So it's been noted in some discussions around mods I use that a core issue is that missiles have an acceleration value of 1m/s^2 in their data that doesn't actually affect their speed, but throws off turrets, because they lead taking that acceleration in mind. If you drop that value to 0 in the files, they actually become almost *too* good at intercepting, but even the tiniest amount throws them back down to where they are. That said, thanks to the round scatter, they *do* get lucky sometimes, which is why increasing volume of fire also works.
What happens if instead of dropping acceleration to zero, the acceleration actually affects the speed? Then the missile should be at the point where the turret is aiming. Or does an increase in speed of the missile tank game performance?
@@WestOfEarth they are already going faster than the speed limit, I'm sure this is a limitation of the engine. You'd need to have them accelerate constantly and that would probably cause issues above a certain speed. Pretty sure Klang doesn't like things that go too fast
Could that acceleration value be addressed by a script, so that gattlings would take it into account and therefor be able to actually hit missiles more reliably? Then at least servers where script use is enabled could use such script.
"So it's been noted in some discussions around mods I use that a core issue is that missiles have an acceleration value of 1m/s^2 in their data that doesn't actually affect their speed, but throws off turrets, because they lead taking that acceleration in mind." I would have expected the turrets to over-shoot, not under-shoot, the target. " If you drop that value to 0 in the files, they actually become almost too good at intercepting, but even the tiniest amount throws them back down to where they are." ...you mean they become capable of intercepting and become subject to being overwhelmed because of their poor tracking speed.
I’d love to see another warfare update that introduces CWIS, guided missiles, and countermeasure launchers. We have the sub targeting system now so it would make sense.
well I asked the dev that and they said they love to as well however they are more forecast on ai/encounters as well as endgame than the update plan so far
Countermeasures? You know you can just throw out Stone like a protective barrier. For example if somebody is chasing right behind you, you can drop Stone out of your ship and when they run into it it will damaged their ship to the point where they will have to call off the chase
To increase probability of interception, without: A - making players build dozens of turrets B - making high RPM weapons that are hard to simulate, and lagg-up the server ... Keen could just increase the missile's hitbox by like 2-3" and the effect would be the same. (or make turrets more accurate, but that might disrupt the balance against other entities, unless they make the turrets specifically more accurate against missiles - but *just make missile hitboxes larger, thats the simplest answer...* )
I'd say their accuracy is the biggest issue, they spray all over the place at such a short distance so they are whiffing past the missiles even at point blank ranges because of the heavy deviation. If they were more accurate then lower fire rate wouldn't be such an issue. I also wonder if having the camera below a central an array of gattlings would be more effective as they seem to shoot slightly low with it centralized
@@SilvaDreams was exactly my thought so i tried using a custom turret where you tilt individual gattling guns a bit to the center to create a focus point at around 400m and using a camera at dead center as the aiming reference. This increase the number of bullets per area while still holding the area relativly small in comparison but that is also only true for a area of about +- 20m - 40m around the focus point. Seems to increase the interception chances i get about as much intercepts with 2 gattling guns this way as compared to 6 shooting in a straight line
Another way would have to be some specialized turret, that are indeed more accurate only against missile, but don't do a lot of damage, so that they are pretty much useless as a damaging weapon.
Should've also put interior turrets in this comparison. They have shorter range, but they are much smaller for grid space, meaning you can put lines of these in AA embankments. Personally I put interior turrets into sortof AA nests, with their settings set to only intercept missiles purely. Efficient use of space, considering you can fit 9 of them in the same space a Gatling turret takes up, without adding the complexity of a custom turret.
Yeah, Interior turrets actually even have a higher accuracy rating too, making them much more efficient and effective as a point defense turret... Absolutely useless against ships though unless you have loads of them, but they work very well as light AA and point defense
@@manadrache42 Yeah... But 4 on a smaller large-grid ship, or 20(ish) on a bigger ship is usually enough for an entire engagement... By the time they all run out of ammo, the enemy will probobly have already depleted most of their missile boats... They also have the added benefit of targeting boarding parties; though on a meta PVP server, the better option would definitely be to just put on more armor or spaced armor and hope for the best
I usually do this and I always pair 2 interior turrets for every 1 Gatling or auto cannon turret. And I set them to only target missiles small grids and player’s.
It looks to be less of an issue of rate of fire and more the turrets targeting ability, a lot of shots look like they are just missing the missile behind it almost like the turret is aiming where it is and not accounting for travel time.
I wish we could give it a default position to return to - also for ocd, I have having turrets pointed all over the place. A minimum targeting distance could be helpful so it would give up on those that are going to get through anyway and focus on the ones further away.
For this reason I think the gatlings below the camera are useless, since they'd be firing even further past where the missile currently is. Move the 3 lower gatlings to the top and it might just increase accuracy
I think this is from how someone else explained..the missiles have an accerlation factor that the gatlin's cannot account for. If the acceleration factor was at 0, they'd be shot out of the sky 100%. But with small acceleration factor, the turrets cannot hit the moving, increasing speed missle. I guess the devs have to balance offensive and defensive abilities, and in the end offense should partially win or nothing would ever get damaged, meaning defensively, you need to take out the grid threat vs the missles themselves.
With the idea of a CWIS mode for the gatling turret: It would be nice to also have a variable minimum and maximum range for the turret to engage. As you could see when the missiles would get close or would land a hit the turret is then far out of position for follow up shots on the next target and could lead to it repeatedly snapping to missiles which are too close for it to effectively engage. An alarm similar to CWIS sounding from the turret when it engages would be nice as well, that or the option to hook them up individually to a sound block. I'd personally really like to see some form of flak added to the game, filling the skies with black puffs of smoke with an rng dispersion of very short range projectiles where the flak detonates. Though that would most likely also need to be coded for proximity detonation.
@@5peciesunkn0wn The only issue would be setting the timing. It would most likely be set in the menu so when it comes to a fight it would be very awkward to adjust on the fly. Could do something along the lines of: After it reaches it's max distance, each shot would randomly detonate within 0-100m? Giving the effect of a blanket/cloud of flak? And not just a flat wall.
@@mike12313 well, the timing can be set automatically. The setting should be how far in front you want it detonating. Measure distance, projectile speed is known, apply timer, fire away.
i thought it was a clear change in the warfare update, that gatlings were made less accurate and interior turrets would be the optimal small target interception turrets.
the problem with interior turrets is that you have to manually rearm them, making them less feasible for use in larger ships or bases since theres no easy way to quickly rearm them
@@rominkivela9351 True, no gun is perfect, i'd still say it's easier to replace a dozen interior turrets and rearm then, than building new custom turrets with turret controllers. Much more simple. The point was simply, the gatling was purposefully made less accurate to give the interior turrets a niche instead of it just being a straight up upgrade in all situations.
Over time I found that the gattling turrets may not be affecting against missiles but they do work well during meteor showers. Which I know many don't have active but personally always felt it a fun addition I have active on my survival runs
I enjoy meteors, too, tho I worry about the voxel-damage adding to lag. Especially when on planets, where the crater field around the player base eventually makes it look like there is someone shelling your base in particular.
Based on your current layout and testing situation I think moving the camera to the bottom of the face so all the guns are above it may yeild slightly better results because then it would have the guns all leading the missile. Because the way you describe it you have 3 shooting where it will be, 2 shooting where it is, and 3 shooting where it used to be. THat's also assuming the gatling guns have a bit of deviation. If they are laser perfect accurate then you have 1 shooting ahead of the missle, 1 shooting behind the missile, and 6 shooting beside it on either side.
I also though this would be better however unlike in this testing environment missiles do not typically come from the same direction/plane which might then mean, if coming from another direction, this change would affect the performance in an equal but negative way.
@@stuarthill7488 Possible, and somewhat likely in a non-accomidating ship design. But when you are testing in lab conditions, changing the test to best match the lab conditions can lead to a better understanding of how to get the results you want to at least see how it works best. Now even if something leads to a 100% success rate in lab environments doesn't mean that can translate into 'live' application to existing ship designs. But once you understand how to get that 100% in a lab then you can alter your ship designs to maybe get an 80% success rate instead of the traditional 20%. All about gathering data.
Okay, I really need to read the comments before I post myself, just made the same comment too. also added that a limit to the turret would be good, as it does not help that it can shoot straight up, as it means it has to angle back afterwards, better to have a smaller more efficient arc.
Wow awesome observation! Also I agree on the balancing. Once set to counter missile fire, it *only* targets that and not other stuff. (Railguns could be an exception, they are expensive and slow to fire) Love the comparison to the real C-RAM too, very nice. Very few people forget that how cool engineering IRL is :)
Anti missile laser turret. That’s my solution. Add in something based on AN/SEQ-3 Laser Weapon System, a real life anti missile system that uses high powered laser to shoot down missiles.
I really really want the game to add a laser turret to the economy. It doesn't take ammo, but instead has a capacitor which charges slowly, and drains as it fires. It's continuous fire but exceptionally low damage, making it very good for missiles/rockets and spiders, and functional against engineers, but near useless against any but the weakest blocks. So it's roll is as anti missile, and as a counter to hydrogen men attacking your base by just draining the turrets. Also it's effectiveness against engineers but uselessness against blocks means it could be fitted to NPC drones/bases to provide a encouragement to make small fighter craft early on.
