Projectile drop on vehicles and RL's

Discussion in 'PlanetSide 2 Gameplay Discussion' started by Kumaro, Jun 13, 2016.

  1. Kumaro

    Okay so i know that the Tanks projectiles have had nerfs and tweaks for several reasons.
    1: they wanted to pull tanks closer to battles.
    2: Tanks got good at shooting down aircraft. Judging from my Tear calendar a bit to good it seems.
    3: Tanks learned to us AP to farm infantry when HE was nerfed to HEAT level Area of effect or blast range. (Prowler AP is allround death gun)

    However the changes has removed some core functions from ranged vehicular battles. And that is the function of natural cover. Hull down has essentially become useless against anyone that has gotten used to a Tank.
    If you have a hard time with a sunderer in cover don't worry mark the spot on your map get some distance and you can hit that vehicle without even seeing it because the rounds drop allows you to act like a short range artillery. Just stick within render range and you are juuust fine.
    Can a Tank use hull down to avoid enemy anti tank fire?? Not really all bullets curve enough to ignore majority of all hull down positions across the map. And your barrel counts as the main body of the tank all you need to do is get into a 45 degree angle of their rear and hit the barrel of the tank tower or the tower itself and it counts as a rear hit as if you hit the rear of the tank itself.
    Of course hull down works if you get closer but when the battle is that close hull down usage is no longer a valid tactic not to mention it can work against you and you should already be planning your next move.

    Now it is not all bad along with the Tank changes they also gave the rocket launchers similar changes for similar reasons above but also so that the reduced range of the tanks wouldn't hit to hard with the old Rocket launcher ranges.

    Now what are some of the negatives in this?
    1: Well from Air's perspective you can worry less about skill shots against you from people on the ground as you farm and hover in place because they need to go get AA devoted equipment. and Air can move really close to it's targets for sure kills.
    2: Rocket launchers are no longer medium range threats. They are close-medium threats and can easily be out ranged by vehicles thus even with these changes being a very low threat to mobile armoured units.
    3: with current drop there is a power vacuum between certain weapons like the Gatekeeper, Saron and others that has not really been filled.

    Now im not saying give us Railguns on everything the game is dumbed down as it is. What i want is a way to give the game more tactical options and depth for vehicle drivers as well and make it a bit more fun in battles.
    however i do realize this can be tricky to fix and regardless there will be tears from pilots and infantry alike heck even from some vehicle drivers. But i think it's worth it to give the vehicle gameplay some flare.

    Now then let the discussion and whining and heated debating begin.
  2. Horrida Messor

    Dunno man, when I'm forced to switch to HA I personally have very little problem shooting tanks and aircraft with my default S1. If anything, I actually like how safe groundpounders feel. Ofc that's before my rocket blows them to smithereens. As for anti ground duty I do think that default RL's can have a small speed/curve adjustment.
    • Up x 1
  3. PatateMystere

    Projectile velocities are fine. In game, armor fight are about 250m range most of the time. In real life, it's about 1000m range. Basicly, as in game engagement distance is 4 times smaller than real life distance, the speed is also 4 times slower.

    It's already easy to hit aircraft with tanks with a little practice. Increase velocity and reduce drop would be a nighmare.

    For HE round, they should reduce the direct damage and merge max and min indirect damage range. Tweak the final range to be balanced. Basicly make HE round works like DIME Bombs
  4. Hajakizol

    If the velocities were more like real life and with this games time to kill and first shot accuracy it would be laser tag one shot and your out. There is perhaps some room for exploration with projectile velocities when you take into account the intended target. Should a tank gun that has as its primary target other ground vehicles have the same muzzle velocity as a weapon system like an AA platform? I say no. Slow arcing shots require more skill to line up and those one-off shots you get are that much more rewarding because of it.
  5. Keiichi25

    Actually, the game engine would need to be majorly overhauled to actually handle not only the numbers involved, but also the range finding that should be involved in real life Velocities.

    The Barrett .50 cal Sniper Rifle can take out a person close to 1km, albeit that requires excellent marksmanship as only 5% of the snipers in the world can make those kinds of shots.

    But note. The effective range of the currently best sniper rifle with little drop, being the Railjack, is still less than 400m in game. That's half of the Barrett's range.

    We also have artillery cannons that fire for several kilometers (22 to 50km). The map itself doesn't span more than 50km (If I am guessing right, since I haven't lived long enough to span across the map...).

    Our current game engine doesn't handle the stuff we have right now, I doubt it will handle real life velocities without serious WTF explanations for shells. Missiles and beams have range limits due to fuel/intensity, but shells usually keep going until they hit something (Due to gravity and drag overcoming the shell's momentum to make it hit the ground, hits the side of ground or hitting something).

