phasing is probably impossible... so you could never evade lasers... sorry.

I totally agree with you, but keep in mind that in the real world, it isn't the future yet; in the real world there's no such thing as mind control, at least not scientifically proven (I'd be interested to see a proof that anyone could come up with though, just for laughs); in the real world, we have lives. Well, most, anyway
Be careful with the "real world" arguments, though of course when we're arguing realism then people like you take the cake...

I think in terms of realism, this topic seems to be settled. I agree with Bob, though, in saying that it would be cool if they did move... and, in my opinion, cool enough if they at least "drifted" (simulated, possibly, by a very slight movement of the camera at close zooms).

Do the ships in the game actually obey Newton's Laws? Like, for example, do they have to keep firing thrusters to continue moving? Is the third law evident in any way (though of course a 50000 ton war vessel firing a 1 ton slug at fairly low speed would move perceptibly, eh?)? Do the ships accelerate at all?

Eh, they actually don't obey Newton's Laws, since they have both top speed and fire their thrusters continually while moving. Since there is no air friction in space, firing your thrusters will continually accellerate you untill you reach near relativistic speeds (might take you a long time though).

Anyway, I think Star Wars are more exciting to watch than Odyssey 2001, no? This is a game after all, so lets dispense with all that no-sound-in-space and need-a-flight-control-permission-to-fart nonsense and have really big ships fly around the battlefield with stately grace while ripping each other apart together with small craft zooming totally unrealistically but very excitingly around. Who's with me!?

You have a pretty big error in your assumptions - if you assume that you have no FTL detection (which you do), you won't even be able to properly target those lasers. At a (very close) combat distance of even 3-5 lightseconds your targeting data will be 3-5 seconds outdated. And another 3-5 seconds until your shot actually hits the spot you aimed for. That's a 6-10 second timespan in which your target can make any miniscule course correction required to cause a miss at those distances. So no, lasers are not the uber-weapon in space combat that you make them out to be. They are actually a close combat weapon.

And you sir, have a pretty big assumption in your argument as well. Having not played the game, I can't answer this, but I doubt that any ship can shoot the distance from the moon to Earth (please correct me if I'm wrong), which is about one second. So assume FTL detection and instant implementation of avoidance procedures - you have 1 second to move the entire ship out of the way. I don't know about you, but I don't very much like soupy crewmembers. I like it when they're nice and firm and still breathing. No?

So your are basing your assumptions on the game? Okay, in that case, "lasers" move much slower than a bullet, which again, makes dodging easy.

So, in the end, are we going to be arguing in terms of the game or in terms of realism?

In game terms, shots could be dodged if ships moved and shots were actually calculated instead of automatic hits.
In real terms, the combination of extreme range and inability to determine actual enemy location (thus working with probability wave targeting) also allows dodging unguided shots even with very survivable G forces (5-7 + crash couches and pressure suits).

FFS this is a GAME. We just want stuff that LOOKS cool, who cares if it's realistic or not?! Some of the arguments in this thread are ridiculous!

I’m all for making things look less static in battles, so subtle camera movement would be a good idea worth considering but make it an adjustable setting, so people who don’t like it don’t have to use it.

I have noticed that based on weapons range, ship position and current target, ships DO move to position themselves appropriately in relation to the enemy. I have never witnessed a battle where all ships just sit there and don’t move AT ALL.