I know most of the modded lasers are actually a projectile weapon with high travel speed and fire rate because of the limitations of the engine. Not sure how weapon core does it but it wouldn’t be hard for keen to add an energy weapons type. They should make it hit scan, no projectile, give it charges that are regained every 1-2 seconds with a max of 3 and fire rate of 2-3 per second. Then as soon as the turret is pointing at a target block, a charge is removed and the block takes X damage. Should be balanced to be great for missiles, and ok against engineers and small ships with low but consistent damage.
@@DJTimeLock How so? Space engineers is ‘near future’. Ion engines in real life exist but are about a million times less powerful. Nuclear reactors exist but are about ten times less powerful for the same volume, and can’t be made small enough to fit in a 0.5m cube. Lasers also exist and the US navy is currently doing tests with a laser missile defence system. They’re not fully operational but it does work and took down a dummy missile in their tests. If we assume that the came is set 1-200 years in the future then I think it would be weird NOT to have laser defence systems.
@@JPEight "They're not fully operational." Would just like to point out that whatever info the military releases to the public about capabilities is usually; a prototype, data from 20 years ago or is only showcasing about 1/10 of what it can actually do.
I assume that if you put the camera on a tiny hinge and adjust the angle that you could potentially change it's fire angle to potentially hit the missile more consistently
It's been a while since I've played Space Engineers, so I could be completely wrong about this. However, at 8:53 when you add the gatling guns to the list of weapons, you can see that in the lower right of the menu 'Gatling Gun 10' is listed at the "aiming reference". Earlier in the video you mention that the camera is the center of the turret's aim, but I believe that the first weapon you add to the list is actually the aiming reference. This would make sense since turrets don't require a camera. If this is true, then you could potentially use this knowledge to design a turret with better target lead my moving the aiming reference away from the main grouping of weapons (you may not even have to bother supplying ammo to the weapon you are using as a reference). The hard part might be making sure that the turret is leading in the right direction since depending on the path of the rocket and the orientation of the turret, it could be shooting behind or to the sides of the rocket instead of in front of it.
as a side note: you don't need to "hack" your custom turrets in the way you showed here. just put a large grid hinge on the adv rotor. take out the hinge part, go to the menu --> hinge, add small hinge part. Also there is a vanilla small grid conveyer adapterplate, to go from the small grid large conveyer port (from the hinge part) to a couple of regular small grid conveyer ports. there you go. Now you have your adapter from large grid to small grid. No need of doing it the way you do it here. Also add a breaking torgue to the adv rotor and the hinge. and tick the checkbox "share interior tensor" on the hinge, not on the rotor. that is the way i do all my turrets. they are working abolutue fine, and this way of building it, makes it easier to maintain and repair.
There's a feature that's been missed here, the custom turret controller has an "angle deviation" slider that controls the targetting tolerances of custom turrets. After a bit of testing i've had single gatling custom turrets perform a little better than the ones you've got here
This, and I wonder if we restrict the elevation and rotation. Would the turret keep on trying to track the first missile or switch faster to the next incoming missile?
I would note perhaps adding gatlings higher above the camera would help if the tracking is off as then the bullets will be adjusted for the rate of travel. You seemed to be hitting more the more turrets were above that axis. Adjusting the speed the turrets turn might help as well. Also weirdly enough I will also recommend adding an assault cannon to increase the range of the turret tracking even if you don't pipe it to fire rounds.
@@smokecrash2147 huh I could have sworn if you put blocks with more range it increases it (not the range of the gatlings just the tracking), guess I'm wrong.
What a cool feature that would help this out is, having a sort of slider, where you can scale accuracy (and maybe fire rate) with the penalty of doing less damage, which would give the effect like the modded gun has at targeting missiles. Having this scaling would also be cool to play with to make more specified turrets
If u set a weapon as reference for the CTC, it will have lead. Best option would get a Gatling on the center and use it as referance and surround it with other gatlings. Also. Get the speed of elevation and azimuth at the higher
i think it would actually be a rather simple solution: 1. give missiles a little bigger hitbox. 2. give the gatling smaller spread and higher firerate. there is also the option to add anti missile lasers, which is a very much so real world systems in development this very day by among others america, and they work just not all that practical due to power consumption, just make it to weak to do any real damage to small and large grids.
Make them pulse lasers that have internal supercapacitors that can discharge fast but take longer to recharge. So now you can shoot down a few rockets/players but only for a while. So the enemy needs continuous rocket bombardment to drain the turrets or massive volleys.
This is why I make my bases with gatling turrets and interior turrets to support. I had 4 interior turrets to support each of the main gatling turrets.
Have you tryed putting the gatling like 5 blocks or even higher to the camera so that it artificialy shoots further in front of the traveling missile? would it effect succes rate.
That would only work if the missiles were in line with the camera. If the missiles aren't in line with the camera, you'd be shooting to the side of the missile instead of ahead of it.
@@r3dp9 yes and maybe even server quality can effect it but would need to be tested more thorough. Also position of the turret relative to the direction the missile travels, than you would need a flower shape turret with a overkill amount of gatlings. I'm not even sure if testing it would be worth using 8 gats instead of 8 seperate turrets. But i wanted to ask the question atleast.
the main thing i found with turrets is different axis to what your hitting if you want a turret to hit a missile moving horizontal you need the turret to be place vertically on a wall so the bullet is being fired directly towards the moving missile otherwise the turret turn speed or bullet speed is off and turrets can't track properly you can solve it by making a faster firing gun or shoot more bullets but can also fix it by making a turret tower with a turret on each axis facing the directions you desire
I know for some people the idea of using mods is blasphemous but tbh the weapons in vanilla are not so great. I use Weaponcore and an mod called ITCC Weapons Pack - Weaponcore together to get that very satisfying CIWS turret. If you look up this mod on the workshop page you will see a CIWS turret in the pack that very closely or even exactly approximates the real life weapon. It even sounds exactly like a CIWS. When you see missiles heading for your base and hear half a dozen of these CIWS turrets going off and see the red fire hose going out into the sky you will love the mod. As for vanilla you have to use a dozen or more turrets just to equal one of these CIWS. It would be nice if Keen would give us laser missile defense turrets as someone else suggested.
lol, you guys are funny. everything LSG said he wanted is already in WC. The intercepting artillery mechanic is a core feature of my mod NorthWind weapon mods. You can be sure that the CIWS in NW wont be letting those missiles threw and even has C-RAM ammo.
To make an effective anti-missile turret you would need to get the velocity of the missile, then calculate where it is going to be given bullet velocity and input that into your turret for where to target. So to make that work you would need at least 2 camera turrets(no guns on them) set to tracking missiles for triangulating position and rate of change in that position(done by taking camera positions after they fix on a missile as inputs, set those to variables, then compare those variables to the next position of the cameras that are taken in as input in a formula), a gun turret, and probably a programmable block. Then given the rate of change of position and the bullet speed you can calculate an intercept position to input into the actual gun turret. You might need the gun turrets position, but that can probably be given as a constant, though I'm uncertain cause it has been a while since I've done these sorts of calculations. Then of course there is a difference between the theoretical and the practical, given the engine being run I have no clue if it would even work, though hopeful it could. Perhaps someone is willing to, or has already done the programming needed to pull this off.
I found with custom turrets, allowing the gatling turret to be slightly *inaccurate* when firing actually works better for interception You lay down an initial volley that scatters the rocket bypassing the leading problem.
I started a thread on the Forums over a year ago about this subject. I was contacted by a Moderator and asked to send a saved game world with my testing setup. I set up several Gatling Turrets, a couple of Interior Turrets, and several custom turrets...all to intercept a single missile launcher firing at a Decoy. With 8 guns total and many thousands of rounds fired every minute, I intercepted about 10% of the missiles. Obviously, more work is needed to make anti-missile defenses viable.
might it make a differance not only to have gats on the ball turrets left/right/up/down to create targeting angles, but also to have a few one block forward or backwards and by that when all fire at the same time due to their spacing they hit different poistions in the way of missle projectile and by that additionally increase the chance for a hit?
9:34 Your mistake is thinking the camera has any effect. It does not. It picks one of the weapons for its aim and runs with that. Pick the lower gatling as its only control, and include a group of the 3 others to "fire ON" when it ticks the left box, and "fire off" in the right (inside the CTC's setup actions)
I tested around with custom CIWS turrest for many hours last week, so the person reading this doesn't have to. I strongly recommend a 'spray and pray' approach at this point: set the target deviation to 90 to take away all 'doubt' on the side of the AI. You want it to spray like crazy. Turning speed on rotor + hinge: 30.00 in the controller (max). Braking power in the hinge and rotor: around half of the normal movement strength. @LastStandGamers you may want to try again with these settings.
Your analysis of this game mechanic is spot on. There needs to be higher accuracy or higher rates of fire. The modded gattling gun would be a nice feature, or the alternative would be to start using highly accurate particle beam weapons or lasers.
The Gatling guns are firing directly at the missile so they’re always going to miss unless the missile is shot basically directly at the Gatling gun’s barrel. It needs to know the path of the missile and adjust aim to shoot where the missile is going to be when the bullet reaches it, not shoot where the missile is at the moment of shooting. I don’t think you could code it in game and it’d have to be a mod or some new in-game targeting system. If you’re given the position and velocity vector of the missile you could fairly easily code a system to intercept it properly but those two parameters are only available in the game code afaik, not available for scripting in game. It’d be a function of where the missile is pointing, and the position + distance of the missile from the gun. The position and distance change constantly as the missile approaches (obviously) so a simple angle offset of the gun wouldn’t work as some have suggested. The issue is going to always be that by the time the Gatling gun fires a bullet, the missile has already moved out of the way and no volume of fire will fix that (unless you give the Gatling gun a huge spread to try to randomly hit it.) Alternatively, if they made some sort of flak bullet for these guns it’d bandaid the issue. It’d also be useful for regular combat. Maybe you could jerry rig a targeting system by using two cameras to get the position and path of the missile. Not sure if that’s possible in SE. Higher velocity bullets and higher rate of fire + the inaccuracy of the gun are only bandaid fixes. The inaccuracy of the gun is the only thing that actually gives the bullets a chance at hitting, and if it were perfectly accurate it’d literally never hit unless the missile was coming head on.
