[BUG] Complete Reaver-gun breakdown: It's worse than we thought

Discussion in 'PlanetSide 2 Gameplay Discussion' started by sdfasdfa, Jan 21, 2013.

  1. sdfasdfa

    The short version:
    The Reaver's gun is heavily offset, about ~4x as far as that of the Mosquito. In addition, automatic gun convergence to whatever is currently under the sights makes adjusting for this offset unreliable and often impossible. I am not employing hyperbole here or misleading you in any way: There are very likely and realistic situations in which a Reaver cannot land fire on an airborne target no matter what the pilot does.

    The offset
    The Reaver's so-called nosegun is mounted to it's belly for some bizarre reason. This creates a much larger offset than other empires, by a factor of roughly 4. In the images you below you will see pilot view origins and gun bullet origins. View origins were determined by having a Light Assault climb the canopy while the pilot reports the position of the playermodel, then screenshotting the resulting playerposition. Gun origins were determined by using playermodels to block fire, moving them closer until they ceased to block fire.

    [IMG]
    Vertical gun offset, Mosquito: ~40 pixels

    [IMG]
    Vertical gun offset, Reaver: ~160 pixels

    [IMG]
    Determination of the size of the offset in meters. Assuming average height for a playermodel, this puts it at about ~2.1 meters.


    Convergence


    In the video above you can observe the gun adjusting to different ranges. Midway through you will see the most dramatic case: The gun is aimed at an invisible entity and pitches up accordingly. A player can expect bullets coming from his gun to be roughly parallel to his view (crosshair on skybox) or as skewed as in the invisible-entity test (crosshair on any closeby geometry).

    Note: You can perform the same test with a Scythe and Mosquito. You will get some degree of upward swing largely because their guns are mounted much further ahead of the cockpit. Despite this the maximum angle when shooting the invisible warpgate entity is smaller on those two. If you wanted to be rigorous you would move the gunmount a fixed distance from the archway for all 3 ESFs and then do the test. This is however unnecessary as the behavior is clear: Upwards convergence to the point the crosshair rests on from the bullet origin. The problem is that the Reaver's bullet origin is much, much further from the cockpit than any of the others. At least I assume you've heard me say theta=s/r often enough now to understand that the visual appearance of a first person test with the Reaver's mount will actually dramatically understate the magnitude of the problem.

    Determining maximum angle of gun variation
    If we say the offset is about ~2.5 meters in size and the closest possible target 5 meters, we get:
    Convergence angle = offset/range = 2.1/5 = 0.5 radians = 24 degrees = Omega

    This is just to provide you a mental aid that might make the size of the problem more tangible. The gun can jump around in an instant by up to 30 degrees.

    Determining the impossible shot
    Okay, so it's the same stuff again, but with a twist.
    Lead Angle: PVelocity/[Range/traveltime] = Theta1
    Offset angle: Offset/Range = Theta2

    (Where PVelocity is the component of the target's velocity vector perpendicular to you.)

    If Theta1 = -Theta2, you have to aim at the target. However if you aim at the target, you are subject to Omega and therefore cannot actually aim where you mean to.

    So the condition for impossibility is easiest described as:
    (PVelocity*traveltime)/Offset=1
    or
    PVelocity=Offset/traveltime

    For 75meters that is:
    PVelocity = 2.1/0.1 = 21m/s = 75.6 km/h

    Which is a pretty common fall+thrustdown speed and range. Of course, the clearest way to showcase this behavior is with a graph of velocities that at the right angle would be impossible to hit:

    [IMG]
    critical descent velocities (m/s) versus range (m). The line represents impossible shots. Below it you would aim above, above it you would aim below.

    [IMG]
    Lead angle (degrees) versus target's tangential velocity component (m/s) adjusted for gun offset. Sample range of 50 meters. Angles near 0 are impossible to actually fire.

