Laser range/effectiveness
Posted: Sun Dec 10, 2023 9:06 pm
Hello, nerding out again, this time over lasers and their ranges. If you define a laser's effective range as the distance at which armor has normal effectiveness, the early-game lasers look like:
Naively, I'd expect diffraction to become significant at a range of about D^2/λ, with the beam intensity almost constant at shorter ranges and following an inverse-square law at longer ranges. But the in-game ranges are much shorter than that formula (fortunately for balance!), instead being an (almost) pure function of D/λ with quickly diminishing returns and following an inverse-square law everywhere.
So I'm curious how the armor effectiveness scores are actually computed from the laser's base specs. So far I haven't been able to find any function that reproduces that steep leveling out at high D/λ.
(Also, are all these measurements really in cm, and not mm? These lasers seem rather... big compared to conventional and magnetic guns.)
Code: Select all
| Name | Aperture | Wavelength | Armor @ 200 km| Eff. Range |
|--------------------|----------|------------|---------------|------------|
| 60 cm IR Laser | 60 cm | 1080 nm | 1318% | 55 km |
| 60 cm Green Laser | 60 cm | 540 nm | 358% | 105 km |
| 120 cm IR Laser | 120 cm | 1080 nm | 361% | 105 km |
| 120 cm Green Laser | 120 cm | 540 nm | 121% | 180 km |
| 240 cm IR Laser | 240 cm | 1080 nm | 124% | 180 km |
| 240 cm Green Laser | 240 cm | 540 nm | 64% | 250 km |
| 480 cm IR Laser | 480 cm | 1080 nm | 66% | 245 km |
| 480 cm Green Laser | 480 cm | 540 nm | 51% | 280 km |
So I'm curious how the armor effectiveness scores are actually computed from the laser's base specs. So far I haven't been able to find any function that reproduces that steep leveling out at high D/λ.
(Also, are all these measurements really in cm, and not mm? These lasers seem rather... big compared to conventional and magnetic guns.)