I like to add a few interior turrets around my builds as little AA Turrets,You can group them you for better chances of hit and I find it does occasionally work.
Here's an alternative, one that we are even using a bit IRL, active denial systems, these are mostly used by big warships and some tanks, as both of those are targeted by missiles. The way they could do this is a low-power gun specifically used to intercept and weaken enemy projectiles, doing very little damage to regular armor but lots of damage to things like missiles, this would give us a turret expressly used for defense so that you don't need to worry about missiles when using bigger ships or smaller less valuable vehicles that aren't worth shooting with higher caliber guns.
I love seeing this tested even tho I don't play, but I noticed some ai stuff thing on, if the camera is looking directly at the missle and not just a head of the missle like real life, you'd have an easier time hitting the missle if your Gatling guns were above the camera to adjust for that deviation and not just all around it the camera, in my opinion this makes sense because the bullet seam to be going under the missile and that's why they're missing, which is why it's hitting the missiles more accurately at farther distances and when the angle lines up better but I'm pretty sure it's only the top one that's actually hitting the missile. Actually since this is in space you would theoretically have to put them in the four cardinal directions on the camera at least and it seems like they might have to be two or more out to get better results except for the diagonals witch I think you'd only need the one, so the pattern should look like a diamond or an eight-point star if the sweet spot is farther than two out, I could be wrong but it would be worth testing😅🙃💜
I agree the Northwind mod has a great double barrel CIWS. The ITCC mod also has this taken care of with a fairly accurate replica of the real life CIWS turrets. It sounds and looks just like them and it has the big red firehose from it too. You should check it out.
Afghanistan Vet here, The CIWS (Close In Weapon System) or Phalanx as others call it is a cool weapon system. But even in real life its actual target destruction rates are very low. Many nights I spent listening to the Phalanx try to bring down rockets and mortars that insurgents were firing and I never saw one successful interception. I know there was successful interceptions but I personally was not present for one (and I personally saw 237 different indirect fire attempts on my FOB) Another thing to think about is the CWIS uses airburst rounds. Its goal isn’t to hit the target directly. Its ammunition explodes in proximity of the oncoming munitions in hopes of at best destroying the munition and at worst knocking it off course.
you will also want to set a minimum range of something like 100-200m under which the gatling turret would give up and target something else as trying to train onto a close range target too close to hit and then back to the next closest target will make for a situation where when overwhelmed it stops being able to effectively engage anything because it cant train back and forth or spool up that fast.
braucht evtl. 2 minima getrennt voneinander: z.b. unter 200m wird nicht mehr auf das ziel gewechselt, unter 100m wird von einem ziel losgelassen. grund: bei einem Grenzwert und vielen eintreffenden zielen springt das target sonst sehr häufig ohne wirklich zu schießen.
ive tried to make one of these before, I feel like the issue partly (especially with multiple missiles) is the turret tracking and attempting to engage a target it can't. Perhaps the turret cannot spin fast enough to hit it, or the slight dropoff from gats is enough to not allow it to hit missiles point blank. Maybe you should off center the gats, like have a staircase like arrangement going up and around the turret. So you have 3 rounds at 3 different points along the same path. Because more turrets on the sides seems effective, and since they would already be off center, they shouldn't hit anyways. maybe having 12 gats that are in sets of 3, centered and offset by 2 blocks on each set could help. If you can put more rounds in the same path at the exact moment, that would probably be more effective. Maybe if you could also force the turret to stop tracking a missile once it hits X angle, or even have banks of AA turrets that are designed to create as perfect of a wall of rounds as possible. I definitely want to try to make a working turret for this, or some sort of turret bank layout for it.
I always have interior turrets to target missiles and charactors. They have a much higher rate of fire that allows them to get almost every missike that comes in. The ammo is much cheaper as well. I know a lot of players avoid interior turrets because they have to hand load them. This isnt as big an issue as most players make it as you only need to trhow about 100 clips in and you will almost never have to load more ammo assuming you have them set to only target players and missiles. You can even put interior turrets on small grid with rotors if you dont mind sub-grids. If you try this and you experience any Clang, adjusting rotor displacement can help get rid of it. Setting up proper targeting is important on all weapons, so I highly recommend testing each weapon to find what works best for you and your builds
...the npcs attack every 5 minutes... its not like a reactor where you can stick enough fuel in once and never have to fuel it again.... and in pvp your interior turrets will have drained themselves before the action really even begins
@@styleisaweapon I've never had issues using them in pvp and running out of ammo. It takes 2 minutes tops to check their ammo andc restock if needed, leaving plenty of time to repair between npc waves. And their ammo is dirt cheap to make. Assuming you arent using just interior turrets, you should still be able to produce 30a ammo and whatever else you may need with 2 or more assemblers
If I may; one of the flaws with custom Anti-Ordinance turrets is that the camera is offset from the guns. So what's actually happening is that a bullet that "misses" the target actually hits, as if these guns were all 100% accurate, they'd all be bracketing the missile, never actually hitting it. The only ones that likely have much of a chance of hitting the missile are the ones directly above and directly below the camera.
Custom turrets require a centered gun to work properly against small targets. Which is why some designs have terrible accuracy against fast/small craft and projectiles. They're custom and their sole purpose is to pack a lot of extra firepower over the standard turrets, so don't worry about armoring up and adding center guns. The compact 6x gatling design is great because it keeps things within the hinge's boundaries and lessens visible weakspots, but you might want to build one more similar to a Phalanx CIWS to keep weapons centered(hinge at 90 degree offset from guns, often with a conveyor adapter and 3x3 small hinge head).
I think the solution is to have a lock on range (1km) and then a firing range (800m) so there's a second or two for the turret to calculate where to aim and fire by using a targeting computer part would make it more efficient in calculating and this making it fire slightly sooner and more accurately. I think doubling the range is a bit ridiculous because unless a ship is sending a barrage much greater than the number of turrets, it would make missile builds less reliable. I think it should be as close to a 50/50 chance of interception and hits as possible so neither side can just spam defenses or missiles to counter each other (in terms of quantity)
the best in game anti-missle thing i have seen was done by using a script to detect the angle and velocity of the missle, then it uses a simple trigonometric function to find the best intercept point and compensate for the lag of the turret by adding a lead time.
i dont know, but if you placed the cam in the mid and place two or three directly above and below the cam i think it will work better. any on the sides will miss by default if they have a set trajectory. the ones on the top are probably the only ones able to actually hit them because its the cam tracking not the guns but the ones closer to the cam are always firing behind the missile instead of at it. only the one on top was coming close.
I'm only just getting into the game so I don't really know how it all works yet. Yeah maybe slight improved design to fudge the turret to slightly lead the target might be possible with different angles of guns to camera/multi cameras. but looks like the biggest issue is the current tracking speed of the turret. Especially with multi fired missiles. As soon as it fails to intercept and follows all the way to you it can never reach back out to a range where it can effectively target. If possible in the targeting ai setting up a combination of a minimum target range and also a target priority of furthest distance will keep you firing in a effective range giving you the best chance of multi interception. Yeah you will fire at less targets but should get more overall hits once you get the balance right.
also the Gatling guns are fixed inside the hinge so they can't converge all of there barrels to hit one spot there firing in grid pattern......would need to be able to mount mini additional hinges to each Gatling so they can converge onto a single point, i too i'm just getting into space engineers so i have no idea if that level of control is possible.
The problem here isn't RPM or amoung of gunfire, but simple fact that gatlings just don't lead the missile enough. They are aiming slightly behind the missile, hence why they miss. Unless they were turned towards the direction missile is coming from and managed to shoot it down before it gained even a bit of angular velocity by which point gatling turrets become might as well not exist at all. What Keen need to do is to improve targeting and it will be good.
For my point defense needs i use lasers from the DEW mod. It's got 2 solutions that fit the bill. The point defense laser and the AA laser turret. The former is good at taking out missiles and players, the latter is good at taking out fighters and drones. I usually put a fair few of them around my ship which protects it from all but a large saturation attack.
This is why I use the mod Northwind Weapons. Among a bunch of other very cool weapons, it adds a C-RAM turret that can actually shoot down missiles. Also it looks like the turrets are shooting above the missile, so what if you just move the camera up, thereby forcing it to aim lower and hopefully hit the missile
I used to put a number of interior turrets set up to intercept missiles, but I barely use them at all now that they cut the range on the interior turret.
A major problem you pointed out was that the turret took too long to reposition after targeting one missile to hit the other ones. Further more, though I'm too lazy to watch back EVERY test, I'm pretty sure that not a single missile that got above the turret was intercepted. This once again brings us to the problem of the turret being too slow to reposition, and so trying to reposition only reduces it's accuracy. Thusly, my solution is to simply restrict the angles on the turret's rotor and hinge, yes this would render it unable to intercept missiles coming from different directions, but come on, do you really think it can turn fast enough to intercept them anyways? Another, more unorthodox solution, could be to make the turret it's own sub-grid and putting gyros on it so it can turn faster. But it could well be the fact that no gyro rpm could make the turret fast enough, without making it overshoot and causing the missile to already hit by the time it corrects itself. Or, you know, that not working to begin with.