    And let's not forget the fact that most of the weapons in the game are using like 1800s level capacities and range finding.
  6. Kumaro

    First of forget real life comparisons this is completely ignoring what i even wrote and even makes me annoyed on the level of ignorance of how you and the others posting here can miss so much of the content in my post.
    The first year of the game and during Beta you could fire most turrets almost twice the distance before you got the same drop we have now. This even applied to HE rounds.
    This allowed Tanks to use natural cover quite efficiently because when you went hull down (a tactic that hides most of the tanks body behind a hill or other types of cover to make it harder to hit) the bullets wouldn't arc over the cover and still hit you in the same way they do now. Thus Tanks battling at 200 meter distance using rocks and inclines for cover where actually hard to hit back then. And a Sunderer seeking cover in the terrain was actually safe from arching projectiles coming over the hills.

    My complaint is that the current arc and bullet speeds are to low and could use a tweak to increase them a bit again to return some challenge to the Tank combat. The current one makes things to easy and also makes it boring to play because it removes the challenge in finding a good spot to fire from as it dumbs down tank combat a lot. This would also make anti tank combat for infantry more interesting again because they can't move as much in the open but cover will be much safer as Tanks can't arc their rounds to head shot out of sight infantry hiding for a reload. As much as i love doing it i also know the feeling of it happening to me and it can be frustrating.
  7. ColonelChingles


    Tanks... with a 1,000m range? Maybe in WWI or WWII. :p

    The longest recorded tank versus tank kill happened at ~5,000m. Single shot. Which was surprising because it was beyond the effective range of current 120mm tank guns... at 4,000m.

    That is of course if you're just shooting shells... but modern tanks (particularly Eastern ones) can also fire missiles out of those guns as well. The Israeli LAHAT goes out to 8,000m.

    Anyhow, at the end of the day range compression is fine... but range compression should apply equally to tank weapons and infantry weapons.

    Consider how much of a reduction tank shells get:
    120mm M829 APFSDS- 1,555m/s
    120mm P2-120 AP- 250m/s
    Percent Reduction- 16% of "real" velocity

    7x65mm FMJ- 840m/s
    7x65mm KSR-35- 500m/s
    Percent Reduction- 60% of "real" velocity

    So you have a few big problems. For starters, for some reason tank shells have lower velocities than sniper rifle rounds... which is absolutely incorrect. Tank shells (particularly AP) should travel at double the velocities of sniper rifles, instead of being half as fast. If you switch the velocities of the sniper rifle and the AP shells you'd have a better solution.

    Next, it's pretty clear that tanks are heavily penalized compared to infantry in terms of range compression. Whereas infantry weapons are only 60% of what they should be, tanks weapons are only 16% of what they should be. If the game was fair:
    AP shell velocity if range compression is 60%- 933m/s
    Sniper rifle bullet velocity if range compression is 16%- 134m/s

    So either reduce all infantry weapons so they represent 16% of real velocity or buff tank weapons so they represent 60% of real velocity... but to be fair the game needs to have consistent range compression.
    • Up x 1
  8. Kumaro

    *sigh* did you even read what i wrote?? -__-

    I never asked for real life stats to the game i asked for a tweak in the current velocity and arc settings for Tanks and rocket launchers. Because the arcs of them right now makes game play boring and dumbed down. you can literally set up a team of tanks or rocket launchers and at 100-200 meters range hit targets that are either barley out of sight or completely out of sight depending on the weapon you are using thus negating natural cover.
    It's so freaking boring to engage a tank see him/her try and hide behind a rock and all you do is raise the barrel a bit fire and you will hit the Tank anyway the cover completely useless. It feels like a glorified snowball fight. The same with infantry if they hide behind a hill when i roll up i don't have to move further all i do is fire the next round as close to the hill top as possible and i will mostly get a kill or hit marker and if i have HE with previous damage i can even get multiple kills without even seeing my targets.
  9. PatateMystere



    1000m and beyond. I'm not talking about maximum range but average expected range in combat. More than 1000m happens only in the desert or when seating on top of a hill. It's average.

    The compression factor is different for bullets and tank rounds for a reason: feeling.

    Small caliber weapon got a good feeling in this game, you can see the effect of the distance with the drop but not too much, it's well scaled.
    Tank round are supposed to fight at distances that do not exist in this game, beyond render range. So they made a compression of the speed to make the battle feels like you are fighting at more than 1000m.

    That's the first thing, the second one is that it was really too easy to shoot aircraft with old muzzle velocities so they nerfed it.

    Remember that also in this game, projectiles are not affected by aerodynamics. They never slow down. Muzzle velocity is impact velocity, which is really not realistic.
  10. stalkish

    Interesting thoughts.
    Dont think they quite nailed it tho.
    Currently tanking feels like using one of these:
    [IMG]
    Thats not to say i dont enjoy it tho.
    • Up x 1
  11. Daigons

    This is what it feels like while driving a Magrider against a MBT or a Harasser.