    A word of warning:
    Don't get too hung up on the demonstration of impossibility here. Yes, you could roll and use your offset in very exotic ways to after some time make those shots possible (besides the comical difficulty of doing so). This is simply highlighting a case in which a player is effectively disarmed under circumstances that realistically happen in a 1v1 head-to-head fight. The reality of it is, a Reaver's aim point can jump around up to 30 degrees instantly in everyday use, the gun is off the main axis of the craft which prohibits smooth tracking and even when those two things don't bite the pilot in the posterior they are still at a completely unnecessary disadvantage.

    In conclusion:
    This requires immediate attention. Not even a tiny bit of exaggeration here. This is not a matter of skill - this affects any Reaver pilot more than they probably realize. If anything, inexperienced pilots are more prone to put misses down to user error even, because the situations in which a shot is impossible or very close to are not evident without some analysis.



    More videos
    Head-on shots demonstrated
    Tracking shots demonstrated
    Full mag miss. Shot was technically possible, but would have to lead even higher.
    Frontal shot ~15-20 degrees above target and killshot completely offscreen
    A bit of entertainment (I run out of ammo)
    • Up x 69
  2. CDN_Wolvie

    Thank you for this in depth analysis.
    • Up x 2
  3. Nephera

    I think this one was probably the most telling.

    • Up x 11
  4. Sumguy720

    Could you indicate which axis is which for your graphs? I don't know if it's 10 m/s at 200 meters or 200 m/s at 10 meters.

    Also, question: Having offset guns is a necessary evil for most aircraft. How do they deal with it in modern jets? Maybe a solution lies therein.
  5. sdfasdfa

    It's beyond the editing time. I removed it originally because the notation ended up looking even messier. So I went with the old convention of ordinate (y) then abscissa (x). For example: Descent velocities are on the y axis, range on the x axis.

    Modern aircraft uses many solutions, although most still have the nose gun in the nose to avoid these sorts of issues. We have something more akin to old-fashioned aircraft, who solved the problem in a much simpler way: Put the gun in front of the pilot. On the simplest level, you just stuck it between the propeller blades and the canopy and had the pilot sight using his own damn eyes. You then used synchronization to fire past the propeller without damaging it (gun synchronizers/interrupter gear). This happened pretty much the instant anyone stuck a gun on aircraft.The first confirmed aircraft-to-aircraft kill used such a synchronizer.

    (From there on out we added holographic sights to let the pilot visualize bullet inheritance and the likes, but that doesn't exist in PlanetSide so it's unnecessary)

    Two ESFs are very close to this solution. One is very, very far away from it. I wouldn't even be averse to the remaining ~0.4-0.6 meters on the other ESFs being reduced too (or the convergence feature simply being turned off). Nobody would ever build fightercraft with this sort of problem, as it is mechanically very easy to avoid in the real world.

    Edit: Sorry, I looked it up. Most modern fixed wing craft (as in, jets) do indeed have their nose guns in an entirely fixed mount. The aiming is computer assisted however and the actual gun is extremely close to the pilot (literally in the nose).
    • Up x 1
  6. Sumguy720

    Okay so there's a critical speed and angle at which you need to aim directly at your target to hit it, but doing so changes your projectile angle enough to cause a miss? Is that right?

    And you recommend moving the gun closer to the cockpit?

    Seems reasonable.
    • Up x 3
  7. Xae

    He was using verticle thrust. All ESFs have that firing "drag" if you use it. It isn't that the gun is misaligned in those cases it is that your vector is not direct forward.
    • Up x 4
  8. sdfasdfa

    This accounts at this range for approximately 1.3 degrees maximum (the obvious was done to get to this answer: range/[pvelocity*[range/bulletvelocity]]*57). The offset alone would require about a 2.5 degree lead - the correct lead is the two together plus a bit more fudge to move the stream closer to the nose. This is a good example of how pilots don't realize which factor is actually at work - the one you argued for is at very, very maximum one third of the leading that would need to be done here.