Another thing that the Ciwis has that helps it destroying targets is the fact that its projectiles explode when near the target and this facilitates shooting it down
I think on the topic of not using the missile engage option so your turrets are not focusing on the enemy and instead wasting fire on the missiles can be solved by instead putting a couple dedicated turrets specifically for CIWS/C-RAM usage
It seems like the main issue is that gatling guns just aren't *hitting* the missiles. Adding alternative ammo types (namely a timed fuze flak type munition) would allow you to spec out weapons for different purposes such as taking out missiles.
phalanx systems on ships were always a last resort point defense system. I don't know their success rates, but believe it is far from perfect. But you are correct in that using a similar system in game is largely pointless unless you use a mod or a lot of turrets.
We need fuzed flack cannons. Would be quite easy to do as missiles already explode at max range, they could just set max weapon range to the current range to target. Not sure how SE would handle that - depends whether the range is set per projectile at time of launch or if it’s done some other way.
I was thinking that Keen can do what RL already does with flak- you don't need something super accurate, just fill the air with what amounts to buckshot. it's easy to get a hit when your 'hitbox' is measured in feet-by-feet, not millimeters-by-millimeters. Make them do 1-2 damage so that they take out missiles but otherwise do very little damage to ships.
have you tried this test with the C-RAM mod? pretty sure there's a mod like this where it has the same rate of fire and tracking speed as the real life C-RAM/CIWS Phalanx, the bullets go much faster and it dumps a lot more rounds down range, plus the rounds are tracers so they light up the night sky (or space) like a christmas tree when they start going to town and dispensing freedom, it even self-destructs the rounds that exceed the maximum distance of the C-RAM to avoid collateral damage (just like in real life) (i think its been rebalanced so that the rounds dont actually do much damage, but for point defense you dont really even need the damage as long as you hit the incoming missiles.)
I think you probably could get a higher intercept if you increase the offset of the weapons to compensate for lead. Meaning, use fewer turrets spaced out across a taller and wider area vs packed together.
Seeing as damage doesn't matter for intercepting missiles I mixed in interior turrets with gatlings and had the gatlings do the ship-ship combat and interior turrets focus on missiles.
There is a lot more individual components that help increase the CRAM's effectiveness for intercepts. A semi active radar station for early warning would help the accuracy for intercepts. A wall of lead won't help in a three dimensional actual scenario. I don't Play Space Engineers. but from the looks of it, range seems to be the biggest issue.
Custom autocannon turrets do the job, they spray a load of bullets in a wider area , so the center of The turret guns is their aim point Buy because of the “flak” gun layout the guns that are wider from the camera will hit the missiles
The only other thing I can think of is maybe spread the turrets farther apart so they have a wider angle, not grouped so closely together, say 5-10 blocks in every direction? This way theyre not trying to hit the missile head on?
I've found the interior turrets seem to have more luck with this. But still not enough to just hold a point on their own. As a secondary defense on a moving ship they aren't too bad. They reduce the missile volume a bit.
This really got me thinking... too look forward to my day off this Wednesday so that I can play this game. I also regret not bringing my laptop to work today... tho I may still try to play remotely via my phone since I always bring a wireless mouse and keyboard for it.
not really a specialist at combat in SE, but I noticed that turret controller works 100x better large grid rotor > small head > small rotor with a single gatling gun shoots down a rocket in at max 8 shots (very consistently) (tested with 100 rockets)
I think it deserves a special turret all it's own. The other difference is that the CIWS uses tracer feedback to zero in on a firing solution that hits the target.
Adding optional proximity rounds in my opinion would be better. There would be a trade off between using regular ammo and proxy ammo as proxy ammo does less damage but is also able to intercept missiles better.
You should test this out. It appears that most of the bullets are hitting below. Adding a hinge or rotor to the guns to slightly angle them higher then it’s average height will make the bullets travel at a slightly higher angle and thus increasing chances.
I find that interior turrets work better for me, I usually put a set of two to cover a section of the ship (like top-front/bottom-front, top-middle/bottom-middle, etc) and I get pretty good chances of a hit
i actually have a better way to fix it using the game. I set 2 hinges and one rotor. i place the rotor for side to side movement, then a rotor on top that just quickly moves up and down, and on top of that i have the hinge that holds the gun and aims. the rotor and hinge being controlled by the controller wil work as intended. but the middle hinge will quickly and rapidly move at a 20 degree angle plus and minus to force the gun to not always aim to low or high but force the spread of fire across the hinges vertical movement. so it has a higher chance to hit the missle. this test shows the gun will constantly shhot many rounds behind or infront of the missle and aim that way. but my design shakes the top hinge up and down so it still aims but its forced to shoot behind, infront, and directly at it making it hit it more often.
Ive had good luck with interior turrets getting missiles. Ammos cheap and the gun tracks faster. The cyclic rate is similar to the gatling but the ammo is far cheaper.
So in this situation only the Gatling guns on the vertical and central axis are able to hit, meaning that with 8 guns you've still only increased the Gatling rate of fire by a factor of 2. Now, in a less clinical setting the other Gatling guns would come into play as they would be targeting the missiles on more than one axis- however ultimately you would only have guns on the missiles path actually adding to your rounds so- Putting your camera in the middle effectively guarantees that half of your guns will aim too low while tracking the target, so put your camera underneath the guns, either by raising the guns or lowering the camera, keeping in mind that lowering the camera will cause your guns to lead more. Either way your camera should be in line or below the lowest layer of Gatling guns. That way all guns above it are leading the target more than the camera is
Personally, as a countermeasure type weapon, I'd like to see them add a flak gun type weapon where each individual projectile dose very little damage, but it fires a very large amount of them in one shot to target missiles and artillery. I'd image it being something useful for targeting incoming munitions and small, LIGHTLY ARMORED, ships build for speed, but not be particularly useful against larger, more heavily armored, targets with the projectiles dealing little damage.
Maybe we should be able to set minimum engagement ranges for anti-missile turrets. They are only really effective if they can intercept missiles by 300-400 meters out. If it misses that window it would be better to go to the next one.
personally i use interior turrets to target missiles, in a large quantity they seem to do well enough, although at this point missiles are getting a bit outdated
in short defense is still going to come down to armor, ability to dodge, or shields... occasional intercepts do relieve the strain of the other 3 methods, but would you rather absorb a few extra hits to dole out that extra damage to your target, or take a lot of damage trying to intercept and not do that damage to your target.... that's really what it amounts too.... lets also not forget the ammo expenditure needed to actually intercept as well... and with the ability to target specific sub-systems such as engines or weapons.. i don't see the need to waste ammo on a few missiles... meteors yes, missiles no....
Maybe your issue with them missing is due to your distance from the camera. If you want your gatling firing ahead of the projectile, and your camera is your crosshair, and your crosshair is always centered on the missile, then you need your gatlings further from the camera
So it's been noted in some discussions around mods I use that a core issue is that missiles have an acceleration value of 1m/s^2 in their data that doesn't actually affect their speed, but throws off turrets, because they lead taking that acceleration in mind. If you drop that value to 0 in the files, they actually become almost *too* good at intercepting, but even the tiniest amount throws them back down to where they are.
That said, thanks to the round scatter, they *do* get lucky sometimes, which is why increasing volume of fire also works.
What happens if instead of dropping acceleration to zero, the acceleration actually affects the speed? Then the missile should be at the point where the turret is aiming. Or does an increase in speed of the missile tank game performance?
@@WestOfEarth they are already going faster than the speed limit, I'm sure this is a limitation of the engine. You'd need to have them accelerate constantly and that would probably cause issues above a certain speed.
Pretty sure Klang doesn't like things that go too fast
Could that acceleration value be addressed by a script, so that gattlings would take it into account and therefor be able to actually hit missiles more reliably? Then at least servers where script use is enabled could use such script.
Is it possible to use scripts and programming blocks to eliminate this aiming error in game? 🤔
"So it's been noted in some discussions around mods I use that a core issue is that missiles have an acceleration value of 1m/s^2 in their data that doesn't actually affect their speed, but throws off turrets, because they lead taking that acceleration in mind."
I would have expected the turrets to over-shoot, not under-shoot, the target.
" If you drop that value to 0 in the files, they actually become almost too good at intercepting, but even the tiniest amount throws them back down to where they are."
...you mean they become capable of intercepting and become subject to being overwhelmed because of their poor tracking speed.
I’d love to see another warfare update that introduces CWIS, guided missiles, and countermeasure launchers. We have the sub targeting system now so it would make sense.
well I asked the dev that and they said they love to as well however they are more forecast on ai/encounters as well as endgame than the update plan so far
@@sirkawaiipanda1606 Who knows, maybe they will do it later after everything that's being focused right now.
There are countermeasures already, that's what decoys are for.
