EVE General Discussion

Let me start by staying that this thread is not meant to discuss game balance at all. This is purely a question about how you imagine the different gunnery weapons working in your mind.

Lasers clearly travel at the speed of light, meaning it would take a laser beam about 1 millisecond to travel 300km.

Hybrid weapons I imagine travel at a high fraction of the speed of light, maybe 5% (in relative physics that is extremely fast). That would take a charge 0.02 seconds to travel 300km.

Projectile weapons I imagine them being like bigger more high tech versions of the guns on large modern warships. The fastest firing guns on Earth now projects ammo about 6,000 mph, or about 0.001% of the speed of light. Without an atmosphere and with more advanced technology, firing 100 times higher speed seems reasonable; about 0.1% the speed of light. At that speed it would take the charge about one second to travel 300km.

Again, I am in now way suggesting any kind of change to the game, just wondering how others imagine these weapons working.

Sadly, my Guns are not very fast, That my be because my arms lack the strength to propell them properly or maybe they're just too big and I'm too small. Who knows, I've pondered questions like these many a lonely night but alas, the answers always escape me during the morning hours, shortly before I wake up.

My Ammo however is quite fast, I dare say my laser beams travel at the speed of light, my Railgun slugs are propelled at speeds that even leave ionized vacuum behind, hence the glowing lines I can see everytime I fire them, even the plasma charges of my blaster are stunningly fast, the Artillery rounds of my mighty Minmatar crafted guns move fast as a lightining on steroids and hit with devastating force, and the only thing that's faster than my Torpedoes are The Warrior Drones, the Hornet Drones, the Hobgoblins (only by a little bit), the Acolyte Drones and the Stiletto, the Crow, the Taranis, the Ares, the Claw, the Raptor, the Malediction, the Crusader and a small variety of sickeningly fast T1 Frigattes, along with the odd cruiser with oversized Microwarpdrive and Overcharge injectors. But Nothing escapes my cruise missiles lest it warps of the field, so I dare say they might be just fast enough.

And in one condescending second, you turned the entirety of GD against you.

That is a very good point. I like the way you think.

And I think it goes without saying that missiles should also do instant damage, and more damage, and should not have reload time.

Hm, no I find this to be too simplistic an explanation. Projectile weapons are what they are: conventional projectile weapons. It is hybrid weapons only that utilize a magnetic field to propel their slugs. Lasers consist of non-converging bundles of light. So what causes the effect of all these weapons to fire their rounds at roughly the same speed?

The primary answer is the absense of friction. The secondary answer is that the server has to round down values to the second a server tick lasts, and rounding up we always seem to reach a travel time of 1 second for any given projectile in the 'turret' weapon category when under 0 friction and a range below 200Km.