    [IMG]
    • Up x 1
  12. Keiichi25

    And you do realize the game is also catered to casuals as well as die hard players with an engine that can't really handle rendering a lot of people to begin with hence why there is always the constant complaint about how infantry could also easily take out tanks and some vehicles at 300+ meters because infantry don't render, but vehicles do for infantry.

    Again, the game engine itself would need a severe overhaul. The last game I saw were it used closer and more accurate RL velocities and such as Delta Force games and that was a 16vs16 with no vehicles and sniper rifles that would try to hit targets 800m out, but also involved scope adjustments. Other games don't even bother with bullet drops because of design and the fact most maps are still even dinky in comparison to Planetside.
  13. Diilicious


    man, i laughed so much at this...
  14. ColonelChingles

    The problem with this is that fighting in tanks no longer "feels" like you're fighting in a tank... it feels like you're driving around an onager or a potato cannon because of the relative velocity of projectiles.

    Let's say that "normal" tank battles IRL happen at 1,000m. Okay, so it would take an AP tank shell 0.64 seconds to arrive at a target (assuming that terminal velocity isn't drastically different from muzzle velocity). In PS2, "normal" tank battles happen at 300-400m, which with a shell velocity of 250m takes 1.6 seconds to cover... about 1 second too long. Thus for a PS2 tank shell to hit a 400m target in a "realistic" 0.64 seconds, you need at least a muzzle velocity of 625m/s.

    The other problem is that tank and infantry are compressed differently... yet exist in the same area. This leads to strange instances where it becomes considerably more difficult to hit infantry at range with tank weapons. The same is true for aircraft. An Apache attack helicopter has a maximum speed of ~300m/s, which is actually slower than what ESFs can achieve. This means that IRL it is easier for a tank to hit low-flying aircraft than in PS2, which again makes tanks "feel" quite differently.

    I can fire a rifle in PS2 and observe how much I need to lead a target and to compensate for drop. Then I hop into a tank and then observe the same things with the tank shell... and it no longer feels right because the tank shell is so much slower than a rifle bullet! That is the fundamental problem with tank shell velocities in PS2 and why they need significant increases.

    What is even up with drop? 21st century MBTs mostly have fire control systems that automatically correct for range, elevation, atmospheric conditions, etc. All a tanker needs to do is to tell the FCS "I want to hit that" and the FCS takes care of everything else except the actual order to fire. Tanks shouldn't have shell drop, or to be more specific each shot should automatically be corrected to hit the target at a particular range. Otherwise tanks do not feel as if they are tanks (at least not 21st-29th century tanks).
  15. Insignus

    I'm curious as to whether or not people think accuracy on SPEAR turrets needs to be toned down. Just a thought.
  16. PatateMystere



    This is why I suggested some change to MBT a couple of month ago: give them a ballistic calculator.
    Add some spread to the projectile but also had a short "lock on" mechanic. Spotting and stay focus on the target (works only for ground vehicles) will reduce the spread of the shot to 0 and flatten the trajectory. Somehow, like a charge mechanic.
    So you can shoot accurately but it will take 1 sec more to shoot properly or reflex shoot but with a decent chance to miss far targets. Basicly it would have the same feeling as shooting a slug shotgun hip fire and aim downsight.
    It will also make stealth more interresting as the ennemy tank will take more time to make its ballistic calculation. Smoke as well, as no calculation is possible through smoke.
  17. Pikachu

    Funny, in War Thunder tanks have drop compensation and it's in ww2. :D
  18. Kumaro

    O____O you really are not paying attention to what i am writing are you?? Seriously if that is not it and you are bad with English just tell me so we can communicate properly. Or are you trolling me here`??

    Im talking about a 25~100 meter increase depending on the turret or rocket launcher. I mean how freaking hard is that to understand.!!!?
  19. Keiichi25

    The hard part to understand is on your part, given the game engine itself can't handle it, which is why I pointed out the ISSUE of being able to do it.

    But I guess you missed that from the very QUOTED part where I stated the game engine would need an overhaul and the FACT that tankers do complain about the AV turret and some AV weapons that can hit vehicles well outside render range... BECAUSE OF THE GAME ENGINE DESIGN.
  20. chuck105

    I would gladly take a buff to the magrider main gun velocity. I don't get what you're talking about with natural cover, parking sundies in such places seems like more of an exploit than anything. Only the magrider has real drop, the others are more or less lasers in comparison, lol.

    I really don't think infantry should be able to snipe vehicles with lockons, which are crazy irritating as it is. Sure, a tank can farm a single spot by repeatedly firing in the same place, but it's not like you can really engage infantry that are aware of the tank, even out in the open.

    The GK is bs, it's a low dps everything weapon, that makes up for it's one downside, which is actually quite minimal, but sheer ease of use: It's basically impossible to dodge someone using it because of the obscene velocity. It needs to be brought in line with ALL of the other topguns, with 300 m/s projectile velocity. The Sauron is actually a close range, high burst dps weapon, that can plink enemies from range with pathetic dps.