@@SmellyRabbitproper defense against missiles relies on more than just soft kill solutions
Countermeasures? You know you can just throw out Stone like a protective barrier. For example if somebody is chasing right behind you, you can drop Stone out of your ship and when they run into it it will damaged their ship to the point where they will have to call off the chase
To increase probability of interception, without:
A - making players build dozens of turrets
B - making high RPM weapons that are hard to simulate, and lagg-up the server
... Keen could just increase the missile's hitbox by like 2-3" and the effect would be the same. (or make turrets more accurate, but that might disrupt the balance against other entities, unless they make the turrets specifically more accurate against missiles - but *just make missile hitboxes larger, thats the simplest answer...* )
I'd say their accuracy is the biggest issue, they spray all over the place at such a short distance so they are whiffing past the missiles even at point blank ranges because of the heavy deviation. If they were more accurate then lower fire rate wouldn't be such an issue.
I also wonder if having the camera below a central an array of gattlings would be more effective as they seem to shoot slightly low with it centralized
@@SilvaDreams was exactly my thought so i tried using a custom turret where you tilt individual gattling guns a bit to the center to create a focus point at around 400m and using a camera at dead center as the aiming reference. This increase the number of bullets per area while still holding the area relativly small in comparison but that is also only true for a area of about +- 20m - 40m around the focus point. Seems to increase the interception chances i get about as much intercepts with 2 gattling guns this way as compared to 6 shooting in a straight line
Another way would have to be some specialized turret, that are indeed more accurate only against missile, but don't do a lot of damage, so that they are pretty much useless as a damaging weapon.
Also custom ap missiles are sick aswell
They just need to add a script that reads the missiles speed and direction and the gatling bullets speed to lead the shot
Should've also put interior turrets in this comparison. They have shorter range, but they are much smaller for grid space, meaning you can put lines of these in AA embankments.
Personally I put interior turrets into sortof AA nests, with their settings set to only intercept missiles purely. Efficient use of space, considering you can fit 9 of them in the same space a Gatling turret takes up, without adding the complexity of a custom turret.
I've always had better luck with dedicated interiors. Only thing they are set to target are misses/players.
Yeah, Interior turrets actually even have a higher accuracy rating too, making them much more efficient and effective as a point defense turret... Absolutely useless against ships though unless you have loads of them, but they work very well as light AA and point defense
interior turrets make for a decent point defence, but at the cost of being relativly server heavy and you need to reload them manually...
@@manadrache42 Yeah... But 4 on a smaller large-grid ship, or 20(ish) on a bigger ship is usually enough for an entire engagement... By the time they all run out of ammo, the enemy will probobly have already depleted most of their missile boats... They also have the added benefit of targeting boarding parties; though on a meta PVP server, the better option would definitely be to just put on more armor or spaced armor and hope for the best
I usually do this and I always pair 2 interior turrets for every 1 Gatling or auto cannon turret. And I set them to only target missiles small grids and player’s.
It looks to be less of an issue of rate of fire and more the turrets targeting ability, a lot of shots look like they are just missing the missile behind it almost like the turret is aiming where it is and not accounting for travel time.
I wish we could give it a default position to return to - also for ocd, I have having turrets pointed all over the place. A minimum targeting distance could be helpful so it would give up on those that are going to get through anyway and focus on the ones further away.
For this reason I think the gatlings below the camera are useless, since they'd be firing even further past where the missile currently is.
Move the 3 lower gatlings to the top and it might just increase accuracy
@@Netherdan this would only work when missile go above turret horyzontaly. You need guns all over to intercept at any anglle
I think this is from how someone else explained..the missiles have an accerlation factor that the gatlin's cannot account for. If the acceleration factor was at 0, they'd be shot out of the sky 100%. But with small acceleration factor, the turrets cannot hit the moving, increasing speed missle. I guess the devs have to balance offensive and defensive abilities, and in the end offense should partially win or nothing would ever get damaged, meaning defensively, you need to take out the grid threat vs the missles themselves.
@@dham99except missiles quickly cap their speed out
With the idea of a CWIS mode for the gatling turret: It would be nice to also have a variable minimum and maximum range for the turret to engage. As you could see when the missiles would get close or would land a hit the turret is then far out of position for follow up shots on the next target and could lead to it repeatedly snapping to missiles which are too close for it to effectively engage. An alarm similar to CWIS sounding from the turret when it engages would be nice as well, that or the option to hook them up individually to a sound block. I'd personally really like to see some form of flak added to the game, filling the skies with black puffs of smoke with an rng dispersion of very short range projectiles where the flak detonates. Though that would most likely also need to be coded for proximity detonation.
while proximity flak is best, timed flak is the fun kind.
@@5peciesunkn0wn The only issue would be setting the timing. It would most likely be set in the menu so when it comes to a fight it would be very awkward to adjust on the fly. Could do something along the lines of: After it reaches it's max distance, each shot would randomly detonate within 0-100m? Giving the effect of a blanket/cloud of flak? And not just a flat wall.
@@mike12313 well, the timing can be set automatically. The setting should be how far in front you want it detonating. Measure distance, projectile speed is known, apply timer, fire away.
Ciws*
i thought it was a clear change in the warfare update, that gatlings were made less accurate and interior turrets would be the optimal small target interception turrets.
the problem with interior turrets is that you have to manually rearm them, making them less feasible for use in larger ships or bases since theres no easy way to quickly rearm them
@@rominkivela9351 True, no gun is perfect, i'd still say it's easier to replace a dozen interior turrets and rearm then, than building new custom turrets with turret controllers. Much more simple.
The point was simply, the gatling was purposefully made less accurate to give the interior turrets a niche instead of it just being a straight up upgrade in all situations.
Over time I found that the gattling turrets may not be affecting against missiles but they do work well during meteor showers. Which I know many don't have active but personally always felt it a fun addition I have active on my survival runs
I enjoy meteors, too, tho I worry about the voxel-damage adding to lag.
Especially when on planets, where the crater field around the player base eventually makes it look like there is someone shelling your base in particular.
I really like the idea of meteor showers, but I hate the implementation. The fact that they actively target you is ridiculous.
@@WulfgarOpenthroat somebody is, somebody using meteors
I love my rovers so the idea of driving over swiss cheese every time I leave home has kept me from turning on meteors. Not even once.
@@ceilyurie856 gamilas at it again
Based on your current layout and testing situation I think moving the camera to the bottom of the face so all the guns are above it may yeild slightly better results because then it would have the guns all leading the missile. Because the way you describe it you have 3 shooting where it will be, 2 shooting where it is, and 3 shooting where it used to be. THat's also assuming the gatling guns have a bit of deviation. If they are laser perfect accurate then you have 1 shooting ahead of the missle, 1 shooting behind the missile, and 6 shooting beside it on either side.
That a good idea going to have to conduct some testing with the idea.
I also though this would be better however unlike in this testing environment missiles do not typically come from the same direction/plane which might then mean, if coming from another direction, this change would affect the performance in an equal but negative way.
@@stuarthill7488 Possible, and somewhat likely in a non-accomidating ship design. But when you are testing in lab conditions, changing the test to best match the lab conditions can lead to a better understanding of how to get the results you want to at least see how it works best. Now even if something leads to a 100% success rate in lab environments doesn't mean that can translate into 'live' application to existing ship designs. But once you understand how to get that 100% in a lab then you can alter your ship designs to maybe get an 80% success rate instead of the traditional 20%. All about gathering data.
Okay, I really need to read the comments before I post myself, just made the same comment too. also added that a limit to the turret would be good, as it does not help that it can shoot straight up, as it means it has to angle back afterwards, better to have a smaller more efficient arc.
Wow awesome observation!
Also I agree on the balancing. Once set to counter missile fire, it *only* targets that and not other stuff.
(Railguns could be an exception, they are expensive and slow to fire)
Love the comparison to the real C-RAM too, very nice. Very few people forget that how cool engineering IRL is :)
Anti missile laser turret. That’s my solution. Add in something based on AN/SEQ-3 Laser Weapon System, a real life anti missile system that uses high powered laser to shoot down missiles.
There needs to be a end game laser turret for point defence. Something that doesn't need to lead its target.
I really really want the game to add a laser turret to the economy.
It doesn't take ammo, but instead has a capacitor which charges slowly, and drains as it fires.
It's continuous fire but exceptionally low damage, making it very good for missiles/rockets and spiders, and functional against engineers, but near useless against any but the weakest blocks.
So it's roll is as anti missile, and as a counter to hydrogen men attacking your base by just draining the turrets. Also it's effectiveness against engineers but uselessness against blocks means it could be fitted to NPC drones/bases to provide a encouragement to make small fighter craft early on.
I know most of the modded lasers are actually a projectile weapon with high travel speed and fire rate because of the limitations of the engine. Not sure how weapon core does it but it wouldn’t be hard for keen to add an energy weapons type.
They should make it hit scan, no projectile, give it charges that are regained every 1-2 seconds with a max of 3 and fire rate of 2-3 per second. Then as soon as the turret is pointing at a target block, a charge is removed and the block takes X damage. Should be balanced to be great for missiles, and ok against engineers and small ships with low but consistent damage.
Not realistic. Sure, a hyperdrive isnt either, but thats just a feature to reduce travel time. I don't think lasers fit into the aestetic of the game
@@DJTimeLock How so? Space engineers is ‘near future’.
Ion engines in real life exist but are about a million times less powerful.
Nuclear reactors exist but are about ten times less powerful for the same volume, and can’t be made small enough to fit in a 0.5m cube.
Lasers also exist and the US navy is currently doing tests with a laser missile defence system. They’re not fully operational but it does work and took down a dummy missile in their tests.
If we assume that the came is set 1-200 years in the future then I think it would be weird NOT to have laser defence systems.
@@JPEight "They're not fully operational."
