EVE Fiction

A RL Cruise Missile does indeed have the capability to carry a small nuke - but no one is willing to use it to carry one.

So what is dispersing the beam in Spaaaaaaaaace? Also I believe the term you were looking for is divergence.

Space is a vacuum, not 100%, but close enough that for our purposes it might as well be. This means that a photon will continue on a straight course at constant speed and energy as there is nothing to act on it. In short, there is nothing to disperse a laser beam in space.

Now divergence is a different beast, and basically is the tendency of a laser beam to get wider with distance, due to the relationship between the wavelength of the projected light and the diameter of the laser aperture (assuming the parts of the laser emitter are not faulty). This means it's impossible to get a 100% straight laser beam, where all photons are leaving the aperture in parallel.

So as we can't get a properly parallel beam, we will want to focus it onto the target so that we know 100% of the photons are hitting the target. The focus diameter is determined by the distance, wavelength and aperture diameter. For a weapon, we want the focus diameter to be as small as possible.

So if we ignore all the nitty-gritty math, we have an excuse for why EVE lasers have the ranges they do: The size of the laser emitters means each wavelength will have a different maximum focus range, beyond which the focal diameter will only grow larger, and thus the energy of the laser will be spread over a larger area, and not inflict as much damage. The higher energy wavelengths of light will have the shortest ranges as their minimum focal diameter will be closer, and the larger the diameter of the laser emitter, the longer the ranges can be for any given wavelength. The larger diameter weapons can also focus more raw energy regardless of wavelength, due to a complicated explanation having to do with how much energy a square inch of optical material can handle and bigger weapons having more surface area to pass energy through.

And that's why lasers don't have infinite range, why bigger lasers have longer ranges, and why bigger lasers are more powerful.

Kind of off subject but can some one link some lore for the liquid space theory. Does that mean we are actually piloting submarines?

Aside from the fact that space battles would be absurdly boring waiting 20+ minutes for your missile to hit, it'd also leave a huge window for the defending ship to just shoot it down. Imagine if some fired a missile at you and you literally had enough time to redock, switch to a missile boat, load defenders and destroy the missile before it even appeared on your overview.

This. "Modern Day ICBMs" don't travel at several kilometres per second.

please ccp add this!!!!!

TIL: Jumping out of an Eve airlock results in drowning.

Dey needz more Dakka! Take out da juicies, put in more Dakka!

ICBM's are huge. Our ships carry thousands o missiles on a kilometer wide platform. There is simply not room for us to carry thousands of giant missiles.

Also, in order to maintain acquisition of moving targets to perfectly hit every time, much of the missile is guidance. This detracts from warhead str. If you always hit, might as well lob ten or twenty missiles at your foe, rather than one BFG that may miss.

Furthermore, given the extreme amounts of corporate espionage over the history of the Caldari, LaiDai was instrumental in helping to pave industry standards that would limit the destructive power of individual missiles in order to protect assets in Stations they possessed in lawless areas. As missiles invariably were falling through safety webs into the hands of terrorists and pirates, the Caldari State found it best to limit payloads in production so as not to have 21st century ICBMs being launched from the safety of several AU away.

This is the same logic that prevents the Gallente Federation from producing huge rail platforms that could "lauch" asteroids at geostationary stations that would be unable to dodge them.

Warfare has become microcosm'd to a contest of smaller vessels piloted by immortals. Better for everyone, but especially collateral personnel on station and planetside.

So essentially..."Space is big. It's hard to hit things." Sounds reasonable to me.