    If you watch all the videos linked, you'll see similar shots taken at very similar angles against targets that are either not rising or outright diving. The head-on convergence video for example. In one video I take a shot at a rising target with more than twice the angular lead of that video.
  9. Compeer

    Yes I have noticed this before....Our sights need to be adjusted a few mm up on our cockpit screen.
  10. Marked4Death

    OP, can you give some examples of when a reaver can't shoot a scythe / mozzie, but the scythe / mossie could shoot a reaver if the roles were reversed? It's just not clear to me when this would be.
  11. Demerzel

    I'm willing to bet serious cash the SOE dev(s) responsible for flight vehicles has no idea what your post means, or even the slightest clue how to begin fixing it. (Hint: put all nose cannons in the nose, a la modern jet fighters)
    • Up x 7
  12. sdfasdfa

    The simplest case: Both are facing each other, and the Mosquito or Scythe engages downward thrust. Standard falling speed while thrusting of around 20 meters per second would at ~70 meters distance mean that the Reaver pilot's combination of target-lead and offset now overlaps the Mosquito's physical model. As he hits the correct aim point, his gun now angles upwards and overshoots because he is not aiming at the sky anymore but instead at the target closer to him. He is stuck either aiming too high, too low or aiming correctly but missing because he cannot turn off compensation. The Mosquito or Scythe pilot have the simple task of just shooting back, not much can go wrong there.

    Basically, if that one clip quoted in this thread had been with a descending instead of ascending Mosquito, it would have been entirely impossible to hit him (instead of just misleading enough that over 3000 aircraft kills isn't enough experience to not underestimate the effect yet, was was the case in that video).

    Fun thought: If the Reaver's gun were only twice as offset as every other empire instead of four times, that same notorious little clip would have ended instantly with one magazine of Vortek.
    • Up x 3
  13. ChrisJSY

    Demerzel, did you know most.. if all real modern fighter don't have cannons in the nose, they are mostly offset behind the pilot on one side of the cockpit main hull structure. Even the A-10 is offset to account for recoil/torque and that's at the base of the front of the aircraft.

    The nose contains an arrangment of radar and such.

    Game wise, the simple thing here is, you need to check if the bullets actually leave the barrel, not just a visual thing.
    Many games fool people by the model, but where the bullets actually leave unless it's a simulator is done at a very basic level.
    • Up x 1
  14. Xae

    Most modern fighters don't have nose cannons. They tend to be above and behind the pilot.
    • Up x 1
  15. Phazaar

    A bump here for the most intelligent and informative post ever made, and an absolute necessary fix.

    PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD can someone get this onto the Reddit and keep it bumped, as that is the only chance we have of getting the devs to see it. They are only going to be fixing the top 5 issues players report ON REDDIT, so this HAS to be there.
    • Up x 3
  16. Pixelshader

    I thought they were going to ignore the top 5 issues upvoted on reddit and use them as light suggestions, because what gets upvoted most is a terrible measure of what is best for the game.
  17. CrispyHaze

    I think the real problem here is that the enemy pilot's name was "YOLOSWAGGA". If I got killed by a guy with the name YOLOSWAGGA, I'd be upset too.
    • Up x 3
  18. XRIST0

    Enough with the reaver threads , learn to love the reaver for what it is an not what you want it to be .

    Learn to fly better , i get taken down by reavers all the time .. I think theyre a great aircraft , you guys just like to whinge about everything .. Even the offset of the gun , i mean come on get real . All 3 aircraft air different , they are how they are .
    • Up x 1
  19. Ouch Electric

    I hope SOE will fix this ASAP.
    Well, if the reaver gets fixed, you'll get taken down by them even more. A level playing field sucks huh?
    • Up x 12
  20. XRIST0

    Fixed ? i dont understand , there is nothing wrong with it .

    Just because it is not IDENTICAL to the other aircraft , which it shouldn't be .. Does not mean it needs fixing , hah .

    Why do you think nothing has been done about it yet ? because soe are probably rolling their eyes at you guys like i am .