Would just like to point out that whatever info the military releases to the public about capabilities is usually; a prototype, data from 20 years ago or is only showcasing about 1/10 of what it can actually do.
I assume that if you put the camera on a tiny hinge and adjust the angle that you could potentially change it's fire angle to potentially hit the missile more consistently
It's been a while since I've played Space Engineers, so I could be completely wrong about this. However, at 8:53 when you add the gatling guns to the list of weapons, you can see that in the lower right of the menu 'Gatling Gun 10' is listed at the "aiming reference". Earlier in the video you mention that the camera is the center of the turret's aim, but I believe that the first weapon you add to the list is actually the aiming reference. This would make sense since turrets don't require a camera. If this is true, then you could potentially use this knowledge to design a turret with better target lead my moving the aiming reference away from the main grouping of weapons (you may not even have to bother supplying ammo to the weapon you are using as a reference). The hard part might be making sure that the turret is leading in the right direction since depending on the path of the rocket and the orientation of the turret, it could be shooting behind or to the sides of the rocket instead of in front of it.
as a side note: you don't need to "hack" your custom turrets in the way you showed here. just put a large grid hinge on the adv rotor. take out the hinge part, go to the menu --> hinge, add small hinge part. Also there is a vanilla small grid conveyer adapterplate, to go from the small grid large conveyer port (from the hinge part) to a couple of regular small grid conveyer ports. there you go. Now you have your adapter from large grid to small grid. No need of doing it the way you do it here. Also add a breaking torgue to the adv rotor and the hinge. and tick the checkbox "share interior tensor" on the hinge, not on the rotor. that is the way i do all my turrets. they are working abolutue fine, and this way of building it, makes it easier to maintain and repair.
There's a feature that's been missed here, the custom turret controller has an "angle deviation" slider that controls the targetting tolerances of custom turrets.
After a bit of testing i've had single gatling custom turrets perform a little better than the ones you've got here
This, and I wonder if we restrict the elevation and rotation. Would the turret keep on trying to track the first missile or switch faster to the next incoming missile?
That's definitely worth looking into, that way we don't have turrets firing at missiles that have already missed their target
i thought i was tripping out when the video repeated itself when you mentioned about the modded blocks rate of fire.....inception!!!
I would note perhaps adding gatlings higher above the camera would help if the tracking is off as then the bullets will be adjusted for the rate of travel. You seemed to be hitting more the more turrets were above that axis. Adjusting the speed the turrets turn might help as well. Also weirdly enough I will also recommend adding an assault cannon to increase the range of the turret tracking even if you don't pipe it to fire rounds.
The CTC still has a range of 800m though. Only if you lock on to a grid the CTC can aim as far as its weapons can shoot
@@smokecrash2147 huh I could have sworn if you put blocks with more range it increases it (not the range of the gatlings just the tracking), guess I'm wrong.
What a cool feature that would help this out is, having a sort of slider, where you can scale accuracy (and maybe fire rate) with the penalty of doing less damage, which would give the effect like the modded gun has at targeting missiles. Having this scaling would also be cool to play with to make more specified turrets
have you tested interior turrets for missile defence?
since they're weaker than gatling turrets there is probably no point in testing it
More a matter of accuracy and how fast they can track a target. Doesn't take much to take out a missile
@@spacepiratecaptainrush1237 This is the key answer, and part of the change in WF2
@@gamek27, all this time since Warfare 2 and you still haven’t noticed that interior turrets are instant, max-range, headshot beasts?
@@Vessekx yes
It’s been a few years since I’ve checked this channel out, and you’ve dropped a few octaves. Puberty is a hell of a thing. 😅
If u set a weapon as reference for the CTC, it will have lead. Best option would get a Gatling on the center and use it as referance and surround it with other gatlings.
Also. Get the speed of elevation and azimuth at the higher
i think it would actually be a rather simple solution:
1. give missiles a little bigger hitbox.
2. give the gatling smaller spread and higher firerate.
there is also the option to add anti missile lasers, which is a very much so real world systems in development this very day by among others america, and they work just not all that practical due to power consumption, just make it to weak to do any real damage to small and large grids.
Make them pulse lasers that have internal supercapacitors that can discharge fast but take longer to recharge.
So now you can shoot down a few rockets/players but only for a while.
So the enemy needs continuous rocket bombardment to drain the turrets or massive volleys.
Or just slow down missile
I guese also learn the turret to shot ahead of the missile, so the shots actuly connekt
This is why I make my bases with gatling turrets and interior turrets to support. I had 4 interior turrets to support each of the main gatling turrets.
Have you tryed putting the gatling like 5 blocks or even higher to the camera so that it artificialy shoots further in front of the traveling missile? would it effect succes rate.
That would only work if the missiles were in line with the camera. If the missiles aren't in line with the camera, you'd be shooting to the side of the missile instead of ahead of it.
@@r3dp9 yes and maybe even server quality can effect it but would need to be tested more thorough. Also position of the turret relative to the direction the missile travels, than you would need a flower shape turret with a overkill amount of gatlings. I'm not even sure if testing it would be worth using 8 gats instead of 8 seperate turrets. But i wanted to ask the question atleast.
the "Sentinel Turret" from the Akiad Militech - Mod is pretty good against Rockets 😉
Yo you tripped me out with the double take. Of the modded large Gatling gun.
Time line: (5:14)-(6:20)
Honestly I Like it though. Makes wrinkles in this smooth brain of mine. You should do it more often in future videos see if anyone notices.
the main thing i found with turrets is different axis to what your hitting if you want a turret to hit a missile moving horizontal you need the turret to be place vertically on a wall so the bullet is being fired directly towards the moving missile otherwise the turret turn speed or bullet speed is off and turrets can't track properly you can solve it by making a faster firing gun or shoot more bullets but can also fix it by making a turret tower with a turret on each axis facing the directions you desire
I know for some people the idea of using mods is blasphemous but tbh the weapons in vanilla are not so great. I use Weaponcore and an mod called ITCC Weapons Pack - Weaponcore together to get that very satisfying CIWS turret. If you look up this mod on the workshop page you will see a CIWS turret in the pack that very closely or even exactly approximates the real life weapon. It even sounds exactly like a CIWS. When you see missiles heading for your base and hear half a dozen of these CIWS turrets going off and see the red fire hose going out into the sky you will love the mod. As for vanilla you have to use a dozen or more turrets just to equal one of these CIWS. It would be nice if Keen would give us laser missile defense turrets as someone else suggested.
lol, you guys are funny. everything LSG said he wanted is already in WC. The intercepting artillery mechanic is a core feature of my mod NorthWind weapon mods. You can be sure that the CIWS in NW wont be letting those missiles threw and even has C-RAM ammo.
Hell yeah. Ive been more or less preaching the same thing that vanilla just doesnt cut it when you want real combat.
To make an effective anti-missile turret you would need to get the velocity of the missile, then calculate where it is going to be given bullet velocity and input that into your turret for where to target. So to make that work you would need at least 2 camera turrets(no guns on them) set to tracking missiles for triangulating position and rate of change in that position(done by taking camera positions after they fix on a missile as inputs, set those to variables, then compare those variables to the next position of the cameras that are taken in as input in a formula), a gun turret, and probably a programmable block. Then given the rate of change of position and the bullet speed you can calculate an intercept position to input into the actual gun turret. You might need the gun turrets position, but that can probably be given as a constant, though I'm uncertain cause it has been a while since I've done these sorts of calculations.
Then of course there is a difference between the theoretical and the practical, given the engine being run I have no clue if it would even work, though hopeful it could. Perhaps someone is willing to, or has already done the programming needed to pull this off.
A Point Defense option as you mention would be cool, it is how Elite have it and I think is very handy. Dedicated to only shoot missiles and such
I found with custom turrets, allowing the gatling turret to be slightly *inaccurate* when firing actually works better for interception
You lay down an initial volley that scatters the rocket bypassing the leading problem.
am i tripping or did we get a repeat clip between around 5:02 ish and 6:02 ish?
Yes, it repeated.
I started a thread on the Forums over a year ago about this subject. I was contacted by a Moderator and asked to send a saved game world with my testing setup. I set up several Gatling Turrets, a couple of Interior Turrets, and several custom turrets...all to intercept a single missile launcher firing at a Decoy. With 8 guns total and many thousands of rounds fired every minute, I intercepted about 10% of the missiles. Obviously, more work is needed to make anti-missile defenses viable.
might it make a differance not only to have gats on the ball turrets left/right/up/down to create targeting angles, but also to have a few one block forward or backwards and by that when all fire at the same time due to their spacing they hit different poistions in the way of missle projectile and by that additionally increase the chance for a hit?
9:34
Your mistake is thinking the camera has any effect. It does not. It picks one of the weapons for its aim and runs with that. Pick the lower gatling as its only control, and include a group of the 3 others to "fire ON" when it ticks the left box, and "fire off" in the right (inside the CTC's setup actions)
The missile knows where it is at all times.
Its not a guided missile its a rocket
I tested around with custom CIWS turrest for many hours last week, so the person reading this doesn't have to. I strongly recommend a 'spray and pray' approach at this point: set the target deviation to 90 to take away all 'doubt' on the side of the AI. You want it to spray like crazy. Turning speed on rotor + hinge: 30.00 in the controller (max). Braking power in the hinge and rotor: around half of the normal movement strength.
@LastStandGamers you may want to try again with these settings.
