I was reading over your update material and the new fabricated wings are great, but what came to mind is bombs? Maybe not bunker busters but 500 lb bombs that maybe will make a dent in the armor! what better way to fly over your target and drop some bombs? Also, maybe some cruse missiles that are fired from your new winged aircraft that will find it's target and boom!
Bombs would actually be really fun. Sure, rockets are technically "better" but require you to nose-dive into the target for at least a second or two. Dumb-bombs would allow you to fly over and past a target without giving them an easy straight-on shot at your front. Making bombs heavy to carry (if we get some sort of mass system) would limit their practicality but offer a good way to assault heavily armored bases. I'm not sure how they would handle targeting/aiming though.
Ideally, there'd be a HUD overlay showing the projected bomb glide path (easy enough to compute for constant atmospheric density and v-squared friction).
That would work. I imagine your explanation would be a slightly futuristic one that would fall in line quite well with Empyrion's vibe. I know games like Battlefield 2 and the Ace Combat series had different ways of dealing with aiming for bombs, some more realistic than others. In Battlefield you would line up the long "vertical" line down bottom with the curved scale-like bar to determine an approximate impact location of your unguided dumb bombs. It was rewarding once you became an experienced pilot to drop those suckers on a tank or a fortified bunker. It was usually never an exact sight, however, as things such as angle of engagement, speed, and altitude would all play a part as well as standard bomb-flight deviation. A projected unguided bomb glide path would be great for this game, maybe even if it's only included on T2 and up dumb bombs, just so long as there is that slight unpredictability that I have mentioned so pilot skill level takes the act of dropping a bomb accurately from 75% to 95% with a trained pilot. Yet, we don't even have bombs so we shall see when/if Eleon decides to add them in the future.
I'd say the accuracy should be a function of the ship's sensor system; it'd give you a 50% CEP circle whose radius would be based on the sensor system's effectiveness (as determined by its output power and the local noise environment), and maybe also on the stability of your ship's trajectory. The skill-based part would be making the CEP circle coincide with your target; the random part would be exactly where the bomb would land in (and around) the CEP circle.
You can always give the target lock control to the pilot. If someone is in the gun manually aiming then that gun control would go to the person in it as normal.
Some background first about the unguided bombs. World War II dive bombers were actually very accurate at delivering their bombs around about 5 m. Some Air Force decided that if you got your bomb within 30 m of the target it counted as a hit because of the area of effect of some these bombs was up to 300 m. Divebombing requires that you start a long steep dive angles up from 16 to 80° down to an altitude of about 400 m . The smaller the target the lower you have to dive but never under 400 m because you going to need some altitude to pull out safely. Releasing the bomb like this because it to go generally in a very straight line because of the momentum built from the dive, like how javelins are thorough, you run and then throw the javelin as a running the javelin keeps going because the momentum you built from the run. The reason why we use computers to aim unguided bombs is because the long steep that a has to be straight as possible so it's easy to predict where to shoot hit the dive bomber. To hit the dive bomber. So I think that yes you can use a special computer added to the craft or you could try divebombing as well. My bomb weight basically have a 5 -10 meter blast radius and thus the damage of 5-7 rockets
Recall that SVs and CVs in Empyrion can hover over POIs well out of turret range for hours. There's no need to dive bomb and no ballistics involved. You'd just stand there and plop bombs over a target like water balloons from a treehouse. On the other hand, you can do this right now anyway with an artillery HV on a flying vessel. So I guess it wouldn't be really changing that much.
-1 HV docked on a sv can't shoot -2 Hv will clip trugh sv/cv if it is not docked and the sv/cv will move accidentily -3 CV arti can not shoot in atmosphere in vanilla so a bomb bay for sv could make sense
I dunno, it's always worked for me. Make a little artillery HV with a docking pad on the side, head out to the edge of the hangar, rain down the good news. Doing it overhead does kinda take the sport out of it, though. Still, the blind spot above turrets is a favorite attack vector of many. I can see bomb trucks becoming very popular.
I'm imagining how bombs would actually work in game. Ideally, I figure they would have no propulsion of their own, or close to it. They would instead simply inherit the movement vector of the releasing vessel. Gravity would have its say on planets. In space, they just float on. A simple detonation timer determines maximum range. This timer could be pretty long since it's very much a skill shot, especially against CVs. Ten seconds would mean 1 km max range on planets, and 1.3 km in space. It's probably also the minimum length of time you'd want between shots.
The Projecktile system of this game allready supports lifetime , velocity and gravity , but the hook is that 50% of the lifetime of a projecktile is "rocket" propulsated ^^ so it will first fly straight ahead and than fall down , so if there would be a float to say how mutch of the time the projecktile should be propulsated or a bool to remove the acceleration the most cooding stuff would be done , the rest would be put it in the tech tree , templates and add model and image for it .