Your analysis of this game mechanic is spot on. There needs to be higher accuracy or higher rates of fire. The modded gattling gun would be a nice feature, or the alternative would be to start using highly accurate particle beam weapons or lasers.
The Gatling guns are firing directly at the missile so they’re always going to miss unless the missile is shot basically directly at the Gatling gun’s barrel.
It needs to know the path of the missile and adjust aim to shoot where the missile is going to be when the bullet reaches it, not shoot where the missile is at the moment of shooting.
I don’t think you could code it in game and it’d have to be a mod or some new in-game targeting system. If you’re given the position and velocity vector of the missile you could fairly easily code a system to intercept it properly but those two parameters are only available in the game code afaik, not available for scripting in game.
It’d be a function of where the missile is pointing, and the position + distance of the missile from the gun. The position and distance change constantly as the missile approaches (obviously) so a simple angle offset of the gun wouldn’t work as some have suggested.
The issue is going to always be that by the time the Gatling gun fires a bullet, the missile has already moved out of the way and no volume of fire will fix that (unless you give the Gatling gun a huge spread to try to randomly hit it.)
Alternatively, if they made some sort of flak bullet for these guns it’d bandaid the issue. It’d also be useful for regular combat.
Maybe you could jerry rig a targeting system by using two cameras to get the position and path of the missile. Not sure if that’s possible in SE.
Higher velocity bullets and higher rate of fire + the inaccuracy of the gun are only bandaid fixes. The inaccuracy of the gun is the only thing that actually gives the bullets a chance at hitting, and if it were perfectly accurate it’d literally never hit unless the missile was coming head on.
It's probably been talked about before but, what about using interior turrets as a PDS?
That's the meta atm
I like to add a few interior turrets around my builds as little AA Turrets,You can group them you for better chances of hit and I find it does occasionally work.
The explanation is way easier than you seem to wanna say. They just keep targeting where they are rather than where they’re going.
Here's an alternative, one that we are even using a bit IRL, active denial systems, these are mostly used by big warships and some tanks, as both of those are targeted by missiles. The way they could do this is a low-power gun specifically used to intercept and weaken enemy projectiles, doing very little damage to regular armor but lots of damage to things like missiles, this would give us a turret expressly used for defense so that you don't need to worry about missiles when using bigger ships or smaller less valuable vehicles that aren't worth shooting with higher caliber guns.
pretty sure the goal isnt so that "you dont need to worry about missiles" -- its so that "its fruitful to worry about missiles"
I love seeing this tested even tho I don't play, but I noticed some ai stuff thing on, if the camera is looking directly at the missle and not just a head of the missle like real life, you'd have an easier time hitting the missle if your Gatling guns were above the camera to adjust for that deviation and not just all around it the camera, in my opinion this makes sense because the bullet seam to be going under the missile and that's why they're missing, which is why it's hitting the missiles more accurately at farther distances and when the angle lines up better but I'm pretty sure it's only the top one that's actually hitting the missile. Actually since this is in space you would theoretically have to put them in the four cardinal directions on the camera at least and it seems like they might have to be two or more out to get better results except for the diagonals witch I think you'd only need the one, so the pattern should look like a diamond or an eight-point star if the sweet spot is farther than two out, I could be wrong but it would be worth testing😅🙃💜
This is where the Northwind weapon mod comes in handy.
I agree the Northwind mod has a great double barrel CIWS. The ITCC mod also has this taken care of with a fairly accurate replica of the real life CIWS turrets. It sounds and looks just like them and it has the big red firehose from it too. You should check it out.
I haven't tested it in several years, but the shoot missiles setting worked fine on the interior turret.
Afghanistan Vet here,
The CIWS (Close In Weapon System) or Phalanx as others call it is a cool weapon system. But even in real life its actual target destruction rates are very low.
Many nights I spent listening to the Phalanx try to bring down rockets and mortars that insurgents were firing and I never saw one successful interception. I know there was successful interceptions but I personally was not present for one (and I personally saw 237 different indirect fire attempts on my FOB)
Another thing to think about is the CWIS uses airburst rounds. Its goal isn’t to hit the target directly. Its ammunition explodes in proximity of the oncoming munitions in hopes of at best destroying the munition and at worst knocking it off course.
you will also want to set a minimum range of something like 100-200m under which the gatling turret would give up and target something else as trying to train onto a close range target too close to hit and then back to the next closest target will make for a situation where when overwhelmed it stops being able to effectively engage anything because it cant train back and forth or spool up that fast.
braucht evtl. 2 minima getrennt voneinander: z.b. unter 200m wird nicht mehr auf das ziel gewechselt, unter 100m wird von einem ziel losgelassen. grund: bei einem Grenzwert und vielen eintreffenden zielen springt das target sonst sehr häufig ohne wirklich zu schießen.
ive tried to make one of these before, I feel like the issue partly (especially with multiple missiles) is the turret tracking and attempting to engage a target it can't. Perhaps the turret cannot spin fast enough to hit it, or the slight dropoff from gats is enough to not allow it to hit missiles point blank.
Maybe you should off center the gats, like have a staircase like arrangement going up and around the turret. So you have 3 rounds at 3 different points along the same path. Because more turrets on the sides seems effective, and since they would already be off center, they shouldn't hit anyways. maybe having 12 gats that are in sets of 3, centered and offset by 2 blocks on each set could help.
If you can put more rounds in the same path at the exact moment, that would probably be more effective. Maybe if you could also force the turret to stop tracking a missile once it hits X angle, or even have banks of AA turrets that are designed to create as perfect of a wall of rounds as possible. I definitely want to try to make a working turret for this, or some sort of turret bank layout for it.
I always have interior turrets to target missiles and charactors. They have a much higher rate of fire that allows them to get almost every missike that comes in. The ammo is much cheaper as well. I know a lot of players avoid interior turrets because they have to hand load them. This isnt as big an issue as most players make it as you only need to trhow about 100 clips in and you will almost never have to load more ammo assuming you have them set to only target players and missiles. You can even put interior turrets on small grid with rotors if you dont mind sub-grids. If you try this and you experience any Clang, adjusting rotor displacement can help get rid of it. Setting up proper targeting is important on all weapons, so I highly recommend testing each weapon to find what works best for you and your builds
...the npcs attack every 5 minutes... its not like a reactor where you can stick enough fuel in once and never have to fuel it again.... and in pvp your interior turrets will have drained themselves before the action really even begins
@@styleisaweapon I've never had issues using them in pvp and running out of ammo. It takes 2 minutes tops to check their ammo andc restock if needed, leaving plenty of time to repair between npc waves. And their ammo is dirt cheap to make. Assuming you arent using just interior turrets, you should still be able to produce 30a ammo and whatever else you may need with 2 or more assemblers
Is it just me or is the modded weapon part doubled up?
Yeah, I noticed that too
If I may; one of the flaws with custom Anti-Ordinance turrets is that the camera is offset from the guns. So what's actually happening is that a bullet that "misses" the target actually hits, as if these guns were all 100% accurate, they'd all be bracketing the missile, never actually hitting it. The only ones that likely have much of a chance of hitting the missile are the ones directly above and directly below the camera.
Custom turrets require a centered gun to work properly against small targets. Which is why some designs have terrible accuracy against fast/small craft and projectiles.
They're custom and their sole purpose is to pack a lot of extra firepower over the standard turrets, so don't worry about armoring up and adding center guns.
The compact 6x gatling design is great because it keeps things within the hinge's boundaries and lessens visible weakspots, but you might want to build one more similar to a Phalanx CIWS to keep weapons centered(hinge at 90 degree offset from guns, often with a conveyor adapter and 3x3 small hinge head).
even this video what does he do he places a camera to use as his aiming reference .. point defense turrets dont need cameras ..
I think the solution is to have a lock on range (1km) and then a firing range (800m) so there's a second or two for the turret to calculate where to aim and fire by using a targeting computer part would make it more efficient in calculating and this making it fire slightly sooner and more accurately. I think doubling the range is a bit ridiculous because unless a ship is sending a barrage much greater than the number of turrets, it would make missile builds less reliable.
I think it should be as close to a 50/50 chance of interception and hits as possible so neither side can just spam defenses or missiles to counter each other (in terms of quantity)
the best in game anti-missle thing i have seen was done by using a script to detect the angle and velocity of the missle, then it uses a simple trigonometric function to find the best intercept point and compensate for the lag of the turret by adding a lead time.
i dont know, but if you placed the cam in the mid and place two or three directly above and below the cam i think it will work better. any on the sides will miss by default if they have a set trajectory. the ones on the top are probably the only ones able to actually hit them because its the cam tracking not the guns but the ones closer to the cam are always firing behind the missile instead of at it. only the one on top was coming close.
Multi-gatling converging - you deliver a wall of lead which means even without properly leading the target, the missiles are intercepted.
I'm only just getting into the game so I don't really know how it all works yet. Yeah maybe slight improved design to fudge the turret to slightly lead the target might be possible with different angles of guns to camera/multi cameras. but looks like the biggest issue is the current tracking speed of the turret. Especially with multi fired missiles. As soon as it fails to intercept and follows all the way to you it can never reach back out to a range where it can effectively target. If possible in the targeting ai setting up a combination of a minimum target range and also a target priority of furthest distance will keep you firing in a effective range giving you the best chance of multi interception. Yeah you will fire at less targets but should get more overall hits once you get the balance right.
also the Gatling guns are fixed inside the hinge so they can't converge all of there barrels to hit one spot there firing in grid pattern......would need to be able to mount mini additional hinges to each Gatling so they can converge onto a single point, i too i'm just getting into space engineers so i have no idea if that level of control is possible.
The problem here isn't RPM or amoung of gunfire, but simple fact that gatlings just don't lead the missile enough. They are aiming slightly behind the missile, hence why they miss. Unless they were turned towards the direction missile is coming from and managed to shoot it down before it gained even a bit of angular velocity by which point gatling turrets become might as well not exist at all. What Keen need to do is to improve targeting and it will be good.
For my point defense needs i use lasers from the DEW mod. It's got 2 solutions that fit the bill. The point defense laser and the AA laser turret. The former is good at taking out missiles and players, the latter is good at taking out fighters and drones. I usually put a fair few of them around my ship which protects it from all but a large saturation attack.
This is why I use the mod Northwind Weapons. Among a bunch of other very cool weapons, it adds a C-RAM turret that can actually shoot down missiles. Also it looks like the turrets are shooting above the missile, so what if you just move the camera up, thereby forcing it to aim lower and hopefully hit the missile
I used to put a number of interior turrets set up to intercept missiles, but I barely use them at all now that they cut the range on the interior turret.
A major problem you pointed out was that the turret took too long to reposition after targeting one missile to hit the other ones. Further more, though I'm too lazy to watch back EVERY test, I'm pretty sure that not a single missile that got above the turret was intercepted. This once again brings us to the problem of the turret being too slow to reposition, and so trying to reposition only reduces it's accuracy. Thusly, my solution is to simply restrict the angles on the turret's rotor and hinge, yes this would render it unable to intercept missiles coming from different directions, but come on, do you really think it can turn fast enough to intercept them anyways?
Another, more unorthodox solution, could be to make the turret it's own sub-grid and putting gyros on it so it can turn faster. But it could well be the fact that no gyro rpm could make the turret fast enough, without making it overshoot and causing the missile to already hit by the time it corrects itself. Or, you know, that not working to begin with.
Another thing that the Ciwis has that helps it destroying targets is the fact that its projectiles explode when near the target and this facilitates shooting it down
That's a good point if the Gatling had some explosive ammo with proximity detonation it would work great.
I think on the topic of not using the missile engage option so your turrets are not focusing on the enemy and instead wasting fire on the missiles can be solved by instead putting a couple dedicated turrets specifically for CIWS/C-RAM usage
It seems like the main issue is that gatling guns just aren't *hitting* the missiles.
Adding alternative ammo types (namely a timed fuze flak type munition) would allow you to spec out weapons for different purposes such as taking out missiles.
phalanx systems on ships were always a last resort point defense system. I don't know their success rates, but believe it is far from perfect. But you are correct in that using a similar system in game is largely pointless unless you use a mod or a lot of turrets.
the problem is the turrets don't lead the target, they just shoot where the target IS
just some feedback. you have the same footage at 4:50 and around 5:50 in the video. both clips show the modded gatling and have the same lead in.
We need fuzed flack cannons. Would be quite easy to do as missiles already explode at max range, they could just set max weapon range to the current range to target. Not sure how SE would handle that - depends whether the range is set per projectile at time of launch or if it’s done some other way.
I was thinking that Keen can do what RL already does with flak- you don't need something super accurate, just fill the air with what amounts to buckshot. it's easy to get a hit when your 'hitbox' is measured in feet-by-feet, not millimeters-by-millimeters. Make them do 1-2 damage so that they take out missiles but otherwise do very little damage to ships.
have you tried this test with the C-RAM mod? pretty sure there's a mod like this where it has the same rate of fire and tracking speed as the real life C-RAM/CIWS Phalanx, the bullets go much faster and it dumps a lot more rounds down range, plus the rounds are tracers so they light up the night sky (or space) like a christmas tree when they start going to town and dispensing freedom, it even self-destructs the rounds that exceed the maximum distance of the C-RAM to avoid collateral damage (just like in real life)
(i think its been rebalanced so that the rounds dont actually do much damage, but for point defense you dont really even need the damage as long as you hit the incoming missiles.)
The GAU minigun mod work perfectly and has a nice spread for the cwis effect and sound
I think you probably could get a higher intercept if you increase the offset of the weapons to compensate for lead. Meaning, use fewer turrets spaced out across a taller and wider area vs packed together.
Seeing as damage doesn't matter for intercepting missiles I mixed in interior turrets with gatlings and had the gatlings do the ship-ship combat and interior turrets focus on missiles.
did the video loop at 6:00 or something
yeah
There is a lot more individual components that help increase the CRAM's effectiveness for intercepts. A semi active radar station for early warning would help the accuracy for intercepts. A wall of lead won't help in a three dimensional actual scenario. I don't Play Space Engineers. but from the looks of it, range seems to be the biggest issue.
Custom autocannon turrets do the job, they spray a load of bullets in a wider area , so the center of
The turret guns is their aim point
Buy because of the “flak” gun layout the guns that are wider from the camera will hit the missiles
The only other thing I can think of is maybe spread the turrets farther apart so they have a wider angle, not grouped so closely together, say 5-10 blocks in every direction? This way theyre not trying to hit the missile head on?
I've found the interior turrets seem to have more luck with this. But still not enough to just hold a point on their own. As a secondary defense on a moving ship they aren't too bad. They reduce the missile volume a bit.
This really got me thinking... too look forward to my day off this Wednesday so that I can play this game. I also regret not bringing my laptop to work today... tho I may still try to play remotely via my phone since I always bring a wireless mouse and keyboard for it.
not really a specialist at combat in SE, but I noticed that turret controller works 100x better
large grid rotor > small head > small rotor with a single gatling gun shoots down a rocket in at max 8 shots (very consistently) (tested with 100 rockets)
I think it deserves a special turret all it's own. The other difference is that the CIWS uses tracer feedback to zero in on a firing solution that hits the target.
Adding optional proximity rounds in my opinion would be better.
There would be a trade off between using regular ammo and proxy ammo as proxy ammo does less damage but is also able to intercept missiles better.
You should test this out.
It appears that most of the bullets are hitting below. Adding a hinge or rotor to the guns to slightly angle them higher then it’s average height will make the bullets travel at a slightly higher angle and thus increasing chances.
I find that interior turrets work better for me, I usually put a set of two to cover a section of the ship (like top-front/bottom-front, top-middle/bottom-middle, etc) and I get pretty good chances of a hit
i actually have a better way to fix it using the game. I set 2 hinges and one rotor. i place the rotor for side to side movement, then a rotor on top that just quickly moves up and down, and on top of that i have the hinge that holds the gun and aims. the rotor and hinge being controlled by the controller wil work as intended. but the middle hinge will quickly and rapidly move at a 20 degree angle plus and minus to force the gun to not always aim to low or high but force the spread of fire across the hinges vertical movement. so it has a higher chance to hit the missle. this test shows the gun will constantly shhot many rounds behind or infront of the missle and aim that way. but my design shakes the top hinge up and down so it still aims but its forced to shoot behind, infront, and directly at it making it hit it more often.
Ive had good luck with interior turrets getting missiles. Ammos cheap and the gun tracks faster. The cyclic rate is similar to the gatling but the ammo is far cheaper.
So in this situation only the Gatling guns on the vertical and central axis are able to hit, meaning that with 8 guns you've still only increased the Gatling rate of fire by a factor of 2.
Now, in a less clinical setting the other Gatling guns would come into play as they would be targeting the missiles on more than one axis- however ultimately you would only have guns on the missiles path actually adding to your rounds so-
Putting your camera in the middle effectively guarantees that half of your guns will aim too low while tracking the target, so put your camera underneath the guns, either by raising the guns or lowering the camera, keeping in mind that lowering the camera will cause your guns to lead more. Either way your camera should be in line or below the lowest layer of Gatling guns. That way all guns above it are leading the target more than the camera is
Damn I actually had no idea they were that useless at targeting missiles. I thought it was better than this. Thanks for the testing
Personally, as a countermeasure type weapon, I'd like to see them add a flak gun type weapon where each individual projectile dose very little damage, but it fires a very large amount of them in one shot to target missiles and artillery. I'd image it being something useful for targeting incoming munitions and small, LIGHTLY ARMORED, ships build for speed, but not be particularly useful against larger, more heavily armored, targets with the projectiles dealing little damage.
Maybe we should be able to set minimum engagement ranges for anti-missile turrets. They are only really effective if they can intercept missiles by 300-400 meters out. If it misses that window it would be better to go to the next one.
personally i use interior turrets to target missiles, in a large quantity they seem to do well enough, although at this point missiles are getting a bit outdated
Is there a spinny bit? Like a rotator of some sort, u could spin the guns to make a spiral fire patter possibly
in short defense is still going to come down to armor, ability to dodge, or shields... occasional intercepts do relieve the strain of the other 3 methods, but would you rather absorb a few extra hits to dole out that extra damage to your target, or take a lot of damage trying to intercept and not do that damage to your target.... that's really what it amounts too.... lets also not forget the ammo expenditure needed to actually intercept as well... and with the ability to target specific sub-systems such as engines or weapons.. i don't see the need to waste ammo on a few missiles... meteors yes, missiles no....
Maybe your issue with them missing is due to your distance from the camera. If you want your gatling firing ahead of the projectile, and your camera is your crosshair, and your crosshair is always centered on the missile, then you need your gatlings further from the camera
I'll take a look at this and see if I can make or figure out a solution hopfuly by Monday if I can.